The plane sat in the distance, waiting for us. For me. Usually, we were already boarded. Waiting for flight. Unlike commercial planes, we didn’t have to wait as long for takeoff.
You’d think having parents who died in a plane would keep me away, but as I looked at the beauty on the runway, a part of me knew fear drove me to do many things I never thought I’d do.
Almost there, Royce’s text read. He told me he’d be bringing my backup guitar, knowing my emotions weren’t exactly settled after the clusterfuck since Cars and Andy upended my life.
I didn’t respond, he didn’t need my confirmation. Looking at the setting sun, I noticed the haze the California air brought, hating how it basically choked us day in and day out just to survive here.
My fingers tapped against my jeans, my chest rattling with nerves. Turning toward the plane, I watched Memphis go and wondered if Carrig was running late or if something happened.
It didn’t take a fucking priest to know life didn’t always go well, especially when it came to people I cared about. No matter how much I turned my emotions off and deluded myself, thinking I could not care, I did.
Carrig, Memphis, Stony, and hell, the whole shop. I cared about them. If something happened to them, I’d be fucked up over it.
They were my family.
Not of blood, but found, of my choosing.
“Carrig’s pulling up,” Memphis called out from ahead of me. My feet kept meeting pavement as I made my way to the plane. I kept my head down, an unexplainable emotion hitting me with every step away from the place I’d forced to become my home.
The door opened, creaking with old age. Carrig was more than likely headed in my direction. Good, he could pack his shit so we could leave. Standing here any longer made me feel more and more buried beneath the sand.
“Wait up!” Carrig yelled, but I didn’t stop. My pace—slow and deathly sad—kept up. Memphis walked toward me. He stopped me, not touching, but the warning of it was there.
“Stop.”
“Need to board,” I rumbled uncharacteristically short and disappointed. Something final about the stairs five feet away hit me hard.
“Madden!”
That voice.
Her voice.
It stopped me where Memphis couldn’t. My heart pounded, a pendulum of uncertainty, desperate for reality not to make a joke out of me again.
There was no way, right?
“Madden!” Her voice got louder—closer—a promise of either pain or ease. No one but Andy knew. My stomach lurched with adrenaline and I finally allowed myself to turn, needing to see her and confirm if I dreamed it. I hadn’t smoked yet, I wasn’t high.
When our eyes connected, the answer I’d waited so many weeks for hit me. She stared at me in awe, certainty, a knowledge I needed.
The words. I needed to hear them.
No matter the music, lights, and never afters, Andy here right now trumped it all. She was the ending I wanted, even if the road to it was heady.
“You came,” I croaked, finally taking her in. It wasn’t the fact that she was drop dead fucking gorgeous that made me weak in the knees, no. It was the fact that she wore a crop top, showing her new tattoo to the fucking world, and over that, was a jacket.
My jacket.
All the guys wore theirs to death. They even needed a new one every tour. But not me.
I didn’t touch it, ever.
It was designed by me, pinned, patched, and rugged as fuck, but since the first tour, I stopped wearing it. Seeing it brought me painful memories of all the songs I never sang because Andy wasn’t a part of my life.
She didn’t realize how much I numbed myself to everything just to get her off my mind. The drugs, the booze, the meaningless and touchless sex I’d had for so long... she didn’t know.
But she would.
“I never doubted I would,” she said, but somehow, I doubted that much. She was like me, broken. There was a part of her that might always be fractured from the distance I put between us.
“Why?”
“Because I choose you,” she whispered, and I shuddered. The words brought chills to my body. She chose me. Me. She picked me over Brandon. She picked me over safety. She picked taboo over easy.
“We have to fly out, but we need to talk,” I informed her, wanting to kiss the fuck out of her. But something held me back. Something always fucking did.
She followed me onto the plane and stared at me as we took off. I needed her more now than I did before—and I didn’t know how it got to that point for me.
Where she became everything.
My breath.
My blood.
My life.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Another Song About the Weekend – A Day to Remember
Madden
“We going to talk here?” Andy asked as soon as we were leveled in the sky. She unbuckled, coming toward me on the opposite side of the jet. The guys sat around the table, chatting away while I stared at nothing, existing to live not living to exist.
The first tour was in Europe. It was where my dad and I were supposed to meet. The entire idea of an international tour first made me uneasy. Flying, not so much, but going to where he once was. London. Yeah, I was scared shitless.
There were rooms on this jet, four to be exact. One for each member. After my parents went down in our last one, I had to invest in a new one. I hadn’t, not until we made it big. Didn’t want them to think I was a fucking schmooze.
“Back there,” I finally offered, pointing my thumb behind me toward the hallway to the cabins. Stony, Carrig, and Memphis kept to themselves, not even looking at me. I knew why, because they knew Andy being here meant everything.
Even Royce knew and when his lips titled the slightest bit—the only smile he ever offered—I felt at ease.
She followed me to my room, something about being near a bed and Andy didn’t allow me to settle. My blood thrummed with untapped need. The desire to touch her was the first thing I felt. The next, my dick hardened at the idea of touching her for the first time.
“Talk,” she said, not unhappily, but her nerves were obvious.
“Why me?”
Her face softened and I felt tension leave me. “It was always you, Toland.”
Whenever she used my real name, it was so I’d hear her. It was personal, thorough, a way to show her meaning without saying it.
I swallowed, needing to get high and ease myself. I didn’t used to be this fucking on edge, but not touching people and wanting to do just that made my body shake with awareness.
“Why wait five weeks then?”
It wasn’t meant to be a jab but with the way she flinched, I knew it hurt her regardless. She could have made this easier, been with me from day one.
“Life doesn’t work with simplicity.”
“You’re right,” I said begrudgingly. “Doesn’t make it any easier.”
She stepped closer to me and it took everything in me to not take a step back. It had gotten harder over the last few weeks, not easier, to be touched.
Yeah, I grabbed her throat, imagined fucking it, and every single nasty thing I wanted to do to her, but it was different when I didn’t have drugs, booze, and hatred swimming through my veins.
When the distance between us grew even smaller, my breath caught. She was so fucking stunning. Especially with my mark on her chest and my jacket wrapped around her like a hug I couldn’t offer her.