A Lush Betrayal (32 page)

“I’m proud of you, baby. I can’t wait to throw you that graduation party. Hey, is that the Denver Post?” I ask.

“Yeah, our subscription finally got here. I’ve been looking at houses.”

“Cool. You find anything for us yet?”

“There’s a couple in here. Five minutes or so from your dad.”

“How many bedrooms?”

“Umm. Three.”

“Not enough.”

“Joss, seriously.”

“I am serious, Mel. We need an office for you, the master for us, a nursery, and a guest room for your parents when they visit. That’s at least four, and that’s assuming only one kid.”

She rolls her eyes at me. “Don’t you think we should wait until we actually have the wedding, get pregnant, all that stuff?”

I reach over and grab her, dragging her onto my lap.

“Ugh.” She sighs. “Sweat, Joss.”

I grin at her. “What I think, is that we need to practice some more. I’ve heard that baby-making is a very exact science and only by constant practice will you get it right.”

She breaks out laughing and I stand up, tossing her over my shoulder as I head to the bedroom.

Yeah, being a rock star is pretty damn good.

Read other books by Selena Laurence

Special Excerpt from

For the Love of A Lush (Lush No. 2)

(unedited roughcut, subject to change)

Walsh

F
OR AS
long as I can remember, I’ve loved two things in my life – booze and Tammy DiLorenzo. I lost them both in the last couple of years, and I can sincerely say that it sucks. The nights I wake up in the dark, breathing hard, and feeling hard, remembering the way her silky skin would slide across mine as we made love, her long smooth hair brushing over my chest and abs, her tongue gliding along my cock – yeah, those are the times I need a drink so badly I can feel that burn on my tongue, the smoky tang of a good bourbon, rolling all warm and smooth down my throat. So here I am, my dick and my heart missing Tammy, and the rest of me missing the bourbon and the oblivion it brings. The fuzzy static that descends over my mind and body, dulling the pains of the day, blurring the feelings into one big sensation of good. Not great, not horrible, just good. I like good. I was
good
with the good. But, it started taking more and more to reach that place. More booze, more often. And eventually, I needed it all the time. Every day, from sunup till sundown. And so yeah, that shit didn’t work out so well for me.

I roll over and see that the sun is already coming up, so I stretch, try really hard not to think about how sexually frustrated I am, and sit up. I can hear barking outside, and Ronny hollering at Two-Bit the Aussie Sheep dog who must be nipping at the horses again.

“Clark!” Ronny leans in the door to the bunkhouse, letting in one of the barn cats who races over to my bed and jumps up to rub against me. None of the cats have names, but this one seems to like me a lot so I call her JB, after Jim Beam, as a reminder that while it may make me feel all warm and fuzzy, it’s got claws that’ll slice me the fuck up.

“Yo, man,” I mumble as I scrub my hand over my hair that needs to be cut.

“That fence in the south pasture has about sixteen feet that needs to be replaced along the east side. Can you drive out and do that after breakfast?”

“Yep. First thing.

“Thanks, you cowboy, you.”

“Fuck off, Ronny.”

He chuckles as he shuts the door.

“It’s another glorious day on the cow farm,” grunts Mike from the bunk above me.

I stand up and grab my jeans off the nearby chair. “You can go home anytime, dude.”

“Eh, nothin’ to go home to. Might as well make some cows happy. Not to mention enlighten some of these country girls.”

I shake my head and pull on the jeans, then a t-shirt before I head to the bathroom to finish getting ready for my day.

T
HERE ARE
six of us altogether staying at the Double A Ranch right now. And yeah, Double A is a play on Alcoholics Anonymous. The Ranch is owned by Ronny Silva, a recovering alcoholic who decided to give back to the community – the community of lushes I guess you could say. So, if you’re working your steps and you’ve been clean and sober for at least ninety days you can have a place to stay and three squares a day plus a lot of hard labor, fresh air, and cows.

The Double A is a working ranch, Ronny raises cattle and sells them at auction. There’s seven hundred acres on the ranch, and five hundred head of cattle, along with a bunch of chickens, horses, and the dogs and barn cats. Ronny’s softspot extends from drunks to all creatures great and small. He also provides jobs to quite a few ranch hands in the area, but only the guys who are in recovery live here. Well, and Mike. Ronny made an exception for Mike.

Mike is my childhood friend and former band mate. Yep, band mate. See, until about six months ago Mike and I were in one of the hottest rock bands in the country. Actually in the world I guess. Lush was the dream that Mike, me, my former best friend Joss, and our buddy Colin had worked on for ten years. Joss sang, Mike’s one of the world’s best rock guitarists, I was the drummer, and Colin played bass. Then, just as we were hitting the mega big time, I developed my little drinking problem, had to go to rehab, and from there the dominoes tumbled. The end happened in a hospital room in southern California mere hours after we’d played to a crowd of about 70,000 at Coachella.

There’s nothing quite like finding out that your fiancé and your best friend slept together while you were locked away in a facility trying like hell to keep from going insane with withdrawals and really intrusive personal dissection. I’d thought my first full day without alcohol was the worst day of my life, but no, finding out about Joss and Tammy topped anything the world has ever or could ever throw at me.

After a hardy ranch breakfast cooked by Ronny’s wife, Leanne, Mike and I load up the truck with fence rails, posts, and tools. Ronny’s got a few pickups that we use for work. I’m stoked when I manage to grab the newest of the fleet because its got an iPod connector. I plug in and crank up Imagine Dragons as Mike hops in and props one boot clad foot up on the dash.

“Christ, Wing is so stunted on this album,” Mike bitches, referring to the Dragons’ guitarist. “The dude could do a hell of a lot more if he’d break out of his little guitar-school box.”

“Yeah, well, their sales numbers indicate a whole lot of people disagree with you.”

“I s’pose so,” he mutters.

We bounce along the dirt road in silence for a few minutes as the music shuffles through my playlist, until suddenly Joss Jamison’s voice comes rolling out the speakers, “If I could only breathe one thing it would be your air…” I lurch for the power button on the radio, slamming it to “off” and almost weave off the road.

“Sorry, man, sorry,” I say as I rub my chin and correct the truck’s course.

“Fuck. It’s okay,” Mike answers. He sits quietly for a minute looking out the window at the rolling grazing land that goes on for as far as the eye can see. Then asks, “Do you think it was about her?”

I watch the dust churning up in our wake as I glance at the rearview mirror. It reminds me of the trail I left behind when I hopped on a plane to Texas after finding out about Joss and Tammy. A cloud of gritty filth that coats everything it touches, settling in all the crevices and holes around it.

“I don’t know whether
he
wrote it about her, but for
me
it was always about her. Everything’s always been about her.”

“Yeah,” he says in response. Mike can be, and in fact usually is, an ass, but he gets it. Gets me and Tammy. Gets what it did to me for her and Joss to go where they did. Mike was, in fact, the guy who let the proverbial cat out of the bag. At first I was so torn up I couldn’t talk to or be around any of them – the band, my friends, Tammy. But after a while when Mike wouldn’t quit texting and calling, I finally answered.

He said simply, “You shouldn’t be alone, man. I’ll be there in the morning, just give me the address.”

He showed up the next day before lunch, and he’s been following me around working on the ranch ever since. Six months later here we are, the odd couple, two hopeless bachelors nagging at each other all day, and I’m definitely Felix, which if you’d known me back when I was drinking would come as a real shock.

We spend all morning setting posts and hammering new rails. Once we’re done we trundle back to the main house, ready for some of Leanne’s cooking. When we pull up there’s a car in the drive I’ve never seen before.

“Wonder if we’ve got a new guy,” Mike says as he pulls the toolbox out of the truck bed and heads toward the shed to stash it.

“I don’t know, man. Ronny didn’t say anything about getting someone new, but it could have been last minute I guess.”

Mike grunts at me as he walks back from the shed and we amble on inside the house.

As we walk through the utility room toward the enormous eat-in kitchen where Leanne serves up three meals a day to anywhere from half a dozen to two dozen guys, I hear her chatting to someone.

“He’s been doing really well. Such a lovely guy. I’m sure he’ll be happy to see a friend from home.”

“So, no one else has been to visit him?”

I stop dead in my tracks, a handful of steps from turning the corner into the kitchen. Everything inside of me goes boiling hot and then frigid cold in a matter of seconds. My heart feels like it’s stopped inside my chest before I bring my fist up and pound, hard, to get it to start beating again. Mike, who is a few steps ahead of me turns the corner at the same moment I halt, and I hear him say, “Oh fuck.”

There’s silence for a minute, and then Leanne clears her throat uncomfortably. “Uh, Mike, I guess you know Walsh’s friend?”

I’m breathing hard now, and I’m not sure I can keep standing. It feels like my damn heart is going to pitch itself out of my chest onto the floor. I bend over and put my hands on my knees, praying that they can’t hear my raspy breaths from inside the kitchen.

“Uh, yeah,” Mike answers tentatively.

“Is he here?” the visitor asks. I can hear the hope in the voice, the false bravado that only I would pick up on.

Mike turns his head slightly to glance at me over his shoulder, but I can’t look him in the eye, I’m working too hard on being able to stand up straight and breathe.

“I’m not sure…”

“Mike, please,” the guest interrupts, that bravado slipping, and a certain desperation leaking through. Even after all this time, I can’t stand to hear that need. I’m compelled to fix it, make it better, find a way to bring the hope back.

“It’s okay, Mike,” I say as I finally step forward to stand next to him in the kitchen. I stop, taking in the scene, like a frozen tableau, all eyes on me, one pair waiting for me to freak the fuck out, the second questioning what the hell is going on, and the third. Ah the third. I look into the depths of those eyes, remembering all the hours I spent lost in their velvety texture, their warmth, their love. The love I thought was mine to hold forever. Those eyes that committed the greatest hurt I’ve ever felt in my twenty-eight years. The eyes that looked at me every day for months on end and lied. The eyes of the woman I still, very reluctantly, love to this day.

I blink, take a deep breath and say, “Hi Tammy. What brings you by?”