Jet: A Marked Men Novel Read online

  I could have made it easy on her, just let it go. After all, we weren’t in a relationship, but I was feeling raw and split open and she had some fucking badass timing to pull this now. I narrowed my eyes at her and shook her hand off.

  “Yeah right, Ayd. You should be sorry for the simple fact that I can get you off and a douche bag in a sweater vest can’t.”

  I saw her grimace, and she whispered my name like I had hit her. I held up a hand and shoved the door open.

  “Just don’t. Don’t tell me whatever reason you managed to cook up after last night, because whatever it is, we both know the real reason, the real problem is that you won’t even entertain the idea of letting me in. That’s just fucked up because I could have fallen in love with you. Hell, I probably already did. I have shit to take care of, so I guess I’ll see you around.”

  She didn’t say my name again, and I didn’t look back, but I sure as hell took massive amounts of pleasure in slamming the door shut behind me hard enough to make the entire machine rock on its chassis. Von and Catcher walked over to me, and I refused to look over my shoulder when she pulled out of the parking lot. There was a hole in my chest that Ayden had left behind. Her rejection creating a wide-open place for all that fire and burning emotion I tried so hard to control to escape from. The irony was that the only person who had ever offered any relief from the heat, and any escape from the blaze, was the one who had ripped it open and released it all. Ripped it open and left it gaping, for all that awful venom to flow into the world.

  We spent hours trying to put a list together of all the lost gear for the police. They pulled the security footage and I told them not to be surprised if the image of the thief was my dad. I told them I wanted whatever charge they could come up with pressed against him. The rest of the band was stressed out and were getting on my already frayed nerves, so I shooed them off with a promise to take care of everything while I waited for the insurance adjuster.

  It sucked having time to turn things over and over in my head. I had known the deal with Ayden wasn’t a permanent thing, but I still felt like she had pulled my heart out of my chest and handed it back to me after deciding she had no use for it. Moment to moment my ass, it was more than that, always had been, and I never should have let her distract me from having that conversation in the car the night before. I wasn’t sure why her switch had flipped so suddenly; all I knew was that it hurt and I felt like she had pulled further away from me than she’d ever been.

  It wasn’t fair to either of us. There had been so much tension, so much attraction, that I should have known all along that just sex was never going to work out between us. But something told me that if all those months ago, I had just taken her up on her offer, I wouldn’t be in this mess now. If I had gotten her when those defenses were down, there was a chance I could have gotten under the wall before she built it back up. Now it was too late, and I was just going to have to focus on figuring out the current mess and act like yet another woman I cared so much about hadn’t picked something else in life besides me.

  By the time the adjuster finally showed up, I had worked myself up into a state of vibrating rage. I was pretty sure the guy was terrified to walk into the empty building with me, but considering it was his job, he didn’t have a choice. All that was left of my gleaming and shining equipment was a tangle of useless black cords and the swivel chair I sat on in the booth. The pictures of the band and the posters used to decorate the walls hung haphazardly and a lone Coors Light can was on its side, leaking onto the floor. The studio was empty and hollow and looked like a dump, and totally reflected how I was feeling inside.

  After emailing a bunch of pictures I had of the instruments and the recording equipment on my phone to the adjuster, who couldn’t get away from the murderous vibes I was throwing off fast enough, I slowly paced back and forth in the stark and empty space while rubbing my temples. All I could see was the barren landscape, and all I could feel was the place inside that was hot and smoldering in a dangerous way.

  Before I knew what happened, something at the core of me broke loose. It was like when I had witnessed my mom with the black eye, only this time it was my future that was broken and battered. It was the one thing I had ever loved that had unconditionally loved me back, and it had fallen at the hands of some unknown abuser as well. I let out a scream that bounced off the walls, and picked up the only furniture left in the place and hurled it through the glass that surrounded the recording area. A million shards cascaded all over the floor and tinkled against my ears. I pulled all the remaining pictures off the walls, tore the posters down, and reopened all the wounds on each and every knuckle until blood dripped off the tip of each finger. I kicked the Coors Light can across the floor, spilling stale beer in every direction and I tore all the cords and plugs out of the wall and threw them into a pile on the floor. I made a mess. By the time I was done I was panting and sweating, and the fury that was scorching inside me had subsided to a manageable level. I wanted to hit something, to tear someone apart, so I put my hands on my knees and bent over to catch my breath before the heat burned my vision black.

  I don’t know how long I was like that, but when a low whistle echoed through the now-barren space, it startled me enough that I jerked and whirled around ready to fight. Rowdy had his hands in the pockets of his jeans and those ocean-colored eyes were sympathetic as they roamed the devastation, made worse by my current state of freak-out.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I didn’t mean to sound surly and ungrateful, but it was the crap day to end all crap days and I didn’t have one ounce of play nice anywhere in me at the moment.

  “Ayden called me. She gave me the rundown. She thought you might need a friend, or someone to box with. I’m here to fill either roll.”

  I swore at him and finally just collapsed on the floor. Some of the broken glass from the booth poked into the denim covering my legs but I couldn’t muster up the energy to care.

  “She also tell you that she bailed on me? Left me hanging because it is what it is and she doesn’t want it to be anything anymore?”

  He was looking around, taking everything in, and I could tell by the set of his mouth that he knew how bad it was, how hard it was going to be to pull everything together before the tour.

  “No, but she sounded like shit, so I figured something must have happened.”

  I snorted and closed my eyes for a second.

  “I told her I was going on tour, told her I could love her, and I stopped her from having seriously awesome, bare-back sex in the front seat of the Challenger. Then she effectively dumped me, right after I got the call that all my worldly possessions had been stolen. Today can suck it.”

  “She give you a reason why?”

  “She didn’t have to. It’s not like we were dating or in a relationship or anything solid like that.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Ayden.”

  My heart squeezed so hard in my chest I actually had to rub the area with the palm of my hand to relieve the pressure.

  “Well, I’m the one sitting here feeling like I got kicked in the nuts and then run over by a truck, and I’m pretty sure it was a whiskey-eyed brunette who did it. So, yeah, that sounds just like Ayden.”

  He shook his head and not a single blond hair moved out of that fifties style he liked to slick it up into.

  “I just think it’s probably more complicated than that. She sounded as torn up as you look, and any idiot that gets within a few feet of you two can feel that there is something powerful there. Hell, I saw that the very first time you laid eyes on her at the Goal Line and I was trashed.”

  “Sex.” I blew out a breath. “We have awesome chemistry and really hot sex, that’s all it is, all she ever wanted it to be.”

  “I just don’t think that’s the entire story.”

  “Well, that’s the one she’s telling, and now I’ve got all this to figure out, and court, and my fucked-up family. I don’t have time to try to do
revisions or rewrites.”

  He toed the crumpled can that had faced my wrath earlier.

  “Do you think your dad had something to do with this?”

  “Who else could it be? He’s too arrogant to ever ask about what I’m doing, so I doubt he knew about the security setup.”

  “Maybe if you have him on tape you can use that to get him to drop the assault charges.”

  “If I have him on camera, I’m putting his dumbass in jail for as long as I can. I’m not scared of community service or anger management classes, but if I can get him locked up for at least as long as I’m on the road, then I’ll know he won’t be able to put his hands on Mom while I’m gone.”

  “Good point.” He put his hands on his hips and took one final look around the destruction.

  “Do you want to stay here and sulk some more, or do you want to go find some dark bar to sit in and get wasted?”

  What I really wanted to do was go get my guitar and find someplace quiet and alone where I could write the saddest songs ever, about a girl who simply didn’t want what I had to give her. That sounded more dangerous than drowning myself in Jameson, so I took the beefy hand he offered and let him pull me to my feet.

  “Bar it is.”

  Two things became apparent as soon as I pried my eyes open the next morning.

  The first was that I didn’t have any pants on, and the second was that trying to drink an entire bottle of whiskey in order to forget a girl with whiskey-colored eyes was a terrible idea. I groaned and tried to turn my head, only to have pain and a starburst of bad ideas explode in every direction. Luckily, I could feel the leather material of the couch sticking to my bare legs, so I didn’t have to shove out an exploratory hand to make sure I was alone. I was all for drowning my sorrows, but going home with someone else just for spite didn’t seem right or fair to the other party. I was grateful that while he hadn’t seemed to care that I wanted to punish my liver, Rowdy had seemed to keep my hurt feelings out of my pants, wherever those might be at the moment.

  It took me a solid five minutes to roll over and another ten to work up the courage to open my eyes. When I did, all I could do was groan and swear that I was never going to drink like that again. As usual, it was a vow I ended up breaking as fast as I could.

  I heard Rowdy moving around the kitchen and I heard the tinkle of female laughter, so I made the Herculean effort to sit up and try to find my pants. I was in no state to be nice to whoever he had brought home from the bar with him, and I most assuredly was in no shape to do that in just my boxer-briefs. A groan escaped me and a herd of hippos started to river-dance behind my eyes when I swung my legs over the edge of the couch. I heard him and his friend walking toward me, but there was nothing on earth that was going to make me move any faster.

  I gratefully took the mug of coffee Rowdy handed me over the back of the couch, and tried not to grimace as I tossed back the handful of painkillers he dropped in my hand. I tried to avoid the curious gaze of the blonde walking to the door. She was good-looking, at least I thought she was from what I could see through the haze of my hangover, and I vaguely remembered her and a friend joining us at some point in the night. She gave me a smile that I didn’t have the faculties to return and looked over at Rowdy, who had propped a hip on the back of the couch and was outright laughing at my sorry state.

  “Too bad he was such a bummer. Heather would have loved to get her hands all over that.”

  Considering I was mostly naked, I just closed my eyes and fell back against the couch cushions and prayed for the morning-after gods to swallow me up. I heard Rowdy chuckle and the front door open and close. None of us were strangers to the one-night stand, and this one had made less of a scene than some of them were prone to. It sucked that I was the one feeling like I had been caught doing the walk of shame, and I hadn’t even slept with her.

  “What the hell happened last night?”

  Rowdy moved off the back of the couch and plopped his big frame in the recliner across the room. His eyes were serious and he didn’t look amused, so I wondered if maybe he had had to work a little harder to get the blonde to come home with him, considering what a train wreck I had been.

  “You never told me you were in love with Ayden.”

  I blinked in surprise, which made my head throb. I would have frowned but something told me that was going to kill me, so I just tilted my head a little to the side and watched him cautiously.

  “What are you talking about? I told you I was all jacked up over her.”

  He shook his head and pointed a finger at my face. “Jacked up is not the same thing as being in love. Why in the hell did you just let her walk away yesterday?”

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” That was a lie, but I didn’t know where he was getting his information from, so I wasn’t ready to admit defeat just yet.

  “Jet.” He sighed so deeply I could practically feel his exasperation through the floorboards. “You drank your weight in whiskey last night. For most dudes, that would mean you spent the night puking in the john or passed out in a yard somewhere. You, my friend, spent the night telling anyone who would listen about a girl with whiskey-colored eyes who just broke your heart. When that wasn’t enough, you told a very nice, very pretty girl who happened to think it was sweet and romantic that you were acting like a lovesick fool, that you were never having sex again because you weren’t a stud for hire, and that if it took a sweater vest to make her love you, then you would just argyle it up.

  “Said hottie was still willing to come home with you, and, in fact, had her hand almost down the front of your pants, when you called her Ayden, not once, not twice, but three freaking times. Then she just thought you were sad. You were a mess, still are, and I don’t get why, if you feel that way about a girl who obviously has some pretty intense feelings for you as well, you’re just letting her slip away.”

  I was in no mood for this kind of heart-to-heart. In fact, I was in no mood to think about Ayden or anything that had happened yesterday at all, but Rowdy wasn’t going anywhere and it wasn’t like I was in a hurry to go back to the house and face either her or Cora.

  “She’s always running away. She tells me over and over again that I really don’t know her and she made it pretty clear, even as far back as last winter, that all she wanted was a quick hook-up. I don’t have it in me to be someone’s mistake. Look what that did to my mom.

  “I’m going to go on this tour. I’m going to write an entire album of songs about how shitty it feels to get your heart two-stepped on by a chick with mile-long legs and cowboy boots, and then maybe when I get drunk enough, I’m going to take a hot Spanish girl to bed and let her whisper all kinds of things I don’t understand in my ear.”

  We stared at each other for a long time and I grunted when he tossed me my pants from the other side of the room, and they hit me in the center of my chest.

  “I think you’re an idiot for believing that any of those things are going to help. I think you should just tell her how you feel. I think you should demand to know exactly why she can’t handle more than that right now. Your mom accepts the blame for your dad’s unhappiness, and she feeds into, letting him act like the lunatic he is. Ayden is just convinced she needs something different, and if you could show her she was wrong, I think it would save the both of you a lot of unnecessary heartache. Besides, you don’t speak Spanish.”

  It took way more concentration than it should have to get the first leg into the tight denim.

  “That doesn’t matter. I’m in a band. That language translates across all barriers.”

  He shook his head at me and pushed up out of the recliner.

  “What are you going to do about her until you leave? You do recall you live across the hall from her, right?”

  I froze, because I hadn’t thought of that. If she brought someone home, some guy with a blazer and an attaché case, some guy with perfectly coifed hair and nerd glasses, some guy that was the opposite of me
, there was a good chance the rage exploding out of me would burn the house to the ground, and all the relationships that lived inside, with it. Even if she didn’t bring anyone home, there was still bound to be an awful awkwardness between us that was enough to make me shiver. Throw in Cora’s big mouth and tendency to pick at any open wound for her own amusement, and the next few weeks would be a nightmare.

  I knew Rowdy would let me crash on the couch for as long as I wanted, but I had no desire to watch his parade of his morning-after castoffs. Normally, I would have just posted up at the studio, but seeing it all broken and stripped down was too much for me to take right now. Nash and Rule didn’t have any room, and while I could couch surf from place to place with the guys in the band, I needed a solid home base to operate from until the replacement stuff for the tour was locked down. That meant I was just going to have to suck it up and face my gorgeous tormentor head-on, like a grown-up.

  “I guess I’ll just deal with it.”

  “You’re going to have to keep it in your pants. Cora won’t let you drag groupies home regardless of that fact that it was Ayd who called it quits. She’ll claim she’s just protecting her.”

  I swore. “I’m not in the market for a horde of groupies right now.”

  It was true. Anonymous sex with nameless and faceless girls had served its purpose in my life, but now I could see how hollow and shallow it was. Being on the receiving end of being used for a sexual outlet, and nothing more, gave me an entirely new appreciation for all the chicks I had mercilessly skated out on the morning after. It was the reason I had initially turned Ayden down for so long ago. Even then, I knew one night with her had the ability to ruin me.

  “Jet, I’m going to tell you this because I really think the two of you have something that could be forever. When you find someone, someone who gets you, who understand you, it’s worth fighting for. The last thing you want to do is be five years down the road and look back and wonder what could have happened. Trust me, that kind of regret that kind of what-if, can gnaw on your soul until there is nothing left.”