Bare Skin (Skin Deep 5)

“We were in a band. A garage band kind of thing, you know, where we’d go out and gig but we all still had regular jobs. I worked at a coffee shop, Taylor worked at a tattoo studio, was actually making quite a name for himself, but we started getting a pretty good following on the local scenes, one thing led to another, next thing we knew we were in a studio cutting an album and our fan base grew.”

“What band?” Calland broke in, asking.

“Uh…Cold Hearted?”

“No shit?” he said, staring at me appraisingly. “Last I heard, that band had broken up, lost their contract, and the lead singer had had some kind of psychotic break…”

His words trailed off as it clicked in his head. “T.J. He was the lead singer. But I thought his name was Connor James? And you…you had short hair, really short. And your name-”

“Rosie,” I interrupted. “I went by Rosie. We didn’t want to use our real names, so that’s why it was different. And I dyed my hair different colors all the time, T.J. wore contacts and his hair was really long, so when things started going south, he cut it, dyed it, and quit wearing the contacts.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “I just don’t understand how he just walked away from that…how you all did. What happened?”

It was my turn to shake my head, because that was a conversation for another day. I just wasn’t ready to dredge up some things, yet. “I’m not ready to get into that, okay? Besides, we weren’t that big. We were just getting started, really.”

“Well, it was enough that you were on the radio. Cold-Hearted was a great song.”

I dipped my head in acknowledgement. “Thank you. My brother and I wrote that one together.”

“So, back to the whole baby momma thing. The worst she had to blackmail you with was the baby, right? How bad could that have been?”

“No, it wasn’t the baby she was blackmailing me about. It was…other things. Stuff I can’t get into. But then something happened. Not sure what it was, but she called me up, told me she was in labor. Wanted me there. So I went. Turned out she’d found someone else to hitch her wagon to and didn’t want the baggage of a baby—her words, not mine. Thankfully, she legally signed him over to me as soon as he was born. Two weeks later, I got a message that she had overdosed and died.”

I kept going. “I wanted my brother to know, but…it took a while to get things situated enough that I could try to come find him.”

“So, what’s going to happen with him and Kaden, now?” Calland asked me.

Tears formed in my eyes. “I don’t know.”