Von missed his girlfriend and his kid, and spent more time on Skype than he did in the bar. Catcher spent most of his time with the guys in Artifice, but really was just happy to be along for the ride, and Boone we all watched every day, to see if he was struggling at all with his long stretch of sobriety. Being on the road was hard, and for this long and this far from home, we all worried he might slip. I don’t think anyone was thinking about signing with the label and I was glad. The band was solid and I would have hated for us to break up because we wanted different things. That thought just hit a little too close to home right now for me.
Dario insisted we were the better band, that we could go places and do things Artifice had only come close to, and while I took it as a compliment, they were things I just didn’t want. The only thing I wanted, the only thing that mattered, didn’t think we were right for each other and that’s where I seemed to be stuck.
I lumbered to my feet, drunk but not drunk enough, and eyeballed the girl. I needed to get her under me or out the door, and my tired brain wasn’t sure which option it was going to go with, when my phone trilled the very screamy Jucifer from my back pocket. The time changes across the ocean still weirded me out and the fact that Shaw was the one calling me made my blood go cold. It didn’t even register to me that the girl in the bed was swearing at me in a foreign language, or that she hurled the remote at my head as I went into the bathroom to take the call. She was going to be a pain to get rid of, but I didn’t deserve anything less for some seriously piss-poor judgment.
“Hey, Shaw is everything all right? Is Rule okay?”
Worst-case scenarios were running through my head at a rapid pace and I couldn’t slow them down. Angry German was rumbling though the closed door along with hammering fists. If I had been just a shade more intoxicated, this entire situation would have been so ridiculously hilarious there was a chance I would have killed myself laughing over it.
“Hey, sorry to interrupt you, but I needed to call you even though Rule threatened to hide my phone if I did.”
“What’s up?” She sounded nervous, which made me nervous and mad that Colorado was an entire ocean away. Something really heavy hit the door, and I absently wondered if the girl had bothered to put on clothes before throwing her tantrum. It struck me as funny that no matter where I was in the world, a pissed-off groupie was still just a pissed-off groupie.
“It’s Ayden.”
And just like that the world stopped. There was no angry blonde in the next room. There was no band. There was no anything but Ayden, and the fact she was too far away. I stopped breathing long enough that the room got a little hazy and it took Shaw snapping my name to get me back in focus.
“What’s up with Ayden?”
I tried to sound casual, but knew I failed miserably when Shaw just swore softly.
“Look, there is a bunch of stuff she needs to tell you, that you need to make her tell you. I understand why she pushed you away and you just have to believe me that she really did it because she thought she was protecting you, but right now, she’s alone and she needs you. She wouldn’t let me go with her and she refused to let Cora go with her, but she needs someone, and honestly that someone is you.”
“Shaw, you realize I’m in Hamburg right now and I’m supposed to be in Berlin tomorrow afternoon, right?”
She sighed and what sounded like her head thunking against something hard came across the line.
“I know. But she needs you.”
“I think she made it pretty clear I’m the last thing she needs in her life, Shaw.” Something on the other side of the door shattered and I cringed. It looked like the cost of my room just went up exponentially.
“Her brother is in the hospital, Jet. He got beaten within an inch of his life and no one knows if he’s going to make it. Ayden’s mom is a flake, Ayden’s sitting in a hospital in Louisville all by herself, waiting to see if her only sibling is going to die. Come on, I know you don’t fully understand why she pushed you away and left you hanging but the reality is she just wanted to keep you at arm’s length so that you didn’t get hurt. She was trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
“Another situation that was ugly and full of really awful things. She’s in love with you.”
I ground my teeth together and absently kicked at the bathroom door.
“I didn’t even know she had a brother. If she loved me, don’t you think that would have come up before now? Shaw, I know you’re just trying to help, but I think you’re grasping at straws.”
Now she swore loudly, and I heard all kinds of Rule in her attitude when she snapped back at me.
“Stop being such a stupid guy! You don’t need to give her anything, all you need to do is show up. She just needs you to show up, Jet. It’s not that hard.” I didn’t get a chance to respond before she went on. “I know you’re hurting, but so is she, and the only thing that will make either of you stop is for one of you to realize that you just need to be together. Plain and simple. If you can’t see that, then you didn’t deserve her in the first place. I’ll talk to you later, Jet.”
She hung up on me, leaving me stunned and reeling in a bathroom, a million miles from home. My instinct was to throw everything in a bag and run off to the rescue, only the last time I had tried that, I had ended up in jail. I was so tired of trying to save people, women in particular, who ultimately didn’t want me to be their hero at all. The idea of Ayden suffering alone, the idea of her trying to handle something like that by herself, turned me inside out, but she didn’t want me. If she didn’t want me, there was nothing I could do for her that her girlfriends or Sweater Vest couldn’t do. Besides, I had a naked and very angry German girl I had to wrangle, and that was at least a tangible problem I could fix.
We were on the train to Berlin the next day and I felt awful. I hadn’t slept at all the night before and getting rid of the St. Pauli girl on steroids had proven more difficult than I anticipated. I couldn’t get my mind off Shaw’s phone call, and being cooped up on the train with a bunch of hungover metal dudes and loud German families was enough to make me want to pull every last hair out of my head and run screaming for the hills. Von was sitting across from me, alternately napping and messing around on his phone, seemingly oblivious to the noise around us and I envied him the peace he seemed to just naturally have.
“You all right, man? You’ve looked ready to bail out the window all day.”
I shifted restlessly in the seat.
“I’m straight.”
“Really? I call bullshit. You haven’t been straight since things went south with you and Ayden. Your body might be here, but your head has been back in Denver since we picked you up.”
“I’m cool. Just takes time to get over someone like her, is all. I keep thinking maybe I should call her.”
“Dude, who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve know you since you were a punk-ass little kid. Girls were just girls, until Ayden. She’s different, we all saw it. Fuck, you sang oldies on Valentine’s Day, Jet. Do you think we’re all stupid? We knew who you were singing to.”
“She just got to me, is all.”
“Good. She’s smart, she’s a knockout, she has enough attitude to put up with all your moods, and I bet she isn’t scared of all the Keller family skeletons. Goddamn Jet, you write better music than anyone else in the world, you’re a better front man than pretty much anyone else who has ever stepped on a stage, and you’re an all-around really fucking good dude. You should have someone like Ayden in your life. Stop thinking you need to do some kind of crazy penance because your dad is a douche rocket and your mom refuses to see it.”
“Whoa, where did all that come from?”
“Coming on this tour was a great opportunity. We all needed to do it to see where we stood with the band. It isn’t what I want and it’s easy to see it’s not what you want, either. I love playing music and doing a festival here or there and playing at Cerberus is just fine for me, but it’s fine for me because I go home to Blain and the baby. They’re what I want, they’re where I want to be, and I see that in you now. Before, it was fear. You were scared for your mom, scared of what would happen if you just let go and did you, but now it’s different. You want to be where that girl is, even if she told you that it was over.”
I lifted an eyebrow at him.
“Last year, if we had been on this tour you would have had a different girl in your room every night. You would be drinking your weight in whiskey and acting as crazy as the guys in Artifice have been. Face it. You’ve changed.”
I rested my forehead on the window and watched mindlessly as the German countryside sped by.
“The only other person that has ever made me feel that bad is my mom.”
“We all have things we’re trying to handle and deal with. You have an outlet for all your crazy—you can get onstage and scream it out. Maybe your girl doesn’t have one of those things.”
I closed my eyes and let all the things of late float around in my mind. He had a valid point. I’d always thought of the anger that lived inside me as fire—heat and flame—and things that could burn down the world I live in. Well, if I was fire, Ayden was water. She was constantly shifting and moving, reflecting things back and changing form at will. She was cool, and she ebbed and flowed with whatever life handed her. We shouldn’t work together, but we did, and when you put us together everything got hot and steamy, which really was all I could ask for in someone who I wanted to keep with me forever.
“How am I supposed to fix this when we have a show tonight and one tomorrow night? How am I supposed to do anything when I’m here and she’s there? What am I supposed to do if she doesn’t even want me there, and Shaw was wrong and just reading more into it than there really ever was?”
“Stop being a pussy and just do it. If Blain needed me, you bet your happy ass I would leave you jokers hanging.”
“Asshole.”
He laughed a little and stretched his legs out in front of him.
“You aren’t going to be able to get anything done today anyway, so you play the show tonight, figure your shit out tomorrow, and let me and the boys handle the next couple of shows until you get back. I can cover most of the vocals, and what I can’t do, Catcher can. We won’t be half as good without you, but who cares?”
I closed my eyes and turned it all over in my mind. I didn’t want to let the guys down; we were a team and this was a big deal, but I also knew I wasn’t going to do anyone any good when everything that made me so good onstage was wrapped up and focused on something else. Even if she ended up telling me to get lost for good, at least I tried. I dug out my phone and called Cora.
“Hey.”
“Hey, what’s going on?” She sounded sleepy and again I remembered the time change.
“I need to know where in Louisville Ayden is.”
“What?” The sleepiness was gone out of her voice now.