Somehow, I needed to mend things with Rhett. Gray knew something was up; I could see the questions all over him. But Rhett? He hated me, and that hurt more than it should.
sixteen
RHETT
Flo and I were good again. Maybe I didn’t totally forgive her for trying to set Billie up, for conspiring to have her kidnapped by the Ricci family mafia, after which fuck knew what might’ve happened to her. But considering Billie was clearly fine, I could relax my grudge against Flo a little bit.
As we’d laid on the carpet floor of the basement, smoking her smuggled joint, she’d explained how Tom had set it all up and used her as a pawn. Tucker had had a hard on for getting rid of Billie by whatever means necessary, and Flo had just been a convenient means to an end in setting her up.
“Tucker is such a fucker,” I drawled, feeling my head swim and closing my eyes. Then I giggled. “That rhymes.”
“You just worked that out?” Gray asked, finishing Flo’s joint, then stubbing it out in the ashtray supplied. It wasn’t our first, but sadly it would almost be our last. We needed to take advantage of our newfound chill, which was why we were in the recording room.
We’d taken a break so Jace could go grab his notebook, but it seemed like ages ago that he’d left.
“Where’s Jace?” I asked, struggling to sit up. Fuck me, Flo’s weed was excellent.
“He went for a drink,” Flo said.
At the same time, Gray answered. “Taking a shit.”
I squinted at both of them, then looked to the staircase. “Feels like he’s been gone a really long time.”
Flo snickered, strumming random notes on her bass guitar. “That’s the weed talking, bro.”
“I have to tell you guys something,” Gray said out of fucking nowhere. “I hired a guy to follow Billie. But he never told me she was knocked up. That’s bad, right?”
“Uh-huh,” Flo agreed. “One star review for sure.”
“You need a refund or discount or something,” I added, lying back down on the carpet.
Gray hummed a sound of agreement, then yawned and ran a hand through his hair. Fucking diva.
Then I sat back up. “Wait, you had someone following her? All this time? And you didn’t tell me?”
“If I did, would you remember?” Gray arched a dark brow at me.
I glared back at him, but he had a valid point. A lot of the past few months was blurry and blacked out. So I guess I didn’t have any kind of argument for being left out of the loop.
“I guess that explains The Dirty Truth post about Billie getting fat, huh?” Flo muttered with a loopy grin.
“What did he find out?” I muttered. It fucked me off that I was curious about her life away from us. “Was she treated okay by the asshole and his mafia family?”
Refusing to say his name made me feel marginally better—especially if he was the father of her baby when it should be me. Fuck’s sake, did I really want to be a dad? I should be celebrating the dodging of a bullet, and instead, I was mourning like a dumb cunt.
“Apparently, I wasn’t as informed as I should have been,” Grayson bit out, sounding scary even in his buzzed state. “But she seemed to be okay. Happy enough and well taken care of.”
The last line sounded rehearsed. Or maybe I was just too stoned to get the subtle hints, but it felt like he was trying to say everything without revealing anything, and I wondered why the fuck that was. Were we not safe to freely talk here?
“So, she left us?” Flo sounded bitter as she strummed the strings harder. “Tom didn’t even have to do anything. Billie gave him what he wanted without any fucking help from us.”
Grayson grunted before pulling himself up higher. “It’s more complicated than that, and it doesn’t mean the fucker isn’t going to get the beating he deserves, but yeah… it was going to happen with or without him.”
Again, there was a tone that indicated he wasn’t giving us the entire truth, but who the hell cared about the finer details when the base fact remained: Billie had left us and gotten knocked up by the asshole who broke her heart years ago. Her abuser.
Unless she was lying, and the baby was mine. Why lie, though?
Pushing myself up to sit, I wriggled back to rest against the glass wall of the studio, lifting my guitar as I did. The weed was turning me into a whiny bitch, and I might as well use that to channel some angst into a song. We just needed Jace to get back from his drink and/or shit, whichever one of those was the truth. Or neither.
He was probably hate-fucking Billie against the wall.
Motherfucker.
I’d probably be doing the same. Pregnant with another man’s child or not.
It was a new level of screwed up, and I was owning it.
“That’s nice,” Flo mumbled as I absentmindedly strummed a melody, one with darker, richer undertones than we usually used. Our sound had a hard rock beat, with the occasional ballad for the fans. But this one had a dark, slow, cloying beat that wrapped around you and refused to let go.
“I’ve slept about three hours sober since Billie left,” I admitted hoarsely. “When I find that rest, this is the fucking song that’s raging through my head. I feel it in my soul, but I refused to play it out loud because it’s damn haunting.” And it reminded me of her. Fuck, was I turning into Jace over here?
“It’s fitting,” Grayson added, already sounding clearer thanks to the rapid processing of drugs in his giant-ass body. “She’s been haunting all of us for weeks—Jace for years, and I finally understand why.”
I did too. I fucking understood, and I fucking hated it. Jace had tried to warn us, and we wouldn’t listen.
Flo picked up on the melody in a few seconds, joining in with me, adding another facet to the story I was telling without uttering a single word. Grayson moved to sit behind his drums, adding a beat to complete the sound. Flo and I got to our feet as well, and the sound grew stronger. This was my haunted melody, but my bandmates were musical geniuses, and by the time Jace walked into the room looking like he’d seen a ghost, we had a new song all but fleshed out.
He caught the tail end, and some of the blank, wide-eyed look faded from his expression, to be replaced by the sort of hunger he used to show every single time we wrote together. Jace lived and breathed music, but somewhere in the last few years, he’d lost some of that drive. Lost the spark. I saw it again today, though, as he stopped in front of us.
“What the fuck was that?” he rumbled, looking between me and Gray. “And can you do it again?”
For the next two hours, we played our “Broken Hearts and Battered Souls” number until we had it perfected. Jace had already thrown a few lyrics in, but we all acknowledged that this was a piece with fewer words. There was just no need. The beat, melody, and guitar riff in the middle that gave me a chance to let fucking loose told the tale of pain without excessive lyrics.
“Fuck me dead,” Jace said as he shook his head, all of us gulping water like we’d run a marathon. “Who knew that having Billie back in the house and some quality weed would produce that. Maybe Brenda knew what she was doing.”
Grayson lowered the towel he was using to mop up the sweat across his brow, narrowing his eyes on Jace, examining our lead singer for many unnerving minutes. If that look was directed at me, I’d be squirming, but Jace just flipped him off. “Don’t analyze me, bro. I can talk about Billie in a somewhat positive light without being struck down by lightning. I don’t like or trust her, and that’s never going to change, but at some point, I have to move on.”