Beautiful Musician

Beautiful Musician

By Sheri Whitefeather

Copyright © 2013 Sheree Whitefeather

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to
other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com
and purchase your own copy.

Thank you.

Chapter One

I stood outside her window in the
dark, my heart filled with angst. I considered her my everything,
and I was certain that I was hers. But we hadn’t told each other
how we felt. Neither of us knew quite how to say it. Loving each
other was dangerous. Someday we would be separated, and we might
never find our way back together again.

I fanned my hand against the pane of
glass. Was she asleep? Was she nestled in her bed, the covers drawn
tight?

Her name was Abby Winston, and she was
nineteen years old. Currently, she lived in a treatment center
called The Manor, and I paid secret visits to her.

They claimed that she had
been schizophrenic for most of her life, and that I was one of her
hallucinations. According to the rest of the world, I didn’t exist.
But to her, I was real. As much as I hated to admit it, I knew she
was mentally ill and that I was a component of her disease. But I
would never,
ever
tell her that. It was my job to keep her warm and safe, to
let her believe in me.

She’d created me when she was a child,
several years after her parents died in a devastating car crash.
She imagined me, and I appeared to her. I was a kid then, too, just
a few years older than she was.

These days I was a man: tall, dark,
and leanly muscled. I was known as Smiling Seven. An odd name, but
she’d given it to me, so I’d always treasured it just the same.
Besides, mostly I was called Seven, and that suited me
fine.

On this Southern California evening, I
was one with the night, pressing my hand gently against her window.
I liked being part of the darkness, the moon scattering its silvery
beams down on me.

But I wasn’t going to stand out here
until morning. I longed to see her, to be near her.

My sweet Abby.

I didn’t try to open the window. It
wasn’t necessary. I could simply pop into her room, sort of like
the “Beam me up, Scotty” thing, only I wasn’t from outer
space.

Then again, I wasn’t from this world,
either. I hailed from a meta-universe called Room 105. According to
Abby, everything and everyone in it had been created by people like
her, who were prone to using their imaginations. It was where I
lived when I wasn’t with Abby.

105 was a bizarre place. To me, it was
like Oz on crack or maybe the Mad Hatter ingesting molly. You never
really knew what to expect. Of course, Room 105 wasn’t any more
real than I was, but that didn’t make it any less my
home.

Anxious to see Abby, I beamed into her
room and stood in the golden-hued shadows. She’d left a nightlight
on. She’d always been afraid of the dark. I moved closer. She was
asleep, but the covers weren’t tightly drawn. At some point, she’d
kicked them away.

She looked like a troubled princess,
locked in a twisted fairy tale. She wore her white-blonde hair
short and choppy, and she was small and frail. Sometimes I had to
remind her to take care of herself, to wash her pretty face, to
shower, to wear clean clothes. Her crappy grooming habits were a
symptom of her illness.

Sometimes I was a bit of a mess
myself. My medium-length brown hair looked as if it had been styled
with an eggbeater, and I always had a dusting of beard stubble on
my chin. I favored black clothes, leather accessories, and rugged
boots. On top of that, I had a pierced tongue, my left ear was
decorated with silver studs, and both of my arms were inked with
full-sleeve tattoos, the artwork a hodgepodge of random
shit.

But what could I say? I was a
musician, and my creation and the development of my persona was
inspired by a young Nikki Sixx. He was the co-founder and bass
player for Mötley Crüe. He was also a brilliant songwriter, author,
photographer, and radio host. Abby had chosen him because her mom
had harbored a crush on Sixx back in the day. I didn’t look like
him, but I had his bad-boy vibe, I supposed, with a schizophrenic
dose of romantic hero tossed in.

Abby thought I was as hot as fucking
sin and ridiculously handsome. She’d always had a bit of a thing
for me, even when we were kids, but she’d been better able to hide
it then.

I glanced down at the foot of her bed
and noticed that Dingo, the dancing dog, was curled in a ball,
keeping her company. He was another of her hallucinations. There
were four of us altogether and she called us her “people,”
regardless of whether or not all of us were human.

I was friends with her other people,
but sometimes they got on my nerves, especially when I wanted Abby
to myself. Dingo was cool, though. He didn’t talk or do anything
annoying or abnormal. Abby said that he danced, but it was typical
doggie stuff, jumping around in circles and whatnot.

He lifted his furry head and perked
his ears at me. I put a finger to my lips, warning him to be quiet.
Sometimes he could be rambunctious as hell. He was a Jack Russell
terrier, and they were a feisty little breed.

The dog settled back down, and I sat
in a chair in the corner and watched Abby. We’d never kissed or
touched in a sexual way, but I wanted her.

Damn, I wanted her.

I’d been with lots of women in 105. I
wasn’t famous, not like the rocker who inspired my creation, but my
career was beginning to bud, and I got my fair share of
long-limbed, sultry-eyed groupies. But recently, I’d stopped
partaking of their favors. I couldn’t bear to fuck someone who
wasn’t Abby.

I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t see the
need. I was already a weird-ass guy, invented by a beautifully
strange girl. No drug could ever expand my mind the way Abby could.
But don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a teetotaler. On occasion, I got
bleary-eyed drunk and painfully maudlin. Other times, you could
catch me on the happy side of the bottle, charmingly, laughingly
wasted.

Tonight I was neither. Tonight I was
blindingly sober and admiring the girl I loved.

Chapter Two

I dozed off in the chair, but I kept
waking up every few hours and watching Abby. She thrashed a bit in
her sleep. I wanted to climb into bed and hold her, but that might
cause the kind of intimacy neither of us was ready to deal with. So
I stayed where I was.

In the morning, she sat up and blinked
through the sunlight stealing into her room. She had the biggest,
brightest blue eyes, framed with silky lashes. Her pajamas were out
of sync. They had a Christmas print on them, even though it was
nowhere near that time of year. But Abby didn’t pay attention to
that sort of stuff.

She petted Dingo, but he didn’t bounce
to attention. He wagged his tail and went back to sleep.

When she spotted me, she smiled.
“Seven. How long have you been there?”

“
All night.”

I returned her smile, and she made a
girlish sound, a sigh of sorts. The devil-may-care tilt of my lips
was a source of fascination for her. She’d named me Smiling Seven
because she said that I had a secret smile that enhanced my psychic
powers.

I was considered an empath, which
meant that I was able to read people’s emotions, to feel what they
felt. I was clairvoyant, as well, predicting events destined to
happen.

Of course I didn’t know everything
about everyone. Mostly I felt what Abby wanted me to feel about the
people associated with her, whether they were real or
imagined.

In the real world, she had a matronly
aunt named Carol and a twenty-year-old sister named
Vanessa.

The sisters adored each other. They
even looked alike, except that Vanessa took better care of herself.
She wore stylish clothes, had longer hair, and wasn’t mentally ill.
But that didn’t mean she didn’t have issues. Vanessa spent most of
her time worrying that she was going to develop schizophrenia and
become just like Abby. There wasn’t much I could do about Vanessa’s
fears. I already had my hands full with Abby.

“
Why are you being so
quiet?” she asked me.

“
I was
thinking.”

“
You’re always
thinking.”

That was true. I was always trying to
figure things out. Abby’s poor little mind moved at a dizzying
pace. Either that or it slugged along in states of dark-cloaked
depression.

She ran a hand through her haphazardly
chopped hair. She cut it that way herself. She’d been hacking away
at her hair since we were kids.

I checked the clock on her nightstand.
Then I said, “You need to get ready for the day. To bathe, brush
your teeth, go the dining hall for breakfast, take your
medicine.”

“
I want to stay here with
you and Dingo.”

“
They won’t let you stay
in your room all day.” I grinned at her. “Besides, this place is
pretty swanky for a loony bin. You might as well try to enjoy
it.”

She laughed. She liked it when I poked
fun at The Manor. But in actuality, it was a damned fine facility,
a private treatment center designed to teach people how to manage
their disease and then, hopefully, transition into mainstream
society. Abby would probably never make it that far, but at least
she was here, learning what she could.

The Manor didn’t come cheap. Her aunt
footed the bill, but it was Vanessa who’d convinced Abby to become
a Manor resident.

I gestured to her bathroom. “Go get
ready.”

“
Will you still be here
afterward?”

“
Absolutely. I’m not going
anywhere.”

“
Pinky
promise?”

“
Always.” I came forward
and held out my hand so we could lock pinkies, a cozy habit from
our youth.

Only now her touch sent a jolt of
hunger through me. I severed the connection quickly, shooing her
into the head. What I really wanted was to take a shower with her,
to lather every inch of her sweet body.

She grabbed a change of clothes and
gave me a lingering look before she closed the bathroom door,
wanting me as badly as I wanted her. Even a guy who wasn’t psychic
would’ve recognized the yearning in her eyes.

Dingo roused from his sleep and jumped
off the bed. While I waited for Abby, I rifled through her desk
drawer, where she kept the imaginary dog treats. Dingo barked and
twirled, and I tossed him a cheese-flavored bite.

Abby had created him a few months
after she’d manufactured me, but he didn’t grow older the way I
did. He would be the same young, playful age for the rest of his
fake-canine life.

After a short while, Abby emerged from
the bathroom looking like a ragamuffin. Her oversized oxford shirt
was wrinkled and misbuttoned, and her razor-edged hair had been
towel-dried but not combed. She also had a speck of toothpaste near
the corner of her mouth. If she were my lover, I would’ve pulled
her tight against me and licked it off. I did the next best thing.
I scooped it up with my thumb and tasted it that way.