“You just worked that out?” Gray asked, finishing Flo’s joint, then stubbing it out in the ashtray supplied. It wasn’t our first, but sadly it would almost be our last. We needed to take advantage of our newfound chill, which was why we were in the recording room.
We’d taken a break so Jace could go grab his notebook, but it seemed like ages ago that he’d left.
“Where’s Jace?” I asked, struggling to sit up. Fuck me, Flo’s weed was excellent.
“He went for a drink,” Flo said.
At the same time, Gray answered. “Taking a shit.”
I squinted at both of them, then looked to the staircase. “Feels like he’s been gone a really long time.”
Flo snickered, strumming random notes on her bass guitar. “That’s the weed talking, bro.”
“I have to tell you guys something,” Gray said out of fucking nowhere. “I hired a guy to follow Billie. But he never told me she was knocked up. That’s bad, right?”
“Uh-huh,” Flo agreed. “One star review for sure.”
“You need a refund or discount or something,” I added, lying back down on the carpet.
Gray hummed a sound of agreement, then yawned and ran a hand through his hair. Fucking diva.
Then I sat back up. “Wait, you had someone following her? All this time? And you didn’t tell me?”
“If I did, would you remember?” Gray arched a dark brow at me.
I glared back at him, but he had a valid point. Alotof the past few months was blurry and blacked out. So I guess I didn’t have any kind of argument for being left out of the loop.
“I guess that explainsTheDirty Truthpost about Billie getting fat, huh?” Flo muttered with a loopy grin.
“What did he find out?” I muttered. It fucked me off that I was curious about her life away from us. “Was she treated okay bythe assholeand his mafia family?”
Refusing to sayhisname made me feel marginally better—especially if he was the father of her baby when it should be me. Fuck’s sake, did I really want to be a dad? I should be celebrating the dodging of a bullet, and instead, I was mourning like a dumb cunt.
“Apparently, I wasn’t as informed as I should have been,” Grayson bit out, sounding scary even in his buzzed state. “But she seemed to be okay. Happy enough and well taken care of.”
The last line sounded rehearsed. Or maybe I was just too stoned to get the subtle hints, but it felt like he was trying to say everything without revealing anything, and I wondered why the fuck that was. Were we not safe to freely talk here?
“So, she left us?” Flo sounded bitter as she strummed the strings harder. “Tom didn’t even have to do anything. Billie gave him what he wanted without any fucking help from us.”
Grayson grunted before pulling himself up higher. “It’s more complicated than that, and it doesn’t mean the fucker isn’t going to get the beating he deserves, but yeah… it was going to happen with or without him.”
Again, there was a tone that indicated he wasn’t giving us the entire truth, but who the hell cared about the finer details when the base fact remained: Billie had left us and gotten knocked up by the asshole who broke her heart years ago. Her abuser.
Unless she was lying, and the baby was mine. Why lie, though?
Pushing myself up to sit, I wriggled back to rest against the glass wall of the studio, lifting my guitar as I did. The weed was turning me into a whiny bitch, and I might as well use that to channel some angst into a song. We just needed Jace to get back from his drink and/or shit, whichever one of those was the truth. Or neither.
He was probably hate-fucking Billie against the wall.
Motherfucker.
I’d probably be doing the same. Pregnant with another man’s child or not.
It was a new level of screwed up, and I was owning it.
“That’s nice,” Flo mumbled as I absentmindedly strummed a melody, one with darker, richer undertones than we usually used. Our sound had a hard rock beat, with the occasional ballad for the fans. But this one had a dark, slow, cloying beat that wrapped around you and refused to let go.
“I’ve slept about three hours sober since Billie left,” I admitted hoarsely. “When I find that rest, this is the fucking song that’s raging through my head. I feel it in my soul, but I refused to play it out loud because it’s damn haunting.” And it reminded me of her. Fuck, was I turning into Jace over here?
