A Rocker's Melody (Dust and Bones) (27 page)

“Then tell me where you are,” she begged desperately. “Let me come get you and bring you back to the loft. You don’t even have to talk to me or look at me. I just need to know youre safe.”

“I’m weak,” he whispered. “If I see you, I’ll be selfish. I won’t be able to let you go.”

“I don’t want you to,” she cried. “I want to make things better for you.”
I love you
. She almost said it, but she didn’t think it would matter to him right now. Besides, she wanted him sober (and preferably in front of her) when she finally told him. “Please, baby, let me help you.”

“I want you to have an amazing life,” he said quietly. “I want you to be happy.”

“You make me happy,” she whispered, tears rolling down her face.

“This isn’t happy, sweetheart,” he told her.

“Tell me where you are,” she demanded again, ignoring his implication. She was getting very tired of arguing with a maudlin drunk.

“No. It’s better this way,” he said. “I have to do this now because I won’t be able to do it later. Because you made me want more, Mel. You made me believe I could have it. I almost hate you for it, but I cant.”

She was sobbing now, her breath hitching and unsteady as the dawning realization of his resolve grew. “Dylan, please.”

“Forget you ever heard my name,” he said. “I’ll never forget yours.”

He hung up. Melody tried to call him back, but the line went straight to a message, which informed her that the cellular customer had not yet set up their voicemail box.

She battled a desire to sink into a ball of despair on the floor.
Get it together, Hopkins. Stop sniveling. That isn’t going to accomplish anything.
She gathered her wits, along with the last tattered pieces of her sanity, and forbid her tear ducts to shed another tear until she had seen with her own eyes that Dylan was safe and sound. She copied the number he’d called her from and forwarded it to Jesper, along with a brief message:
Do you know whose number this is?

She impatiently waited for a response. When it came, she almost wished it hadn’t.

That’s Snake’s cell phone. What the hell’s going on, Mel?

The only good thing about losing the best thing that had ever happened to you was that things couldn’t get much worse.

Had it really only been twenty-four hours since his world had come crumbling down around Dylan? It felt like so much longer. Would the rest of his life be like this? Would he just be counting down the seconds until he was put out of his misery? All these years, he’d been watching what he ate in order to stay healthy; now he wished he had eaten all that junk food, gotten diabetes, grown obese, done
some
thing else that would further shorten the remainder of his time on this godforsaken planet.

He had been forced to surrender his bottle of Scotch when he had boarded the plane. The TSA didn’t make concessions about their liquid requirements, not even for pouting rock stars. They had already given him a pass, allowing him to fly when he was clearly inebriated.

While he had waited for takeoff, he’d immersed himself in playing absently with his phone, just to have something to do with his hands before he could close them around the neck of another bottle of alcohol. As he had looked at the phone, he had suddenly realized what day it was. He’d dialed a number he hadn’t used in over a month.

Snake had answered on the first ring. “About goddamn time one of you assholes picked up the phone,” he’d said by way of greeting.

“Rip said you were spending your first week out with your folks,” Dylan had slurred.

“Ha. Like anyone really believed that would last,” Snake had scoffed. “My dad and I got into a fistfight on my second night there. I’m back home now. What’s going on with you?”

Dylan had known, even then, that in his current state, he shouldn’t be around Snake. The two of them just encouraged each others’ bad behavior. But he had briefly explained what had happened and he had asked to come visit anyway. And of course, Snake had willingly agreed.

When Dylan’s plane landed, he exited the airport quickly and had found his ride—Snake had arranged for a car to be waiting for him to pick him up. He had faded in and out of consciousness as the car wound its way through Los Angeles, eventually arriving at a rented house in Topanga Canyon. This had been Snake’s home for the past six months—if one could call it a home. It had clearly been designed to be nothing more than a party house, and there were very few personal belongings inside. The overall décor screamed ‘temporary.’

“Stay as long as you want,” Snake had said, after welcoming Dylan with a hard clap on the shoulder.

For a moment, Dylan had stared at one of the four men on the planet who had known him longer and better than even his own family. “I don’t know what to do,” he’d confessed.

“I do,” Snake had assured him, leading him to a leather couch. He’d produced a bottle of premium vodka from a paper grocery bag, and had tossed it onto a cushion beside Dylan. “That’ll cure whatever ails you.”

“Fuck. I thought you’re sober now,” Dylan had said. Snake had only laughed, and had proceeded to open a bottle of his own and take a large swig. He should have known better than to assume that rehab would work on Snake McCreedy.

They’d been drinking ever since, downing vodka as if it was water. Snake had been a little too quiet for a while, messing around with something in the kitchen. Just as Dylan was thinking about getting up and seeing what he was doing, he reappeared suddenly, humming a merry tune, bearing with him a silver tray upon which cocaine was spread out like fairy dust.

“No, thanks,” Dylan said. The last thing he needed was to be
more
awake.

“More for me,” Snake declared cheerfully.

“Hey, y’know, thanks for helping me out,” Dylan said. “I know I didn’t say it before, but thanks. And also thanks for covering for me.” He was pretty sure that Snake had lied to the guys when they called, asking if he knew Dylan’s whereabouts.

Snake shrugged. “Shit man, Rip’s been like a brother to me my whole life, but you were the first real friend I ever had. You’re the leader of the band. Jesper may do the management stuff and whatever, but you’re the...you’re like the guy, you know? The shit I’ve pulled, you could’ve kicked me out years ago.”

“I would never have done that,” Dylan said. “You’re our brother. You’re one of us.”

“Yeah, tell that to your little honey,” Snake snickered, cutting a neat line of the powdered drug and snorting it in one go.

“Don’t talk about her,” Dylan warned, real menace in his voice.

“Peace, dude,” Snake said, holding up his hand. “I’m not gonna be a dick about it. I’m out now, and everything can go back to normal. We don’t have to make a big deal out of it.”

Dylan’s gut clenched—yes, things would go back to the way they had been before the tour, wouldn’t they? Snake would resume his place as bassist for Dust and Bones, and Melody would be out of his life. Forever. God, it hurt just thinking about it. He wanted to stop remembering the last thing she had said to him, and the last thing he’d said to her. His chest tightened, like a vice was closing around him.

When he’d been a kid, he’d foreseen a dark—but manageable—future for himself: it was the life he would have happily lived, had he never met
her.
But Melody had come along, and she had taken a sledgehammer to the cold world he had built for himself. The girl with the bright green eyes, the missing melody to the songs he’d been struggling so long to write...he’d been happy with her, for a little while. Even after Emma—his mind still shied away from that pain, still so fresh and sharp—he had been at peace with Melody. The music had come to him again, not the kind born from angst and longing, but the kind that only stemmed from pure, perfect joy.

He’d never believed that he deserved her, but he had actually convinced himself he might be able to keep her. The joke was on him, of course; even if they’d ever had a chance, he’d certainly blown it by now. No matter what she claimed on the phone, not even Melody would be able to see past how broken Dylan was. That was the real disease inside of him: he didn’t think he would cheat on Melody or leave her the way Blue had left his family, but he
knew
he wasn’t good enough for her. He’d always be too weak, too lost, too emotionally damaged to make her happy.

“Dude.” Snake held up the silver tray. Half a line still remained. “You’ve gotta try this. Epic.”

“Not in the mood,” Dylan said. He hadn’t had too much alcohol tonight—in fact, he felt like he was sobering up. It seemed he was so caught up in wallowing in his misery that he couldn’t even conjure the energy to binge drink or do drugs anymore. Pathetic. “You should probably lay off, man. You just got out of rehab.”

“But I’m cuckoo for cocaine.” Snake laughed at his own terrible joke. “Don’t worry about it, I know my limits. And I wasn’t exactly sober in rehab.”

Dylan shook his head. “Of course you weren’t.”

Finishing off the last line, Snake collapsed on the couch beside him. “This is just like the good old days, huh? Remember the night we found out we got signed?”

“Not really,” Dylan admitted. “I remember...body glitter. And a girl with a tarantula?”

“Fuck. That was so hot,” Snake said.

“Mm,” Dylan said in a noncommittal tone. The huge, ugly spider had actually freaked him out, but he could understand why a guy who called himself ‘Snake’ would be into that sort of thing.

“God, I wish we could go back to that,” Snake continued. “Everything was new and exciting. We were young and wild, about to hit the most magical transformation of our musical lives.”

“I remember when Jesper didn’t believe that two years later we’d be playing in stadiums,” Dylan agreed.

“We were babies,” Snake said. “Fuckin’ wet behind the ears, desperate to get some easy action. Not that
that’s
changed,” he added with a dry chuckle.

Dylan tried to imagine it now: the debauchery, the girls, the random hookups with groupies who were all too willing. He felt ill at the prospect. That was all that remained for him.

Would this be his punishment for being so weak? He hadn’t stayed away from Melody, like he should have; now he would be doomed to want her for the rest of his life. No one else would ever be able to compare to her. She’d warned him that it would hurt, but he hadn’t been prepared for it to hurt
this
much. This was beyond pain. This was like his rib cage had been ripped open, and his heart, still feebly beating, had been left exposed and vulnerable to the world.

While it might make for a cool album cover graphic, it was a shitty way to live the rest of your life.

“What am I supposed to do for the rest of my life?” Dylan muttered, voicing his thoughts out loud.

Snake slapped him on the back. “Let’s start by worrying about the rest of your night,” he decided. “Fucking sweet, man, I think I just found some Vicodin in the couch cushions. That’ll keep you from whining like a thirteen-year-old girl on her period.”

Dylan eyed the pills for a moment, seriously considering it. They would certainly take the edge off his agony. Then he sighed and shook his head.

This was the reason he had known he shouldn’t call Snake—and it was also the reason he
had
called Snake. Because Snake was weak, too. All the others, even Rip, would have called Melody and asked her to take Dylan’s sorry ass off their hands. And if that had happened, he would have forgotten that he was doing this for her own good. Because he was weak. As weak as his father, just in a slightly different way.

Snake was the only one who was as lost as Dylan. That deep-seated pain was what they had initially bonded over. Jesper always worried that Snake got Dylan into trouble, but it was really a symbiotic relationship. They were a co-dependent pair of dumb fucks and this—sitting around with Snake, watching him do whatever drugs he could get his hands on—was going to be the rest of Dylan’s life.

The thought alone was enough to drive a man to drink.

**

The early evening sun beat down on them as they languished on the golden beach. Sunset was Melody’s favorite time of day. Her limbs felt heavy and warm, particularly with Dylan’s body pressed against the length of her back as he cradled her in the sand. His mouth touched her ear, his breath tickled her skin.

“Best Beatles era?”

“Easy,” she said, stretching against him like a cat. “
Help!
It’s got
Yesterday, Ticket to Ride,
and
I’ve Just Seen a Face.
It’s all hope and want and bright, sunny tomorrows.”

He started humming
You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
in her ear. “I don’t know. I like
Let it Be.
”

“That was their last album,” she said.

“There’s something magical about that. The end of something beautiful.”

“Okay, Donnie Darko,” she muttered.

He kissed her shoulder, deftly untying the bikini string around her neck. “You like me this way,” he teased confidently. “You like the darkness in me; you like that I drive you crazy by disagreeing with everything you say.”

“Clever boy,” she said approvingly.

They were on her favorite beach, the one she’d wanted to show him because it was hidden from all but a very select few. The Internet didn’t know about it yet, which made it her favorite spot in California. Waves lapped gently against the shore as the sun sank slowly into the water. Everything around them was at peace. A clean sea breeze swept up from the open water to caress them.

“What’s your favorite board game?” he asked, tracing her shoulder blade with his tongue.

“Mm. Clue.”

‘Would you like to make an accusation?” he growled, thrusting the evidence of his impressive arousal against her rear.

“
‘Mr. Bennett did it from behind with a lead pipe?’”
she joked. “No more silly questions.”

“I want to know more about you,” he said. “I want to know everything.”

“I’ll tell you anything,” she promised, shivering agreeably as his hands started wandering, driving her to the point of insensible distraction.

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Like I can think about colors when you’re doing that with your fingers,” she whispered.