Rocked Senseless: A Stand-Alone Rock Star Romance, page 6
“Oh no, what happened?” Celeste lowers herself to the bed to watch me. I look at her in the stunning ruby-colored dress that hugs her every curve. Any red-blooded man would give up his plan in a heartbeat to ravage this beautiful woman and her curves, but my cock is limp every time I look at her. That wasn’t always the case. Early on in our relationship, we had sex nonstop. It was pretty much all we did. Now, the fighting over Madison combined with her irritating personality have made her about as attractive as a telephone pole to me.
“Nana fell and broke her hip. We’re going to take care of her.”
Celeste’s eyes narrow. “‘Nana’? As in Madison’s grandmother?”
A wave of heat rushes to my forehead. “Yes.”
“So you’re going with Madison on a plane?”
I grunt out a sigh. “Celeste, how many times do I have to tell you? Madison is just a friend. She doesn’t think of me that way, trust me.”
“But you’ve thought of her.” Celeste’s eyes grow darker in her anger.
“What makes you say that?”
Celeste stands and crosses her arms in front of her, deepening her cleavage. I glance down at my cock. Not even a twitch.
“I’ve seen the way you look at her, Logan. I’m not blind.”
I frown. “I don’t look at her in any particular way.”
Celeste throws her head back and laughs. The sound is mirthless and oozes with bitterness. “You are such a clueless idiot.” Celeste leans down to my level, speaking softly, but I’m not clueless enough to think her words aren’t a threat just because they’re not loud. “And if you think you’re traveling alone with Madison after leaving me alone to travel the country for three months, you’re even dumber than I thought.”
Scowling, I toss the last of my clothes in my bag and zip it up with more force than usual. I stand to face her, refusing to let her back me into a corner. “Celeste, I’m a grown man, not your whipping boy. The Daleys are like family to me. I’m going, and there’s nothing you can say or do to change that.”
Fire burns behind her blue-gray eyes. “Fine, but mark my words: you’re going to regret this.” She turns on her heels and catwalks out of the room. I’m left with a boulder in my stomach.
I wonder how many of my belongings will be left intact when I return.
Madison settles into the window seat, placing her travel pillow underneath her head before it even touches the leather. I get why she needs to be comfortable. Six hours is a long-ass time to be stuck in one spot. I plan to spend most of my time sleeping or chilling to a Spotify playlist. We couldn’t get a flight until eleven o’clock this morning, but since I spent the night tossing and turning, a nap sounds like heaven right now. Madison and I usually do our own thing on flights instead of spending the entire time talking to each other. We already know everything there is to know about each other, after all.
I look down into Madison’s deep azure eyes. “You okay?”
She puts on a brave smile—the one she likes to pretend I can’t see through like Windexed glass. “Yeah, I’m good. Thanks for coming with me. Taking this trip by myself would have sucked.”
I smile, relieved that she isn’t saying anything about me slipping up last night. “Back to the place where it all began. I just wish it was under better circumstances.”
“Me too. Poor Nana.”
I reach for her hand. She intertwines her fingers with mine. The simple touch is enough to turn my cock to iron in my sex-starved state. Luckily, I already tucked him away in case he decided to come out to play on the trip.
“She’ll be okay,” I say, hoping it’s true. “That woman is a spitfire. A little thing like a broken hip won’t keep her down for long.”
Madison nods, the same forced smile on her face. I guess I can’t expect her to be Miss Optimist right now. I unthread my fingers from hers and wrap my arm around her shoulders, pulling her close to my chest to kiss her temple. Madison leans against me. I swallow down the feelings rising up inside my chest like a bad case of heartburn.
Sometimes, I can’t seem to pull her close enough.
“So . . . ” Madison’s voice lilts with humor. “You love me, huh?”
Goddamnit.
I clear my throat and pull away abruptly. “Yeah, not really sure where that came from.”
Madison giggles, her eyes sparkling with mirth. “It was funny. I knew you were probably just trying to comfort me.”
I let out a tight chuckle. “Yeah, that’s all it was. It is true, though.”
She smiles in a way that makes my stomach turn somersaults. “Same to you.” She gives me a little playful shove before sliding on her Beats headphones and closing her eyes, snuggling up against her travel pillow. She wraps both of her arms around mine and holds me like a lifeline. I look at her for a second, then shake my head and reach for my own headphones.
Why does it feel like something deeper just happened there?
When the sun is just beginning to dip toward the horizon, we finally arrive at the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport. Logan and I head down to baggage claim, where my aunt Melissa is waiting for us. Her dark eyes smile at me as she fans her aqua blue hair to the side.
“Madison Abigail, it’s about time you came home.” She pulls me into a suffocatingly tight hug and grunts. “Girl, have you lost weight?”
“A little bit.”
Melissa clicks her tongue and pulls back from the embrace, shaking her head. “We’ve gotta get you some fried chicken and fixin’s, STAT.”
“Hell yeah,” Logan pipes up. “Am I invited?”
Melissa nods and pulls him into an equally python-like squeeze. “Tomorrow night. Bring your mama. We have enough for everyone.”
Logan grins his assent. Melissa takes the handle of my rolling duffel bag and makes a beeline for the door. Logan and I follow in swift pursuit.
“Damn, she must be hungry,” Logan mutters. This is Melissa at her finest, the one who takes charge in every possible situation. She owns a tattoo parlor in downtown Miami, which is so successful that she only has to go in once a week to work with clients. She spends the rest of her time volunteering at an animal shelter. I’m pretty sure she runs that operation too.
We pile into Melissa’s pewter gray sedan and head off into the sunset toward the east side of the city. I sit in the passenger’s seat, and Logan sits in the back.
Melissa and Logan chat about her job and the latest drama in her life while I tune them out and watch the sunset. I’m glad Logan wears the extrovert hat in this friendship. He can have all the small talk and catching-up time he wants while I sit in silence and watch peach and golden hues paint over the blue sky.
Yet another way in which he completes me . . .
Fucking hell. I wish I’d never hit my head.
My gaze sweeps across my old room. A twin-sized bed with a white headboard perches atop a circular area rug. On the left side of the room sits a cluttered desk with a mounted picture board above it. To my right is a practice area with an amp, a guitar stand, and a mic.
So many memories . . .
Melissa shuffles into the room and sets my purple duffel bag down on the floor. She sighs, placing her hands on her hips. “I’m starving. Pizza?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.” I flash Melissa a smile as she heads back downstairs to call in our order. I close the door behind her and sag against it, letting the revelations of the past few weeks hit me full force.
This crush on Logan is eating away at me. I don’t know if coming home is going to make it better or worse. Nowhere I’ve been and nothing I’ve done so far has stopped it. I’m running out of ideas, and it’s scaring the shit out of me.
I walk over to the desk to look at the picture board. Photos of me with my friends, spanning various time periods through middle and high school, are pinned up with tacks. They cover the entire board and bleed off to the side.
I run my fingers over a photo of myself and Logan when we were young. It’s a shot of us in Nana and Papa’s above-ground pool together. He made bunny ears with his fingers behind my head without me noticing. Our eyes looked so innocent and carefree. I miss those days: no complications, no drama, just a boy and a girl with dreams of stardom who had more in common than they realized.
Looking at those two silly kids, I wonder: are they right for each other?
Apparently, Jay and Ana think so. I wonder how many people over the years thought he and I were an item. Kids used to tease us about it in middle school, but we ignored them. We needed this friendship. Next to Nana and Mrs. Young, we were all each other had.
Now I wish I had claimed him when I had the chance. When he said he loved me last night, I could barely breathe. It was like everything in my life finally made sense. I brushed it off in front of him, of course. He didn’t mean it the way I wanted him to, and he never will.
I sag against the desk. It’s no use denying these feelings anymore. They’re real, and for all I know, they’ve been bubbling under the surface this entire time. I was probably too afraid to confront them, and then when I forgot who he was, I didn’t have the buffer of my fear to stop me from realizing it.
Now what?
Melissa and I bring our plates of pizza into Nana’s room, where she’s sitting pretty against six pillows on the wall. The room’s decor hasn’t changed since Nana and Papa bought this house in the 70’s. The walls are olive green, contrasting sharply with the emerald carpeting. Doilies and family photos litter the walls. Sheer, flimsy curtains cover old, broken plastic blinds. The smell in the room reminds me of old suede shoes doused in Estee Lauder perfume. It’s almost like a culture shock coming back here from the modern pulse of Los Angeles.
I settle on the bed next to Nana’s good hip and stuff my face with pizza. The delicious, greasy gift from the gods warms my spirit as well as my body on the way down. I wash it down with a long swig of Mountain Dew.
“Madison Abigail, we’re not having an eating contest. Slow down,” Nana croaks. Her hand trembles slightly as she lifts a piece of plain cheese pizza to her mouth.
“She’s just trying to hurry so she can go next door and see her boyfriend.” Melissa grins.
My cheeks warm without my permission. “Dammit, Melissa, you know we’re just friends. That joke was old fifteen years ago.”
“Your dad and Cass were ‘just friends’ too, until they ‘just fell into bed’ with each other.”
Melissa wiggles her eyebrows at me. Nana slaps her on the arm.
“Mind your tongue, Melissa. Honestly, what am I going to do with you two?”
Melissa shrugs. “Just stating the facts, Mama.”
I stare at a divot in the carpet where I dropped a piece of gum when I was eight. Melissa’s right: Dad and Cass have been best friends since college. They’ve been in a band together for over thirty years. When Dad married my mom and had me, Cass was standing by the entire time. They loved each other unconditionally, but only as friends, for so long. After they had one drunken night together, it all changed.
At first, they continued to date other people, but they fought nonstop. It was like they had reverted to high school behavior: dating someone else to make the other one jealous. One night, I was kept up until the crack of dawn because they were arguing in the room next to me. I heard her burst into tears and thought things had gotten physical, so I ran next door, and there was my dad, down on one knee, proposing to my “aunt” Cass. She was ugly crying, not because of the fight, but because after all those years, her best friend wanted to marry her.
It was strange having her as a stepmother after calling her “aunt” for so long. Eventually, we dropped the prefix, decided I should just call her “Cass,” and lived happily ever after.
Cass is a wonderful stepmother and a wonderful wife to my dad. I couldn’t love her more if I tried. Still, I have to admit that being compared to the two of them makes me sick to my stomach. Is that the kind of drama I’m in for if I pursue this thing with Logan? Are we going to break and mend and break and mend each other’s hearts over and over again? There’s also a chance our ending won’t be as happy as Dad’s . . .
My appetite suddenly disappears.
Every time I come back to this house, it’s like walking through a portal to a different time. Nothing has changed since I was a boy. The faux granite countertops in the kitchen are still littered with Mom’s knick-knacks. The refrigerator still swings a little too wide when you open it. The place still smells like sesame oil and chili peppers, a sweet yet spicy aroma.
It’s good to be home.
I set my overnight bag down on the kitchen table and begin to hunt for my mother, starting with the living room. “Mom?”
Faintly, I hear a response from her. It seems to come from upstairs. I cross the living room to the carpeted staircase and take the stairs two at a time. Something akin to fear coils my gut.
When I open my mom’s bedroom door, I’m saddened to find her lying in bed with the comforter tucked closely around her ears. Mom has struggled with clinical depression ever since my father went to jail all those years ago. Some days are better than others. She’s on medication for it, but sometimes when things get too overwhelming, or when something upsets her, she’ll spend entire days in bed, only getting up to go to the bathroom. Sometimes, she’ll even stop taking her meds. When that happens, she’ll just waste away in bed until something clicks inside her or she starts having withdrawals.
Her tendency toward depression started when she was young. Being half Korean and half Caucasian wasn’t easy for a little girl in the 60’s and 70’s. My grandparents let her use the Americanized spelling of her Korean name, Soo, but even that couldn't stop people from seeing the obvious—that she was different from them. She was bullied her whole life until she met my father. He would never let anyone say a damn word that was negative toward her. She was drawn to him, not only because his last name was “Young,” a name reminiscent of the Korean half of her heritage, but also because he was one of the few people who ever stood in her corner. Then the bastard went and shattered her fragile heart. Since Halmeoni, my grandmother, had died just a couple of years before, I was all she had left.
I sink down into the mattress beside her and brush her gray-streaked brown hair away from her face. Her dark eyes are reddened and swollen from crying. My inner mama’s boy goes into a rage. Whoever hurt my mother is about to pay tenfold.
“What’s wrong, Ma?”
Mom sniffs and grasps my hand, squeezing it tightly. She paints on a smile. “Hey, sweetie. How was your flight?”
“Fine. Don’t change the subject. Why are you glued to your bed again? Are you missing work?”
Mom groans, releasing my hand. “One question at a time, hon.” She sighs and squeezes her eyes shut. “Today would have been our thirty-year anniversary.”
I swallow hard. “Wow. Thirty years is a long time to be married.”
Mom nods and sniffles. I hand her a tissue from the nightstand. Mom rises up to a sitting position against the headboard and takes it.
“Thank you, son.” She blows her nose loudly and tosses the tissue in the trash. She lets out a deep breath. “It’s been so long. I can’t believe, after all this time, I’m still not over it.”
I move to sit next to her and pull her into my arms. My face hardens as my mother’s tears wet my shoulder. For over half of my life, I’ve had to be my mother’s strength. I’ve had to pick up the slack when she couldn’t. As soon as I could, I started working, and all my money had to go to support us instead of buying myself a car or an Xbox. My friends all had those things, but I didn’t. I had to watch everyone else enjoy their high school years while I made sacrifice after sacrifice for someone else’s sins.
Hence why Celeste threatening to break my shit pisses me off so much. She hasn’t worked a day in her life. There’s no way she could possibly understand what a slap in the face that was. And that wasn’t the first time she’s done it, either.
My shit is my shit. She’s lucky her daddy owns the record label; otherwise, she would have been out on her ass immediately after threatening my Xbox.
When I moved to L.A., Mom busted her ass to finish her degree and got a better job. She’s been such a trouper since I left, and now it almost seems like she’s back to square one.
Were all those years of struggle and sacrifice for nothing?
The sound of crickets chirping wafts in through the open windows. Mosquitoes land on the screen, trying to chew their way in. I cross the room to hang the last of my clothes in the closet and turn around, startled to see Mom coming into the room with a stack of linens.
“You’re up.”
Mom nods and sets the linens down on the bed. “My boy is in town. I wanna make the most of it.” She looks up into my eyes and cups my jaw, turning misty-eyed. “I’ve missed you, sweetheart.”
A corner of my lip quirks up. “I’ve missed you too, Ma.”
“You still with Celeste?”
“Yes.” She drops her hand. “Don’t groan like that.”
“Sorry, sweetie. You know I support you.” She doesn’t even try to disguise the fact that her smile is fake this time.
I chuckle. It’s no secret that my mom can’t stand Celeste. She wanted me to settle down with some nice girl from Greenville instead of a Californian. Can’t imagine why.
“Be nice.”
“I will.” Mom sighs and detaches herself from me. “I’m gonna go make dinner—”
Her sentence is interrupted by the doorbell. “I’ll get it,” I say.
I lumber down the stairs and take a look through the peephole. Grinning, I yell up to Mom to hold that thought.
I open the door for Madison, who smiles and holds up a pizza box. “Hungry?” With the porch light behind her and the lilt in her voice, she reminds me of a dark angel.
“Starved.” I take the pizza box from her and open it, unceremoniously grabbing a piece of salami and Italian sausage pizza and stuffing it into my mouth.
