Anyway, it wasn’t exactly her fault she was cockblocking me. Summer was a DJ; she was just doing her thing. Keeping the party rolling, spinning her dirty-ass songs.
Did anyone even see my dream fuck out there but me?
Janner slid in, looking more wasted than he did even five minutes ago. Technically, I was also supposed to be “celebrating” the breakup of my band, the Penny Pushers, tonight. Which meant, technically, none of my former bandmates should really be here.
Yet somehow my former rhythm guitarist had joined the party, and what was I gonna do, send him away?
Most of Dylan’s band, Dirty, was partying with us tonight. Xander, an old friend of mine, who’d just been touring with Dirty and his band, Steel Trap, was partying with us. Some people I’d never even met before had joined the party along the way.
The invites had been fairly liberal.
Janner was the only member of the Pushers who was in town right now, so really, it would’ve felt wrong to exclude him.
He’d lost his band, too.
We’d partied together hundreds of times over the years, but I was pretty fucking sure at this point that Eric Janner was an addict—one of many reasons the Penny Pushers had imploded—so at the end of the day, I felt shitty for him. He had worse problems than I did.
Serious problems.
Yes, I’d been a fucking mess these past few months, but at least I was pretty sure there’d be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Some fucking day.
Janner, on the other hand, kept refusing rehab. Kept denying he had a problem, when everyone around him knew he did.
At least I knew I had a problem.
And it wasn’t booze or drugs.
It had a lot more to do with this lingering fear of actually trying to get on with my life in the wake of having my heart broken—several fucking times—and failing.
Yeah… The fucking classic fear of failure.
And seeing so many of my friends happy, successful… in love… I was happy for them. Really. When I was feeling mature about it.
Other times?
It stung.
It just reminded me of how badly I’d been broken, and how hard it was gonna be to pull my life—and my heart—back together. How last year, I’d thought, for a brief moment in time, that I had it all. Everything I could ever want.
Including love.
And then I lost it.
Well, realized I’d never actually had it.
But as of right now, I wasn’t dwelling on that shit anymore, right?
This party was about letting it all go.
I watched as Seth, Dirty’s rhythm guitarist, climbed into the limo, and Summer cuddled up to him. Not a flirtatious thing, just a keeping-warm thing. The two of them were tight now that Elle, Dirty’s bassist, was having Seth’s baby, since Summer and Elle were super-tight. Elle probably would’ve been here too, if she wasn’t about to burst—she was overdue to give birth—and if part of the reason I needed to have this breakup party in the first place wasn’t because of her.
Seriously a long story.
Now that the father of Elle’s baby, who was also a member of my best friend’s band, was partying with me, I’d pretty much surrendered to the fact that no breakup with any of them was gonna mean they were gone from my life.
We were all family now, for better or worse.
