49. Chapter 34
Hate Me
Dallas
The battle lines are drawn. It’s Cohen on one side.
My brother and Rain on the other. What team am I on?
Even I don’t know, because even though my arm is extended, reaching for Cohen, I’m still kneeling beside Rain.
Like some kind of phantom, Cohen’s gone before I can do more than call his name, disappearing behind the elevator doors.
My heart doesn’t know what to do beyond thrumming frantically behind my ribcage. That organ only knows one beat, one rhythm, the one belonging to Cohen Brady. My broken soul searches for anything to anchor me, to steady the beat that’s approaching heart-attack levels of bad.
I look up, and there is Rainy. Our eyes meet, her purple melting into my blue as she pleads, “Dallas?”
Her right hand is clasped in my brother’s, and they look down at me like their hopes might be born or dashed by whatever I say next.
It’s too much pressure. Meanwhile, I’m on my knees at Rain’s feet, so she shouldn’t need me to say a damn word to know I’m waiting for her release.
Her left hand runs through my hair, and she grasps the roots just enough to pull my face up to see hers.
There are a million uncertainties in her expression, but she leans down and whispers against my cheek, “Go after him?”
If she could read my mind, she wouldn’t even have to ask.
“He’s—” I try to articulate half of what I feel, but my fucked-up head can’t quite manage it. Something Rain seems to understand because her hand runs from my hairline, down my face and under my chin. Without meaning to, I lean into her touch.
“I trust you, Dallas.”
Those words are ones that no one else, not even my brother, has ever said to me.
No one has ever trusted me with anything.
Rightfully so. Why would you trust a drug addict?
Why would you trust Dallas Kelly when his smarter, stronger, better brother is right there?
Yet Rain does. She trusts me, and I let that be the thing that soothes my pounding pulse.
With her and my brother’s help, I rise to my feet. Delicate arms embrace me. Loosely. Without touching my scars. Because Rain remembers that’s the only way to make it possible for me. Other kinds of touch are easier. But hugs have always been hard.
Rain remembers. And that is enough to let me close my eyes and lean into her hold.
Not completely. I don’t even lift my arms to hold her in return.
The ghosts of another’s arms wrap around the outside of my shoulders.
Panic floods my nervous system for a single second, until I look down and recognize that it’s my brother.
He’s standing behind Rain, so her back is against his chest, and his big ass arms are long enough to reach close to me.
Like Rainy-girl, his hands don’t actually do any more than brush my skin.
Still, their intentions are clear. They are reminding me that I am, that I can, be cared for.
I’ve been hugged and held so rarely in my life.
So much of the touch I’ve known has been violent and invasive.
Sometimes I even crave it that way. Right now, though, their gentleness has me blinking away tears.
This is the closest I’ve been to my brother in months.
Shame kept me from reaching out, and Rain’s faith in me caves in part of the wall I’ve built between us.
Though I know that if I’m going to earn that faith, I can’t stay here forever. Nor do I have any way of predicting how my conversation with Cohen will go, so I ask about the only other living thing that matters to me.
“Kitten?”
My brother’s eyes rest so softly on Rain.
“We’ll get her and take her home.” He’s not just talking about Kitten.
He’s got that same determined look in his eye.
The one he used on our social workers all those years ago to ensure they didn’t split us up when we moved foster homes.
It’s the one he gave me every time he promised to help me get sober.
Judging by Rain’s single raised eyebrow, she doesn’t realize it yet. But in my brother’s head, she’s the newest permanent resident of Casa de Kelly.
“But we need you to talk to Cohen,” my brother reminds me.
Cohen stalked off alone. He is sulking, confused, angry, not to mention a stubborn bastard who refuses to look back at what part he might have played in where we are right now.
Still, I love him. And I love us, our band, The Preaching Pistols.
And if we are ever, ever, going to survive—fuck, if I’m going to survive—we need Cohen Brady.
On unsteady legs, I wobble like a newborn foal towards the elevator.
Thankfully, it’s a one-floor-up, one-floor-down point of travel, and Cohen did me the solid of telling me exactly where I would find him when I eventually came looking.
As we all knew I would. Didn’t exactly take a crystal ball to know it would always turn out this way.
Because I have been the little lost lamb, letting Cohen shepherd me wherever he wanted for a very long time, even to the worst possible places. I have the track marks to prove it.
Unlike Cohen, when I get to the elevator, I spin to face my brother and Rain, catching one last glimpse of my bandmates. After tonight’s confessions, Rain should be the one falling apart. She should be the one crumbling under the weight of everything she’s been through. Not me.
There’s an iron rod in her spine that never used to be there. Rain’s always been strong; Grams made damn sure of it, but while the rest of us have spent a decade floundering without her, without the band, she’s gotten stronger.
There are small signs of pain from tonight. Her controlled breathing. Her hand squeezing Dutch’s to the beat of a song only she can hear. But she’s still upright and kicking.
Life for the past few years may have beaten us all down, but she’s the one who pulled herself back up without any damn help.
Part of me is fucking jealous. Part of me is ashamed I couldn’t do the same, always relying on my big brother to save my ass.
But the last part of me is just as in awe of the woman looking back at me as I always was of the girl who used to hold my hand, sing, and make all my demons fly away.
Her shining violet eyes are the last thing I see before the elevator doors clang shut, enclosing me in a metal box headed one way. There’s an itching in my veins that springs up now that I’m alone. That deadly, dangerous and addictive itch. Because I know what I’ll find when the doors open again.
Bruce’s clubs are designed to drive the party further, longer, harder, higher. Without anyone to distract me, the urge to get lost in that is strong. Drugs tempt me with their all-too-familiar promise of oblivion that would be so much easier than trying to make Cohen understand.
Except the world I live in is a stage, and all thoughts of using are wiped away with the opening of the doors.
The scene before me is a tableau pulled directly from my nightmares.
People, party-goers, waste-cases thread around the room.
I know they’re there, but they might as well be ghosts because there’s only one person before me that feels real.
Cohen sits in the centre of the VIP booth reserved for our band.
His arms are thrown over the back of the seat and his legs, though invisible beneath the table, are clearly spread wide before him.
He’s a king with no need of a crown, surrounded by fawning, giggling, flushing, touching men and women.
They’re practically gagging for a piece of a man they don’t really know, and don’t actually give a shit about beyond his wealth and fame.
It’s worse than the scene we witnessed on the bus.
That was just two people. This is so many more.
To his left, a man with corn-coloured hair speaks, trying with increasing desperation to engage Cohen in conversation.
I resent his presence. I resent his hair for the fact that people would call us both blondes, despite mine being near white, and this chump looking like he fell headfirst out of a field.
I resent every word he’s said to Cohen and all the ones he hasn’t yet.
Fuck him for thinking he’ll ever get the chance.
On his right, a beautiful brunette woman raises an open bottle of vodka and angles it towards Co.
I resent her too. Because her beauty is all wrong; it’s freckles and sunshine, where it should be swirling night skies and moonbeams. Cohen tips his head back and lets her pour.
Too fucking bad her arm jerks in surprise when I slap my hands on the table so hard it shakes.
The gathered hangers-on go silent or wide-eyed. Cohen, on the other hand, lowers his chin slowly, unhurried and unbothered by my presence. Vodka droplets coat his lower lip, and he takes a moment to wipe it away with his thumb before acknowledging my presence.
“Tired of playing third wheel already?”
He’s so fucking smug that for the first time ever, I ask myself why my stubborn heart is so damn fixated on this bastard. He’s a grade-A asshole, but I swear he wasn’t always. Somewhere, somehow, he changed. Hell, I changed. So did Dutch and Rain. Time made strangers of us all.
That’s what Cohen and I are right now, two strangers with a shared past staring each other down from across this table that might as well be a chasm, surrounded by people who I’m certain will report every word to the highest bidder given the chance.
“Get out,” I say, though with the thumping bass it’s no surprise I’m not heard. Cohen, though, reads my lips and the corner of his mouth twitches. I’m glad he finds my anger so amusing. Maybe he’ll find this amusing too.