A Second Chance at love The Rocker Girls Series (19 page)

“
Mickey always told me I
was beautiful, but now he would tell me all the time. He’d open the
door for me, guide me through by touching the small of my back. He
would whisper to me how he couldn’t believe what a fool Jimmy was
for cheating on me, because if he had me I would be all he ever
needed…he made me feel beautiful and wanted at a time when I felt
very ugly and alone.

“
Jimmy would come over all
the time, making sure no man got too close to me, then I would
smell the women on him, and with him so gone from the booze, I
couldn’t even talk to him, he would try to dominate every move I
made.

“
Mickey on the other hand,
had to be near me every second of the day. He loved letting
everyone know he was seeing me… He loved it more when Jimmy would
burst in, seeing him at my place.

“
I broke it off with him
when we were singing at the Hot Spot…that’s a club on the Strip,
and he came to watch us one night, well him and the guys. I didn’t
know he was trying to piss off Jimmy. I thought he just wanted me.
But that night when I got off stage, I guess he told Jimmy where we
were singing and told him to come watch. Jimmy and the guys were on
tour, so we never worried about us running into them, but that
night…

“
So I go off stage and
Mickey starts to kiss me…really no big deal. That is until Jimmy
comes up ripping me from his arms, that’s when Mickey tells him
that he’s, as he put it, ‘fucking me’ and the two of them got into
a fight in the middle of the damn club.

“
Nickels blamed me for the
publicity mess. It was one thing to have Jimmy think Mickey and me
were just friends, but when he told him that he was sleeping with
me… That led into more problems for me than I was willing to deal
with. I wanted to finish my last year of school without all this
shit.”

“
Did he know Jimmy hit
you?”

Again she nodded. “Well, they all knew
he slapped me around every once in a while. Did they know that he
put me in the hospital…no, I didn’t want anyone to know what I went
through with him. His band knew of only one time that he did that
to me.”

“
Angel, if a man knows a
guy is hitting his woman, and doesn’t do anything to stop him, then
he’s no fucking man at all!” Win growled to her.

Addison shook her head. “He told me
that I should divorce Jimmy and marry him. I tried to tell him that
I already gave the damn papers to Jimmy… He just wouldn’t sign
them!” she said irritably. “Everybody’s afraid of Jimmy, especially
when he’s drunk,” she whispered.

Win nodded, looking at Addison’s
shattered appearance. He took a deep breath before he asked her the
toughest question. “Angel, were you really going to have his
baby?”

Tears flowed freely, and he moved to
take her in his arms, but she put her hand up and shook her head.
“Yes, I was going to,” she whispered, then looked back up at him.
“But how it happened…that’s the terrible part.”

“
Okay, angel, tell me what
you want me to know,” he said softly to her. She nodded, looking
back down, taking a deep breath. “You see, Jimmy knows me and my
body. Troy told me that Jimmy went over there fighting with Mickey
after that night in the club. But Jimmy taunted Mickey, saying
gross foul things about his and my lovemaking, which I won’t bother
to repeat, but Mickey was pissed.

“
After a couple months of
Mickey and I seeing each other, I knew he wasn’t the man I thought
he was. He definitely wasn’t the man for me. I thought when we
broke things off we were still friends, I mean I was still married
to Jimmy, I let him go to go do his thing. You’d think he’d be
happy…right?” She looked at him, and he could see the confusion in
her eyes.

“
Mickey called me up about
two months after, telling me Acid Pool were doing a benefit concert
right there in Los Angeles. It’d been a while since I played in
concert, but he and the guys would love to have me and the girls
play with them, to, you know, give the fans a thrill.” She sighed.
“So, being stupidly flattered by what he said, I talked to the
girls and we told him we would love to do the concert with
them.

“
The after parties are
massive after a benefit concert. And since this wasn’t our normal
group of people who we dealt with, you really needed to watch
yourself. But Mickey came up to me, separating me from the girls,
telling me he wanted to talk to me about working on his next album
together.

“
Buddy came and Tia went
off with him. Margie and Troy were always friendly with each other
so I didn’t think anything was strange, and Lynn and Mindy went off
mingling with others. I thought I was with a friend, a friend with
benefits, but still a friend no less. I wasn’t aware of his
ulterior motives.

“
He gave me lots to drink
that night. It had been some time since I’d gotten out. I had been
studying so hard to get good grades. But between dealing with Jimmy
and school work, I didn’t have a moment to myself. That night we
were having a great time together, just like when we were friends…I
didn’t even notice that he wasn’t drinking.”

She bit her lip hard before she spoke
again. “We had unprotected sex. I found out after everything was
said and done, and you remember what I told you about me not being
able to be on birth control. That was one of the things Jimmy let
slip out in his fight with Mickey. I was really drunk, but I know I
asked him about protection, and he told me he had on a condom.” She
stopped and shook her head. “I got pregnant that night.

“
A month later, I went to
the studio to talk to Mickey after their recording session to let
him know I was pregnant. It was Buddy who came up, slapping Mickey
on the back, congratulating him on his plan working out so well to
knock me up. Now Jimmy was sure to give me the divorce that Mickey
wanted, he laughed, walking away from us, leaving me in
shock.”

Holy shit, he couldn’t believe all the
shit she’d been through. Something in his gut was turning when he
thought about the next question, but he knew he better ask now,
because like she said, after tonight all of this was behind
her…behind them.

“
I’m so sorry, angel. I
can’t believe what he did to you, and all his friends knew about
it. Makes me want to go back and beat the shit out of him again,”
he said, taking her hand now, letting her know he was there for
her, and she let him. “Can I ask you one more question,
sweetheart?”

She shrugged, looking back at the
comforter. “What happened to the baby? Did you have an abortion?”
He saw her whole body tense and start shaking, and she shook her
head. “He told Jimmy.”

He waited for her to say more but she
didn’t. She just let go of his hand and uncurled herself from the
wall, tucking herself under the covers. “I think you should go now,
Winston. I’m really tired and I have to work in the morning.” She
turned her back to him and faced the wall.

“
I can stay with you,
angel, I want to be here for you,” he whispered. She just shook her
head without saying another word.

“
Can I come see you after
work?” he asked nervously. He thought maybe she would want him to
stay with her for the night, they could talk, and he could hold
her. Being told that she was tired and that he should leave was not
what he was expecting.

“
I get off really late
tomorrow,” she whispered.

His breath hitched, and panic flooded
him at the thought of losing her. “I don’t care what time you’re
off, I need to see you,” he said, running his fingers through her
blonde hair.

He saw her nod, and his panic eased a
little.

“
Okay, we’ll talk more
tomorrow,” he whispered, kissing the top of her head. “Night,
angel.”

He got up from the bed, shut the door
and made his way to the kitchen where Lynn and Margie were sitting
and talking.

“
What time does she get off
tomorrow? I want to be the one to pick her up,” he told the
girls.

Margie looked at Lynn and she shrugged.
“She’s off at one.”

He nodded. “Thanks.”

Her last statement wasn’t sitting right
with him, as he walked slowly back to the apartment. All she said
was that he told Jimmy. Told him what?

Then he got it. That stupid fucker told
her husband that he knocked her up! And Jimmy beat the hell out of
her, and she lost the child.

His hands went to the back of his neck
and he just wanted to scream. So he ran downstairs and out to the
parking lot and did just that; he growled out at the top of his
lungs all the anger he had rushing inside him. Then he started
swearing loudly about how fucked-up these two men in her life
were.

After a minute, he took some deep
breaths, feeling a little less wound up, but just as angry. But
never, never once in his whole life, had he felt so damn useless as
right now. He had always tried to protect his mother, even when he
was small.

Where were the people protecting
Addison? Then he thought about how Lynn always acted like a mother
hen, or Margie bursting in like a big sister. It was the girls. It
had always been the girls protecting each other any way they knew
how. And to save Addison they all ran away together, leaving
everything and everyone they knew behind them.

Chapter 12

Win walked into his apartment to see
Rex and South both on their laptops. Old magazines were tossed
around all over the floor, as they talked to one another about what
they were finding on the Internet.

“
What the hell’s going on?”
he asked, looking around the disaster of their apartment. “And
where’s Andy?”

Rex looked up quickly from his laptop.
“Andy’s at our place taking care of Tia. We thought you’d be
staying with Addison,” he told him, then returned to looking
intently at the computer screen.

South rubbed his eyes with the palm of
his hand, like he’d been staring at a computer for hours…which he
had. He finally looked up at Win, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Why the hell are you home, anyway?”

Win went into the kitchen to grab a
beer, slamming the fridge door shut. Guess he wasn’t going cold
turkey on the drinking just yet, either. “She told me everything
that I asked her about. Then she told me she was tired and wanted
me to leave,” he told him, falling onto the sofa.

“
Shit, that isn’t good,”
South commented.

Win didn’t answer, but looked at all
the magazines on the floor. “What’s with all the shit on the
floor?”

South got up, picked up
a
Playboy
from
about seven years ago, and handed it to him. “Well, we found Addie
Richardson. Shit, I think I jerked off to a couple pictures of
her,” he laughed.

Win threw back the beer, just letting
it slide down his throat after South’s stupid-ass comment. And
looked down to see his angel, sitting with a guitar hiding her
naked body on the front cover. Her hair was just as long, but raven
black. She wore a straw hat and her silver aviator
glasses.

“
Everything we found with
her in the public eye was from about seven years ago. After that
she just kind of vanished from the scene. I was thinking maybe
because that’s when she decided she was going to go back to
school,” Rex told him.

South took a swig of beer. “Yeah, we’ve
found only a couple things after that. Here’s a picture with James
Richardson and her on the red carpet at some music awards…this was
about three years ago.” Win came over and looked at the beautiful
rock goddess in her red gown, black hair straight, luscious red
lips and black stilettos. Her arm was around James’s waist; she
smiled up at him lovingly, as he looked cockily into the cameras,
holding her tightly to him.

“
That photo is the only one
we’ve found that she isn’t wearing her glasses. Man, she was really
good at hiding her true appearance. If we weren’t told who she was
I would’ve never put the two together!” Rex said.

He sat up quickly in his chair. “Holy
shit, I found them!” he yelled out to South and Win. There in a
club in downtown Hollywood was the band Spitfire. The girls were
singing, having a great time, and the crowd was going wild; someone
had posted it on YouTube.

They found posts for Hot Spot being the
place to go to meet the girls. All the social media loved them, and
all the women wrote in about who they wanted Addison to stay with,
James, or Mickey. There were photos of the girls everywhere. And
posts about Lynn’s hair, Margie’s shoe fetish, Mindy’s Audrey
Hepburn style, and then they called Addison the fashion to follow.
They had her in shorts, dresses, hell, she looked hot in her
baseball cap and sweats, holding books and walking around campus.
And they were a little over a year old.

“
How the hell did they get
into all these pictures?” South asked.

Rex typed something. “Looks like the
band was really big. The girls were taking photos for fashion
updates. Look here, the tattoos on Ad’s back,” he told them, and lo
and behold there she was…

South hit Rex in the shoulder. “Hey, I
found a fight between Mickey Tamms and James Richardson. Looks like
they got into a fight one night at a club, and someone posted it.”
Win had already heard about that. But to sit and watch what
happened really hit the nail on the head.