Hung Out: A Needles and Pins Rock Romance (40 page)

Damn rock stars
.

No regrets, I decided
when my eyes opened and the memories flooded. Even the unfortunate choking and subsequent coughing fit when I’d paid Gage back, sip for sip, hadn’t put a damper on how I viewed our celebration.

If I had to rate getting my freak on, well, waking up uncovered and naked with my feet in the fur of a hundred-pound dog lying on the foot of the bed would be up there on the freaky scale.

“Hey.”

“Morning.” I soaked in the sight of him as I returned the reverent greeting.

How with his hair wild about his head and eyes bloodshot with fatigue did he look good enough to eat again? Maybe the secret was all that ink. Self-consciously, I rose my one tattooed wrist to smooth wayward strands of my own hair.

“You feeling okay?” His finger trailed my cheekbone.

“I need something. Tylenol or whatever you’ve got.”

“Headache?” He seemed worried at this prospect.

I shook my head. “Just all over, you know?”

“Must be bad if you’re going all over-the-counter instead of whipping up smoothies,” he teased, but he continued to assess me with concern. “I’ll get it for you.”

“I will. I’ve got to pee anyway.”

“Scar? You sure you’re okay?” He stayed me with a gentle brush of his fingers on my neck, but his mood quickly turned angry. “I was too rough. Shit. You should have told me. Damn it!”

“No. It wasn’t like that. I just feel…”
Sore all over
. I bit my tongue on words sure to make him feel worse even thought he’d be taking them out of context. “I’m not feeling this way because of our sex.” I caught his hand and squeezed his fingers. “Gage, being connected like that—fucking you—was the only thing that kept me sane last night.”

Instead of glowing with passion at my ‘four letter’ words, he still blazed with anger. “I want to kill him.”

“What? Who?”

“He fucked you up. Those little bruises last night are now… If I’d known it was that bad… Dammit, I can’t believe I didn’t knock him the fuck out.”

I’d seen Gage on a very thin line as we’d all watched Ketchum being led to the squad car. His fingers had curled. His jaw had worked in that way I’d learned was a grit of his teeth. While his fury had touched me deeply, his restraint of it had been another sign to me that Gage had his shit together.

Reaching out, I traced a caressing hand down the inked guitar strings on his arm, and then back up the broken one. Leaving the bed, I padded to my bag and pulled a tee shirt over my head.

In the bathroom, I was as shocked as he at what I saw in the mirror. My neck was yellow and black, finger marks clearly present. Deluged by the visible reminders of an hour in my life I had no desire to remember, I pulled the vanity drawer open. I would swallow something for my aches and even though Gage and I had showered the champagne and sex away before falling into bed to sleep, maybe I could talk him into another shower if for nothing more than to feel his soothing touch soaping my body. Keeping my eyes averted from my reflection and onto the contents of the drawer, I reached for a familiar label and froze.

Lying noxiously among the vials of pain reliever was a Ziploc bag. The sight of the syringe and other paraphernalia inside the plastic had me jerking my hand back.
Why in holy hell?

In the other room, Gage was out of the bed, and I watched him step into a pair of pajama bottoms like the ones he sometimes wore around the house. Twisting toward me, he met my eyes. His expression was sweet and gentle until he read whatever was on my face. His look dropped to the drawer, and the life seemed to fizzle out of him.

Unlike on tour when he’d adamantly denied drugs the second he thought I was suspicious, this morning, he simply lifted his brows. I held his searching gaze, and sudden clarity settled me.

Before, he had been quick to defend himself because he couldn’t stand my thinking even for a second that he’d screwed up. Now, something had changed. There was confidence in his eyes. As if he knew I
wouldn’t
jump to conclusions.

“Why do you keep it?” I wondered. Because yes. I trusted him. Because of who he was. Gage. And despite of who he was. A disturbed rock star. “Isn’t it bad to have it around?”
Tempting?

“That’s what they say. The shrinks in rehab. But, if I’m having to hide the shit away from me because, ‘fuck me, I might lose control,’ isn’t
it
controlling
me
?”

He had a point.

“If I look at it every day, choose whether to pick it up, choose whether to shoot it up, then I’m in control of my life again.”

I didn’t have a good feeling about this. But I knew Gage. He didn’t bullshit. He didn’t lie. And he was a very controlling person. “So, you just leave it there? Look at it sometimes?”

“Mostly.” A shadow of shame passed over his features.

Mostly?
There was that weird feeling again.

“What?” My question came out in a fearful whisper.

“A few times I’ve done more than look. But I needed to. I needed to know
I
was in control. Not the other way around.”

My spit seemed to congeal in my throat, and I swallowed the painful lump.

His steps ate up the distance between us. Before I could agree or disagree with this roulette game he’d obviously played a few times, he shook the contents of the bag out. I gnawed my lip raw when he meticulously and with a practiced hand went through the motions until he was drawing the golden liquid through the needle into the syringe. Next came the tourniquet, and here, I looked away. “Don’t!” I couldn’t stand to see this. Even though I knew he wasn’t going through with it, this shit was too real for me.

Trapped in a fog beyond the reach of my voice, he dragged the needle across his skin, tracing the bulge of a vein, and then with a flick of his wrist, depressed the pump, shooting the contents into the toilet.

With a whoosh, my breath blew out, and dizzily, I sucked in another, realizing I’d been holding it.

“And that’s that. Me. In control of my shit.”

“Did you bring that on tour?” I tucked my icy hands between my arms and sides.

The pride in his eyes fizzled, and he huffed out an offended breath. “I’m not stupid, Scar.” He dropped the syringe into a plastic case, similar to the ones in examining rooms, but his wasn’t adorned with an orange hazardous label. “It may be ‘very rock ‘n roll’ to be arrested at customs, but that’s not me. Not anymore.”

“Get rid of it, Gage.” I hugged my arms closer to my chest and skirted around him to exit. “Seriously. You have to have proved your point to yourself by now. Get it out of the house.”

W
ell. Fuck
. He’d been an idiot to think she’d understand. He’d been an idiot to subject himself to the disgust in her beautiful blues.

Pivoting, he made haste to the door and shoved it closed. Reaching into the shower, he twisted it on and set the temperature a couple of degrees higher than he was normally comfortable with. He threw off the pants he’d just put on and stepped in. The heat calmed him quickly. His eyes dropped to her handwriting on the bench. He eyed the numbered progression, the chords automatically converting and bouncing around his brain. He uncapped one of the markers and began to write, slowly at first and then faster as words became verses and twisted into more verses.

It was later that evening when Scar saw. After a day of dropping by the police precinct so she could sign her statement and they could take more pictures of her bruising. After a drop by her apartment for a few necessities she’d forgotten. After dinner with his father. After sex on the giant chaise between the pool and patio heater. After she’d raced him up the stairs for the shower. After he’d caught her and they’d fooled around on the warmed tiles of the bathroom floor.

“What’s this?”

He was too busy lathering her long hair to answer, and she was quiet while she continued to read. His fingers massaged and played for a while before he turned her to tip her head and rinse.

“Something completely new or something you’ve been working on?” Her eyes narrowed, and when she glanced at her scrawlings on the bench, he realized his eyes had strayed that way with her question. “It better not be for my song.”

“Why’s that?”

“It has lyrics already.”

“They just changed.”

“Nuh, uh. Nope.”

“Let me hear ’em. Your lyrics. If they’re so fuckin’ stellar.”

“Oh, they’re way stellar.”

He shoved the marker into her hand, and let his brows drift up in a clear challenge. Truthfully, he antagonized her out of curiosity. Scar had yet to write lyrics as far as he knew. At her house earlier, he’d faked a piss just to get a look of the whiteboard she’d mentioned. It had been filled with tabs only. If she had verses floating around in that pretty head, he longed to see them.

“The lyrics to that song?” She waggled the marker and her lips pursed. He could almost see the hamster wheel in her mind as she tried to wiggle her way out.

“Pick a spot.” He hitched his chin to the plenty of white space.

She tipped her head back. Soap suds ran from the long length of her hair, disappearing down the drain. When she was done rinsing—or stalling as he called it—she wiped a hand down her face. And then to his surprise, she bit the cap off the pen and began to write fast and furious, her body shielding her masterpiece in progress from his view.

Seriously? She had lyrics? Now he felt bad for goading her.

Capping the marker, she turned, still shielding what she’d written, and tossed the pen to him with a smug smile. A draft hissed into the cubicle when she exited. He voyuered through the beads of water on the glass as she dried, before turning curiously to her words.

A smile tugged his lips when he saw she’d rewritten his lyrics and after every few lines had penned, ‘Btw, you’re an asshole.’ At the end, she’d added, ‘but I love these lyrics. And I love you.’

He emerged, finding her wrapped in the towel, sitting on the flipped down lid of the toilet, rubbing the polish off her toenails with one of those magic-disposable wipes for everything that women always seemed to have. He enjoyed the way her eyes followed his every move as he dried, just as he couldn’t help himself when it came to her.

Moving to the mirror, he peered into it, testing the scruffiness of his facial hair. Too rough for Scar’s silky skin, or not? Deciding it could wait another day on his razor, he picked up his toothbrush. Scar was still attending to her toes and returning his looks. The domesticity of the moment had him hooked as hard as any drug he’d ever put in his system.

“So…” She threw the last cloth away and let her foot drop from the toilet edge. “I guess we just wrote a song.”

He spit toothpaste into the sink and took care to rinse it all down the drain. “Yeah. If you want. I was just messin’ with you. You don’t have to―”

“I want them. The lyrics. If you want me to have them.”

“Oh, wait a minute. Wait, wait,
wait
a minute. It’s
your
song now?”

She giggled, and he loved being the one to cause that secret laugh that no one else ever heard—unless she was silly drunk.

“To be decided.” He pointed the toothbrush at her with mock sternness.

Opening the door, he stepped into the bedroom, moved to the bed, and pulled back the sheets. Housekeeping had removed the champagne sheets and replaced them with the usual Egyptian cotton but in a deep red hue. Rose.

“Coming to bed?” He turned, contorting his face into a silly leer and knowing after they’d banged from the pool to the shower they’d likely just fall asleep.

The bathroom door was closed.

He hopped into bed, gave Rascal the okay to come aboard, and picked up his tablet to scan his social sites. His fingers froze in the middle of typing a reply to Colt when he heard a distinct squeak. With his ears tuned to the bathroom door, he listened as cabinets were opened then a few seconds later, closed. As drawers slid out on their tracks and then back.

The tablet skidded from his lap as he swung his legs from the bed. Stomping to the door, he wrenched it open and watched when she jumped up guiltily from her crouch next to the trashcan.