Hard Rock Roots Box Set (12 page)

“What?”

He looks at me like I'm crazy and steps back, running his fingers through his blue-black hair. The star tattoos on the edges of his hairline flash at me, highlighted by the bright lights on the sign at my back, the one that has both our bands' names plastered across it in two foot tall letters.

“I've never forgotten to use a condom before. Not with anyone. Not even once.” I laugh so hard that tears come to my eyes, and I have to bend over to take a breath. Blonde hair falls over my shoulder like a curtain and obscures my face.

“Really? Is that the best line you've got, Turner? Jesus, I thought you were better than that.”

“It's true,” he snaps, voice so rough that I have to look up at him. His eyes are narrowed on me, and his full lips are flat and straight. He looks like a different person when he's pissed. The Turner Campbell I'm used to seeing is always smirking and is so cocky and arrogant, that anger doesn't even seem to be an option. After all, to be angry about something, it has to bother you, and Turner likes to give off this impression that he's immune to the world. Or above it. Probably both.

“And I'm supposed to believe that shit?” I say as I stand up and reach my hands into my bra, adjusting the girls for maximum cleavage exposure. Turner watches with hungry eyes, and starts pitchin' a tent, if you catch my drift. Glad to see that I'm not the only one with a sweaty back and a pulsing crotch.
So we have sexual chemistry, how is that surprising? You're both young, relatively good looking, it happens. Just remember what happened last time you gave into it.

I take a step back.

“If you can't even remember us fucking, how do you know that's true? How many girls have you fucked that have escaped your recent memory, hmm? There could be a dozen Campbell bastards running around by now.”

“No.”

That one word is strong as steel.

Turner and I stand there staring at one another with this sort of burn in the air between us, like we're both about to catch on fire.

“I know what happens to kids who grow up without dads.”

“They turn into rock stars?” I say, and immediately regret it. I don't know why. The guy plucked my cherry from the tree, ate it, and ran off before I woke up after. He didn't use a condom (maybe half my fault, but shit, I was the inexperienced one in the situation) and left me pregnant, homeless, and confused. The idol I'd looked up to had been relegated to devil, and I had a person growing inside of me who needed things, things that I couldn't give or didn't know how to give. Food, shelter, clothing. Love. Most especially that. And stability. You can't give something you've never had. Check the laws of science; it's impossible.

“I know that you're the only one. Don't ask how, but I just know.” Turner shrugs and then sighs, dropping his anger into the hot desert air before reaching for a joint he's got hidden in his front right pocket. He offers it to me, but I decline, and he lights up. “I also know that you hate me, and that you're pissed at me, and I get it. Believe it or not, but I do.” Turner puffs on his joint for a moment. I watch him and wonder why my knees are starting to feel weak and why my thighs are shaking like they can't hold the weight of my life anymore. I hate that feeling. Makes me sick to my stomach. I wait for it to pass. “But I want my kid, Naomi. No matter how you feel about me, how little you think I deserve him or her, I have a right to know everything. Bringing a person into this fucked up, shitty existence is something I don't take lightly. Wherever they are, I'll find them.”

My throat is dry now, and I'm having trouble breathing. I swear to god that I'm about to pass out. I want to blame it on the heat, but I can't. It's Turner. It's always been Turner.

“What if you had to quit?” I ask him, voice breathy. Turner hears it, too, and takes a step forward, wetting his lips, holding his hands out, so that his fingers brush the thin hairs on my arms. I hate him, and yet I want him so bad it hurts inside. But after what he did to me, can I ever forgive him? Do I want to? Why am I even asking myself these stupid fucking questions? Even if I did admit to myself that in some fucked up, Stockholm syndrome type of way that I liked him still, he'll never change. He's always be an arrogant, cocky whore, and there's nothing I can do about that. “What if you had to quit the fucking and the drugs and the booze and the … ” My words trail off and my breath catches in my throat as Turner leans in so close that I can see the beads of sweat on his upper lip, hear the thumping of his heart. “And the music? Would you do it?”

“Well,” he begins, and I realize now that I'm paralyzed, that I can't drag my eyes from his. I should be kneeing him in the balls right now, watching him suffer with glee, but instead I'm standing here and breathing in the smoke from his joint, gazing at him like one of his stupid groupies. Fuck me sideways. “I know that I love that kid. I know for sure, even without meeting 'em. I mean, with you as a mother and me as a father, how could we go wrong?” Turner tries to grin, but it falls flat. He's trying to come across as self-assured, but it isn't working. He's nervous right now, and he's thinking too much and too hard. My guess is that he's been thinking about this non-stop since I told him. “And I'd do anything for love.”

I swallow hard.

“But you know,” he begins as his fingers finally touch my skin, clamp around my bicep and pull me close. “That you can never really quit the music.” He shrugs and tosses his joint into some bushes behind me. “But the rest of the stuff … ”

I want to tell him; I have to. Not for him, but for me. For that kid he's so obsessed with that doesn't exist anymore, the one that I kind of wish still did.

“Meet me after the show,” I say as I make the second hardest decision of my life and step back, drawing my arm from Turner's grip and finding myself icy cold in the middle of all this desert heat. “Meet me after the show and I'll tell you everything.”

Chapter 14
Turner Campbell

After talking to Naomi, I feel like I'm having an out of body fucking experience, floating above myself and wondering how I've let my life get the way it is. I have the chance and the opportunity to have everything, and yet, I still have nothing. I've had sex with over a hundred girls (I stopped fucking counting a long time ago), but I've never had a girlfriend. Never. Not once. Naomi makes me wonder what I'm missing out on at the same time she pisses me off and makes me see red. She's interesting, that's what it is. I find her so fascinating that I want to grab her and keep hold, make her mine just so I can see what it is she's gonna do next, even if I hate it, even if it pisses me off. And I don't even know her. I wonder if that has anything to do with it, if maybe after I get to know her that she'll be less interesting. See, the thing is, I have no experience with which to base this shit on.

So I convince myself that maybe I should find out and head back to the bus to slip on a hoodie. I hide in the back of the crowd, and I watch as Amatory Riot heads onstage, letting my eyes follow Naomi in her tight, black tank, her short shorts and her ripped tights. She's got on these steel-toed boots that look like they're meant to stomp the world into shreds, and I can tell that the crowd likes her, maybe even more than that skinny bitch at the mic. What's her name?

I cross my arms over my chest and let a smile slither across my face as Knox slips her guitar over her head and hits it, drawing the crowd – myself included – into the music so fast that it makes their heads spin. She bites her lip and she sweats so hard that she's splattering the crowd with moisture as she flings that axe around and destroys them. And when she does sing, her voice nearly overwhelms Skinny up there, and I know without a doubt that if she wanted to, she could steal the show same way she did when she challenged me.

My smile turns into a fat ass grin as I lean back against the wall and slip my hand down to the waistband of my pants. It's dark and crowded and sweaty in here, and I guarantee that I'm not the only one doing this. My fingers sneak open the button and fly on my pants, hidden beneath the baggy folds of the sweatshirt. When I finally get a good grip on my cock, a groan escapes me, melting into the collective moans of the crowd as they eat up the music, the words.

“
Soaked in your betrayal, drenched with pain and disbelief, I wander. At first I walk, but then I run because I can't stand being here even a second longer. With you. With you. But most especially without you.
”

I stroke the length of my shaft with strong fingers, using the sweat from my heated body to glide up and down with long, slow strokes, just the way I'd like to do to Naomi. God, I wish I could remember what she felt like beneath me that night, if things would be different if I could remember.
I doubt that, Turner. You would have smiled at her and kissed her goodbye, tossed her a T-shirt and said
have a good life.
Count yourself lucky that you stumbled out of there before she woke up.
I squeeze my dick harder and try to focus on the here and now. Like I said, fuck the past.

Naomi's desert eyes start out dry, but after the first song, they're moist as fuck, lit up by the wetness that leaks down her face and betrays the tight set of her jaw, the straightness of her knees, the screams that burst from her throat as she riles the crowd into a frenzy so powerful that I get swept away and have to button up my pants, climbing into the mass and getting into the music in a way I haven't been able to for a long, long time.

When she sees me, she knows. Even the hoodie dripping over my face can't keep her from locking gazes with me, from holding me with that stare as I'm shuffled through the crowd, pushed forward by unseen hands. I don't know if it's just chance or fate, but I end up at the front with my body pressed against the metal fence that separates the crowd from the bouncers who guard the stage. Girls press up against me, and for the first time
ever,
I don't really notice them. Right now, Naomi's got my full attention, drowning me in melodic mind fucks and rampaging riffs. I stop being Turner Campbell, frontman for Indecency, and start just
being.
Can't even tell you how good that feels.

“
No, I won't let you ruin me; I won't let you win. Pushing me down only lifted me up, and now I'm here to stay, and it's your turn to feel this way, this broken, bloody, shattered way.
”

There's this charge in the air, and it takes me awhile to get it at first, to really put it all together. It's melancholy.

I never stop to wonder if it has anything to do with me.

By the time I get around back, Milo is having one of his customary panic attacks, pacing back and forth and bitching to anyone that'll listen. When I glance at my phone on the way in, I see that I have several missed calls and a couple of texts. In a jovial fucking mood from watching Naomi, I snap a friendly shot of my ass and message that to him, smiling when I see his face register the photo.

“Miss me?” I ask as I slip into the darkness stage left and toss him a nasty smirk. Milo's blonde hair is sticking up every which way, and his eyes are round as marbles in his pale face. I stare at him for a moment and try not to let him ruin my good mood. “Dude, you need to chill the fuck out.”

“Turner,” he says, but that's all he can get out because I'm walking on stage and grabbing the mic, pulling the band out behind me without using a single word. That's the way I like it. I lead, and they follow. I've lived too long with life being the other way around, and I'm done with that shit. In fact, today, I don't even pick a girl out in the crowd like usual. I just smile into the mic and say what I'm feeling. If the crowd doesn't like it, they can go fuck themselves.

“Hey there, Tucson,” I growl, and I watch as they ripple with shudders and gasps.
God, I'm on top of the fucking world right now.
Maybe it's a false high, but that's really all anything ever is. Temporary. Fleeting. “I hope you enjoyed Amatory Riot,” I say and cheers go up, violent ones, like a horde of howling fucking demons. My eyes flicker to stage right, and there she is, standing there, watching me with those stupid fucking shades on, arms crossed over her tits, sweat sticking her shirt to her skin. “Because I've got a big ass crush on their guitarist.” I pause and listen to the collective voice of the room. It stretches out before me into the darkness, eyes and cells winking at me from the balconies, from beneath the chandelier that hangs precariously above them all, heavy and drooping with glass teardrops.

I smile.

“And I'm going to try to fuck her tonight.” More cheering, hissing, some whoops. “But first,” I continue, eyes sliding to the side. Good sign. Naomi's still standing there; if she hasn't left, good things could be in store for me. I slide the mic out of the stand. “First, I'm going to fuck the shit out of you.”

I open my mouth and I take a deep breath, drawing air into my lungs for that first scream, the one that breaks down the sound barriers and opens up the souls of the people below me. Usually, when I'm up here, all I do is drink in the attention, soak it up like a sponge, revel in the worship. Tonight, my focus is a bit different, and it scares the shit out of me. Yeah, I still like to be looked at, idolized, who doesn't? But there's one person that refuses to participate, and she's the only one tonight that I care about.