2. Hawk
“Fuck.”
My shoulder collided heavily with the door frame as I listed to the side, gravity taking hold and pulling me over too quickly for my inebriated ass to recover.
I was drunk, but not drunk drunk. The bottle was more than half empty, dangling from my fingers as I wove my way through the house, having stopped in each of the different rooms along the way for a drink.
The eight bedrooms hadn’t been that bad, but by the time I had gotten through all twelve bathrooms, I was starting to feel like this maybe hadn’t been one of my better ideas.
Not that I’d had a ton of those lately.
There were two rooms that I’d specifically avoided, though. The master bedroom and the basement studio.
I had no desire to see what kind of memories I’d face if I spent any amount of time in either of those places. Not with the mood I was already in.
Instead, I’d meandered my way from empty room to empty room, wondering why I had even bothered to buy a house this big in the first place. If I was ever asked, I would have told people I’d bought it simply because I could. Because I was young when the checks had started rollin’ in and I couldn’t fuckin’ spend it fast enough. And the more I spent—the more people saw me spending—the more I seemed to make. It was like the media couldn’t get enough of us. The boys from Black Kite, young, dumb, and full of come. Our faces were splashed across every tabloid and industry magazine in the country. We couldn’t go anywhere without someone recognizing us.
Women wanted us, and men wanted to be us.
It was the most incredible fucking thing in the world.
Until it wasn’t.
Because once the world knew who you were, they never forgot. And the higher you flew, the harder people tried to bring you crashing back down again.
And, man, did we crash.
Lifting the bottle, I took another swallow before shoving off the door frame and slowly entering the darkened room. Sometime between the fourth and fifth bathrooms, the sun had gone down, and I hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights.
There was nothing I was interested in seeing anyway.
Once I’d finished all the rooms in the main house, I’d gone to the garage, weaving between the half-dozen cars that lined the massive space. At the back of the garage was a door I had forgotten existed, which ultimately led to a narrow set of stairs, dusty and almost too steep for someone as wasted as I was. But I’d climbed them, lifting my heavy feet one after the other until I’d reached the top. I stumbled into the room at the top of the stairs, wondering if I’d ever even been inside of it.
It smelled like dust, which I only noticed because it had been so long since any place I’d lived had smelled that way. Living most of my life on a bus with at least four other dudes had taught me that, sometimes, no amount of scrubbing could get a smell out. I had seen and smelled things I’d much rather forget about, but these days, Harriette kept everything spic and span, no matter how much of a slob I was.
My echoing steps told me that the space was large, my ears long accustomed to gauging spaces and acoustics after a lifetime of playing various venues. Now a bit more interested, I fumbled blindly on the wall beside the door until I found a switch, flicking it on and illuminating what I could now tell was actually an attic. The large, vaulted area that mirrored the massive garage below was unfinished, the bare wood studs standing naked in the harsh light. Squinting against the sudden brightness, I looked around, seeing the vast room was filled with random furniture, dozens of stacked boxes, and more Black Kite memorabilia than I could have imagined.
I walked up to a large cardboard cutout of myself, the image showing me around twenty years ago, with my trademark smirk in place, not a care in the world.
Fuck, I had been so young. So goddamn sure that nothing could ever touch me.
“You had the world by the balls, kid,” I muttered to my younger self. “And you fucked it all up.” Palming him in the chest and shoving backwards, I laughed darkly as the flimsy cardboard toppled over, drifting silently to the floor, unnoticed in its demise.
Just like me.
Sighing, I took another slow drink from the bottle, staring around at all the other shit someone had stored up here and forgotten about. Setting down my bottle, I bent over and opened the nearest box, peering at the contents curiously.
It was a box of t-shirts, leftover merchandise from our second national tour, and I lifted one out, holding it before me as I took in the image on the front. We’d designed them ourselves, Gavin drawing the logo up one night while we’d sat around the pool, smoking weed and bullshittin’. He’d just done it on the fly, sketched the design on the back of a pizza box, but damn if we didn’t all love it right away.
The label had been pissed, but we’d held firm, insisting that Gavin’s design was the one we used and, just like we’d predicted, the things had sold out in every city. Holding the shirt in one hand, I brought it up to my nose, smelling the stale cotton and the lingering scent of motor oil, likely from spending months stuffed in the underbelly of a tour bus, going from state to state for shows.
Fuck, those had been the days.
Before the real bullshit started. Before it all fell apart.
Gritting my teeth, I dropped the shirt back into the box. I didn’t want to travel down that particular memory lane tonight. My head was fucked enough as it was.
“Is there nowhere in this whole fucking property that I can get some fucking peace?” I growled, my voice rumbling around the hollow space. Drawing my knee back, I delivered a kick to the box, the aged cardboard giving way under the toe of my boot. “Fuck!” I screamed, kicking it again, feeling a sick satisfaction as the side of the box crumpled further, the shirts spilling out as my rage disintegrated the box that had held them for decades.
My heart pounded, my anger flowing through my veins as I finally released some of the pent-up resentment that had been festering in my soul for the last five years. Over and over, I kicked the box, the purge of energy and emotion almost cathartic after all this time.
I gave one kick for the label, for holding us hostage long after we should have been freed.
A kick for Lewis, that backstabbing bastard.
One for Victoria, who’d handed him the knife.
For me, who’d chased all my dreams except the one that had truly mattered.
And who had let it all slip away without a fight.
“Fuck!”
The box lay in tatters at my feet, and I laughed at the sick parallel it made to my career. My chest heaved, sweat pouring down my face as I breathed in lungfuls of musty attic air, then dragged my hands down my face before shoving them through my hair. I didn’t wear it as long as I used to, but it still wasn’t what anyone would consider short. It hung down to my chin most days, and after the enjoyable but childish temper tantrum I’d just had, it was sticking to my cheeks and making me crazy.
“What am I doing?” I asked out loud, apparently to myself. “What in the actual fuck am I doing with my life?”
I didn’t have an answer.
Suddenly feeling drained, I pressed my back against the wall and slid down to the floor, my legs practically giving out beneath me as I surrendered to gravity.
Mick was right; I needed to get my shit together, but I just didn’t know how. What the fuck good was I if I wasn’t the lead singer of Black Kite? What purpose did I have in the world if I wasn’t making music? It’s not like I had any other skills, unless you counted drinking, and after last night, I didn’t think I was even that good at it anymore.
Music was where I belonged, where I thrived, but what was I supposed to do if music didn’t want me anymore?
Where did that leave me?
Stretching out my legs, I tapped my toe against another box, this one sounding heavier than the one I’d just destroyed, more solid. I frowned, striking the box with my boot a little harder and trying to identify the contents by the depth of the resulting thud. It was definitely heavier than t-shirts, more solid than any instruments I could think of. Cables, maybe? Or an amp? Something with some weight and heft to it, that was for sure.
Blowing out a breath, I rubbed my eyes, trying to clear the last of the whiskey fog from my brain. I should go back to the house. If I stayed here on the floor any longer, I’d fall asleep, and if Harriette couldn’t find me by breakfast tomorrow morning, she’d probably call the fuckin’ cops.
I wanted to move. I did. I wanted to do the right thing for once and get my ass up and go to bed. But the mystery of what was in the box intrigued me more, so instead of hauling my sorry self to bed, I reached out and hauled the big box toward me instead, noticing that it was one of several identical boxes someone had placed in a row against the wall. It took me three tries, but I finally got the end of my fingernail under the edge of the tape holding the box closed, peeling it off like a bandage, slowly and with as much discomfort as possible.
Of all the things I had suspected might be in the box, I’d have never imagined what I actually found.
Letters. Hundreds and hundreds of letters.
All addressed to Black Kite.
Looking around at the other boxes, I felt my eyebrows raise as I realized what my dusty attic was actually housing was not just the lonely remnants of my long-dead career, but also what appeared to be every single piece of fan mail we’d ever received.
All of it unopened and ignored.
Motherfucker.