Fade Into You (Shaken Dirty 3)

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything.” She headed toward the kitchen to find something to keep herself busy. “Can I get you some coffee or something while we try to figure out what to do next?”

“No. If he’s not here, I need to keep looking—”

“Do you even know where you’re going to look next?”

His shoulders slumped. “I don’t have a fucking clue.”

“That’s what I figured. If you’re here, you’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel, so you might as well sit down for a few minutes.” She poured coffee beans into the grinder then waited for them to be pulverized before she tried to speak again. “Besides, I make really good coffee.”

Quinn looked like he was going to protest, but after another look from her, he nodded in defeat. Then, after texting someone, he sank down onto one of the barstools that lined the raised counter separating the kitchen from the living room and did his best to look like he wasn’t completely freaking out.

“You know,” she said as she got out cream and sugar, “if he falls off the wagon tonight, it isn’t actually the end of the world.”

Quinn looked at her like she was insane. “It’s pretty fucking awful.”

“It is,” she agreed. “But people

make mistakes. Alcoholics and addicts relapse. If Wyatt messes up today, he can start again tomorrow. It will be okay.” She wasn’t sure if it was Quinn she was trying to convince, or herself.

“I know that,” he told her. “Wyatt’s the one who doesn’t get it. For him, it’s always been all or nothing, you know? He gives the best advice of anyone I know. He would give a stranger the shirt off his back if he thought they needed it. He forgives the people he cares about any mistake, any slight, any hurtful thing they do to him. But he can’t forgive himself. He can’t let his mistakes go. If he fucks up, if he drinks or gets high, it’s done. He isn’t going to be able to let it go tomorrow or next week or even next month. That’s not how he’s made.”

The coffee finished brewing just as Quinn grew quiet, and she took a few moments to pour the hot liquid into cups as she turned his words over in her head. As she tried to figure out exactly what he meant, and what had made Wyatt so uncompromising with himself.

The only problem was she didn’t know enough about him to figure it out. Oh, she knew his basic bio, knew what she’d read in magazine articles and interviews through the years. But something was missing from the story—something big. A guy as smart and dedicated as Wyatt didn’t continually go down this path unless he also had some pretty huge demons to fight. If she was going to help him, she needed to know what those demons were.

She didn’t know when her job here had gone from helping her brother out by babysitting a rock star to trying to find a way to reach through Wyatt’s self-loathing to help him, but sometime in the last twenty-four hours, that was exactly what had happened.

Except she felt like she was flying blind here, like she was trying to put together a puzzle that had half the pieces missing. She had a good idea what the picture was supposed to look like by the outside frame, but there were too many holes in the center for her to figure out what it actually was.

As she slid Quinn’s cup of coffee in front of him, she tried to decide the best way to ask what she wanted to know. But sometimes there was no way to ease into a topic, no way to bring it up gradually, and she had a feeling that whatever was haunting Wyatt was like that.

And so, as she was pouring cream into her coffee, she just did it. Just blurted it out.

“Why, Quinn? Why is he so hard on himself and not on others? Why does he always expect the worst of himself? He’s a good guy—you know that way better than I do. So what is it that makes him hate himself so much?”

Quinn shook his head as he stared into the depths of his coffee. Silence stretched between them—awkward and uncomfortable and filled with a million unspoken things—and for a minute she was certain he wouldn’t answer her.

Not that she blamed him. In his eyes, she was probably just another stooge who worked for the label, a ditz who was there to increase the band’s online presence without having a clue who they really were. And yet she willed him to answer anyway. The desire to know what was hurting Wyatt was a need deep inside of herself, a compulsion that had nothing to do with the label and everything to do with her convoluted feelings for him.

Still, when he finally shook his head and said, “It’s not my story to tell,” she felt the loss like a punch to the gut. She tried to hide it, but she really was as bad an actress as she was a liar. Or at least that’s what the look on Quinn’s face said.

“Look, it’s bad,” he told her after he picked up his cup and drained the near-boiling liquid in a couple of long sips. “It’s really bad. That’s all I can tell you. And that it wasn’t his fault, though he doesn’t see it that way. He blames himself, has blamed himself for more than twenty years, and nobody’s been able to convince him differently. Not the shrinks he’s seen or the counseling groups he’s been a part of or any of us. In his story, he’s the villain, and there’s not a damn thing any of us can do to convince him otherwise. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll come to accept Wyatt’s shortcomings as just part of the package.”

Chapter Fourteen

Wyatt sat at a table in the corner of the dark bar and stared at the drink in front of him. Two fingers of the best dark tequila the place had. It was his drink of choice—had been for as long as he could remember—and as he sat here, in this dive bar he’d found in what felt like the middle of nowhere, he wanted it more than he wanted his next breath. More than he wanted this nightmare to be over. More than he wanted just about everything…

Except Poppy.

And his band.

He was used to needing the band—and the guys in it. It’s why he’d let himself get talked into rehab again, after all. But Poppy…Poppy was something new. Something desperate and dangerous and all-consuming that clawed at his insides a little more with each second that passed.

He could be at her apartment right now, he told himself viciously. Kissing her, holding her, fucking her as slowly or as quickly as he’d like. All he had to do to make that happen was get up from this fucking table and walk out of this fucking bar.

But that wasn’t how this was going to go down, was it? Oh, he could talk a good game, even in his head, but the truth was, this glass of tequila owned him. It fucking owned him, and nothing—not Poppy, not his bandmates, not his fucking drums—was going to change that. Not tonight, and probably not ever.

With that thought blinking in the front of his mind like a particularly gaudy Christmas display, he picked up the tequila.