Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7) (4 page)

He snorted.

“You don’t have to want to sleep with me,” I continued. 

He didn’t react.

“But you need to give me a modicum of basic respect.”

“Why?”

The single word ran around and around in my head like a NASCAR driver at the beginning of a race.
Why. Why. Why. Why.
Forty-eight laps later and it was still going strong and steady.

“Why?” I repeated, incredulous. My eyes searched his face and I wondered, for a split second of clarity, why I was doing this. Torturing myself over this guy’s rejection. He was hot. Quiet. Taciturn, really. He had never made an overture toward me (unless you count a few sensual looks). We’d exchanged more words about
not
fucking than we had on any other topic. He was not my type. He was not the kind of guy I dated...before.

Seven years and two months ago.

So why was I bothering? What was it about him that made me—

Lips. Warm, soft, but in control and commanding. Hands around my waist, tugging on my belt loops, pulling my pelvis against his. The rub of his jeans rivets against the pad of my thumb. He was kissing me. Tyler was kissing me. 

I pulled my hands up and pressed them flat against his chest, ready to push hard.

Instead, I pushed hard with my lips. My hands slipped up around his neck and pulled.

Tight.

He tasted so foreign, so forbidden, like something you know you shouldn’t sample but you can’t help yourself. Recriminations and warnings inside my head faded into a nothingness replaced by pure sensation, by the split certainty that I was violating every single norm about how I understood myself while enjoying every second of it. 

“You,” he said in a low, deep voice, his breath coming out in little pants, his cheek scraping against my jaw, “are a pain in the ass.” 

And with that he released me and walked away, leaving me wet, aroused, and ready to kill him.

But not stupid enough to follow. What the hell was I doing? At least this time,
he
kissed
me
. What did that mean? 

“You okay?” Liam’s voice at my side made me jump. I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth, as if I could hide Tyler’s kiss.

“Yes,” I whispered.

“You don’t look okay,” he said, glaring down the hallway where Tyler had just departed. “Did Frown do something to you?”

Oh, yes he did.

“Um, no,” I said, sighing and running my hand through my hair. “It’s cool. I just needed to clear up a few things with him.”

Liam has these eyes that make you think you’re on the beach in Nantucket when you look at him. Incisive and perceptive, those eyes took me in.

He opened his mouth to say something, then looked at Charlotte. An unreadable look passed between them, and he took off down the hallway, following Tyler.

I stayed put.

I had to.

My legs wouldn’t move.

Chapter Two

Tyler

For the record, I was
not
the one found hanging out of a window, naked, with a chicken and a gerbil clinging to my ass. But I was the person they called to fix that mess. Two days later I went home to help see my dad off to prison.

“Too late,” Johnny taunted as I walked in the apartment, my brain scrambled from being on seven different semi trucks over two and a half days. Being broke meant I couldn’t afford to fly. Hitching a ride was cheap but not easy.

Nothing’s easy when you’re broke.

“Too late for what?” I asked. My stomach growled. I felt like a giant grease ball. Shower first. Food second. Bed third.

I dumped my backpack, my bass and my acoustic guitar on the floor near the door and stretched. My palms could rest flat on the yellowed ceiling when I did that. My calves screamed and my triceps burned from the relief of blood flow.

I’d see Dad in the morning. I guessed he was at Shorty’s, the bar around the corner where he hung out sometimes. Two months ago he’d called and I’d bailed him out. The damn idiot did it again last week, only this time I couldn’t bail him out. No money. He got someone to get him out, but he’d violated the terms of some court agreement and now he was going back in. The plan was to take him in tomorrow. 

“He turned himself in.” Johnny walked past me, his body twitching, as he went into the kitchen and flung open the fridge door. A stench worse than the alley behind most of my bar gigs hit me like a wall of puke. Half-opened takeout containers filled the fridge shelves.

He picked one and tossed the styrofoam thing into a microwave, pressed some buttons and picked at a scab on his arm.

“What?” I snapped. He turned and stared me down with eyes like sandpaper. 

Johnny looked like our mom. Tall and lean, all knees and elbows. Pale skin with veins hiding under tissue paper. His eyes were a pale beige, like the shallow part of the ocean. I only know that color from living in Boston for a couple of years. You go to Castle Island a few times for free shore time and you can see it.

The water. Growing up in St. Louis meant Johnny’d never seen the ocean. I wanted to bring him back with me. He was eighteen now and could do whatever he wanted. Two years ago, when I moved to the east coast, he begged. Pleaded. Bargained and all that shit for a chance to come with me. 

I couldn’t.

He hated me for that. Still does. But now he’s eighteen and can do whatever the fuck he wants. 

That appeared to be
drugs
. And lots of them. I knew a tweaker when I saw one. So did Johnny.

All we needed to do was look at our dad.

“Too late to give Dad a hug and a kiss,” Johnny said. “What the hell do you think, Tyler? He’s gone. Turned himself in.”

Back in prison.

“Fuck.”

“Fuck? That’s it?” He snorted, then shoved his palm up, fast, against his nose. A thin trickle of blood smeared his thumb joint.

Scabs. Twitching. Bleeding nose. What drug was Johnny
not
taking?

“How long?” I asked. My lips began tingling. My scalp felt like bees crawled under it. My fingers wanted to do anything but stay empty. I bent down to grab the handle of my bass case. 

“How long
what
?”

“How long’s he in for?”

“Ten months.”

I made a low whistle and looked around the place. No ceiling lights and half the lamps were out. I knew that meant the light bulbs had burnt and no one had the money to replace them. Overflowing ashtrays dotted the broken coffee table. Burns made the top look like it was a piece of sick art, the surface eroded on purpose by the heat of the cigarette cherries. But there was no purpose. 

Just Dad’s way.

No one had vacuumed in months. I was probably the last person who bothered to clean. The apartment had a funk. More than the smell of two men sharing the place. It smelled like decay. Like hopelessness. Like agony.

Like giving up.

Johnny’s eyes were so hateful it hurt to look at him. He looked so much like our mom. When he glared at me it was like Mom came back from the grave and shamed me. I tore my eyes from him and took a deep breath. Cut it off right away ’cause the odor burned.

“Shit, man, what are we gonna do?” I asked him, my fingers going half numb from too many hormones, too little sleep, and the sense that something was deeply wrong in this place. More wrong than usual, and that was saying a lot.

“We?” He made a nasty sound in the back of his throat. “What the hell you think
I’m
gonna do, Tyler? Go to my fancy prep school and get a massage? I’ll be fine.” His eyes hardened, like two pieces of tree bark. “I’ve got jobs.”

Jobs. That meant he was dealing.

“Huh,” was all I could say. It said everything. It said nothing. Any words I could come up with would be about as useful.

“What about you?” He smirked. “Made it big yet? Sign a contract for a record deal?” His tone of voice made him sound exactly like Dad.

Dad wasn’t exactly an optimist.

“Nah,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I get by.”

“We all get by. It’s what we Gilvreys do. We get by.”

My throat filled with angry, salty outrage. Being lumped in with Dad and Johnny made everything in me go tense. A cold flush covered my body. Words didn’t come. Just feelings. Emotions I was about as good at handling as words. 

I looked at his greasy hair, the scabs on his body, his crappy shoes and how his bones seemed like someone carved them out of his skin. I hadn’t been home in half a year. How had Johnny changed so much? I was five years older and a million miles away. His life was nothing but street running and drugs.

“I’ll help.” Those were the only words I could think to say.

Wrong ones.

“Help? What the fuck kind of help do you think you can give me, Tyler? Dad’s gone.
Gone
. No way I can pay the rent here. Hell, I don’t even know
how
to pay it. Who the landlord is or how that works.”

But you can find a meth dealer in sixty seconds flat
, I thought. Saying that would have been like dropping a nuclear bomb. Good thing I know how not to say words. 

“And,” Johnny continued, “I got friends. I’m fine. I’ll live somewhere.” He gave me a hard, sarcastic grin. “You don’t have to worry about me. Oh. Yeah. You never did.” His hands balled into fists and the skin under one eye twitched.

I knew it was an act. Or, at least, it would have been a year ago. Now, though, he’d added an inch of height and had arms corded with ropy muscle. The tingle of danger began in the skin at the base of my neck. One thing you learn from being raised by a dad like ours: when to sense a threat.

When had my little brother
become
one?

Bzzzz.
We both grabbed our asses like they were on fire.

“Yours,” Johnny said, blasé and scratching something under his shirt. He turned away like nothing had just happened. 

It was Darla. “Yeah?” I said, wondering why she’d call me now. Here. Like this. It felt weird, so out of context, to have my Boston life intrude on my St. Louis life. 

“Change of plans,” she said, all breathy and weird. She inhaled and exhaled like some Euro technobeat was controlling her lungs. 

“What?”

“Change.Of.Plans,” she said slowly, like that would make more sense.

“What plans?” Layers of shit piled on layers of shit in my head made talking harder than normal. Listening, too.

“More Than Nothing needs an opening act at their L.A. concert. Half their opening act has chicken pox.”

“Chicken pox? Is this a joke?” 

“No joke,” she said with a weird laugh.

“How Angelina Jolie of them.”

“You need to be on a plane tomorrow,” she declared. 

“What the fuck?
Tomorrow?
What the hell for?” I barked, the words angry. Johnny was busy with his phone but I could tell he was listening.  

“Are you high?” Darla asked. “I said, More Than Nothing had a last-minute cancellation of their opening act. In three days Random Acts of Crazy is opening for motherfucking More Than Nothing,” she added, then recited the amount of money I’d make for one show.

“Quit fucking with me,” I said. A small headache formed behind my eye. Johnny started laughing his ass off suddenly. The tinny sound of a video playing on his phone hit me. He started wheezing about a chicken and a gerbil.

That video was
everywhere
.

“Not fucking with you. I already called in a plane ticket. Tomorrow.” Today was Sunday. She named an airline. “You have a 10:11 a.m. flight. I’m headed to L.A. the same day and Liam and Sam are following on a later flight. We couldn’t get the same one.”

“Darla. Darla? Slow down,” I said, my brain turning into a hay bale with the string cut and tossed out of a loft. “You’re saying this is for real? I need to be on a plane that fast?”

“Make sure you have your I.D.,” she said over my words. “And save receipts, because it’s all on the expense account.”

My heart sped up so fast. “You mean it.” I made a mental check of my money. I didn’t have credit cards, but there was four hundred bucks in my bank account I hid from Dad and Darla was fast with reimbursements. Holy shit. This could work. 

“I don’t say things I don’t mean, Frown.” She laughed. “Congrats. You’re in the big time.”

“Joe must be pissed.”

“Joe’s high as a kite on legal prescription drugs. He still gets to take over when he’s recovered,” she added in a low voice.

“I know. Promise. No problem.” By then I’d have enough money and experience to go find more gigs. “That’s cool.”

“Ten eleven a.m. Airport. I’ll email you the hotel reservation and the other details,” she said. “Gotta go. This,” she sighed, “is some heady shit.”

No kidding.

She ended the call right there, leaving me dazed and spinning. I grabbed my backpack and music cases. Johnny started playing some video game on his phone and the room began to hum. My ears fought to drown out the sound but it was strong. Too strong. I ignored my brother and marched into my old room.

Which was stripped down to a stained mattress, an old sheet I think was on the bed six months ago when I left for Boston, a ton of cigarette butts, and enough aluminum beer cans to side a house.

Which meant it looked like I expected.

I dumped my shit by the door and stretched out on the bed. It smelled like cigarette ashes, Axe body spray and corn chips. My eyes began to count the tiny holes in the ceiling tiles above me. I was supposed to be thinking about Johnny. About Dad and prison. About getting on a plane in two days for the big show. 

But all I could think about was a girl with purple and blue and red and orange and
everything
hair.

Liam had grabbed me the other day at the hospital as I left before I did something stupid. Pulled on my arm. He wasn’t pissed, but there had been something in his eyes.

All he’d said was, “Careful with Maggie. Google her. Last name’s Stevenson with a v. Google her name and don’t stop at the first five pages.”

And then he’d walked away.

Stupid me. I’d listened to him.

Maggie Stevenson. Margaret Stevenson. First few pages I found people who weren’t her. By page five I found nothing but her. Seven years ago.