Roxy (Pandemic Sorrow #3) (24 page)

Chapter 31

The next afternoon we sat on the patio at a random restaurant.

Jag’s eyes locked on a glass of bourbon the waiter had just brought a man at the table beside us. I watched his tongue wet his lips, his eyes trail up the glass that sweated in the dry, mid-afternoon heat, and then his gaze shifted back to me.

He looked guilty.

I smiled, softly saying, “It’s not gonna go away. That’s normal, Jag. It’s normal to still want it.”

“I know,” he said, and wiped his hand down his face. “I know, and that sucks because I would really, really just like to have one fucking drink…but I’m not going to.”

I knew he needed to say that out loud. He wanted to assure me, and he needed to
hear
himself say it.

I ran my hand over his leg. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” Taking my hand, he pulled it toward his face, then kissed the back tenderly. “I’m so glad you loved me enough to stay.”

He glanced up from under his lowered head and just looked at me—like I was all that mattered.

That look is one I could never get tired of seeing. It’s pure, it’s one that can’t be faked…and it feels good to be needed, to be loved, to know that to one person you are the entire world.

Everyone deserves that feeling.

Everyone.

We walked back through the restaurant, dodging several waiters, and stepped onto the semi-crowded sidewalk.

Jag had taken my hand, and I couldn’t help but notice how damp his palm was.

With each step we took, Jag’s pace quickened.

I looked up to say something, but stopped myself. His jaw was clenched tight, his breathing had grown shallow, and his gaze fixed straight ahead, intently aimed at nothing. By then he was practically pulling me down the sidewalk like he was trying to escape something.

He was panicking and trying his damnedest to hide it.

And this is where I struggled.

The night before had been perfect, but
this
would be his life…my life…our lives—a constant struggle between addiction and remaining sober.

All it takes is one trigger: a whiff of alcohol, a song he used to get high to, a moment when he had been worn down.

That’s all it would take, and he could very well spiral back into that disease, fall down the rabbit hole of addiction.

I knew that.

I had lived that.

And I knew that each day would be a new day; it would either be another day he’d spent sober, or a day he’d stumbled.

Sean stumbled once, right into his grave! Can I do this?

My heart flopped like a fish that had been chased up on shore and left stranded and suffocating. That was what I felt like—like I was suffocating.

I loved him. I wanted to be with him, but I feared the unknown.

Loved.

Feared.

And love and fear are both very real emotions that don’t tend to go hand in hand.

Clearing my throat, I squeezed his palm. “You wanna go home?”

He nodded and we stopped at a crosswalk. Jag kept shifting his feet, unable to remain still.

As we stood there I heard whispering and giggling behind us.

Please, please just leave him alone. Don’t bother him. Not right now. I don’t know that he can take it.

Fans didn’t understand that just because there wasn’t a mob gathered around him, it didn’t mean he hadn’t already been approached fifty times over the past hour.

Until you live a life like Jag’s, you can’t fathom how little time you actually have to yourself. Someone as famous as Jag is constantly gawked at and approached. He even got asked to autograph things in gas stations restrooms.

Another burst of giggles caused me to anxiously glance at Jag.

He was still staring straight ahead, so deep in thought that the giddy chatter hadn’t even registered with him.

I watched the pedestrian walk light, tapping my foot in the hope it would hurry the hell up and change so I could get him in the car and get him home.

“You ask him,” a timid voice whispered.

I heard a gasp. “No way! I’ll piss on myself. You ask him.”

“You think he’ll get mad?”

“He can’t get mad. He’s Jag Steele. He’s got to be used to this by now.”

I swallowed. It wasn’t the fact that they were trying to work up the nerve to talk to him that bothered me. It was the fact that I didn’t know how on edge he was. I figured he was fighting a demon at that moment, internally yelling at himself that he didn’t need drugs, trying to convince himself that he could stay sober.

He had been back for one day. No triggers yet, but he was already in panic mode.

Fame was his trigger.

Being Jag Steele was the one thing he would never escape, and that fact terrified the shit out of me.

Jag wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere in the civilized world and not be recognized. The only way he had ever been able to cope with that stressor was with a high.

“Okay,” the girl behind me panted.

I stared at the light, willing it to change.

She cleared her throat, and I felt her reach over my shoulder to tap Jag.

Oh, shit.

Jag turned around, looking behind him, the muscles in his face still concentrated.

“I’m sorry, but I…I just…I just wanted to tell you how much I love your music,” she choked on her words a little. “You are my favorite singer.”

His face softened. “Thanks.”

The light changed, but he’d now turned to face them completely, spinning me around in the process.

“Could we get a picture with you?”

“Sure thing. Rox,” he shrugged, “would you take the picture?”

I nodded and took the phone from the girl’s jittery hand. I quickly snapped a few pictures and handed the phone back to her.

I was so busy watching his reactions, wondering if this was helping or hurting him, that not one part of their conversation registered with me.

The next thing I knew, Jag had placed his hand on my stomach and was gently caressing it, smiling back at the two girls.

“…the best thing that’s ever happened to me, even better than getting that record deal with Deviant Faults Records,” he said.

Both girls swooned and shot large grins in my direction.

He seemed all right, like that may have been a welcomed distraction.

“Thanks so much. You totally just made our day!” one of them said.

Realizing that I probably seemed like the biggest bitch to ever exist, I smiled. “He’s a lot sweeter than he lets on in interviews, huh?”

They both shook their heads and walked off.

“It’s good to be back home,” Jag mumbled, taking my hand back in his and crossing the street.

I remember thinking that maybe I’d been wrong, maybe this wouldn’t be the struggle I’d made it out to be in my head. Maybe Jag would surprise me.

After all, nothing with him was typical.

Chapter 32

Jag flung himself down, panting and wiping the sweat from his face. “God, I love making love to you.”

He settled back in the pillow, and I admired the way the outside light poured in through the window and bathed him in a pale white glow. My eyes traced over his body, over the shadows nestled within the crevices of his carved muscles, glad that he was within reach, thankful those three months were over, and that things were how they should be.

Jag stretched his arm across my pillow and I crawled up next to him, resting my head on his chest.

I listened to the sound of his heart beating, the thud of it drowning out the stereo. I felt his body relax under me, and then he shifted on the bed, turning on his side to look at me.

“You know that I didn’t really overdose, right?”

I held my breath for a moment as I let that comment set in. I wanted him to end that conversation right there.

“Roxy, you know that wasn’t an accident?”

A sudden chill swept over me, and I yanked the covers over my body, trying to block that sensation out.

“What do you mean?” I finally looked at him. “You did that on purpose?”

Jag raked his teeth over his bottom lip and stared at the ceiling. His chest rose as he pulled in a large gulp of air then blew it out.

“Yeah. I did,” he said, shame coating each word.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to yell at him, but I didn’t. I’d thought he’d overdosed. I’d believed that he had gotten so low, so twisted by his fame, so lost that he had lost all control.

Suicide…that’s not an accident. That is premeditated to some extent, and it meant that Jag had thought killing himself was a solution. That revelation broke my heart. It seemed more tragic, it made him seem even more broken than I’d realized.

I wanted to cry, but didn’t allow myself to.

I fought back the tremble in my voice and asked, “Why?
Why
would you want to kill yourself?”

He continued to look at the ceiling in thought, then he shrugged, his fingers combing through my loose hair. “I wanted to take care of you, and that’s the only way I knew how to. I didn’t want to be my dad, and I just thought that maybe I should call it quits while you could still have some respect for me.”

I was choking underneath sobs. My nostrils flared, my throat kept constricting from my fighting the urge to let it all go. I had pushed him to that edge. That statement confirmed that for me.

“I was in a shitty place, princess. A real shitty place. I felt like a loser, worthless…and I had felt that way for years. You,” he grabbed my face, pressing a soft kiss to my lips, “you made me feel like I had a reason. When I found you, I knew I’d found my reason in life…fame, I know that I became famous just so that I could find you, and when I fucked us up…I just couldn’t take it.”

Jag’s eyes met mine and everything inside of me crumbled. This man, a man who had every single thing anyone could ever want, a man who had excess, who literally had the world at his feet, had just told me that without me he had nothing.

A comment like that would tear at anyone’s heart, but for a girl who had lived her life hearing she was worthless from the people who “loved” her, well, that confession crippled me with emotion.

Jag’s face crumpled and he propped himself up on his arm. “I promised you I’d never hurt you, and when I realized I had…I don’t like breaking promises!”

Guilt drowned me. I hadn’t given him much room to keep his promise. I had been so selfish and demanded ridiculous things from him.
Stop using drugs.
That was my expectation of an addict, to just stop. There were better ways I could have handled that because I’d known
what
he was years before I ever knew
who
he really was.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to say between sobs.

He shook his head again, this time smiling. “No, princess, no. You have nothing to be sorry about. You just wouldn’t put up with my shit, and honestly, that was the only thing that saved me. Had you just let me keep on, had you accepted it like every other person did, I
would
have killed myself.” He swallowed, closing his eyes to hide the tears that had pooled in them. “I had to lose everything to see the things that really meant something to me. I had to realize that something could be better than that high. I’m just sorry I drug you down with me.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”

“All that matters is that you are now, princess.”

Jag laid back down, pulling me back to his chest and securing his arm around me, his hand slowly caressing over my arm. We laid in the darkness listening to the music, and the song “Broken” by Seether came on.

Those lyrics fit us perfectly; they fit me perfectly, because I didn’t know that I was strong enough.

I had thought I was strong all my life, I’d thought I had grown hard, but Jag had shown me I really had just been pretending. I had been hiding behind a façade. The type of strength I would need to have to stay with him, to trust him, to be the rock that he needed…I really wasn’t sure I possessed that. I wanted to, but I was terrified I may be too weak.

I didn’t want to let him down. I didn’t want to lose him. I so badly wanted it all to work out.

And for a while, it did. It was perfect.

Chapter 33

I followed Jag down the hallway of the record company with knots all in my stomach.

He had to meet with James and wanted me to go with him. I’d only had the one encounter with James, and it wasn’t that I was scared of him that had kinks going all through my body, but the fact that James was such an utter dick that I wanted to punch him right in the middle of his unfortunate-looking face.

There were people wandering around the hall, and none of them even gave Jag a second glance.

Jag stopped in front of the door at the end of the hallway and glanced back at me. “Just don’t spit on him or anything.”

“Really? You think I’d spit on someone?”

“Well, you don’t have a soda gun, so I thought that might be the way you improvised.”

I shook my head and whacked him on the back.

As soon as we walked in and I laid eyes on James sitting behind his sleek grey desk, the baby jumped. I think she could sense the evil he radiated all the way through the womb.

“Well, good to see you, Jag!” He rose from his chair and walked toward us. Grabbing one of the chairs, he pulled it out for me. “Roxy, right?”

Like he doesn’t know my damn name by now?

“Yes, Roxy.”

James patted Jag on the back, squeezing the top of his shoulders when he sat down.

“Well, we’ve just got to go over some details. Get things sorted back out now that you’re well.”

He sat back down behind his desk and forced a fake smile at me before pulling out a drawer and fiddling with papers.

I took a quick glimpse around his office. Platinum records covered the walls, mostly Pandemic Sorrow’s. There were countless awards on the wooden shelves lining his walls. Pictures of him and endless celebrities. A small bar with bottles of liquor, and, if I had to guess, somewhere in that office he had a year’s supply of every narcotic in existence.

As far as I was concerned, this man was the devil incarnate. To me he was an opposition, he was the enemy.

He laid down a stack of papers, turning them to face Jag. “So, this is our proposal for the tour. We’re planning to start in a year.” His eyes darted over to me. “Figured that would give you about three months with the,” he cleared his throat, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, “baby before you had to start touring.”

Jag glanced at me, nodding ever so slightly. “Sound all right to you? You think that’ll be okay? I mean, you both can come with me, but by then she should be on a schedule or something, right?”

Shit, on tour with a baby? Really?

Before I could answer him, James interrupted. “Jag,” he laughed, “It’s not
really
up for debate. I’m giving you a year…that makes it fifteen months since the tour was
supposed
to have started, we have to get this tour done.”

Jag picked up the papers, scanning over the print and nodding. “Yeah, I guess so. I guess we gotta do it.”

“We can make whatever arrangements you want.” His beady eyes shifted down to the invisible speck of dust he wiped from the edge of his desk. “We could give you a break once a month to come home, or have Roxy flown to you. I mean, there’s really no reason to drag her and the child along on a tour. They’d be miserable.”

Jag turned the page, and, without looking up, he shook his head. “Nah, man. That ain’t gonna work.” He laid the paper down in his lap. “You want me to go, they go. That’s not up for discussion.”

James’ eye twitched, his brow wrinkling as he decided how to combat Jag’s matter-of-fact tone.

“Sure thing, Jag. Sure thing. Uh, I’ll see what I can do.”

“No.” Jag tossed the papers back onto James’ desk. “You’ll see that what I said is fucking done. That’s what you can do.” He rose from the chair and I followed suit.

“Hey, hey!” James stood up. “I’ll get it done. Here…”

I watched him scratch through the document, scrawling out something in the margins. “Done. They go with you.”

“Good.” Jag turned back and leaned over the desk, picking up the pen and signing the papers. “And, you make sure we have the best accommodations.” He dropped the pen on the table. “Oh, and make sure we have an extra room for a nanny. You know, just in case.”

“You can’t be serious?” James clenched his jaw, his fist balling up on the desk.

“I got a contract, but you gotta please me. You’re about to start earning your fucking money with me, fucker.”

Jag grabbed my hand and we walked to the door. I was proud of him for standing his ground.

“If you fuck up,” Jag laughed, “there’s a hundred other agents that would do a circle jerk to sign us. Just remember that. I don’t need you anymore, I’m famous.” He pointed at all his platinum albums hung along the wall and grinned. “You fucking need me!”

And with that, the door closed.