22. Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
Her breath catches and I hate the distance between us and the fact that I can’t see her face.
“I have something to ask you,” she says.
My pulse kicks hard. “Go for it.”
She doesn’t. At least not right away.
I wait, which has never been one of my stronger skills. Patience and I have a complicated history, mostly because I usually fuck off before it has a chance to teach me anything.
“Phoenix, when I leave here,” she says slowly, “my counselor thinks I need support for the first few weeks. Not someone hovering over me like I’m made of glass, but someone to be there. Just while I get used to being back in the real world.”
My hand tightens around the phone.
“She suggested my parents,” Willow continues. “But Mom would worry every time I made coffee and Dad would probably install himself outside my bedroom door with a baseball bat and a blood-pressure problem.”
“That sounds accurate.”
“It does. And I love them both so much. I do. But I cannot have their fear breathing down my neck every second. I already feel enough like I'm a walking family trauma project.”
My heart slams once against my ribs as I wait for the rest.
Ask me. Come on, Wills. Ask me to stay with you.
I stare at the whiskey bottle because if staying is something a man can learn, I am about to become the most stubborn bastard in the fucking classroom.
Willow inhales. “I was wondering if you could stay with me for a while after I get out.”
My heart drives its tiny fist into the air.
“If you don’t want to,” she starts, rushing now, embarrassed, already building an exit for herself before I can disappoint her, “or if you can’t because of the tour, I understand. I just thought—”
“I’ll do it.”
The line goes quiet.
“I’ll do it,” I say again. “I’ll be there.”
“Phoenix.”
“I said I’ll be there, Wills.”
“You have one minute remaining,” says that same automated voice.
I glare at nothing. I fucking hate that voice, the way it keeps putting a number on how long I get to have her for.
“Tell me when you’re leaving and I’ll come get you.” I shift into a different position on the floor. “The tour has another two weeks, but if you need me before then, the label can go choke on its contracts. I’ll be there.”
“Phoenix,” she says again, softer this time.
“I mean it, Wills.”
The silence that follows is different, yet something within it settles. For the first time in weeks, I can breathe without feeling as if my ribs are full of broken glass.
“Thank you,” she says quietly.
I want to tell her I would crawl there if she asked. I want to tell her I am sorry again and that I have been trying, even though it’s ugly and inconsistent. But I’m trying.
I want to tell her that hearing her voice did what whiskey, weed, applause, and every willing woman in the world never could. It made the noise stop.
I say none of it because the call is ending, and I don’t want to waste the last seconds with her comforting the man who already took too much from her.
“Did you write anything today?” I ask instead.
“A few lines.”
The recorded voice cuts back in. “Fifteen seconds remaining.”
“Willow,” I say too fast, because suddenly fifteen seconds feels shorter than a breath.
“Bye, Phoenix.”
The line clicks dead.
I keep the phone pressed to my ear long after she is gone, listening to nothing. The blunt still burns in the ashtray. The whiskey waits on the table. For once, neither of them touches my hand.
I put the phone down and pick up the guitar.
For a while, I just stare at it.
I have spent weeks trying to understand why I put that first pill in Willow’s hand. Why I smiled when I told her to trust me. Why I made poison appear harmless, because everything looks harmless when it is sitting in the palm of an arrogant dick who thinks consequences are for other people.
Now she is in rehab and some ugly part of me cannot stop drawing a straight line from my palm to that hospital bed.
I set my fingers on the strings and play the same progression as before. This time, the notes do not sound dead. They sound rough. Unfinished. A little drunk, a little wounded, and too stubborn to lie down and fucking die.
For now, that is enough.
Two weeks later, I am outside Willow’s rehab center at 9 a.m.
She told me ten. I’m early.
The tour brought us home last night, and I am running on fuck-all sleep and the kind of nerves I would punch another man for noticing.
I lean against the driver’s door, my sunglasses on and my arms folded, while the center sits behind low walls and trees.
Willow surprised the shit out of me by calling again the next day. Then the day after that. And every day after that.
Five o’clock suddenly became hers.
I didn’t care whether I was backstage, in a meeting, halfway through a mic check, being screamed at by Damon, or signing something stupid with a woman’s tits six inches from my face.
At four fifty-eight, I disappeared. At four fifty-nine, my phone was in my hand. At five, I answered like a man with manners, which was new and frankly alarming.
The guys figured it out by day three.
Jax said I’d better not fuck it up this time. He told me to treat her right, as if watching her almost die had not already beaten that lesson into me with a tire iron.