Off Her Rockers (Loving All Wrong #3.5) (16 page)

My chest
.

Eyes hooded, smile lazy but cocky, his hair, uncontained, spilled around his face and shoulders, and he had an actual goatee. He looked reckless, careless, as if he couldn’t give a shit about anything. I’d never seen him like that before.

The cover read:
L.A.’s Bad Boy Rocker is Back!

To the left of the blonde’s head was a circle frame with a picture of me in it. No idea when that photo of me was taken, but my facial expression was of utter disgust, worse than a sneer. A caption bubble was drawn from my mouth with the words, “
That’s what he replaced me with? Ew.
”

Despite myself, I giggled. Whoever published that had to be a fan of mine. After contemplating for a good five minutes on going inside to purchase the magazine and read the article, I decided against it and walked on.

I didn’t want to know what the article said. Xavier had obviously relapsed and that’s all that was bugging me. It troubled me more than I imagined it would. I loved him. I cared about him. Enough to be damn near devastated by this fact.

I mean, how could Jessica let this happen? Knowing she was a freak of the utmost that got pleasure from including other women in her relationships, I didn’t have to wonder why Xavier was with another woman on the cover. More than likely, the blonde was a sex-related friend of hers and they all had a jolly threesome that night.

On the rest of the walk home, Xavier was all I thought about. I couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling in my stomach, the need to reach out.

If I had my shit together, I would. Reach out, that is. Talk to him. Shake him. Slap him and ask him what the hell he was thinking. How could he do that to himself? How could he relapse?

Unfortunately, I
didn’t
have my shit together. I, myself, needed someone to shake me, slap me. I had issues I needed to deal with. Issues within. So before I could attempt to fix someone else, I first had to fix myself.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

“
I
’M SO
BORED
,”
X
ENA WHINED ON
the other end of the line. “Gosh, my life is so lonely and pathetic.”

With my phone on speaker and propped on a pillow, I chatted with Xena while painting my toenails.

Xena sang the same song every night; always whining about being bored and pathetic. Aside from Jess and me, she didn’t have many friends, and it was radio silence on her and Tex’s relationship.

Her life surrounded the band, so when she didn’t have work to do or the boys weren’t around for her to annoy, she was pretty much left to her own company.

Normally we would do stuff, like go out to eat, go shopping, or driving, but we hadn’t
seen
each other since my break-up with Xavier, and our relationship had somehow limited itself to phone chats.

“Then go bang on Jess’s door,” I muttered absently as I used the side of my thumb to clean a smudge of nail polish from my skin. “Or is she too busy hosting orgies with—” I caught myself in time, swallowing his name like a fat, bitter anti-depressant tablet. Of late, it had become some kind of unspoken rule between me and Xena to keep his name silent like the P in pfhucker during our chats.

Of course, I’d been extremely tempted to fire questions about him ever since I saw him on the front cover of that magazine a few weeks ago, but I always managed—just barely—not to.

He’d made the news a number of times since then, each update worse than the last. Either he was working to get me to notice him—
Look at me, Chino! I don’t need you. I’m on top of the world. Good riddance, bitch!
—or he was on a mission to self-destruction, because each time he made the news it was a different girl, a different fight, or a different charge.

“Los Angeles’ Bad Boy” was back indeed.

Despite all the noise surrounding her brother these days, we had conversation after conversation like normal, as though her
brother
wasn’t my
ex
.

Xena was quiet on the other end for such a long time that I had to prompt a “Xena?” to check if she was still there.

Almost a minute of silence passed, but then she chirped, “Let’s go clubbing!”

I groaned. Just
hearing
the word clubbing made me nauseous. Last time I went clubbing, I woke up the next morning with Davian in my apartment and my first taste of a hangover—which, let me say, has to be
the
most awful feeling the world. “I don’t think I wanna step foot in another club anytime soon.”

“Come onnnn, Alina,” she begged, “Please. I’m bored shitless.”

Closing the nail-polish bottle, I focused on our conversation. “Why do you want to go out with me all of a sudden? You’ve avoided being around me since I ended things with your brother. What’s changed?”

“Because…” Pausing, she sighed. “Because I think I love you, Alina. You’re the closest I’ve ever been to anyone that’s not blood, and I’m tired of putting everyone’s well-being above my own. I want to be like you and not stop to think about anyone’s feelings. I want to be selfish
just for once
. Because being selfless for the people I care about has done nothing so far but make me freaking miserable.”

This gutted me. That she felt this way. That she felt it was better to be selfish than selfless. Why on earth would she want to use me and my screwed up personality as a model to follow?

Was it safe to tell her I was, somewhat, not the girl I was a few months—heck a few
weeks
ago?

Chewing my bottom lip, I thought back on my session three days ago…

“How much do you value your friendship with his sister, Xena?”

“Not much. I’m kinda hesitant, you know. Like I told you before, the last best friend I had—also the sister of an ex—let me down in a time when I was depending on her the most.”

“Have you spoken to that friend since then?”

“No.”

“Have you ever had any inclination to speak to her?”

“No.”

“So, you refuse to have anything at all to do with this friend because she lied to you only to protect her family—which I assume was hard for her to do—yet you continuously fight and make up with this Xena person, who threatens you, pushes all your buttons and just doesn’t seem like a nice person in general?”

“She’s nice,” I quickly defended.

“Not based on all you told me, she isn’t.”

“That’s because you don’t understand her. You have to
understand
her first. And then you will
know
her.”

“Do you believe you understand her?”

“I do.”

“And you believe she understands you?”

“She does… Our friendship is just a little, ah, unorthodox.”

“I am going to repeat my first question, and this time, I want you to think before you answer.”

“Okay.”

“How much do you value your friendship with Xena Xander?”

“I love her.”

“How hard was that for you to admit, Miss O’Hara?”

“Hard….Very hard.”

Yep. It took me a number of sessions to realize
and
admit how much I valued our weird, complicated friendship.

“I wish I could say I know what you mean,” I replied finally, opting to be the Alina she knew, not the Alina I was becoming, “but I have
no
idea what being selfish entails.”

Xena cackled, because, of course, that was something Alina the bitch would say. “So? Are we clubbing?”

“Not without Danni.”

Seeing as Xena was the one with social contacts and links abound, a welcome side effect of being PR, we left it up to her to choose the party spot of the night.

Thus, it took Danni and me a helluva long time to locate this never-heard-of club. Once we did, though, we understood why it was so top-secret.

Exclusive, top-shot, celebrity hot-spot—some of the impressions we got once inside. Xena was already there with a VIP booth booked, and she all but pounced on me when she saw me, her arms squeezing the life out of me.

“Oh my God, I missed you
so
much, it’s not even funny!”

Stepping back, she held me at arms-length, frowning.

“What?”

“You look…different,” she said. “Fresh. New. Happy.”

With a small smile, I shrugged.

She studied me further, and I didn’t miss the sad dent in her excited expression. She asked, “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Happy.”

Ha. Happy? Haha. I’m miserable. Mis-ser-able!
Smile wide and fake as acrylic nails, I replied, “Don’t I look it?”

Danni, who knew well and good I was lying off my ass, stepped in before Xena could push further. “Did we come here to get high off our tight little butts, or hug and giggle like sorority sisters?”

Gaze shifting over my shoulder to Danni, Xena grinned and shoved me aside. She leaped full body at him, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. “Oh, my
hot
,
sexy
gay lover! Kiss me! Squeeze my tits.”

Danni stumbled back a little from her attack, and we both laughed. I’d never seen her like that before, so free and playful.

“Whoa there,” laughed Danni. “What’s gotten into you? You just got out of jail or something?”

“Something like that,” she said. “Yeah.”

“Well, in that case, let’s get this party crackalacking!”

That we did. We drank, danced, and had fun like we never had before. Though I stopped drinking after two glasses of champagne, dreading another hangover in the morning, but Xena kept going, and Danni even popped an ecstasy pill.

Despite the club being packed with celebrities of every kind, I hadn’t been searching for any familiar faces, so I was a little surprised when Dustin Latimore, one of Lion T’mar’s signed artists, popped up in our section, smile glowing white under the psychedelic light.

His long, lean body curled over the metal bars of our VIP booth, resting the full length of his torso along the top edge of the seat I was ensconced in. “I thought that was you!” he yelled over the music. “In a dark club packed with hot babes, I made you out from yards away. You’re something special, Alina.”

Twisting and craning my neck to look up at him, I made a face, fighting back a smile. “You. You don’t give up, do you?”

“Give up? Last time we spoke, you told me to get permission. So, I got permission.”

“And what did Lion say?”

Dustin’s grin was miles wide. “He said ‘
go for it
’?”

My eyebrows rose to the ceiling. “
Lion
said that?”

“I might not sell Diamonds or bring in Grammies like Saskia Day, but I still sell platinum’s. ‘Course he respects me.”

I was stilling gaping at him, unable to believe he actually did that. No one went into Lion’s Den with bullshit like permission to date a girl. My intention was to scare him off when I posed that challenge a few months back at a basketball event at Ninety Miles Villa Gymnasium. I didn’t think he would actually do it.

And Lion telling this tool to “go for it”? Must be his way of getting back at me for buying out of his contract.

“So…” Dustin dragged, amused by shock. “Now that I’ve held up my end of the bargain, you need to hold up yours.”

“W-what?”
What end of what bargain?

“Dance with me.”