Sloe Ride (2 page)

Being upright was a significant challenge. The dark didn’t help. Rafe couldn’t tell which way was up or even how large the room was. As odd as his blackened prison was, his body seemed to be in a very familiar state.

He ached from sex, and a sour rankness poured off his body, a combination of drugs, vomit, and come filming over swathes of his skin. Rafe wasn’t exactly sure if he was on the upswing of drunk and stoned or coming down. It was too soon to tell. He’d have to give it a few minutes to see if he got happier or sadder with healthy doses of belligerence and anger if whatever he took hit those spots in his brain. Thinking hurt. His skull felt boiled solid by his muddled thoughts, and as he stumbled forward, looking for a wall or a doorknob, Rafe heard his subconscious whisper for him to crawl back into the tub and wait for death to take him.

It would be easier than actually killing himself. And sure as hell less painful than how he’d been at it before.

“Fuck the pity party, Andrade,” he grumbled aloud. “Just find the fucking door.”

The knob seemed to appear beneath his grasping fingers, and he lunged for it, using one hand to slap at the wall nearby. Feeling up around the frame, Rafe found a switch, then flicked it up, hoping to finally see what he was doing.

A simple click, and suddenly he was blinded by floodlights bouncing off of white marble. A turn of the knob, and he was free, blindly stumbling into a bedroom he didn’t remember but knew its stench. It was intimate and cloying, just like the odor bleeding out of his pores. There was a pounding coming from somewhere, but Rafe couldn’t figure out if it was his head or the anxious tap of his heart in his chest.

“Hotel.” He carefully looked around. Double doors, one hanging off its hinges, led to a living room off of the bedroom. “And I’ve trashed it. That’s par for the course. But where the fuck is the hotel?”

The king-size bed was a mess, and something’d leaked on the floor near an overturned nightstand. It was standard high-star hotel fare, slithery duvet crumpled up and probably full of dried come. Somehow either he or someone else got all of the artwork off the walls and thrown into a pile of torn canvas and frames in a corner of the room. Burn marks on the wood pieces were a hint at an attempted bonfire. The water-soaked carpet and an empty ice bucket set on top of the pile spoke of at least a panicked success.

Oddly enough, the bedroom was empty. Rafe’s bedroom was never empty. Hell, even if he had to sneak a piece of ass around Jack once in a while, his bed was always filled.

“Okay, so somewhere, I probably lost a boy.” He rubbed at his face, shivering in the air-conditioned room. “God, I could use a good fuck. Better than coffee.”

His balls were still AWOL, and his dick was limp between his legs. He was thinking about sex, and nothing. Not even a stirring want churning up in his belly. Common enough. The drugs were taking their toll, and for the umpteenth time in his life, Rafe promised himself he’d cut back. A few little blue pills took care of any nonsense his body decided to toss back at him, but au natural was definitely a better way to go. Looking down at his cock, Rafe suddenly realized the chafing on his skin had less to do with fucking himself senseless and more about the condom rolled down his shaft.

“Jesus Christ.” The sheath was hard to get off, and he tugged at it, snapping it clean off, then tossing it into the failed bonfire. Rubbing at his temple, the pounding continued, a muted thump-thump echoing across his skull. “Okay, forget the guy. Where the fuck am I? I don’t even know what city I’m in.”

Panic was starting to set in. He felt like he’d missed something—a birthday or even maybe a show. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d slept through a gig, but Jack’d been harsh on his ass the last time he skipped out. The band wasn’t going to take much more of his shit, but for the life of him, Rafe couldn’t recall if they were on tour or if he’d just gone someplace all by himself and got stinkingass wasted.

“No, not on tour. Come on, where’s your stuff, Andrade? There’d be a bass in here if—”

He found the guy he’d been looking for in the living room.

Unfortunately for both of them, he was as cold and lifeless as Rafe’s cock. A pretty blond, barely old enough to know better than to let a rock star lure him up to a hotel room, or maybe he hadn’t cared. Either way, it was a decision he’d never live to regret. His lifeless brown eyes stared up accusingly at Rafe, a froth of vomit speckled with something black drying over his parted lips and long throat. Sprawled out naked on the floor, his fingers were covered in dried blood, the carpet near his thighs streaked a dark brown where he’d clawed at the pile. Shock closed Rafe’s throat, and suddenly the pounding grew louder, shattering the silence.

Then the door flew open, and Rafe’s world broke apart.

“Police! Hands up! Clear the room!” There were a ton of cops, too many to count. Hell, too many for Rafe to even see. It was a tidal wave of uniforms, some blue cotton while others wore the red-gray livery of a Los Angeles hotel he’d stayed in before.

And in the middle of it—Jack
fucking
Collins, lead guitarist and Rafe’s mostly-on-sometimes-off lover, staring him straight in the face. Jack’s handsome face was curdled with rage, and the white light coming from the hotel corridor formed a corona around his broad shoulders, gilding his sun-streaked hair.

“Fucking Christ, Rafe. What the
hell
did you do?” Jack accused, a hot spit of words and anger pouring from his lanky body. “You’re out of the band. Missing last night? Too fucking much, but—
this
? I just—God, Rafe. What the
hell
?”

Naked, cold, and hungover, Rafe did the only thing any rational bass player would do when standing over a stiff corpse and being surrounded by cops. He leaned over and vomited all over the dead guy’s body.

Nine Months Later

R
EHAB
TOOK
everything out of him. More than two hundred days of white walls, porridge, and singing “Kumbaya My Lord,” and Rafe’d been about to kill himself just to get free. Sobriety sucked, and even worse, he’d spent his birthday craving a blow job and some coke. What he’d gotten was a cupcake and a call from his mother.

He’d clung to her voice. In an instant, he’d become a little boy again, curled up around a plastic headset and crying, deep, jagged sobs violent enough to tear him apart. They’d been the longest five minutes of his life, too short for his brain to grasp and too long for his soul to take.

It would be the last time they spoke for months.

Thank God for Brigid and Donal, or he’d have gone mad.

Rafe’s skin didn’t stop itching until three months into his sentence. As court orders went, he’d gotten off easy. Locked up in rehab on a suspended sentence was nothing compared to jail time, and despite a grumpy judge’s opinion of Rafe failing the course, he’d done pretty good. Despite what everyone’d thought of him, when he sobered up later that fateful evening, the horror of what happened in his hotel room haunted him.

He also couldn’t seem to get his feet clean of the dead blond’s—of Mark’s vomit.

Now he was slinking home, worn through and torn apart by his own demons. Despite the cleaning service his former manager set up, his Nob Hill penthouse smelled stale and dead. The doorman’d been friendly enough. Once Rafe established he actually belonged in the building and once security reassured themselves of his ownership, the property manager scurried out from his office and handed Rafe his new keys.

“There were some issues, Mr. Andrade,” the beak-nosed man simpered. “Some very hateful things painted on the side of the building, but it was taken care of. Have no worries. We rekeyed the penthouse as a precaution.”

There was no good-to-have-you-back nonsense from the sour-faced man. Rafe knew if he hadn’t actually bought the penthouse outright, there’d have been a fight to get him out. No matter what anyone said, life was always just like high school. Fuck up royally, and people were more than happy to rip his ass to shreds and hand it back to him piece by piece.

This time, he didn’t blame them.

Set on one of San Francisco’s steep hills, the building had gorgeous views of the city and bay. When he’d first seen the penthouse, Rafe knew he had to have it. It was the furthest thing from the shithole he’d grown up in, a symbol of how far he’d climbed from being a charity case begging for scraps of education and food. He’d always wanted more—wanted what his friends Connor and Sionn had, longed for a time when he didn’t have to look at price tags and juggle food against electricity or snatch cigarettes off the back of a truck to sell in a Chinatown alleyway for a bit of extra money.

The water glittered off in the distance, and the city’s spires below hadn’t quite shaken off their foggy veil. On a clear day he could see Finnegan’s, where he’d washed dishes for Sionn’s grandmother, wanting to be too proud to take the day’s leftover food home, but he hadn’t been stupid. He’d taken everything anyone offered and sometimes without permission. He’d sucked out what he could from the private school education his mother’d gotten him and charmed his way out of shit he’d fallen into.

Oddly enough, the penthouse and its million-dollar view meant nothing now. He owned it. He owned a lot of things. Stashing money and hiring people to keep every damned cent he made was the best piece of advice he’d gotten from Donal Morgan. It was a pity that was the only advice he’d listened to.

Despite the months he’d spent in Malibu soaking up sobriety, his place looked almost exactly the same as when he’d left it. Rich, warm buttery walls and comfortable furniture with a few dashes of art the decorator tossed in warmed the empty apartment. A sparkling kitchen armed with gadgets he had no idea how to use and bedrooms with beds soft enough to sink into lay off the main entrance. He’d paid for a room to be soundproofed and set up amps and a soundboard, intending to blow out his own ears while staying up all hours of the night with Jack.

That
bit of life never happened, and Rafe wondered if it ever would have to begin with.

To the left of the front door, unread books lined a bank of cases, and the view from the midcentury modern living room was heart stopping, the Golden Gate Bridge poking up through the far-off mist. His favorite part of the place were the guitars hanging from a long wall separating the rest of the house from the long living space, bright spots of color splashed up against white paint and what he’d used to pull himself up out of perdition.

Some of which were now gone, taken by the man he’d built his escape on.

There hadn’t been love. Not the love he felt for Quinn Morgan—the love he’d tucked away deep inside of himself so it wouldn’t hurt—but a casual affection, a kindred musical spirit he’d not found in his other relationships.

Fuck, Jack dumping him out of his life
really
hurt.

The gaps in the guitars hurt the most, and Rafe stumbled to sit down on something before he fell to his knees and cried. Of all the things Rafe’d fucked up in his life, losing Jack Collins’s friendship left the biggest hole. It was more than hurt, he realized, staring at the white spaces where Jack’d once hung some of his favorite instruments. It was losing parts of his life Rafe knew he’d never get back. The band was gone. Jack was gone. There was no one he hadn’t fucked over, including the person he’d thought he’d always have, his own mother. As empty as he felt inside, Rafe knew he’d run out of excuses. Reality came back and bit him hard because he’d been the one to set it all on fire and laughed when it burned to a crisp.

A note was tucked into one of the wall mounts, and Rafe debated leaving it there for the housekeeper to clean up. His resolve lasted about a minute before he snatched it out of its perch. He wanted a drink, something to steady his nerves, but the stint in rehab left him with a sour taste for numbing his brain when things got rough. While anything chemical was now off-limits, alcohol hadn’t been his problem—wasn’t his problem, Rafe corrected himself.

“Shit’s not going to go away just because you want it to. Always going to be there.” He sat down on a fluffy armchair he didn’t remember owning. The whole place looked odd, unfamiliar in so many ways, leaving him to wonder if the guitars weren’t the only thing Jack took with him.

From the look of the handwriting on the folded paper, Jack at least left him a Dear John letter.

“More like a fuck off and die,” Rafe muttered, opening the note.

It was everything he’d imagined. Clear and strong in black ink, Jack left Rafe with no delusions he’d ever be welcomed back into Jack’s band or life. There’d been too many times, too many disappointments, and one too many deaths for Jack Collins’s liking, and Rafe Andrade could go twist in the wind for all he cared.

They’d not been in love. They’d fought as much as they’d fucked, bound by rhythms, words, and a shared hardscrabble past. Rafe wasn’t a fool to think Jack cared for him more than he liked a good piece of steak or a fine bottle of tequila, but they’d been friends. Hell, they’d gone through so much together. Rafe’d created the band with Jack, and despite it all—or maybe because of it all—he hadn’t fought Jack when he’d been pushed out. It was all over between them except for the legal wrangling as lawyers and record companies untangled Rafe’s half ownership of a band he’d help put on the map.

“I should fuck them all up and refuse to sell.” Even as the spite gushed from the sourness in his belly, Rafe knew he wouldn’t do it. He owed Jack. With as much shit as they’d been through at the start, it’d been Jack who’d held it all together once Rafe began to destroy it all in the end. “Hell, Jack. I wish you’d just let me say
I’m sorry
. Would you fucking at least give me that much?”

He’d fallen so damned far, crashing down on sharp rocks and tearing out the wings he’d built for himself to get away from who he’d been. And now Rafe was back where he started. Alone, unwanted, and most of all, scared down deep into his soul.

“Damn it, Andrade.” Rafe swallowed around the pain hitching up through his throat. “Should have just done the shitty world a favor and taken one last handful of fucking pills. ’Cause after all of this crap, no one’s going to fucking want you around.”