Midnight Blue

“I didn’t. One of his one-night stands did. We paid her, and part of the money goes to charity, so don’t slam it all the way.”

“You shamed your friend, and the fact that he doesn’t feel violated doesn’t change the fact that he was violated.”

“Don’t act like a saint, Indigo. Part of your job is to slip into bathrooms with him. You’re on this gravy train, too, doll. Just because your conscience is less stained, doesn’t mean it’s clean.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“I’m telling him.” I stomped down on an imaginary cockroach.

“Then you’re out,” Blake deadpanned, his face switching from wary and anxious to harsh in the blink of an eye. He took a step closer to me, eliminating the distance between us. I could smell his breath, cinnamon and a fruity gum. A fresh and light scent Alex was too carnally male to possess.

“The minute he knows the truth he’ll drop everything and run to his precious coke. In which case, we will no longer need your services, Ziggy will no longer get his tubes, and Craig would still be a miserable, drunk sod. Think before you do something stupid, Indie. Because you can very easily steer your life onto a very bumpy road.”

I stared at Blake.

He lifted his chin, returning a look just as firm.

He knew. Knew about my family, about our financial situation, even about the tubes we were planning to get Ziggy with the money.

How the hell does he know?

I’d gone through a personality assessment with the HR person who’d hired me. The girl with the pedicure asked me two hundred questions, all of which I’d answered with brutal honesty. She must’ve paid it forward. Now Jenna and Blake had leverage over me. Maybe Alex, too. Hell, for all I knew the whole tour knew how much debt I was in and my nephew’s health problems.

Feeling my blood bubbling with the kind of anger that makes you want to puke, I turned around and stormed from Alex’s dressing room. I was no longer sleepy and jet-lagged.

I was wide-awake.

Vibrating, like my stammering, rebellious heart.

Burning like bonfire and completely alive.

“One is the loneliest number.

So you said we should be two.

But in the end, baby, it was all about you.

The worst part is, I’d still take you back.

Though this time, I’d be sure to be the one to break your heart.”

—“Poison and Poetry,” Alex Winslow.

Everybody wants to be a rock star. It’s the closest thing to being a god, but what people often forget is that God has a hectic job.

God creates. Twenty-four-fucking-seven.

God is worshipped.

God is expected to answer, to deliver, to reassure.

And when God is sent to earth to deal with humans? Well, God is bound to disappoint.

See, when you’re a rock star, your fans feed you expectations.

And you almost always swallow them down greedily and ask for seconds.

Because you want to believe you’re a genius, whose lyrics are immortal, whose tunes run chills down people’s spines. You want to be unforgettable, irresistible, and unique. You don’t want to believe there’s nothing more after this—because there isn’t, you might be a hotshot millionaire motherfucker with a different model in your bed every night—but at the end of the day, you’re human.

So, terribly human. A human who is expected to be much more than a human. Which was how I’d gotten here. To where I was today. The very laughable cliché I’d taken the piss out of when I was younger. A washed-up, alcoholic, druggie rocker who is never alone but always feels so desperately lonely.

The first time I found true intimacy wasn’t when I shoved my cock into Laura, the lorry driver’s daughter, on a bench at age fourteen at Cassiobury Park. It was when I stood in front of thousands of strangers and sang to them. Asked them to love me. To believe in me. To support me. And. They. Did.

You feel stark naked on the stage.

Even with Waitrose behind me on the drum set and Alfie walking around with his bass guitar, it was mostly just me. And them. And the lights. And the fame.

The sweat dripping down on the guitar. Sex.

My muscles flexing, straining to produce that perfect harmony. Climax.

They see me, feel me. They hear me. Bliss.

But having sex with ten thousand people every night was not what you called a laid-back job. Which was why I’d needed a little pick-me-up to ensure my performance was up to par with my own unreachable standards. I used to get on stage with more coke in my bloodstream than platelets. I was high, and when you’re high, you can’t see how fucking low you’ve reached. Ninety days of rehab, and I’m clean now. Physically, mostly.

I gave my audience an encore. “Poison Poetry” was inspired by Fallon, who’d torn my heart out and fed it to the tabloid wolves. It was also one of the last decent songs I’d written before becoming too dependent and fogged by narcotics to produce anything real and substantial. Now that I was sober again, I wondered if my creative side hadn’t washed out along with the drugs.