This song was like that, the words running through his brain like a rain-swollen river, pouring out of him as fast and powerfully as the music had. Even knowing they weren’t perfect, he sang them aloud, let the recorder get every syllable.
When it was over, he ran through the song over and over again while everything was still fresh in his mind. Playing and singing, singing and playing, until his shirt was drenched in sweat and his arms felt like they were going to fall off.
And still he played. Still he wailed away at the drums like the demons of hell were after him. Or worse, like the sins of his past had finally caught up to him after all the years he’d run and all the drugs he’d used to keep them at bay.
And maybe they had. Maybe they had.
Since he couldn’t do anything about it, he played instead.
Long after sweat rolled into his eyes and poured down his face.
Long after his shoulders and biceps and pecs cramped up.
Long, long after blisters formed between his fingers.
He played and played and played, like these drums were the only thing standing between him and hell. And like getting this one song right was his only chance at salvation.
At one point, the blister on his right index finger cracked open and started to bleed. He grabbed one of the clean towels he always kept next to the kit, tore a strip off it, and kept playing. When his left index finger followed suit a couple of minutes later, he did the same thing. And then he played through that, too.
The pain was there, his nerve endings sending agonized alerts to his brain, but he ignored them. Compartmentalized them. Put them in a part of his brain he didn’t need to access to play, and then concentrated on the music. On the beat. Right now, it was the only thing that mattered.
The knuckles at the top of his already injured hand went next, busting through the skin and scattering drops of blood on the pure white drum heads with each hit of the stick on the skin. But because he couldn’t do anything about these wounds, he ignored them. Just like he ignored the burn in his middle fingers as the skin and flesh slowly, agonizingly got worn away.
Hours passed, and still he played like his life—and his soul—depended on it. He didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t stop, not when the music just kept coming, just kept pouring through him like it used to in the old days. Like it hadn’t done in way too long. And now that he’d found it again, there was no way he was giving up on it, no way he was just getting up and walking away from it because it made him hurt. Because it made him bleed.
This pain was nothing, less than nothing. Not compared to everything that had come before it. And not compared to what he hoped, prayed, would come after it.
The longer he played, the worse the bleeding got, and he either wiped it away or ignored it as it spattered the hi-hat, the snare, the toms. But then—just as he was working out a huge, ascending drum riff for the end of the new song, it happened. The skin at the edge of his hand, right below his pinkie fingers, gave way, and blood went from splattering to gushing over the drum heads.
Fuck.
He grabbed another couple of towels, wrapped them around his hands, but they were pretty much soaked through in the matter of a couple of minutes. Cursing under his breath because the song wasn’t completely finished—and the muse was still riding him hard—he stumbled out from behind the kit and made his way to the bathroom.
Once there he turned on the faucet and filled the sink. Then he doused his hands in the ice cold water, watching as it turned red in seconds. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He was used to playing ’til he bled—just a hazard of the job that few people ever talked about—but it had been a while since he’d messed up his hands this badly. He couldn’t believe he’d been so in the zone that he hadn’t noticed how bad it had gotten.
Then again, he admitted to himself as he emptied the sink and then refilled it, it wasn’t like he would have stopped even if he had noticed. The music had been too pure, too perfect. It had been a long time since he’d had something that pure in his life.
Poppy came into his mind again then, her bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and Renaissance Madonna face floating before his closed eyelids as he once again plunged his raw hands into the water. He cursed a little, tried to do the trick again where he compartmentalized the pain. But the music was gone, and he couldn’t do it without it. If he could, he never would have needed heroin.
When the bleeding slowed to a gentle ooze, he grabbed a towel off the rack and wrapped it around his most damaged hand, making sure to keep as much pressure on the wounds as he could. Then he crouched to rummage beneath the sink. He always kept a first aid kit in here for occasions just like this.
He found it behind a twelve pack of toilet paper and more soap than any one person could use—which made him wonder just what Jamison was trying to tell him, since she was the one who’d stocked his apartment before he got out of rehab.
Shaking his head in amused exasperation, he fumbled the first aid kit open. And found a lot more than bandages and antibiotic ointment.
One of his small, secondary drug kits fell out at his feet, and for a minute he just stared at it, almost too afraid to touch it. Too afraid, even, to be in the same room with it.
But fuck, it wasn’t like he could just leave it in the middle of the bathroom floor to keep tripping over, either—not if he had any chance of surviving—so eventually he bent down and picked it up. Turned it over in his hands. Ran his thumb over a random burn mark in the bottom left corner of the leather.
Every single brain cell he had shrieked at him to throw it away. To toss it out the window. To do anything, everything, but keep holding it, shifting it this way and that as memory after memory assaulted him.
He didn’t do that, though. Instead, his fingers seemed to move of their own volition as they unzipped the kit. As they pulled the spoon and lighter out of one side and the package of wrapped, unused syringes out of the other. As he did, he sank down onto the floor, rested his back against the wall, and tried not to think about how good it felt to get high. To nod out. To bliss out.
I
t didn’t work.
Suddenly, the heroin he’d been carrying around since he’d met Rollo at the bar last night was burning a major hole in the pocket of his jeans.