Strung Out (Needles and Pins #1) (57 page)

T
he app buzzed and Gage squinted at the text before tapping on his phone screen to unlock the gate out front.

Tripping over the Les Paul he’d treated far more carelessly than it was entitled when he let it slip from his grasp as he dozed on the couch, he oriented himself and crossed the studio. He staggered down the hallway, stopping before the mirror in the entry foyer. After smoothing at stray hairs, he wiped at his eyes but wasn’t surprised when the shadows beneath them didn’t magically disappear. He pulled open the front door.

“Hey, man.” His neatly groomed personal assistant was reaching for the doorbell and jumped back, clearly startled. After the greeting, he inclined his head toward the fence and high shrubs skirting the property. “You got paps out there.”

“Yeah?” Although he knew the bend in the drive didn’t allow a view of the gate, Gage instinctively peered beyond him. “Been a while.” The last time more than the random loner with a lens had hung around for any length of time had been during his divorce. Stupidly, he’d never thought he’d go through anything more undesirably newsworthy than that.

“Yeah. Fuckin’ drones too.”

At this revelation, Gage wasted no time closing the door between him and any lens hovering far above his hedges.

“Listen, I heard the news, man. I’m sure sorry.” The guy offered the condolence while following him inside and then froze. “Who’s that?”

Gage followed the other man’s lustful look down the hall and outside where a pool current drifted the float adorned with Scar’s beautiful bod around the turquoise waters. “No one.”

“Must be nice to always have a ‘no one’ baking in your pool.”

The assumption of Scarlette being one of the whores who often flocked by just to tweet, Tumblr, and Instagram themselves in Gage Remington’s pool aggravated him. “Look, I got things going. If you could just…”

“Yeah. Sure.” His assistant, whose sole daily duty was often drug delivery—and today was one of those days― reached into his pocket. “Want me to fix you up?”

“No, I’m good.”

“All right then. Clear Morning. Don’t forget.”

“Yeah.” Gage acknowledged the stamp on the paper and his understanding of the purity—a purity percentage that had almost killed him when he hadn’t taken the warning seriously the last time.

He had already authorized the payment through the pay app his dealer used, so he bolted the door behind his assistant and closed a protective hand over the goods.

Back in his studio, he tucked the packet away inside a drawer for later. He had an incredible urge to join Scarlette in the pool. Instead, he grabbed up the Les Paul and fingered a tune as he watched her float. As he pressed and plucked at the metal strings, he remembered how her nipples had already been taut the moment he’d touched them this morning.

As if feeling his heated thoughts, she twisted her head to the side. The massive wall of windows was open between them, and she called out. “Who was here?”

His riff slowed and his mind raced. “Just a friend. Why? Expecting someone?”

“Colt texted an hour or so ago. Said he and Seth were coming by.”

Colt had texted him the same thing. But when had he begun texting Scarlette?

He felt the snarl but couldn’t stop it. “Yeah. Well. Colt says things. Doesn’t always do them.”

She pushed the sunshades farther up the bridge of her nose and seemed unperturbed about his tone, or whether Colt was arriving. Rolling off the float, she sank under and came up, slinging her head so that her hair sleeked back from her face.

Holy fuck.
All that wet hair. All that wet skin
. What would she do if he dove in and banged her animal style against the side of the pool beneath the glare of the California sun?

His dick throbbed with the thought. Closing his eyes, he let the friction of the guitar against his body and the scream of the music in his ears soothe his wayward thoughts.

Other unwanted thoughts edged in…

…”
Just tell me Gage.”

This morning instead of going upstairs, they’d each freshened up in the movie studio bathroom, and she’d followed him to the kitchen where they took turns brewing their coffee. A breakfast casserole waited, but the thought of food turned his stomach. His insides were a coil of nerves because of Ben’s call.

“I’m being charged with inciting a riot.” There. Blurt that shit out. Easiest way. “And now they’re trying to add a hate crime to the charges.”

“How did you incite a riot? What is that exactly?”

The normal Gage who wasn’t her semi-brother would have ignored her. Told her to fuck off if she continued with the questions. But he found himself wanting to tell her. Desperate to get it off his chest.

“I said some shit at a show. Possibly the stupidest moment of my life—including some of the stupidest that would normally come to mind.”

She’d blown on her coffee, waiting.

“We’ve come under fire for some lyrics on this last album. I mean we have before. But especially this last one. The very people the songs were written in support of took them wrong. Thought they were meant differently than they were.”
Rascal had paced at the window, and he’d paused to push the lever. The glass had glided back until the inside was the outside and the dog rushed out onto the patio and beyond into the foliage.
“There was a woman on Twitter. Said her son was bullied at school because he had two moms. I let the publicist handle my account and Fire Flight’s account just to be sure I didn’t screw up. The lyrics were explained to her, and we spoke out against the bullying. But it just got ugly. She wouldn’t let it drop. It became a Twitter war. No longer was it just her. The public rallied to the cause and just as many hate messages and threats came at us and me as support messages.”
He’d begun setting up the maker for another cup of coffee.
“At that point, I had not personally responded at all. I was faultless unless the misunderstood lyrics were considered. Hours before the last show on the tour, I got served. She filed a lawsuit saying I was responsible for what happened to her son because two of the bullies had cited Fire Flight as their favorite band, and I’d written the lyrics they had commonly quoted when they verbally and physically attacked him.”

The guilt always assaulted him when he thought of a kid getting beat up and him possibly being the reason.
“The thing is, the lyrics are pretty ambiguous. Plenty of people say the same exact words in hateful situations. That’s why I used them as lyrics. It was an awareness of the hate out there. Anyway, I offered to pay the medical bills and then some in sympathy for what he went through, and to come to his school to meet him and speak out against bullying. But she sued for a small fortune and petitioned to have charges filed against me.”

“But… Fuck, Gage. That can’t happen, right?”
Her blue eyes had been as wide and naïve as he had been until this shit played out and became his everyday life.

“Maybe not. If I hadn’t shot my mouth off on stage and then jumped into the crowd after a heckler that last night, hours after being served, maybe it would have all died away. I don’t even remember what I said. I mean, the quotes are all there. Online. In the police report. And even on YouTube, a partial video of it. But I was so out of it, I don’t remember. I…”
He’d dumped the coffee in the sink suddenly nauseous again.
“I said horrible things. Not directly about her, but about people like her. About people who attack an unaccepting world because they deliriously assume everyone is against them when they’re not. I punched a guy—after he swung first—and security pulled us apart. We started another song, but a fight broke out in the arena and got bigger. We stood on the stage watching things go freaking crazy. Watching as people were pulled from the crowd bleeding. And the irony. Me, the guilty one. Once I was back onstage, no one even tried to get to me. People were hurt. And it was all my fault. I deserve whatever is going to happen.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“I’ll probably do time. Especially since the hate crime is piled on. And because I had shit on me when I was arrested.”

“You had drugs on you while doing a show?”

“Yeah. I do sometimes. In a necklace. But they didn’t arrest me until the next morning. I was on my way to the bus and had rolled a bag in my pocket.”
Here, maybe the day would come when it would be funny to recall they’d confiscated his dime bag and had sealed away, along with the rest of his personal property, a gram of coke in the secret vial dog-tag pe As he’d done this morning, he ripped the paper into tiny bits. But this morning, the paper had been empty. Now, when he flushed, both paper and powder swirled in the whirlpool of the bowl before disappearing. As he’d done this morning, he ripped the paper into tiny bits. But this morning, the paper had been empty. Now, when he flushed, both paper and powder whirlpooled in the water of the bowl before disappearing.ndant on his necklace. But that day hadn’t come yet.
“I had some weed, and it wasn’t a weed-friendly state.”

…Well, those thoughts effectively cured a hard-on. When he came out of his daze, he realized he was blazing through impromptu riffs, and Scar had pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head to see him better. She was floating again, but sitting up, straddling the float. When he wound down, she clapped, whistled, and raised her fingers in the classic peace, love, and rock-and-roll sign.

He could get used to her being around…

“Sounding good, bro.” Colt entered the studio. Seth darted like a panther through the house and dive-bombed into the water, causing Scarlette to screech.

Gage set the guitar aside and crossed to the fridge in the corner.

“You got paps.” Colt jacked his chair and peered at the computer screen.

“Yeah.”

“So let’s hear it. Where is it?” Colt tinkered around the computer keyboard looking for the file.

“I haven’t gotten it down yet.”

“What? Why?”

“I was messing around.”

“Well, get back on it. Before you lose it. That was fuckin’
it
. The shit.”

Knowing his friend and bandmate was right, he took a long swig from the beer bottle. Motioning Colt out of the way, he readied the program before strapping back into his axe.

S
he hoisted herself onto one of the island pads in the pool and sat with her feet hanging in the water. Colt dropped into the pool near her, and they listened to the music pounding the studio walls and non-walls.

“It’s great!” She bobbed her head and moved her feet to the rhythm.

“Yeah. He’s getting somewhere now. One chorus down; the rest of the song to go.”

“But now that he has a direction, you guys will do your part, right?”

“Our part? No.”

“No?”

“Gage writes the songs. Every note. Every word.”

The tune stopped and restarted, again and again with a tweak here and there. She soon felt guilty for lazing in the pool—with his bandmate no less—while her brother worked.

The discussion with Colt spun out of control, quickly becoming an argument.

“I’m asking why he has to be the one to write the damn song! He’s got so much stuff on his mind already.” She unconsciously kicked beneath the water.

Seth had been doing underwater laps, but he stopped, and since his head was now above the surface, she made a mental note to curb her cursing. Gage’s chords continued, drifting out over the pool and patio and into the canyon.

Colt, now sitting on the pad next to the one she was on, glared at her as if her outburst was idiotic. “Stuff he brought on. He’s the one who went into rehab, and he’s the one who ran away from rehab. He’s the one who incited a riot. He’s the one—”

“I’m not listening to this. You guys are a
band
. Are supposed to be
friends
.” Before continuing, she glanced at Seth who still looked lost in his own thoughts as he stared into the sky painted pink by the setting sun. “Why are you so willing to let Gage take all the pressure?

“Can I ask you something? What’s going on between the two of you? Are you two as good as sister and brother, or are you two something more?”

“Can I ask
you
something? Why are you even here if you’re only going to sit around the pool, ask nosey questions, and not help?”

“Hey, Dad.” Seth continued to view some point beyond them while speaking.

Too wrapped up in the intensity of the disagreement, Colt ignored his son, firing back at her instead. “I stop by almost every day to see how he’s getting along. If he’s left to his own devices, he uses. If he’s under stress, he uses. If he’s celebrating, he uses.”

“Dad…”

“And to answer your earlier question,” Colt went on as if Seth hadn’t spoken, “he won’t let anyone else do the writing. It’s his thing. He wants the publishing credit, and pretty much tied our hands legally with that a while back.”

“Dad!”

“Now, with all the shit that’s going down, I’m damn glad my name’s
not
on the songs!”

The sky was now purple, but she saw red. Surging to her feet, she waded out of the pool, grabbed up her towel, slipped on her flip-flops, and snatched her electronic tablet. Without a word, she tromped into the interior of the house and didn’t slow when her name was called.