“It’s fitting,” Grayson added, already sounding clearer thanks to the rapid processing of drugs in his giant-ass body. “She’s been haunting all of us for weeks—Jace for years, and I finally understand why.”
I did too. I fucking understood, and I fucking hated it. Jace had tried to warn us, and we wouldn’t listen.
Flo picked up on the melody in a few seconds, joining in with me, adding another facet to the story I was telling without uttering a single word. Grayson moved to sit behind his drums, adding a beat to complete the sound. Flo and I got to our feet as well, and the sound grew stronger. This was my haunted melody, but my bandmates were musical geniuses, and by the time Jace walked into the room looking like he’d seen a ghost, we had a new song all but fleshed out.
He caught the tail end, and some of the blank, wide-eyed look faded from his expression, to be replaced by the sort of hunger he used to show every single time we wrote together. Jace lived and breathed music, but somewhere in the last few years, he’d lost some of that drive. Lost the spark. I saw it again today, though, as he stopped in front of us.
“What the fuck was that?” he rumbled, looking between me and Gray. “And can you do it again?”
For the next two hours, we played our “Broken Hearts and Battered Souls” number until we had it perfected. Jace had already thrown a few lyrics in, but we all acknowledged that this was a piece with fewer words. There was just no need. The beat, melody, and guitar riff in the middle that gave me a chance to let fucking loose told the tale of pain without excessive lyrics.
“Fuck me dead,” Jace said as he shook his head, all of us gulping water like we’d run a marathon. “Who knew that having Billie back in the house and some quality weed would produce that. Maybe Brenda knew what she was doing.”
Grayson lowered the towel he was using to mop up the sweat across his brow, narrowing his eyes on Jace, examining our lead singer for many unnerving minutes. If that look was directed at me, I’d be squirming, but Jace just flipped him off. “Don’t analyze me, bro. I can talk about Billie in a somewhat positive light without being struck down by lightning. I don’t like or trust her, and that’s never going to change, but at some point, I have to move on.”
Grayson wasn’t the only one eyeballing him now. Flo and I were just as suspicious of this character change. Jace hated Billie with the sort of bitter passion that could only come from loving her with all of his being. One didn’t move from love to hate to indifference just because we’d managed to create a truly spectacular song in her presence.
Nope.
What the fuck had Jace been doing during his “drink/shit.”
“Come on, once more and we drop it into a track to send to Big Noise,” Jace said, shuffling us all back into position as he took his place by the studio mic. “It will get them off our back for a bit since we haven’t sent any progress tracks up until now.”
He paused, clearly expecting us to burst into fucking song like a cheesy musical movie, but instead, we deadeye stared him down, waiting for him to break and explainwhat the fuck was going on.Something had happened between him and Billie; I knew it like I knew I was going to find her the second we got out of the studio today. An obsessive itch that no scratching was going to help.
“Not now,” Jace growled. “Not here.”
His expression grew even more serious, and I was struck with the same instinct I’d had with Grayson before. We were not safe to discuss the important shit here, which made me think maybe we were being watched. Or at least listened to. In that case, it was best to act normal until we figured out where we were safe to freely speak.
But also…what the fuck?
I strummed the opening chord. Flo joined me two beats later, and then Grayson added his drumbeat. Jace made sure we were recording, and then he jumped in with the chorus, the only lyrics he had so far, but I wasn’t worried about that. The rest would come; they were already floating in the air around us, just waiting for a voice. Music was a lot like that; in some ways we created it and in others, it was already in existence, just waiting for someone to give it a voice.
When the final note echoed, none of us spoke or moved for a good minute. Music like that lived in your fucking soul, and I’d almost forgotten this feeling. No matter how dark that melody was, it actually filled me with light, and for the first time in weeks, I didn’t crave the blissful high of drugs or alcohol. No numbing required for me to exist in my own body.
Music was a high I’d never been able to replicate, not with the best fucking shit in the world.
“Time for lunch,” Flo finally announced, removing her guitar and placing it in the case. “I think I might actually be hungry today.”
I was in the process of putting my precious guitar away too, but that had me looking up to examine her closer. Since the shit with Billie, I’d been ignoring Florence’s existence, and somehow, I’d missed how thin she’d gotten. I’d missed her refusing to eat or function in any productive way.
I mean, fuck, she could have had half her face missing, and I’d have missed it in the drug-induced state I’d been in. I’d been a real piece of shit lately. “Lunch sounds good,” I acknowledged. “I’m going to cook, and we should eat together outside. Take a break from this house.”
The house we couldn’t speak freely in, apparently.
It was time for us to find a place where we could air whatever bullshit was happening around us and make sure we were all on the same page. We hadn’t acted like a cohesive band for a long time, and it was time to get back to that. We might have lost our way—me more than anyone else—but we weren’t dead. We could come back from this, and the chart topper we’d just created together was proof of that.
Bellerose would not be broken by outside forces, not while I was still fucking alive. And to stay alive, I needed to sort myself out. Whatever motherfuckers were watching us and controlling our lives had better be careful because Rhett Silver was no longer living in drug land.
Nope, this motherfucker, who spoke about himself in the third person because he could, was done with all that shit.
Except weed of course. Let’s not go too crazy.
The rest was done, though. Time to focus on music and Bellerose.
And maybe Billie, until I could cut her from my heart and mind for good.
seventeen
