Chapter Twenty-Two
Remi reached into the flames that encircled Skye—the thought of being burned didn’t even cross his mind until he yanked his hand back from the kiss of the fire.
“Ouch. Fuck,” he said, shaking out his hand and staring at the blistered skin as it rose along his palm.
Skye had vanished before he made contact with her. A faint trail of smoke was left in her wake.
Some weird magical heat sizzled through him and then disappeared again.
The skin on his right hand bubbled, turning white in the middle and angry red on the edges.
The wound almost seemed fitting. He never considered the consequences of his actions when it came to Skye.
He only acted. And those actions always left him burned in one way or another.
What the hell had just happened?
The bus felt like it was tilting under his feet. Something in the air felt wrong, creating a stomach-dropping dread.
He wanted to blame the orgasmic endorphins for how he’d tried to get her to stay, but he couldn’t even lie to himself about it, since he’d never once felt that way post-nut with Jillian or any of the other groupies. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so needy and pathetic over someone.
His hands curled into fists, and he pounded the table, wincing as he agitated his burn. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath. This. This right here. This needy and pathetic feeling. This was exactly what she wanted him to feel.
He blew out a breath through his nostrils and readjusted himself into his boxers and zipped up his jeans.
Well, fuck that. Fuck her. He hardened himself to whatever cascade of emotions she’d been trying to orchestrate in him by fucking him and disappearing like that.
By letting him see her fragile and vulnerable and—
Fuck, no. Just no. Enough was enough.
Skye was an expert in manipulation. She knew Remi’s weaknesses and played on his humanity.
He overheard West telling Liam and Ollie to let up on him when it came to Skye.
West wasn’t exactly running around, pointing fingers and claiming that he finally believed that Skye was the wicked witch that Remi had been trying to warn them about, but he was at least more suspicious of her.
Skye had known that. She’d known if she lost West’s trust, it would only be a matter of time before the rest of the band turned on her.
So she tried a new tactic. A “let’s work together” tactic. She played dirty. Her disappearing act was just another tool to make him feel guilty.
Remi ran his hands through his hair to straighten it out as best he could. He should check a mirror to make sure his makeup looked alright, but he didn’t think he’d be able to stomach looking himself in the eye right now, so he put his sunglasses on to hide behind.
He walked off the bus, pushing through the paps, and into the venue, looking for his bandmates, but they weren’t around.
He flagged down one of the stagehands, who told him everyone went to a diner.
Remi was too ashamed to text them to ask where they ended up—if they’d wanted him there, they would have texted him—so he ate what was left of the catering in the dressing room and scrolled on his phone with his non-burned hand.
Skye didn’t come back for showtime, which was the moment when Remi realized she’d never missed a show since she’d become manager.
She didn’t appear when it was over either.
Or when Ollie and Liam went off with a couple of girls.
Or when West shut himself up in one of the bunks.
Or when Remi fucked Jillian in the back room, hoping Skye would just sense it somehow and come yell at him for it.
No one mentioned her absence when the tour bus pulled away the next morning.
His bandmates only spoke to him about perfunctory logistics, and he let the awkwardness between them fester until his self-righteous indignation calcified in his gut, and he didn’t even know how to fix it or where to start or if he even wanted to.
He stopped going out to bars and getting fucked up in hotel rooms. Reasoning that he couldn’t be yelled at for not being in the right place at the right time if he only went from the concert venue, to the bus, and back every single day.
His self-imposed grounding was also necessary since the paparazzi still tried to follow him, though the venues had been better about keeping the scum outside the gates.
The tour went on in that same limbo for three weeks.
Their home may have been moving city to city every few days, but the air was stuck and stagnant.
The corners of the bus were encrusted with a filmy sludge that somehow only seemed to grow the more Remi put his mind to figuring out how to clean it.
Except, maybe, he wasn’t trying hard enough, because a cleansing conversation was too impossible to consider.
Where to start?
The dishes in the sink, the clothes that hadn’t been washed in weeks, the socks stuck between the cushions of the couch, the crumbs in the fridge, their own person’s unwashed in the truest sense—with too infrequent showers and the general malaise of drugs and alcohol ingested for weeks.
Where to start?
An apology was stuck inside him like the clog in the bathroom sink drain, lodged there by the heavy debris of his own pride and indignation.
The burn on his hand started to heal, but Skye didn’t come back.
Her name wasn’t even spoken in passing. Remi had been waiting for the band to notice she was gone and confront him about what he did to make her leave.
He’d been waiting for an excuse to become outraged that they assumed it was his fault, even though it was.
Mostly, he just wanted them to question it, to look for her, to bring her back so he didn’t have to admit to himself he considered doing just that every single day.
They were in Tulsa when he finally caved.
“Do you know where Skye is?” Remi asked, sitting at the dining room table on the bus with Liam and Ollie.
Ollie furrowed his brow. “Are you just now noticing she’s gone? It’s been weeks.”
“No,” Remi said.
Liam didn’t look up as he doled out four lines of coke on a mirrored tray. “She had to go home. Family emergency. Didn’t you read the text?”
“He’s not in the group chat,” Ollie said.
“Oh shit,” Liam said. “Was I not supposed to say anything?”
“You guys have a group chat with Skye that I’m not in?” Remi asked. He modulated his voice as best as he could, but a dark anger twisted around his heart.
They both nodded.
“When is she coming back?” he demanded.
Liam snorted a line, and Ollie just sighed and shook his head in disappointment. “Why do you care?” he asked as he rolled a joint. “You hate her.”
“I didn’t—I don’t—I just—” Remi ran a hand through his hair. “Just tell me.”
“I don’t know, mate,” Ollie said. “She only said she had personal things to take care of. Liam and I texted her last week to check in, but she left us on read.”
Remi leaned over Ollie and grabbed Liam’s unlocked phone. He scrolled through his text messages until he found the group chat, but it was exactly as Ollie had said.
He tapped Skye’s name and ran his finger over her phone number, accidentally memorizing it as he sat there in silence. Liam snatched his phone out of Remi’s hand. Remi retaliated by doing two of the lines that Liam had been about to inhale. Liam glared at him and swiped the tray back.
“What does West say about us not having a manager?” Remi asked.
“We’re fine for now,” Ollie said. “Skye trained our tour manager, so he’s been running things. West asked the label to send us candidates for a new band manager.”
“I don’t understand why you guys are keeping this shit from me,” Remi said. “I haven’t done anything wrong since that stupid picture.”
“We’re na keeping anything! This is what ya wanted, innit?” Ollie said, his accent thicker as his annoyance seeped in. “Skye is gone.”
Skye was gone, and her absence was distracting.
He hadn’t been keeping up with any band management duties since she’d left.
Part of him had been waiting for the tour to fall apart.
That’d been the whole reason she was around, right?
She always threatened everything going to shit if she left, but that must have been a lie because everything was fine.
Unless she’d been telling the truth from the beginning.
That the bargain needed time or whatever, and now it was done, and she didn’t have to be here.
But everything still felt so unfinished, so precarious.
Laurie had told Remi that it’d only be a matter of time before he crashed and burned, but Remi didn’t know if that was still true or not.
If that meant trouble was at the next show, or the next.
He didn’t know why Skye wasn’t around to tell him, to lie to him, to yell at him, to make him miserable.
He didn’t know why he wanted her to be.
He felt insane.
The tour bus door opened, and Jillian called his name, stopping in front of the table and pouting. “You promised we’d do that livestream today.”
Remi sighed. “Can’t we do it later?” He snatched the mirrored tray from Liam and started cutting more lines. He wasn’t even sure why he was doing this. He didn’t even like cocaine all that much. It made him jittery and hyper, like he was jumping out of his skin.
But his real drug of choice was much more potent and addicting. Lethal. And he was only now realizing that the high she had once provided didn’t even come close to the pain of withdrawal.
“You promised you would do it today, and I already told everyone you would, so no, we can’t do it later,” Jillian said and put her hand on her hip.
“Why do you always promise people I’m going to do something?” he asked.
Jillian pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows expectantly.
He wasn’t getting out of this. Sighing in defeat, he leaned down and snorted one more line. If he had to do this shit, he wasn’t going to do it sober.
“Alright, let’s go,” Remi said to Jillian as he got up and stepped off the tour bus.
The sun was blazing hot. Remi squinted against its brightness and the way the light reflected off the metal of the tour bus.
Jillian tugged on his shirt. “Take this off.”
He sighed. “Why do I always have to be shirtless for your social media things?”
“Because it’s what the people want,” she said.
Remi reached behind his head and tugged off his shirt. Jillian inched him to the right, and then to the left, like he was a puppet.
He glanced over his shoulder at the Tilted Haze logo on the bus. The one his brother had designed before he died.
Look at me now, Em.
He didn’t even need to imagine his brother’s reply. He knew Emerson would be less than impressed by the mess Remi had gotten himself into.
“Okay,” Jillian said. “I have a few questions that your fans have sent in that you’re going to answer on the live, okay? Do you want to see them first so you can think of answers?”
“No, let’s just get this over with.” He hopped from side to side as the twitchy coke feeling possessed him.
Jillian glared at him over her phone as she started the intro to the livestream.
Remi would watch the recording later—first to check the comments to see what people were saying about him, but the second time through, he’d watch his coked-up fidgeting and give his real answers to the questions Jillian had asked.
“Remi, the first question that was submitted by your fans was…to what do you attribute the success of your band?” Jillian asked on the screen.
“The deal I made with a demon,” Remi said to his phone as his recorded-self gave some bullshit answer about hard work and luck.
“And what advice would you give to bands just starting out?” Jillian asked.
“Don’t make a deal with a demon,” he said.
The video zoomed out, taking in the full view of the tour bus, really grinding it into his face that his band had made it. They were on a sold-out stadium tour. He’d gotten everything he wanted.
He finally had to admit to himself that Skye hadn’t lied about her bargain promises.
“If you could go back and change anything, what would it be and why?” Jillian asked.
The man on the screen was smiling at some faraway point in the distance, lost in a memory of a red-eyed demoness smirking at him, remembering the last six months of misery that they had created together with a deranged fondness.
That man had answered, “I wouldn’t change a damn thing.”
And standing there in front of the tour bus as the sun burned him like the hellfire he expected would be in his afterlife, his answer had been the cold hard truth, but sobered up from the blissful veneer of the coke, he knew it was a lie.
Remi would change something.
If he had another soul to bargain with, he’d go back in time and do whatever he had to do to keep Skye from leaving.