Hard as Rock (The Rock Star's Seduction 3)

97

Killian hadn’t driven me away because he was spouting anything offensive.

He had scared me off because he was so dead-on.

I don’t know that it was as simple as Ryan was ‘light’ and Derek was ‘dark,’ but it was close. Ryan was safety, affection, stability, love – and Derek was excitement, danger, unpredictability, passion.

By the way, you know how they call those Easter reenactments about Jesus’ crucifixion ‘passion plays’?

It’s because the original meaning of ‘passion’ was ‘suffering.’

And that’s what Derek had offered me: both overwhelming desire – and suffering.

I was walking along a beach in my everyday life with Ryan, but there was this siren call out amongst the dangerous waves, and I yearned to dive into the surf, to swim out past the breakers, to feel the exhilaration I’d felt before.

Even though I was pretty sure it would kill me.

Drawn toward the light, but forever looking over your shoulder at the dark.

It’s in your nature.

Isn’t that why I wanted to write and travel the world when I was young? The siren call to do something wild, something extraordinary?

But I was so acclimated to the normal shackles of the bourgeois life: do well in school, go to college, get a job, follow the crowd, keep your nose to the grindstone, wait for your break, even when it means writing $40 articles about craft beers for crappy little indie papers.

No wonder I grabbed my surfboard and paddled out into the monster surf when the wild man of rock ‘n roll called out to me.

But the sirens had led me out too far, and I’d almost died.

Which one did I want – the well-lit, well-trod path?

Or the exhilarating descent into the dangerous unknown?

Did I want a simple life of simple pleasures, full of love and light?

Or did I want the wild ride, the rollercoaster, the blast-off into space?

Who

wouldn’t

want the excitement? The pulse-quickening, heart-pounding thrill of being

alive,

totally and completely?

Except I’d experienced it – and the flip side to riding the wave is that sometimes it crushes you. Rakes your heart across the reef until it’s nothing but bloody ribbons.

That had happened to me.

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to keep to the safety of the beach out of love of the warmth and the sun and the sand, or out of fear.

All I knew is that I wanted to ride the waves again, but I didn’t want to get hurt.

And you don’t get one without risking the other.

98

Enough of drunk philosophy and surfing metaphors. I had a punk rock drummer to find.

In my addled state, I felt I had to justify myself… and make sure she didn’t go telling Ryan a distorted version of events.

Okay, that’s not entirely true, or at least not the

whole

truth. She’d made me feel super fucking guilty, and I was going after her as much to assuage my conscience as I was to supposedly clear up any misunderstandings.

In retrospect, it wasn’t a very bright idea. Riley wasn’t exactly the most open-minded person. If she had made up her mind about what she’d seen, there was no way I was going to change it. Not to mention she had a pretty good bullshit detector, and I would have said something sooner or later that would have set it off. And if she hadn’t told Ryan already, she probably wasn’t going to go do so now.

But none of that entered my mind, because I was buzzed and not exactly reasoning properly.

That probably saved her life.

I picked my way through the bottom floor of the house, threading my way through tattooed girls and long-haired dudes, looking for a platinum blonde mohawk. Didn’t see it.

I started asking people. “Have you seen Riley?”

Somebody pointed up the stairs, so I went up there.

Ryan wasn’t into the idea of having his spare bedrooms turned into love shacks, so he’d put up a rope at the top of the stairs with a sign that said ‘Upstairs Off Limits.’

Riley would have totally ignored the sign – obviously – so I stepped over the rope and continued looking.

“Riley?” I called out, opening door after closed door.

Nobody in the business study. Nobody in the ‘blue room’ – the spare bedroom done all in shades of blue. Nobody in the master suite.

I checked the bathroom, but she wasn’t in there worshipping the porcelain goddess.

Next up was the ‘knickknack room,’ the spare bedroom with all the things Ryan had bought on tour – some ironic, some beautiful. A velvet Elvis painting, a Navajo bowl, a pretty bamboo carving of a village he’d bought in the Far East.

I opened the door and was immediately assaulted by the vanilla-tinged fumes of whiskey.

Bingo.

She was lying on the bed in the darkness, face up, her hand dangling off the side of the mattress. The bottle of Jack had fallen out of her limp hand and was lying on its side on the carpet. The shaft of light from the open door showed a dark brown wet spot all around it.

“Riley – Jesus, Ryan’s going to kill you!” I snapped as I walked over and grabbed the bottle off the floor. “If you wanted to take a nap, you could’ve just… Riley?”

She was incredibly still. No reaction at all to my voice.

The room was dark, but there was enough light from the doorway to pick out details.

Something dark was trailing down the sides of her cheeks.

I snapped on the light and immediately gasped.

She looked like she had thrown up – mostly liquid, but it had filled up her mouth.

Her skin was pale, and her eyes were blank.