Strung Out (Needles and Pins #1) (65 page)

“I’m always right.” From the speakerphone. “Who’s there with you? Scarla?” Gage picked the phone up and twisted it, so the camera would frame her. She pulled a smile when she saw Colt’s eyes on the screen, and he greeted her. “Hi, Scarla. My pool misses you.”

Gage’s face clouded even more, and he angled the camera away from her. She made another silent gesture of her hands, this one more explicit.

“I’ll call you later.” Gage barely waited for an answer before ending the call. “He’s right. I’ve got to fix that.”

“Whatever. He always finds something to bitch about.” Picking up the guitar on the couch, she held it and sat in its place.

“You ready for that lesson?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking. You know. That I’d be gone in six days.”

“What if I told you, you could learn one song in a few days?”

“You could teach me a whole song?”

He grinned at her doubtful tone and with a challenge-accepted look, crossed to sit beside her. Waving a hand with a flourish toward the guitar she held, he said, “Scarlette, meet Claudine. Claudine meet Scarlette.”

Running a finger down the smooth wood of the neck before relinquishing it to his tuning expertise, she inquired. “Do you have any boy guitars?”

His face contorted into a façade of shock. “Nope. Only ladies up close and personal with my junk.”

The answer confused her, until a moment later when he slipped into the strap and stood, strumming chords while crossing the room. He searched out a container of picks, grabbed one, and turned. “This one should be right for you.”

She nodded, but wasn’t listening. She was too busy noticing the body of the guitar at crotch level, and although she tried, she couldn’t stop a belated giggle.

Claudine was a lucky lady
…

True to his word,
by the next evening, he had her playing the beginning lick and the chorus of Smoke on the Water. This was an accomplishment, because it was no easy feat to concentrate with him so close. His arms wrapped around her to demonstrate finger placement. His breath fanned her neck when he spoke. His fingers held her eyes captivated as they walked along the instrument.

It was during one of these spellbound moments when she first noticed something was not quite right. His hands seemed shaky. A sheen of perspiration ran along his hairline. And like the evening before, his complexion didn’t seem right. Since asking about his welfare had been disastrous the previous night, she didn’t at first.

“Okay. This next lick, instead of being three, two, three, one, is going to speed up so that it’s three, three, two, two, and then three one, three one. And the strokes are going to be down, down, up, down. Down, up, down, down, up.”

Hearing Gage speak of licks and strokes in his husky sweet voice was a continuous rapturous assault on every nerve.

His hand curved naturally around the wood and the pads of his fingers fit themselves to the strings. The pick fell to the floor, but he ignored it and used his fingers instead to show her the next progression. She almost choked on the drool pooling in her throat.

When it was her turn to follow his lead, she played through what she knew so far. To divert her wayward thoughts, she concentrated on the guitar, taking in the faint scuffmarks, the one nick. For a moment, a skull and lightning bolt manifested. It transformed back into a black Gibson as she finished her lick and Gage pulled the guitar into his lap.

His hands shook worse now, so much so that he couldn’t play what he wanted to demonstrate. “Well, that’s enough for tonight.” He offered it back to her. “You want to keep it with you to practice?”

Lightning stretched across it again and the skull faded in and then out. It wasn’t that she actually saw it; it was a feeling. The same feeling she’d had when seeing her father’s guitar. Sorrow. Grief. Regret.

“No.” She recoiled.

One day this iconic guitar and a legend would be left behind, same as her father’s.

Her gaze followed him as he moved across the room, his posture bent like a man forty years older. He rested the guitar in a rack, walked a few more paces, and dropped to a squat, peering into the mini fridge.

Over his shoulder he asked, “Want anything?”

Ignoring his offer, she asked, “What’s wrong? What has you shaking like that? What has you looking so bad?”

Using the shelving unit the fridge was encased in, he hauled himself up and then wrestled with the cap on the beer bottle. An unsteady twist finally popped it off, and it landed at his feet, where it went ignored like the guitar picks. Only it wasn’t a pick. It was trash. It wasn’t normal, especially for this room.

“Nothing. I’m fine, okay?” Whatever he read in her face softened his expression. “I won’t make you worry again.” The promise rang with humble sincerity, and then his voice changed a bit. “You going?” Another chugalug of the beer. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Nonplussed, she stared, and then realized she was being dismissed. In the nicest of ways—but dismissed, nevertheless. It seemed a well-used phrase coming from his lips. In a different element, he was a man who was accustomed to speaking and getting what he wanted—or sending away what he didn’t. For a moment, she saw Gage Remington-Superstar—sprawled on not only this couch, but backstage couches all over the world—and he looked so alone.

She stood, regarding him for a few more seconds, and then left the room. Upstairs, she readied for bed, unable to believe they’d gone from the incredible closeness of the morning, and the affinity since, to this moment now. It wasn’t ‘fine.’ No matter what he said.

Slipping on a pair of shorts, she ignored her bed and raced down the hallway, down the stairs, back to the studio. The main lights were off but a blue light from an equalizer lent a dim glow.

The beer bottle was on its side, pooling into a wet spot on the oriental looking rug that covered the tile in this room. Gage was still on the couch, fully reclined now, on his side, curled almost into a ball.

“Gage?”

He groaned.

“Seriously. What’s wrong?” Avoiding the beer puddle, she stopped beside him.

“Fuck I hate this. I hate this part so much…”

She touched her hand to his head, finding cold clammy skin. Yet without touching him anywhere else, she could feel the intense heat radiating off the rest of him.

Suddenly she felt like an idiot. The shakes. The shivers. The vows of never worrying her again…

“Withdrawals? Are you in the middle of withdrawals? How many days?”

Croaking out another swear, he coughed, his entire body jolting with the motion. “The morning after last time. After you left. That morning.”

Now she was the one to swear. Straightening, she crossed the shadowy room. The fridge light blinked on when she pulled it open and grabbed a bottle of water.

Carrying it with her, she returned to his side and knelt to his level. “Drink this. You need water. Not beer.”

“Beer takes the edge off.”

“And dehydrates you, making the symptoms ten times worse right after you’re done drinking it!” She managed to get him sitting up enough to tip the rim of the bottle to his lips. “Where’s your smoke?”

She pulled open the indicated drawer and found it littered with paraphernalia she had no idea how to use. Rooting through it, she picked up a prescription type container containing pre-rolled joints. She shook one out and took it and a lighter to the couch.

He moved his legs aside and she took a seat. Sparking the lighter, she held it to the tip of the rolled paper, inhaled, and leaned in close enough so their lips barely brushed as she let the hit out. Pinching it backward between her lips, she leaned in again, expelling another breath while he sucked it in.

Within a minute or so, he sat up and accepted the transfer of the joint from her fingers to his. After taking in a few more hits himself, he gave her a sideways look. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

Knowing he was speaking of the hits she’d shared with him, she shrugged, not up to stories of her past ruining the weirdly comfortable moment.

His half smile quirked enough to see his dimple, but his posture still seemed pained. “I would’ve beat up whatever little punk taught you that. Still will—just tell me who.”

She laughed, letting him think it was one of her school-aged boyfriends.
Because how many teen girls had been taught to ‘shotgun’ by one of their mom’s rocker boyfriends?

H
e listened to her amused giggle and basked in the moment of making her laugh. He wondered what relationship he and Scarlette would have today if there had been no divorce between their parents. If he had been there to watch over her through high school, through college. If she had been a teenaged girl without a druggie, promiscuous mother.

If he would have been around to make things better for her, would he be sitting here right now as her big brother? Or the man who had just inconspicuously adjusted the boner her shotgun hits had given him?

“You can’t just quit cold turkey.” She broke the silence. “It’s dangerous.”

“I think I can. I had already done the detox part in rehab. And I didn’t go back to using every day when I left.” He took one last hit and dropped the smoke onto a glass coaster. He could sense her mind churning. “I’ll go into rehab if I have to. But… And I know this is a lot to ask… You can help me, right? If you tell me what to do, what to take, whatever it is you studied, I could stay home, right? I can beat this thing in my own house. And not somewhere where every other junkie looking at me knows who I am.” The light beneath the pool surface created an alien-like glow on the windows and he watched it for a bit when she didn’t answer. “I know you don’t want to be in L.A. for the twentieth thing. Just… We could do this, right? I can text you or call you with questions. We can Skype. Whatever it takes.”

At this point, he felt as if he was pleading for more than her help in home detox. He felt like he was begging her to stay in touch.

“I’ll help you. You know I will.”

Turning to Scarlette for help
with his sobriety was starting out harder than rehab had been.

However, it was far more interesting, he acceded as he eyed her long bare legs. She was wearing the black denim shorts he liked on her and a stretchy white cotton tee shirt with a generous vee neck.

Her ankles were bare. The top ridge of white footie socks edged the rim of her black sneakers.

He slowed his hiking pace, needing to catch his breath, and Scarlette slowed too. She stood several paces ahead of him, beyond the shade of an overhanging tree limb, and the sun ignited fiery highlights in her hair.

“Too out of shape to keep up?”

He didn’t know if he wanted to flip her off or kiss the taunt from her lips. Doing neither, he ignored her and resumed his hiking pace. She caught up and fell into place beside him.

Seth and his friend both carried their skateboards, and Seth grumbled, “Thought we were going to Runyon.”

“Too crowded,” Gage replied. Because of the unfortunate notoriety the band was getting these days, hiking Runyon Canyon trails would have meant security trailing behind them.

Scar stopped and pointed down the side of the trail. A rusted out frame was all that remained of an old car.