Strung Out (Needles and Pins #1) (16 page)

I rolled from him and wanted to whimper when his hands dragged down the skin of my body and clutched one last time at the denim on my hips before we completely separated.

His phone screamed for attention again, right when I was about to explain I was trying to retrieve mine. His eyes fluttered open. “Oh. Morning, Scar.”

But something ambiguous danced in his eyes, and I narrowed my gaze. Sitting up, he reached above him, fetching his phone.

“Can you throw me mine? Turns out trying to get it myself is risky business.”

“Ah. You’ve been trying to get to your phone all morning. That explains. Sorry.” He tossed it onto a pillow between us.

Again, I peered into his face. Had he been awake when I’d practically molested him in his sleep?

One of his thumbs tapped at his screen, and he put it to his ear. “What the hell, Bill? Fifteen calls? No voicemail or text?”

Already in desperate need of the restroom, I prepared to scurry away and leave him to the call with his manager, but the tone of his voice stopped me short right before I left the bed.

“I don’t fuckin’ believe this. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Fuck! I’ll call you later. And thanks, man.”

“Everything okay?”

His gaze swung from the ceiling to my face, and the torment in his expression belied his reply. “Sure. We’re the lucky ones. Remember, Scar?”

T
he app buzzed and Gage squinted at the text before tapping on his phone screen to unlock the gate out front.

Tripping over the Les Paul he’d treated far more carelessly than it was entitled when he let it slip from his grasp as he dozed on the couch, he oriented himself and crossed the studio. He staggered down the hallway, stopping before the mirror in the entry foyer. After smoothing at stray hairs, he wiped at his eyes but wasn’t surprised when the shadows beneath them didn’t magically disappear. He pulled open the front door.

“Hey, man.” His neatly groomed personal assistant was reaching for the doorbell and jumped back, clearly startled. After the greeting, he inclined his head toward the fence and high shrubs skirting the property. “You got paps out there.”

“Yeah?” Although he knew the bend in the drive didn’t allow a view of the gate, Gage instinctively peered beyond him. “Been a while.” The last time more than the random loner with a lens had hung around for any length of time had been during his divorce. Stupidly, he’d never thought he’d go through anything more undesirably newsworthy than that.

“Yeah. The piranhas. Listen, I heard the news, man. I’m sure sorry.” The guy offered the condolence while following him inside and then froze. “Who’s that?”

Gage followed the other man’s lustful look down the hall and outside where a pool current drifted the float adorned with Scar’s beautiful bod around the turquoise waters. “No one.”

“Must be nice to always have a ‘no one’ baking in your pool.”

The assumption of Scarlette being one of the whores who often flocked by just to tweet, Tumblr, and Instagram themselves in Gage Remington’s pool aggravated him. “Look, I got things going. If you could just…”

“Yeah. Sure.” His assistant, whose sole daily duty was often drug delivery—and today was one of those days― reached into his pocket. “Want me to fix you up?”

“No, I’m good.”

“All right then. Clear Morning. Don’t forget.”

“Yeah.” Gage acknowledged the stamp on the paper and his understanding of the purity—a purity percentage that had almost killed him when he hadn’t taken the warning seriously the last time.

He had already authorized the payment through the pay app his dealer used, so he bolted the door behind his assistant and closed a protective hand over the goods.

Back in his studio, he tucked the packet away inside a drawer for later. He had an incredible urge to join Scarlette in the pool. Instead, he grabbed up the Les Paul and fingered a tune as he watched her float. As he pressed and plucked at the metal strings, he remembered how her nipples had already been taut the moment he’d touched them this morning.

As if feeling his heated thoughts, she twisted her head to the side. The massive wall of windows was open between them, and she called out. “Who was here?”

His riff slowed and his mind raced. “Just a friend. Why? Expecting someone?”

“Colt texted an hour or so ago. Said he and Seth were coming by.”

Colt had texted him the same thing. But when had he begun texting Scarlette?

He felt the snarl but couldn’t stop it. “Yeah. Well. Colt says things. Doesn’t always do them.”

She pushed the sunshades farther up the bridge of her nose and seemed unperturbed about his tone, or whether Colt was arriving. Rolling off the float, she sank under and came up, slinging her head so that her hair sleeked back from her face.

Holy fuck.
All that wet hair. All that wet skin
. What would she do if he dove in and banged her animal style against the side of the pool beneath the glare of the California sun?

His dick throbbed with the thought. Closing his eyes, he let the friction of the guitar against his body and the scream of the music in his ears soothe his wayward thoughts.

Other unwanted thoughts edged in…

…”
Just tell me Gage.”

This morning instead of going upstairs, they’d each freshened up in the movie studio bathroom, and she’d followed him to the kitchen where they took turns brewing their coffee. A breakfast casserole waited, but the thought of food turned his stomach. His insides were a coil of nerves because of Ben’s call.

“I’m being charged with inciting a riot.” There. Blurt that shit out. Easiest way. “And now they’re trying to add a hate crime to the charges.”

“How did you incite a riot? What is that exactly?”

The normal Gage who wasn’t her semi-brother would have ignored her. Told her to fuck off if she continued with the questions. But he found himself wanting to tell her. Desperate to get it off his chest.

“I said some shit at a show. Possibly the stupidest moment of my life—includi
ng some of the stupidest that would normally come to mind.”

She’d blown on her coffee, waiting.

“We’ve come under fire for some lyrics on this last album. I mean we have before. But especially this last one. The very people the songs were written in suppor
t of took them wrong. Thought they were meant differently than they were.”
Rascal had paced at the window, and he’d paused to push the lever. The glass had glided back until the inside was the outside and the dog rushed out onto the patio and beyond into the foliage.
“There was a woman on Twitter. Said her son was bullied at school because he had two moms. I let the publicist handle my account and Fire Flight’s account just to be sure I didn’t screw up. The lyrics were explained to her, and we spoke out aga
inst the bullying. But it just got ugly. She wouldn’t let it drop. It became a Twitter war. No longer was it just her. The public rallied to the cause and just as many hate messages and threats came at us and me as support messages.”
He’d begun setting up the maker for another cup of coffee.
“At that point, I had not personally responded at all. I was faultless unless the misunderstood lyrics were considered. Hours before the last show on the tour, I got served. She filed a lawsuit saying I was responsible
for what happened to her son because two of the bullies had cited Fire Flight as their favorite band, and I’d written the lyrics they had commonly quoted when they verbally and physically attacked him.”

The guilt always assaulted him when he thought of a kid getting beat up and him possibly being the reason.
“The thing is, the lyrics are pretty ambiguous. Plenty of people say the same exact words in hateful situations. That’s why I used them as lyrics. It was an awareness of the hate out there. Anyway, I of
fered to pay the medical bills and then some in sympathy for what he went through, and to come to his school to meet him and speak out against bullying. But she sued for a small fortune and petitioned to have charges filed against me.”

“But… Fuck, Gage. Th
at can’t happen, right?”
Her blue eyes had been as wide and naïve as he had been until this shit played out and became his everyday life.

“Maybe not. If I hadn’t shot my mouth off on stage and then jumped into the crowd after a heckler that last night, hou
rs after being served, maybe it would have all died away. I don’t even remember what I said. I mean, the quotes are all there. Online. In the police report. And even on YouTube, a partial video of it. But I was so out of it, I don’t remember. I…”
He’d dumped the coffee in the sink suddenly nauseous again.
“I said horrible things. Not directly about her, but about people like her. About people who attack an unaccepting world because they deliriously assume everyone is against them when they’re not. I punched
a guy—after he swung first—and security pulled us apart. We started another song, but a fight broke out in the arena and got bigger. We stood on the stage watching things go freaking crazy. Watching as people were pulled from the crowd bleeding. And the i
rony. Me, the guilty one. Once I was back onstage, no one even tried to get to me. People were hurt. And it was all my fault. I deserve whatever is going to happen.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“I’ll probably do time. Especially since the hate crime is piled
on. And because I had shit on me when I was arrested.”

“You had drugs on you while doing a show?”

“Yeah. I do sometimes. In a
necklace
. But they didn’t arrest me until the next morning. I was on my way to the bus and had rolled a bag in my pocket.”
Here, maybe the day would come when it would be funny to recall they’d confiscated his dime bag and had sealed away, along with the rest of his personal property, a gram of coke in the secret vial dog-tag pendant on his necklace. But that day hadn’t come yet.
“I had some weed, and it wasn’t a weed
-friendly state.”

…Well, those thoughts effectively cured a hard-on. When he came out of his daze, he realized he was blazing through impromptu riffs, and Scar had pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head to see him better. She was floating again, but sitting up, straddling the float. When he wound down, she clapped, whistled, and raised her fingers in the classic peace, love, and rock-and-roll sign.

He could get used to her being around…

“Sounding good, bro.” Colt entered the studio. Seth darted like a panther through the house and dive-bombed into the water, causing Scarlette to screech.

Gage set the guitar aside and crossed to the fridge in the corner.

“You got paps.” Colt jacked his chair and peered at the computer screen.

“Yeah.”

“So let’s hear it. Where is it?” Colt tinkered around the computer keyboard looking for the file.

“I haven’t gotten it down yet.”

“What? Why?”

“I was messing around.”

“Well, get back on it. Before you lose it. That was fuckin’
it
. The shit.”

Knowing his friend and bandmate was right, he took a long swig from the beer bottle. Motioning Colt out of the way, he readied the program before strapping back into his axe.

I
hoisted myself onto one of the island pads in the pool and sat with my feet hanging in the water. Colt dropped into the pool near me, and we listened to the music pounding the studio walls and non-walls.

“It’s great!” I bobbed my head and moved my feet to the rhythm.

“Yeah. He’s getting somewhere now. One chorus down; the rest of the song to go.”

“But now that he has a direction, you guys will do your part, right?”

“Our part? No.”

“No?”

“Gage writes the songs. Every note. Every word.”

The tune stopped and restarted, again and again with a tweak here and there. I soon felt guilty for lazing in the pool—with his bandmate no less—while my brother worked.

The discussion with Colt spun out of control, quickly becoming an argument.

“I’m asking why he has to be the one to write the damn song! He’s got so much stuff on his mind already.” I unconsciously kicked beneath the water.