The Purest Hook (Second Circle Tattoos) (21 page)

“Petal has been placed in foster care. Amanda died today.”

“Let’s hustle. Sam, can you get a jet? We’ll need to go back to the house to get your passport,” Elliott said.

He heard Sam talking to someone, hopefully getting him on the next available plane, while the security team hustled them through the rear entrance of the Staples Centre.

“What the fuck,” Lennon said, once they were all in the limo and on their way to the Hollywood Hills. “What happened?” he asked, frantically. “Is Petal okay?”

Dread swallowed hard and nodded, trying to bank the overwhelming feelings from his childhood of being left alone. He reached for his phone and dialed Petal’s social worker.

He promised his baby girl that he would always be there for her, yet at forty-one days old she was going to spend her first night in emergency foster care.

And it sickened him to the very core that the pattern of his life was already repeating for her.

* * *

“It’s quiet today,” Trent said stripping the protective plastic wrapped around his tattoo equipment. He’d just finished up a neck tattoo for a regular client.

It was only three in the afternoon, but the studio was unusually empty. Eric was processing the credit card of a young woman visiting from Phoenix who’d wanted a spiritual saying tattooed on the inside of her forearm, and he’d done a kick-ass job with the calligraphy.

“Yeah,” Pixie acknowledged, heading to Eric’s station to clean it for him. “Although it’s a bit like the calm before the storm of the weekend.”

“Do you want to practice some more, Pix? We could work on lettering. You were starting to get the hang of it.”

The front door swung open and Cujo ambled in for his shift. “Hey, guys. Are we closed or what?” He looked around the studio at all the empty stations.

Eric’s client said good-bye and left.

“Was about to give Pix another lesson on lettering, unless you want to do it so I can head out early. Gotta get the painting I’m doing for Harper’s anniversary present finished then head to the airport for filming tomorrow.”

“Anniversary of what?” Cujo asked.

Trent laughed. “Of the day I kissed her on a pavement outside a pool hall.”

“Yeah, well, on our anniversary, Drea’ll get
me
as a gift, and that’s enough. Harper needs one of your paintings as consolation for ending up with you.”

“Asshole.” Trent shook his head.

Pixie watched as Trent and Cujo disappeared into the office. Thinking about how happy the two of them were hurt, but not as much as watching the New Music Press Awards on Sunday had, curled up on the sofa with her favorite ice cream. A pain akin to needles being driven into her eyes had tortured her as she watched Dred step out of his limo and walk the red carpet into the Staples Centre. But seeing him onstage with his mask firmly in place sucked the very life out of her. Beneath the frozen smile were flat eyes. To the average observer, the confusion of who was meant to speak could be attributed to the excitement of the moment. But Pixie knew different. The subtext between the band was there. Dred was off his game, and everyone else was covering.

It was nine days since she’d seen him. And each one of those nine days hurt. There was no lessening over time. Every morning she woke up thinking about what she’d lost, and it hurt all over again. She battled with the same questions. Would telling Dred the whole truth, with the risk of losing him anyway, be worse than the way she felt right now? She doubted it.

Pixie picked up her phone, tempted to break the silence between them. If she took the first step, made the first move toward reconciliation, what would he do? Ignore her, maybe?

But first she needed closure with Arnie, and so it all came full circle. He still had her trapped, he still had a measure of control over her life. And she hated it. He hadn’t been around since the incident and she was on tenterhooks, waiting to see if he would follow through on his threats to expose her. A naïve part of her wanted to believe Dred had scared Arnie away. Lord knew he’d been furious when he hit Arnie, but it was impossible to believe that her stepfather would walk away from an opportunity to extort serious money.

Trent and Cujo returned from the office. “You ready for your next lesson?” Cujo asked.

She’d circled around Trent and Cujo for days, dodging Cujo’s suggestion of going to see a lawyer because admitting to someone else that she killed a person was a step she wasn’t ready for.

There was one lie she could stop perpetuating though, and to ease her conscience she made a decision to solve it right now. “Can I talk to you guys for a minute?”

“Sure, Pix,” Trent said, slinging his jacket over the desk. “What’s up?”

Pixie took a deep breath. “I don’t want to be a tattoo artist. I’m sorry. I really don’t want to hurt your feelings after you’ve all tried so hard, but I don’t think—”

“We figured,” Cujo said, resting both hands on the counter. “We’d even said we’d talk to you about it after all this other stuff was over.”

“You did?” Pixie’s eyes pricked with tears born of relief.

“Yeah,” Trent said. “Your heart needs to be in tattooing. And yours isn’t.”

“But you guys wanted me to do it, and I didn’t want to let you down. I was useless at it.”

“Is that what you thought?” Cujo asked. “Because there was never any expectation on our part that you’d want to. We offered to teach you if you wanted to learn, and you said you did.”

“I wanted to be great at it,” she said with a sad shake of her head. “Like you guys are.”

“Listen,” Trent said, reaching across the counter to take her hand. “We’ll be here for you. No matter what you want to do with the rest of your life, or what you did before you came here, we aren’t going anywhere. Who you are right now is perfect, Pix. Don’t try to be something you’re not for us, or for any other asshole.”

“He’s not an asshole,” she said, knowing exactly whom Trent was referring to.

“He is, and I’m gonna tell him when I see him tomorrow.”

“Please don’t say—”

“He’s an asshole,” Cujo grumbled. “He needs to hear it.”

“There are days,” she said with a half smile, “when I wish you guys weren’t quite so brotherly.”

“Yeah, well. Tough luck on that one,” Trent said, pulling her into his arms for a hug.

But today his arms weren’t enough.

And that made her heart bleed a little more.

* * *

Dred yawned sleepily in the make-up chair. The triple-espresso shot in his coffee was not having the desired effect. He could do without a day of filming, because he really wasn’t in the mood to make nice with contestants or face Trent. It wasn’t that he was scared of having the conversation with him—it was a given it was going to happen, so there was no point dodging it. What scared him more was that Trent was going to be right about him. That he was a fuck-up. Because that was the conclusion Dred had come to in the small hours of the morning. And he needed to make things right with Pixie, or at least listen to her and figure out if he could deal with what she had to say.

The make-up lady, obviously sensing his lethargy, didn’t make her usual inane small talk as she applied crap to his face. He reached for his coffee and took another large gulp.

In the four days since the award show, his world had been knocked off its axis. A perfect little seven-week-old baby now lived in his house. There was no way he was ever going to be able to repay Maisey and Ellen for all their help. Maisey had guided him through the process of dealing with social services, and seeing as there was no one to legally contest his right to keep her with him, it had all gone smoothly. When he’d finally held his daughter in his arms, he cried unashamedly. And right there he’d made her a promise. He’d be there for her for the rest of her life. There was nothing or no one who could convince him to give her up, or give up on her. Ever. All thoughts of her being better off with someone else were long gone, already replaced with four days’ worth of memories. Of Nikan being puked on. Of Jordan helping him get Petal out of the onesie she’d crapped all over volcano-style. Who knew her little body was capable of storing that much shit?

One afternoon, after a very cranky morning, he’d sat with Petal cradled against his naked chest. He’d read somewhere—likely in one of the thousand books on caring for babies that Lennon had bought—that skin-on-skin time was a good thing. He feared for his life if the diaper didn’t hold because her poops were toxic, but she slept soundly and her rhythmic breathing soothed him.

It was two days until Amanda’s cremation. He’d paid for it, since no one had come forward to claim her. Even her lawyer was unable to provide any further next-of-kin information. The autopsy had proven drug overdose, but both her roommates at the house,
and
her sponsor, were adamant it was accidental. They all agreed that having a baby had changed her. Dred had no clue what the truth was, but his heart hurt for the loss of his child’s mother, and he’d said silent words of thanks to her for giving him their baby girl.

Dred shook his head and drank more coffee. Petal was safely at his house with a nanny friend of Ellen’s. The guys were going to look after her overnight while he was away. He’d served notice on the Bay Street CFO in his Rosedale home. By the time the European tour was over toward the end of the year, he wanted to be able to move in, and when he got back to Toronto, he was meeting with some designers and contractors to hopefully make that happen. Jordan could move in with him or stay with the rest of the band, but Petal needed a stable, loving home that didn’t have half-dressed women parading through it.

Which was why he needed to talk with Sam. They were behind with their recording because he’d barely had time to breathe. Petal needed a passport to travel with him and it had physically burned to leave her in the nanny’s arms. He’d nearly had the limo driver turn back when he hit the 427 for the airport. And the tour was going to need to accommodate her. They’d need two buses to be fair to the other guys. Having a baby along wasn’t going to work if they didn’t plan for it properly. And they’d need a nanny, possibly even two, given the whacked-out hours they worked on tour.
Holy fucking shit.
His head pounded like it was going to explode.

Trent walked in and sat down in the chair next to him. The temperature dropped a solid twenty degrees, as the usually good-natured and easygoing friend he knew greeted all the show staff but didn’t so much as look his way.

Filming was going to be a fucking disaster, but he wasn’t sure it was possible to make it right even if he tried.

“Hey,” Dred said, uncertain where to begin. The makeup lady walked toward Trent.

“Go fuck yourself,” Trent replied curtly, and the makeup lady hurried away to the other side of the trailer.

Great start.
“Look, I know you’re pissed. But can you at least let me explain?”

Trent stared at his own reflection in the mirror, but his lips were in a tight, angry line. “Did you let Pixie?” he said after a couple of moments. “Explain, I mean. Did you sit down next to her on that step we found her crying her heart out on and hear
her
out?”

Touché.
“You know I didn’t.”

“Yeah. So fuck you and your explanations.”

“Did I ever tell you my mom died of a drug overdose?” Dred felt sick to his stomach, but he needed to shock his friend into talking to him. He needed to find a path out of this. A path that would lead him back to his friends, his daughter, and Pixie. He was done wearing the son-of-a-junkie tag once and for all. He needed to be a different man—for all of them, but even more importantly, for himself.

Trent turned in his chair to look at him, his expression neutral.

“Yeah. I mean I’d seen her knocked out for days with drugs before. Even seen her hospitalized. The first time she OD’d, I was apparently four. There was one time when I was seven when I was taken into care because the teacher at school noticed I’d been wearing the same shirt for four days. When they visited the house of the person we were staying with, they found my mom high, banging some john. So when she OD’d the last time, I didn’t understand how serious it was. Overdosing was just something that happened.”

He’d held her in his arms, like he always did. It was the only time he could hug her close like he wanted to, without her pushing him away. “I didn’t realize that her mouth being wide open was a state called primary flaccidity. There was usually a sickly gray color to her skin. How was I supposed to know that
this
time it was pallor mortis? I didn’t even know what the fuck that was at twelve.”

The realization hit him hard. There was nothing he could have done to stop it. How could a four-, or a seven-, or a nine-year-old child stop a parent’s addiction? “It was well before everyone had cell phones, not that we could have afforded one. I ran outside and screamed for help, and once I was sure someone was calling an ambulance, I ran back into the house we were crashing at and held my mom as she turned cold.”

Chilled by the recollections, Dred stopped and took a long draw on the coffee. Baring his soul needed more than caffeine, but it was all he had.

“I’m sorry, Dred. That you went through all that.”

Dred nodded and ran his thumbnail down the stitching along the inseam of his jeans. He needed to bring his sorry-ass story home. “When that guy said Pixie was a junkie . . . I couldn’t deal, man. I spent years watching my mom fall deeper and deeper. And to bring this pathetic fucking melodrama to a close, I now have full custody of Petal because Amanda, her mom, was an addict who . . .”

Dred rubbed his hands across his face. He couldn’t bring himself to say the words. “Anyway, I got shit I need to deal with too. And it got in the way of me being there for Pixie. How is she?” He looked at Trent, and for the first time since he’d entered the room, Trent didn’t look like he wanted to kill him.

“She’s a tough cookie, but this week has been rough on her.”

“Has he been around? Do you know the full story?”

Trent shook his head. “No. He hasn’t been around. And no, I don’t know the full story, but over the years, Cujo and I have pieced bits of it together. When we found her, she was in withdrawal. I hate to admit it, but I even looked her up on the internet. I wasn’t quite as trusting of women back then,” he said with an embarrassed smile.