Rock N Soul (31 page)

“I will if I want to,” Eric grumbled back. “You’re dead.” He laughed a little hysterically. “Oh my God, I’m standing in my kitchen talking to a
ghost
.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I’ve been putting up with the bastard for months. You get used to it.”

“So what now?” Eric asked. He stepped back, and Chris let him go, dropping his hands to his sides.

I sighed. “We’re here so you guys can say what you need to say to each other. And then we’re going to see his sister. And then . . .” I shrugged.

“And then he . . . disappears?”

“We have no idea, actually,” I admitted. “That’s the current theory. Finish up his business and then he leaves for whatever comes afterwards.”

Chris turned again and looked at me. “Is that what you’re hoping?”

“Shut up,” I said in a flat voice. “I’m too pissed to talk about that right now.”

Eric knitted his forehead. “Too pissed about what?”

“Nothing,” I muttered. “Can we just continue with your good-byes and then we can get the hell out of here?”

“Ask him if he has my car,” Chris said.

I clamped my jaw shut and ground my teeth for a second, then said, “He wants to know if you have his car.”

“Yeah, it’s in the garage,” Eric said. “I got our manager to contact Allison and see if she wanted any of his other stuff, but . . . Well, she wanted the ring. But I didn’t have that. Nobody really knows where it went when he . . .” He scowled. “When he died.”

“Oh.” I pulled the chain out from inside my shirt, only realizing how incredibly obvious that was when it was too late to change my mind. “This ring?”

Chris’s eyes snapped to my hand. “You still have it?”

“Of course I still have it, you dick,” I said. “You’ve been with me 24/7 since I picked it up. When would I have had time to get rid of it?”

“You . . . you
wear
it, though?” He looked floored by this, and I hated it.

“Shut up,” I said. I pulled the necklace over my head and put it in my pocket. “I’ll pass it off to Allison when we go to see her.”

Chris opened his mouth, presumably to be a dick and keep talking about it, so I threw him a Death Glare and he sighed. “Well, ask him what he has that’s mine.”

I asked Eric the question. “Lots of things,” he said. “I mean, his money went to Allison as his next of kin. She almost didn’t take it, but his mom’s care is expensive so I think she used it for that. But she didn’t want any of his actual stuff, so I ended up with most of it, and I kept the important things. Some of his clothes. His car. His guitars.”

Chris sucked in a breath. “Which guitar?”

“He wants to know which guitar you have,” I told Eric.

Eric shrugged. “All of them.”

Chris stepped forward and reached for Eric’s arm again. Eric jumped when Chris’s fingers wrapped around his biceps, then relaxed. “Do you want to see them?” he asked, so softly I almost didn’t hear the question.

“He does,” I said loudly, causing both of them to raise their stupid perfect rock star eyebrows at me. “Just show us.”

We followed Eric up to the second story, where he opened the door to what looked like a music room. On one wall was a sizable collection of guitars. Most of them were basses, but there were a couple of six-strings in the mix, including one that was significantly cheaper and more beat-up than the others.

“Holy shit,” Chris said. “He has my first one.”

Eric was talking too. “These are all the guitars he had in his house when they cleaned it out. They didn’t know who else to give them to. Allison didn’t want them, and I guess I was next in line for everything.” He sighed. “I’d been thinking about auctioning them off for charity, but I just hadn’t worked myself up to that yet.”

Chris walked slowly over to the wall and reached for the old guitar. It didn’t even surprise me when he wrapped his fingers around the neck and pulled it down off the wall—I’d known the second the bastard reached for it that he was going to be able to touch it. Since the second he’d laid eyes on it, he’d been looking at it like he’d looked at Eric a few minutes ago, so of course he could touch it. Of
course
he could.

My guts started to feel like they were going to fall out, so I wrapped my arms around my stomach. I stared down at the floor and focused on the grain of the wood, the way the varnish played with the light pouring in through the window and gave the boards the illusion of being lit from the inside. It was a little steadying, which was good, because I wasn’t the one who had the right to break down over all of this. After all, it wasn’t like Chris would have ever even talked to me if it wasn’t for this cage I had him in. And it wasn’t like this was a cage he would be in for much longer, so . . . the hollow wrenching feeling in my insides was going to happen sometime. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

That didn’t make me feel any better, though.

I had no real concept of how long I spent wrapped up in my wood-gazing reverie, but it couldn’t have been very long because Eric clearly hadn’t seen Chris pick up the guitar. I know this because it was him yelling “Fuck!” really loudly and stumbling backward that broke into my thoughts.

I laughed at him. It felt good.

“You can see Chris?” Eric asked me.

I thought about being sarcastic, but instead I just nodded.

“Then as far as you can see, there’s not a levitating guitar in the middle of the room?” He gestured toward Chris and the guitar.

“No, just some guy fondling his guitar like it’s made of tits,” I answered. I could hear the bitterness in my voice and knew how obvious it must be to everybody else, but I wasn’t sure I could do anything about it. So I didn’t bother trying.

Chris flashed Eric a grin like he’d forgotten that Eric couldn’t see him and strummed a chord on the guitar. It sounded horrible, and we all cringed.

“Oh my God, it’s so out of tune.” Chris started tuning the guitar, and I let my gaze fall back down to the floor.

“Um,” Eric said. I glanced at him, but it seemed like “um” was all he had to say, and I wasn’t in the mood to take the conversational bait.

So I didn’t say anything, and after a moment Eric cleared his throat, and even
that
sounded like it was coated in caramel-flavored lube, which wasn’t fucking fair. “I can get you a tuner if you need one.”

Chris shook his head without looking up. “I don’t need one. Almost done.”

“He says no,” I relayed to Eric as I pulled my arms tighter against my stomach.

And then when Chris strummed a chord that finally sounded right, we all sighed in unison, and I suddenly understood the insanity defense a lot more, because sighing in unison with Chris and Eric fucking Painter made me want to grab a guitar off the wall and smash it into the floor until it was nothing more than splinters and curled strings.

“It’s been a long time,” Chris murmured, caressing the neck of the guitar and probably getting a ghost boner from it if the look on his face was any indication. He found a stool in the corner of the room and sat on it, then started playing a simple melody.

Eric watched Chris and the guitar move across the room, and then he took a few steps toward the stool. “Do you want me to go get mine?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, but neither of them seemed to have heard me. Chris was just staring at him with a thunderstruck expression and so I spoke louder, “He says yes.”

“Okay,” Eric said. “I’ll be right back.” He left the room.

Chris stopped playing and raised an eyebrow at me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I snapped, and he looked so confused that I took pity on him for being as dumb as a jar of paste, and went for a toned-down version of the explanation. “I just didn’t expect . . .” I waved vaguely at the guitar. “This.”

“I didn’t either,” he said, going back to plucking out a tune I’d heard before but couldn’t place.

“Chris,” I started, but then Eric walked back in the room carrying a black acoustic guitar—of
course
it was black—and another wooden stool. He’d also changed from his sweatpants into blue jeans and a Def Leppard T-shirt, and I specifically didn’t look at Chris because I didn’t want to see his eyes light up. Eric put the stool down near Chris and perched on it, swinging his guitar strap up over his neck.

He fidgeted a little as he got ready and took far too long positioning his guitar, then glanced at Chris’s guitar and then up to where Chris’s face would be. His eyes didn’t point exactly at Chris’s, which was good because I was pretty sure I would have a rage-induced aneurysm if Eric could
see
him too.

“Do you remember ‘Houses on Fire’?” Eric asked.

Chris smiled softly and bent his head back to his guitar, then started playing the first part of the song—the rhythm guitar part instead of the bass line. I did recognize this one from the many times Carmen had played their first album, which had a hokey fire theme but was decent anyway, I guess.

Eric nodded and joined in. The song had an instrumental beginning and so it took them a while to get to the lyrics, but when Eric started to sing and Chris harmonized with him, my stomach dropped again and the shitty hotel breakfast suddenly seemed like an even worse idea than it had before.

“This is bullshit,” I muttered. I needed some physical distance—even fifteen feet still felt way too close to me—so I backed away from them, walking backward until I saw Chris move forward a little as I got him to the end of his invisible chain, then I sat down on the floor and pulled out my phone so that I could have something to stare at besides the jam session in front of me.

The acoustic version of the song without the driving bass line and without the drums sounded a lot more wistful than the album version. It was a song about losing everything, falling into a void, and on the album and on stage it was one of those angry dark metal thrashing songs that made even the daintiest church mouse start headbanging and yelling about fucking The Man. But here in Eric’s guitar room with the two of them perched on wooden stools and Chris staring into Eric’s stupid blue eyes, it was almost like a ballad. I mean, a
power
ballad, but still. It was nauseating.

And it was fucking
gorgeous
, which made the whole thing even worse. But when would I ever hear this version of the song again? I found the voice recorder on my phone and pushed Record, hating myself a little as I did it.

They sang well together—Eric’s deep powerful voice layered with Chris’s lighter baritone—and they played and sang with the ease of years of practice. Chris closed his eyes and an effortless smile started to hover around the corners of his mouth, and Eric’s angry-badass stage presence disappeared under the peace of the room and left the two of them looking like just guys with their music.

And
this
was where Chris belonged. Sitting beside Eric Painter and singing a triple-platinum song while the troubles visibly faded off his face. In a multiroomed house in Los Angeles where the temperature was kept at a comfortable level regardless of the power bill. With someone who was in his league instead of six floors below it.

I’d never really kidded myself into thinking Chris would ever belong in my shitty apartment and my shitty life. He’d always seemed like a visitor there, just passing through. But I guess I’d started to hope for . . . something. Some kind of . . . holding pattern, at least. A way to keep him around a little longer while I sorted out what I wanted from all of this and what I was likely to end up getting after this unfinished business was wrapped up.

But fuck that. I would never be enough to make him as happy as he looked right now at Eric’s side. And now that I’d seen him really
happy
, I felt like an asshole for being the reason he would have to leave this behind at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t like it was my choice to pull him around with me like one of those leash-kids.

They got to another instrumental part of the song, and without stopping, Eric lifted his head and caught my gaze. “Is he enjoying this?”

I swallowed around the softball lodged in my esophagus. “Yeah,” I said. “He’s singing with you. And he’s smiling like an idiot.”

Chris shot me a dirty look that he’d given me a thousand times since we met, but this was the first time that it really cut down into me. I pressed the button to stop recording and slipped my phone back in my pocket, pulling in a deep breath that wasn’t at
all
shaky, no way.

“Tell him I’ve missed this,” Chris said. “Being with him when he didn’t hate me.”

The softball swelled to more of a grapefruit, and I couldn’t imagine how I was even breathing around it. “He says—” I started, but my voice cracked and it was just too much. I scrambled to my feet. “Fuck this,” I said. The door wasn’t that far from Chris and the hallway shouldn’t be past his range of movement, so I mumbled something about needing to make a call and practically ran into the hall, slamming the door behind me.

Once I was outside, I leaned against the wall of the hallway and let my head fall back with a thump that was pretty satisfying. I did it again.
Thump
. Nice. Let those assholes have their mating session with some damn privacy instead of doing it in front of me. Leaving me out of it was just common decency.