Rush (Pandemic Sorrow #2) (19 page)

Chapter 27

“James is calling your phone,” Jules called from the kitchen.

I waved my hand in the air. “Fuck him.”

I still hadn’t mentioned to her that he knew about us. I had been trying to figure out the best way to break that to her, and I needed to come up with a solution before I told her.

“
And
he’s calling again.”

She came into the living room, her hands squeezing my shoulder as she stopped behind the couch and dropped my phone in my lap. “I’m gonna lose my job, aren’t I?”

Drawing in a breath, I tilted my head back and looked at her. She looked concerned, and I was afraid that if I didn’t do something, she wouldn’t feel this was worth it. Patting the cushion beside me, I said, “Hey, come sit down.”

“Rush, what do you know that I don’t?” She narrowed her eyes at me and her jaw clenched.

Before she could sit, I’d risen from the couch and placed my hands on her shoulders. Looking in her eyes, I felt each side of my mouth flip up into a pleased grin.

“How long have I known you, Jules?”

For a second she remained silent, staring at me as she tried to figure out where I was going with this. “Six years.”

I nodded. “Yep, six years. That’s a long time, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t get what this has to do with James knowing that we’re fucking.”

My hand crept up her neck, my fingers gently stroking the feminine outline of her jaw. “That’s not all we’re doing, now is it? Because if that was all this was, I don’t think you’d have your clothes on right now. I don’t think we would spend so much time together. I don’t think we’d talk, we wouldn’t
know
each other.” I pressed my mouth over hers briefly, then laid my forehead against hers. “We know each other, Jules.”

She bit down on her bottom lip and shifted her weight on her feet. Her eyes kept straying down to the floor, over to the side of the room; anywhere but to my eyes.

“Look,” I swallowed. “I really…you, you are…” I stopped and closed my eyes.

“Rush, you don’t have to—”

“Uh-uh. Just give me a second, okay?” My heart thumped in my chest and I kissed her, hard, pulling away only so I could see her eyes. “I love you, Jules. You hear me? I fucking
love
you.”

Her eyes widened, and I swear she staggered back a few steps. She studied my face, frowning. “You’re serious?”

I nodded. My pulse was now throbbing through my temples, and before I had a chance to think that maybe I should’ve kept my damn mouth shut, she grabbed me and crushed her lips over mine.

“I love you too. I do.”

Relief flooded me and I drew her to me, my hands skimming over her neck and up into her hair. “Fuck, you don’t know how good it feels to hear that.”

She pressed her lips over mine and quickly pulled away again. “And so I guess we’re pretty screwed, huh?” She smiled, but there was still doubt on her face.

I nodded. “James knows.”

Jules rolled her eyes and fell down onto the couch. “I knew it. I fucking knew it.” Her eyes darted up to me. “I’m gonna have to find another job.”

“Fuck that. It’s bullshit. How many people end up fucking their managers? You can’t tell me they’ll really fire you for that.”

My phone rang again.

“That’s him again,” I groaned.

I picked up the phone and walked toward the dining room.

“What the hell do you want?” I snarled into the phone.

“The question is what
the hell
have you done? You—”

I cut him off. “It’s not gonna be Jules. And it’s not gonna be Roxy. You can’t fucking dictate our relationships, you know. That’s just bullshit. It has nothing to do with the band.”

“Rush, that is the
least
of our concerns right now. And honestly, once she finds this shit out, if it’s true, she’ll leave your ass anyway.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

James cleared his throat. I could imagine he was standing in front of his window loosening his tie about that time. “Well, we got a call from a girl in Jersey about you, said she fucked you.”

“So? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Oh, it has a lot. Maria, does that ring any bells?”

Slapping my hand over my eyes, I groaned, “You really expect me to remember names?”

“She said you’d be most likely to remember her one of two ways. She has a starfish tattooed around her asshole—already sounding very classy—and she said she showed you what a rusty trombone is.”

A flashback of that girl flew through my head. “Oh, yeah.” I glanced up at Jules and felt guilty. Even though I hadn’t been with her at the time, although I’d used that girl to keep my mind off Jules, I felt bad.

James huffed into the phone. “So you did fuck her?”

Brushing a piece of lint from my knee, I said, “Yeah.”

“Well, she got in touch with the label because evidently she tested positive for HIV. Very responsible of her to fucking track you down. How many fucking times do I have to tell you guys to stop being so stupid? I hope to God this is one of the few times you actually used a rubber.”

He paused and I remained silent, everything in my stomach churning. The entire world seemed like it had slowed down.

“Aw, shit, Rush. My God, if this turns out to be true, do you know what this will do to the band? We have to get…”

Everything else he said faded into the background, melding into a long ramble of senseless syllables. The floor seemed to move beneath my feet, and sweat quickly pricked its way over most of my body.

Heat. My entire body was covered with the heat of fear, of confusion, of denial. I could hear the blood rushing through my ears. My fingers tingled and my chest grew tight. I coughed to try to open up my throat, which I was certain was closing.

“Are you okay?” Jules whispered, stepping toward me. Her eyes widened and she grabbed my arm. “You’re white as shit.” Her grip tightened; she looked scared. “Are you gonna pass out?”

I could barely manage to shake my head, and the tirade James was letting loose on the other end of the line was still not registering with me.

Suddenly, guilt coursed through me. I stared at Jules, wondering what the hell I’d done to her. If I had fucking AIDS and had given it to her, I’d want to kill myself. How they hell could I have been so stupid and careless? Shit like that happened to other people, not to people like me. I’d spent my entire life thinking I was invincible, and I had evidently been wrong.

The moment I’d been saving my entire life, the moment I gave the word “love” up, was the same moment I’d been told that my life had pretty much just ended. Irony is a motherfucker.

James’ voice forced me back into the moment. “Damn it, Rush? You’ve got to go get tested. Do you hear me?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” I was swallowing back bile, prying my eyes open so I wouldn’t be tempted to cry.

“Don’t you fucking mention this to anyone. Got me? Not a fucking soul. Don’t even tell Jules.”

“But—”

“No. Not a soul. We can’t handle this right now. Jag was enough. We can’t take this. The company has already tracked that bitch down and paid her off to keep her mouth shut.” He sighed, and I heard his pen tapping across his desk. “I made you an appointment. Okay? I hope to God you didn’t catch that shit, especially since your blood got all over me the other day when you tried to beat my ass!”

And then he hung up, leaving me with the phone pressed against my ear and fighting back fear, anger, shock, and a sense of mourning.

Jules touched my shoulder and I jumped. “Hey, what’s going on?”

I stared at her, my breathing growing deep and uneven.

“Rush?”

“Nothing. Nothing, he’s just…he’s just being an ass. You know, being James?”

Jules leaned in to kiss me and I dodged her, walking across the room to put as much distance between us as I could. Panic swept over me. I was afraid for her to kiss me; honestly, even though I knew it was ridiculous, I was afraid for her to touch me.

“Why the hell are you freaking out?” She stood in the middle of my living room, shaking her head.

“I don’t know. It’s just…” I glanced around my house, trying to figure out some lie to tell her, my heart slamming against the wall of my chest because I couldn’t tell her the truth. I hadn’t even had time to process it. “I just…I need to go take a shower.”

She glared at me, one brow arching slightly. “Okay,” she mumbled, watching as I clumsily made my way through the living room and toward the stairwell. “I’ll come with you.”

“No!” I shouted, my voice bouncing from the tall ceiling as I stopped in the middle of the foyer. “I need to clear my head. I just need some time to think.” I managed to bring a calm tone back to my voice momentarily. “Okay, sweetheart?”

I jogged up the stairs, refusing to look back at her. “I just need to think,” I mumbled, reaching the top of the stairs.

I went straight through my room to the bathroom and turned the water on. My pulse kept growing harder and faster and my breathing fell shallow. The longer the word “HIV” echoed in my head, the faster my head spun.

Just as I stepped into the shower, nausea swept over me and I gripped the cold tile wall. The sick feeling passed and I closed the door. The trickle of the water seemed amplified, but it did little to drown out the sound of the heart banging in my chest. I just stood there, gazing at the floor of the shower, watching the water find its way down the drain.
What the hell have I done?

Looking down at my body, I felt like I was someone else. This didn’t seem real. Sex. It had
just
been sex. Just a careless action to provide thirty seconds of relief, of bliss, of something I didn’t really need. And that one incident very well could have changed my entire life. If I had AIDS, I couldn’t stay with Jules.
Oh, shit. If I have it, she has to have it too.
If she already had it, she would despise me. No kids, no life outside of a shit-ton of pills to keep me from dying. My mind kept jumbling up, jumping from one thought to the next. The media…fuck, it would be all over the place. I would be stigmatized. It would ruin the band.

The band!
I’d fucked that girl months ago.

The image of me snorting a line of coke and then handing the straw to Jag, who handed it to Stone, then Pax, ran through my mind. How many times had we shared a straw, how many times had one of them accidentally jabbed their nose with the edge of a straw that may have had AIDS all over it?

Bile rose once again in my throat.

It kept snowballing. My carelessness kept slamming through my thoughts. All the girls I’d slept with since then, all the girls the guys had slept with. How many people could have been infected just because of me? The fight I’d gotten in with Jag, he had my blood all over him.
What if Jag had gotten it? Roxy would have it…the baby!

I slid down the shower wall and sat. The hot water washing over me did nothing to loosen my tense muscles. At that moment, guilt and fear had consumed me. I felt like a different person. I felt sick. I felt weak. I felt like my body no longer belonged to me.

The deprecating thoughts swirling through me were interrupted by Jules tapping on the glass of the shower. “Babe, what are you doing?”

I stared at her, water trickling down my face and over my lips. “I don’t know.”

How could I possibly begin to explain to her what was going on inside my head?

Her entire face scrunched up, and her fingers tapped along the glass. I could tell she was trying to figure out how to handle whatever this was.

Shrugging, I tried to peel the look of worry from my face and reassure her. “I’m fine. I’m just tired.”

Her eyes narrowed on me. “What was that call about? You had a look of utter fear plastered all over you when you got off.”

Standing up, I wiped the water from my face. I had to tell her something, but I had no idea how to tell her the truth, and before I really knew what I was saying, I’d blurted out, “James said it’s you or Roxy.”

“What?” Her shout echoed from the tiled walls, and she yanked the shower door open. “What!”

I shrugged and grabbed the soap, lathering it in my hands. “Yeah. He’s an asshole. Like he can do anything.”

“Rush! He can
fire
me!”

“For what?”

Jules tossed her hands up in the air. “For fucking you! You are a client. A client, Rush. That goes against our code of conduct.”

“Code of fuckin’ conduct, my ass.”

She grabbed her head, shaking it and staring down at the ground. She shouted, “Yeah, we’re held to a different standard of professionalism than you are. Damn it! I busted my ass to get where I am. And James, he’ll completely screw my reputation. I’ll never, I’ll never be—”

Anger had been building inside me over the entire situation. I swiped the lather from my face and blew the water from my lips. Glaring at her, I grumbled, “You don’t
need
a job.”