45. Interlude 13
Screaming Infidelities
Lou has led me around the whole fucking house in search of Dallas, but either he’s already left, or he is doing such a good job of hiding that not even a scent hound could find him.
Lou gave up the search pretty quickly, but after a while, even I am forced to abandon it. I’m ready to track down my girl and get the hell out of here because even though this party is supposed to be about us and our album, this place, these people just don’t feel like us at all.
“Seen Rainy?” I ask as I race past Dutch. He immediately abandons his conversation and trails after me.
“No. Where is she? You lost her?”
Fuck him and his accusatory tone.
I spin back to him and force a finger into his chest with an accusation of my own. “I didn’t lose her; I was busy trying to find Dallas. Any idea where your brother is, big man?”
He doesn’t say shit, and I’m too busy worrying about Rain to give a single fuck. Together we trace our way back through each and every room in this giant house. There’s no sign of her. The last place I saw her was by the bar in the ballroom, so that’s where we head.
The shitheads behind the bar don’t know much, but after I grill a couple of them, they admit to seeing her head deeper into the house with Blue Grace.
That alone makes my blood pressure spike.
Rain’s not the type of girl to judge anyone by what the media says about them, because God knows, they say some horrendous and misogynistic shit about her, but I am.
And Blue Grace is a widely reported man-whore.
“She wouldn’t,” Dutch repeats as we wind our way through award-lined hallways. The current hallway we’re searching through is lined with doors. Between Dutch and me, we’ve opened every last one. Some rooms were empty. One or two were occupied by couples obviously mid-fuck.
So far, though, there’s been no sign of Rain. As I close the door on the most recent of those rooms, the only door we haven’t checked, the one at the far end of this narrow hall, opens and out walks Blue Grace.
With a fucking smirk. A fucking golden grin.
“Boys.” He laughs as he passes us. “That’s quite the girl you’ve got there.”
My lungs stop. My vision falters. Or maybe I just see red.
Before I know it, I’m running towards the door he’s just exited.
I’m not alone either. I don’t need to see him to know that Dutch is at my back.
Together, we blow the door off its hinges and are greeted by a sight that makes my stomach lurch.
Not just lurch. Spoil. I actively vomit on the carpet. Beside me, I have only the vaguest sense of Dutch cursing: “What the fuck?”
The room we’ve just walked into reeks of sex.
It fucking stinks. And there, in the middle of a king-size bed, naked, so, so, so, naked, so, so, so…
fucked out, is Rain. She rolls towards us both.
Her eyes are open, but I’m not sure she even sees me.
It’s so obvious what’s happened here; I can’t even bring myself to say it, to say anything.
For a long time, Rain’s dropped hints or made comments that tell me I’m not enough for her.
The very idea of that makes me sick. Sick enough that we’ve fought about it more than once.
Every single time, our fights eventually end when she promises that she would never, ever be unfaithful.
A bullshit promise, apparently.
“You fucked him?!” My voice is stretched to the point of breaking. Yet the girl I love barely registers the fact that my heart is actively breaking in front of her.
Her head lolls towards me, and she asks, “Cohen?”
That’s all I can take. I spin on my heels, and I am fucking gone. Knowing Dutch, he’ll stay with her when really he should—we should—I should have been looking for his brother this whole time instead of wasting my breath searching for that slut.
I leave the party alone.
I go back to my parents’ house in The Neck.
I break up with Rain the next day. She cries through the whole thing. First, she blames the alcohol, then she claims she was drugged and that what happened between her, and Blue was an assault.
I might be a stubborn asshole in a lot of ways, but I can hear my mom in my head reminding me to believe women.
And I want to. God, do I want to believe my Rainy, because the sight of her crying undoes me.
I long to hold her, to comfort her, and the thought of Blue Grace doing something like that to the girl I love is so downright horrifying it makes me want to rip the hair out of my head.
Yet days go by, and I can’t get that smirk of Blue’s out of my mind. And the sight of Rain, naked in that sex-tossed bed, fucking forget it. That is burned into the back of my eyelids forevermore. Both images play on repeat over and over again.
My phone won’t stop ringing. I ignore it.
My parents won’t stop knocking on my bedroom door. I refuse to come out.
Blue’s voice won’t stop saying, “Quite the girl,” over and over and over. Before too long, Rain’s voice is there too, telling me things I should know aren’t true. Things I know she didn’t say, but I wonder if she thought all along.
“You’re just too much, Cohen.”
“I wanted him more than I want you.”
“You’re not worthy of my love, Cohen.”
“All those songs, and you’re still not worth it.”
Even though I hear each statement in Rainy’s voice, I know it’s not her. So I start to think of it like the devil on my shoulder.
Only days later does the angel on the other shoulder pipe the hell up.
He sounds a lot like Dax and reminds me that I don’t want to be the kind of man who treats people I love and care about with the mistrust I’ve exhibited over the past few weeks.
He reminds me that I can’t rely on that; I need more.
I need proof. Solid concrete proof that what Rain said is true. It makes me sound like a monster, wanting to see some fucking evidence to prove that the girl I’ve loved since I was a teenager was raped. But I can’t tell the angel and the devil apart anymore. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not.
I’ve even taken to watching our old viral videos over and over again just to prove to myself that The Preaching Pistols existed. Do exist. I think.
Again, a tiny voice inside me that sounds a fuckload like Dallas tells me what to do, and for once, I buck tradition and do it. I call Lou Braun.
The first clue my brain is totally fucked over is that he actually shows up. He knocks on my bedroom door and says, “Cohen, can I come in?”
For the first time in days, I crawl from my bed so I can twist the doorknob.
When the door opens, Lou Braun is there, and my parents are right behind him.
Their faces are riddled with so much worry that I cannot possibly handle it, so I ignore them and sweep back enough to allow my manager to enter.
The second his feet are through the door frame, I slam it, preventing my obviously caring parents from saying a word.
I spin back to Lou. “Show me,” I order.
“Now, son—”
“Don’t call me son.”
Lou lets my rebuff slide. “Are you absolutely sure you want to see this?”
That question makes my skin itch. However, I am absolutely sure.
When I called Lou, it was to ask if there was any video, any evidence from the party to prove what happened to Rain.
I might not know much, but I know that house was owned by Viktor Vetrov, and that that man was likely to have cameras everywhere.
I grab my laptop from my childhood desk, the one I used to do homework on but that I’ve outgrown since we left The Neck.
Lou as good as confirms my fears when he brandishes a disk from behind his back. “I’m going to ask you one more time, Cohen. Are you sure you want to see this?”
My jaw tightens, and I barely manage to growl, “Yes.”
“Okay.” He slides the disk into the laptop I’ve handed over.
The two of us watch, standing there like helpless pylons while we watch together as my girlfriend, my Rain, visibly smiles as Blue Grace seats himself inside of her.
This isn’t a video of a girl in pain. But it is the video that rips my world to shreds.
End Interlude