Between Us (The Renegade Saints #3) (3 page)

I grimaced as I tightened one of my strings. My summer school schedule had caused a lot of angst within the band. We’d moved past it, and I wanted to keep it behind me.

“Shut your yap,” I grumbled. “I’ve more than made up for it this year, and you know it. Tyson and Gavin aren’t even a little bit pissed anymore, and the band is going full-steam ahead. For the record, I didn’t hear a word of complaint when I was sucking your dick, asshole.”

“Dude, you blew me twice while I ate Mary out,” he countered. “I had my face buried in snatch. For all you know, I wasn’t feeling those blowjobs at all.”

“You were feeling them,” I said smugly. “But never mind the blowjobs since something far more serious just came up. Did you
really
use the word snatch in a sentence?”

He threw his head back and barked out a laugh. “I’m testing it out. Only so many times you can say pussy before you’re looking for a new word.”

“Well, the new word isn’t snatch,” I said bluntly. “That’s some eighties porn shit. Ooh Flynn,” I cooed mockingly. “Will you lick my
snatch
? That’s fuckin’ nasty. As much as I fuck, I would never have the balls to call something a snatch.”

“You think about getting off entirely too much,” he chided. “You know that, right?”

“I’d say I think about it just the right amount,” I answered cockily. “Don’t be a hater.”

I didn’t see him picking up one of my shoes from the floor, so it came as a surprise when it hit me on the shoulder. I wasn’t even a little bit mad, and we both laughed.

“
Anyway
,” he said with a chuckle, “let’s move on to more interesting things. You all ready to go balls-to-the-wall in the studio tomorrow? This is a big deal for us.”

“I was born ready,” I assured him. “We’re going to make this studio time our snatch.”

He gave me the one-finger salute. “Snatch this, asshole. Seriously though, you think we can get some traction off this? I want to play music all the time and to do it the right way, we gotta get some serious interest. I’m not cut out to be a moving man for the rest of my life. My body’s sore as fuck.”

He wasn’t the only one. All the members of the band had collectively pooled our resources to purchase a moving van. The main purpose was to cart our gear from gig to gig, but we’d also taken on some small moving jobs. We did a lot of office furniture moving for law offices and antique furniture for auction houses. It was strenuous work and none of us loved it. The thing was, it paid well enough to fund our equipment and gas to the gigs. Like Flynn, I was anxious to put that behind us.

“If you’re asking if I think we’re going to get signed immediately off the strength of one of these few songs, the answer is no. We’re fucking eighteen, man. We’ve got a few years of busting ass ahead of us before we’re playing to the masses. But someday, we’ll be rocking the fuck out of arenas around the world. They’ll lay out a snatch buffet for us in every city, pretty boy.”

Age 24

The tension in the room was so thick, it would’ve taken a chainsaw to cut through it.

“Do you think he’s in trouble?” Flynn asked worriedly.

I had a horrible feeling but I was trying to ignore it, so I lifted my hands in a
I have no clue
gesture. Even if he wasn’t in crisis, he was definitely in trouble. The severity of it remained to be seen.

We all understood Tyson was a mess. What was happening with him was far more than a little trouble. It was going on every day. He was on fuck only knew what drugs and he seemed to sink a little more by the hour. It was depressing and completely fucked up. We tried to take a hard line with him, but it wasn’t easy. I couldn’t blame him for being depressed. People thought he had everything, but they didn’t know what he’d been through.

He’d been missing sound rehearsal a lot, but this was another ball of wax entirely. It was the final night of the world tour for our third album and we were ninety minutes away from taking the stage at Madison Square Garden. Ty had real issues and they needed to be dealt with. We knew being on the road constantly was no help, and we’d already agreed to take a year off. All we had to do was finish the tour. The finish line was right in front of us, we just had to cross it.

Tyson being M.I.A wasn’t a good sign.

Gavin stopped pacing the small area we were all holed up in backstage and let out a yell as his arm came out and swept half of the contents spread out on the makeshift bar to the floor. The smell of alcohol filled the space as bottles smashed on the ground. One of our assistants came running in to see what was going on, but I waved him off. The room was a powder keg and having anyone else come in who didn’t have info on Tyson’s whereabouts was only going to make things worse.

“We have staff everywhere,” Gavin yelled. “How the hell did we lose a goddamn band member? We’re coming up on five fuckin’ hours!”

I’d never seen Gavin look so unglued. He was normally the most even-keeled of the bunch, but right then his anger was palpable. My stomach churned as I shook my head. Five hours might not sound like a lot, but when dealing with an addict, it was an eternity. Far too long for it to be anything other than a whole lot of not fucking good.

“He told security he was going to take a nap,” I reminded him.

“I know what he fucking said,” Gavin bellowed. “But who the fuck thought it was a good idea to take the word of a fucking drug addict?”

“It’s not security’s fault that Tyson’s taken it to the next level,” Flynn ground out. “Who knew he needed a fucking babysitter?”

In retrospect, we should have known he needed round-the-clock babysitting. Nothing in Ty’s life was easy. Of course, him hitting rock bottom was damn near catastrophic.

Conversation came to a halt as John, otherwise known as our manager, stepped into the room. As soon as I saw how pale he was and how shaken he looked, I knew it was bad.

He was barely in the door before I spoke up.

“Where is he?”

“He’s in the hospital,” he answered. “It doesn’t look good.”

It was as if every bit of oxygen had been sucked out of the room. My heart thundered in my chest as an overwhelming feeling of anxiety hit me. It took everything I had to get my next question out.

“What the fuck happened?”

“Drugs is what fucking happened,” Gavin yelled. “Tell me I’m wrong,” he implored John. “Tell me it isn’t drug related!”

“Overdose,” John murmured.

The signs were all there and it wasn’t like we didn’t know he was in deep. But hearing those words made it way too fucking real. Gavin and Flynn let out horrified sounds. I clutched at the couch and tried to steady myself for whatever was going to come next.

“There was a 911 call from someone who got to him as he went down,” John said. “They found drugs on the scene, and he wasn’t breathing when the EMTs got there. He was revived with a shot of adrenaline but when they got him into the ER, he flatlined. They needed to administer two more shots of adrenaline and then use a defibrillator on him to bring him back. There’s really nothing else they can do for him now.”

“Is he—“ I had to stop in order to swallow down the bile creeping up the back of my throat. “Is he going to die?”

John’s eyes darted to a spot over my head as he shook his head uncomfortably. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I hope not, but it doesn’t sound good. You need to prepare yourselves. He’s not responsive right now and it will take days to see what the effects on his brain are from all of this, if he makes it.”

I felt sick to the depths of my soul. The way John was talking, it sounded like Tyson was probably going to die. There was no way any of us would be able to deal with that in a calm way.

“Prepare? Prepare! Jesus fucking Christ,” Gavin roared. “There’s no preparing for this!”

Flynn clapped a hand on Gavin’s shoulder and told him to calm down. After Gavin nodded his agreement, Flynn turned to John.

“We need to get to the hospital.”

“Already on it,” John answered. “The limo is ready to take you now.”

The ride to the hospital was fucking awful, a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on anyone. The three of us stared at each other in silence as we each tried to grapple with what was happening. There was no playbook for how to deal with something so fucked up. People thought just because we were rich and famous, our lives were perfect. The reality was far from ideal. We’d shot to the top so fast there had been no time to adjust. One day we’d been high school punks, and then a few months later, our faces were everywhere and people were screaming when they saw us on the streets.

Flynn and I were twenty-four and Gavin and Tyson were just twenty-three. All I could focus on was trying to figure out how we had all gotten so fucked up so fast. We were still fucking kids, really. It made no sense.

When we arrived at the hospital, it was pandemonium. There were news crews, fans, and photographers everywhere. A wall-to-wall sea of screaming people, some crying, others yelling out questions and comments. Normally when we arrived somewhere, we would stop and say hello. With Ty inside the building fighting for his life, there was no time for pleasantries. We each jumped out of the limo and then ran behind our security personnel as they rushed us into the hospital, ignoring the flashing bulbs and the screaming mob entirely.

All any of us cared about was our brother. At the end of the day, we were family, and the thought of losing Ty was unbearable. At its core, Ty’s problem was centered on what happened when love was too much. Once again, I was reminded of why I didn’t do one-on-one relationships.

It took three days for him to wake up, and when he did, it was obvious he was as scared as we were. Ten days after that, he left the hospital and went directly to rehab.

“For real, the chorus is fucking epic,” Ty proclaimed proudly.

He was right. We were in the second week of writing our new album and things were pretty damn tight. Ty did ninety days in rehab, followed by two months in a sober living community, and the difference in him was like night and day. He still struggled with his past, but without the drugs, he was coping much better. Therapy was finally making a difference, something I knew wouldn’t be the case if he’d continued using.

Being together, working on the album was good for all of us. We’d needed the reboot. The last one we’d put out had been utter bullshit, to be honest. It was a fucking embarrassment filled with self-indulgent crap, and it grated on my damn nerves whenever I heard it. Fortunately, we all felt the same way about it, which meant we were working hard to make sure the new shit we were writing, rocked.

In the beginning stages, the writing sessions were always pretty laid back. Most of the album was written in Ty’s guesthouse, where we met and wrote for a few hours each day.

Our routine was pretty set in stone. Flynn wrote down the lyrics he and I came up with. I strummed the guitar as we wrote because it helped me think. Gavin used his drumsticks on every damn thing he could to get us into the rhythm of it, and Ty would up or down vote ideas, then tweak the lyrics with Flynn.

It could take us days—sometimes weeks—to get the lyrics of one song just so. While Flynn and Ty would work out the runs, Gavin and I would get to work writing the music. Hands down, my favorite part of being in the band was the way we all worked together like a well-oiled machine. It was a brotherhood and I loved it. The things the four of us had experienced together were things no one but us could ever really understand. Our bond was unbreakable.