“No,” Remi said.
Liam didn’t look up as he doled out four lines of coke on a mirrored tray.“She had to go home.Family emergency.Didn’t you read the text?”
“He’s not in the group chat,” Ollie said.
“Oh shit,” Liam said.“Was I not supposed to say anything?”
“You guys have a group chat with Skye that I’m not in?”Remi asked.He modulated his voice as best as he could, but a dark anger twisted around his heart.
They both nodded.
“When is she coming back?”he demanded.
Liam snorted a line, and Ollie just sighed and shook his head in disappointment.“Why do you care?”he asked as he rolled a joint.“You hate her.”
“I didn’t—I don’t—I just—” Remi ran a hand through his hair.“Just tell me.”
“I don’t know, mate,” Ollie said.“She only said she had personal things to take care of.Liam and I texted her last week to check in, but she left us on read.”
Remi leaned over Ollie and grabbed Liam’s unlocked phone.He scrolled through his text messages until he found the group chat, but it was exactly as Ollie had said.
He tapped Skye’s name and ran his finger over her phone number, accidentally memorizing it as he sat there in silence.Liam snatched his phone out of Remi’s hand.Remi retaliated by doing two of the lines that Liam had been about to inhale.Liam glared at him and swiped the tray back.
“What does West say about us not having a manager?”Remi asked.
“We’re fine for now,” Ollie said.“Skye trained our tour manager, so he’s been running things.West asked the label to send us candidates for a new band manager.”
“I don’t understand why you guys are keeping this shit from me,” Remi said.“I haven’t done anything wrong since that stupid picture.”
“We’re na keeping anything!This is what ya wanted, innit?”Ollie said, his accent thicker as his annoyance seeped in.“Skye is gone.”
Skye was gone, and her absence was distracting.He hadn’t been keeping up with any band management duties since she’d left.Part of him had been waiting for the tour to fall apart.That’d been the whole reason she was around, right?She always threatened everything going to shit if she left, but that must have been a lie because everything was fine.
Unless she’d been telling the truth from the beginning.That the bargain needed time or whatever, and now it was done, and she didn’t have to be here.But everything still felt so unfinished, so precarious.Laurie had told Remi that it’d only be a matter of time before he crashed and burned, but Remi didn’t know if that was still true or not.If that meant trouble was at the next show, or the next.He didn’t know why Skye wasn’t around to tell him, to lie to him, to yell at him, to make him miserable.
He didn’t know why he wanted her to be.
He felt insane.
The tour bus door opened, and Jillian called his name, stopping in front of the table and pouting.“You promised we’d do that livestream today.”
Remi sighed.“Can’t we do it later?”He snatched the mirrored tray from Liam and started cutting more lines.He wasn’t even sure why he was doing this.He didn’t even like cocaine all that much.It made him jittery and hyper, like he was jumping out of his skin.
But his real drug of choice was much more potent and addicting.Lethal.And he was only now realizing that the high she had once provided didn’t even come close to the pain of withdrawal.
“You promised you would do it today, and I already told everyone you would, so no, we can’t do it later,” Jillian said and put her hand on her hip.
“Why do you always promise people I’m going to do something?”he asked.
Jillian pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows expectantly.
He wasn’t getting out of this.Sighing in defeat, he leaned down and snorted one more line.If he had to do this shit, he wasn’t going to do it sober.
“Alright, let’s go,” Remi said to Jillian as he got up and stepped off the tour bus.
The sun was blazing hot.Remi squinted against its brightness and the way the light reflected off the metal of the tour bus.
Jillian tugged on his shirt.“Take this off.”
