Vindication: A Motorcycle Club Romance (38 page)

~
TWENTY-ONE ~

Noah

I was already waiting on the beach by the time Laurel
arrived. Actually, I had been on the beach for hours, ever since I left the
label’s office in Seattle. Gavin took my instructions to call the
Slipstream
Magazine
offices in New York and speak with Laurel’s editor. The tactic felt
a little dramatic, but part of me knew that Laurel was swimming in an ocean of
guilt right now, and just like I needed Quinn and Gavin, she was going to need
her best allies to convince her to get back up and fight.

Still, there was no guarantee she would
take the invitation. She had no idea what state I was in. And I wouldn’t have
blamed her if she passed it off to some other writer after everything that had
happened. But I knew I had to try—both for her, and myself. Laurel always
seemed to reward my effort.

She came down the hill toward me,
sitting on the driftwood log by the river. Her hair was pulled back in a messy
bun, and her face looked like she hadn’t had a very good few nights. It had the
unmistakable puffiness of someone who had been crying, and my heart ached at
the thought. It ached even more when I saw she was again wearing my sweatshirt,
too big for her frame, wrapping her halfway down her thighs and almost over her
hands.

I stood up as she approached, hands
in my pockets. She looked almost afraid as she approached, like she thought I
was going to announce this was all a fucked-up prank to hurt her. I didn’t
move; I let her come to me. Laurel was a shark, like me, and I knew what people
had to do to get me to listen; so that was what I did for her. I let her get
her bearings and approach on her terms. The rush of the river overlaid our
silence.

“Hey,” she said, stepping to the
driftwood.

“Hi,” I replied. We stared at each
other with wet, unsure eyes.

Laurel swallowed and looked around.
“Domino asked me to meet you here…”

I nodded. “It’s for real. I asked for
you.”

“Okay,” she said. “So, what do you
want to…”

“Why don’t you sit down, and we can
just start the interview?” I said, waving a hand over half of the driftwood
log. “Did you bring your recorder?”

She pulled her phone out of her
pocket and followed me. I straddled the giant log to face her, while she hiked
one thigh up side-saddle and turned toward me. Wispy strands of pale blonde
hair drifted around her face in the light wind.

Laurel activated the recording app
and held the phone out in her hand between us. She stared at me and took a few
breaths before she began.

“Noah… tell me what happened that day
at the festival.”

Even though I was ready for it—I had
asked
for it—a stone still sat in my gut at the thought of talking about that day.
But I looked in Laurel’s face and it became easier. “Our set started late
afternoon. I’d had a few beers with some of the other bands backstage, but I
wasn’t plastered like some of the reports are saying. People don’t understand
how much booze it takes for a guy my size to get drunk. Anyway…” I cleared my
throat. “The set started out fine, everything was normal. We had a few lady
fans brought up on stage during ‘Locusta,’ like we always did—they were local
contest winners, if I remember right. Security got them on and off without a
problem. But it was a few songs later when I saw somebody in the pit.”

Laurel’s face crinkled with worry.
She hadn’t heard the story this complete. No one had.

“The photographers had already
cleared out, and nobody had started crowd-surfing yet, so I thought it was off
to have someone that close to the stage. Everything seemed to move in slow
motion after that. Suddenly he wasn’t near the stage, he was crawling up and
onto it. He didn’t look happy, or excited, or drunk. He was just staring at
Quinn.”

I had to take a pause and a breath.
The sound of the river rushing helped to soothe my anxiety.

“I was already moving to confront the
guy when I saw the knife in his hand, and that just made me move faster. Quinn
wasn’t even paying attention. I just hit the guy with all the strength I had to
knock him off his feet and make him lose his weapon. Security could deal with
him after that. But when I hit him, he just kept falling. The sound of his head
hitting that beam, even through the sound of the music… I still hear it in my
sleep.”

Tears dripped down Laurel’s face. Her
chest rose and fell with her ragged breathing.

“Then it was just chaos. They rushed
us offstage, cancelled the rest of the main stage sets. We were stuck on our
bus with no information until the head of security and a police detective came
to tell us the man had died. And… that was the moment everything just started
to fall apart.”

Laurel asked in a shaking voice, “Did
you tell the police about what you saw?”

“I told the police. I told security.
I told my manager and my band,” I said. “But no one else had seen the knife,
and the police couldn’t find any evidence that it existed. Only my manager and
Quinn believed me, in the end.” After a pause, I said. “And you, Laurel. You
believed me.”

Her face got sad, and she held back
tears. She looked down a minute to gain her composure and continued. “Why did
your bandmates abandon you?”

Hearing it said so starkly made my
heart hurt. “I don’t know,” I said. “Tensions were high after the festival,
obviously. I’m not an idiot. I know what my reputation is, and those boys had
dealt with missing shows because I couldn’t get out of a jail cell fast enough,
or being too hungover, or whatever. Me fucking things up isn’t that rare a
happening, if you catch my drift.”

“But this time, you hadn’t.”

“This time, I hadn’t. This time, I
was in the right. And I thought they would be able to see the truth of that.
But Jeff, Ash… they didn’t.”

“What about Duke Rogers?”

I couldn’t wait until I never had to
hear his name again. “Duke, well… Duke has goals. And he’s not going to let
anyone stand in the way of those goals. In this case, it fit his goals to
believe I was an animal capable of murdering an innocent man for no reason.”

“So you’re not upset with Duke for
what he did?”

“I was,” I admitted. “Very upset. But
the last few days have been very… eye-opening for me.”

Laurel flushed.

“I feel like I’m seeing things more
clearly now. And as strange as it sounds, I don’t think what Duke did was
personal. I don’t think he ever cared about me enough to make this personal. I
think he only ever saw me as a ladder to a better place—a ladder he’s all too
happy to kick out when he’s done using it. I’m not mad at Duke, but I pity him.
I look at the relationships I’ve found because of my love of music,
relationships that exist because of vulnerability… of willingness to be human.
Duke may love music as much as me, but he will never have that. I feel sorry
for him.”

Laurel wiped the tears on her face
with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. The gesture made me smile.

“What happens to you now, Noah? What
happens to the band?” she asked.

“Cut Up Angels is done,” I said.
“This was a hit we can’t survive. I’m putting it out of its misery. The legal
shit will get worked out, and Quinn and I will find another project to work
on.”

Laurel paused and swallowed. “I’m
sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “Bands break up
all the time, and new ones get formed. I’ll find something different to do.
Maybe it’s time I head back to my hardcore roots.”

She smiled, still teary. After a
second she got her bearing and cleared her throat. “I, uh… is there anything
else you want to include or say? Anything you want the public to know?”

“Yeah. I want to publically apologize
to my band… well, mostly
ex
-bandmates… and our loyal manager, Gavin
Jones, for them having to go through this. They may not have stood by me, but
they did in earlier years, when I did stupid shit just for the hell of it. They
still made music with me, anyway. And if I’d had my way, this wouldn’t be how
we ended. So I’m sorry for that.

“And I want to thank the people who
believed me through this ordeal when everyone else had thrown me to the wolves.
Quinn, who has never let me down and never let me fight on my own; Kevin, an
old friend and mentor; Gavin, who has done some of the finest work for this
band and always looked out for us; and you, Laurel. I want to thank you for
believing me.”

Laurel’s eyes widened, her body
tensing.

“You had no reason to believe me,” I
said. “You didn’t know me. You had heard the same bullshit stories everyone
else has. But you came here, and you met me… and you believed me. And then you
went out and saved my fucking life. And I owe you everything. That’s why I
wanted to give this to you. You earned your success.”

Laurel’s mouth dropped open as her
cheeks flushed pink. No doubt she hadn’t expected how much thinking I had been
doing about what had happened. After the fury passed, and after the
confrontation with Duke and the band was finally over, the impending charges
wiped away from my future, my mind was able to focus on Laurel. Really, though,
my mind never stopped focusing on Laurel. Even after what she had done, every
bone in my body ached for her touch again.

“I… I was just doing my job,” said
Laurel, but the way she frowned, it was like she didn’t believe her own
words—like she was reciting some script.

“Were you?” I asked.

She looked at my expression and
searched it with her gaze. With a glance down at the recording phone in her
hand, she couldn’t help herself. “Am I the one giving the interview, here, or
are you?” The ghost of a smirk appeared in the corner of her mouth, and warmth
spread through my body at the sight of it.

“Make it one of my conditions,” I
said. “Quid pro quo.”

“Does that make you Hannibal Lecter?”
she joked, sniffling as she did.

“Will your magazine print a joke as
dirty as the one I want to make right now about eating you?” I said with a
grin.

Laurel laughed, a real, full laugh,
her eyes bright. “Ask me whatever you want.”

I slid a little closer to her on the
driftwood trunk. “What made you want to come do this story on me?”

She licked her lips. “Timing,” she
said. “I’d fucked up pretty hard on my last one. I wanted something big to get
me out of the proverbial ditch I’d fallen into… and then Sun Fest happened.
With the press moratorium, this was my only play, but I had to try, so...”

“So if you had been a hardcore
guitarist instead of a journalist, you’d be the dude who climbs up on the
highest cabs to stage dive from, is that what you’re saying? Go big, or go
home?”

The comparison made her laugh and
blush. “Well, when you put it that way, I sound insufferable.”

“You want the big prizes,” I said. “I
can relate.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” she said. “And
your story was the biggest prize.”

I took a beat, and a breath. “Did you
come here thinking I was guilty?”

Laurel looked sad. “Well… yeah.
Everyone did. The videos were… they were pretty hard to fight. But, even that
first night in the Graveyard Club, I had already started to question the
narrative that was playing out. There was something about you, Noah… even
talking to you, the real you, for just a few moments, made it perfectly clear
that you were not the man everyone thought you were.”

My chest welled up with emotion and
ache for her. I’d never heard a woman talk about me like that. None of them
ever seemed to see past the surface. But it hadn’t fooled Laurel for even a
moment, once she got close enough. She really was flawless.