What the fuck is wrong with me? Oh my God, I have issues if that’s the shit that I’m thinking of. But at the same time, I did find it so damn adorable when she said that, even when the only reason I should want her is the quick fuck to shut Vince up.

“I’m surprised your teeth aren’t rotted out yet,” Vince says as he plops down on the recliner we have in the pseudo-studio we’ve created here at the rental house.

Something’s rotten in me, all right, but it’s not my teeth. I flop down onto the couch adjacent to the recliner and lie across the seat of it with my feet crossed over the armrest. Out of habit, I put my hands behind my head and stare up at the ceiling for a bit, the thought angering me. “Do you ever miss our old life when it was strictly music and chicks and ramen? When we had like five groupies and we thought we were the shit?”

He snorts. “You mean you had five groupies and we were just the assholes they had to get through to get to you.”

“Those were the days.” It all seems so long ago. The funny thing is I had all the same shit in my life back then—Hunter’s antics, figuring out how to help my mom, trying to keep my promise to my dad—just on a much different scale, but it still seemed simpler back then somehow. Less stress, less pressure, less bullshit.

“Living the dream, man,” Vince says.

“Yeah, living the dream.” I fall silent, my mind running over the day and what exactly I’m going to do about it.

“Dude, the guys and I talked and we’re willing to push back the start of the tour if we need to so you can take care of all of your shit.” I hear the sincerity in his voice and it pisses me off. The guys have to keep adjusting and reprioritizing because of me and the shitstorm currently surrounding me. “We’re just worried about you.”

“Thanks, man … appreciate it, but I can’t do that to you guys. I’ll get it figured out, leave it all behind by the time we kick it off. Besides, man, I need this—to get the fuck away for a bit.”

“New women, new faces, more just for the nights,” he muses.

I grunt in response because normally that sounds more than appealing to me. An escape from the pressure here although I still worry about it all when we’re on the road. I push away the thought that the only new face I see in my mind is Quinlan’s tonight as I basically kicked her off the porch. I shake the image away.

“Offer stands,” he reasserts as I sit up and rest my elbows on my knees so I can meet his eyes. “We can pull out of the benefit if need be as well. Might raise some eyebrows but you can have a nodule on your chords again and have to rest your vocals or some shit like that.”

“You’ve got this all planned out, don’t you?”

He shrugs. “Well …”

And as much as I’d love to blow off the upcoming fund-raiser, take a weekend for myself and get lost in a cabin in the High Sierras to clear my head, I can’t be that hypocritical by abandoning the cause so near and dear to my heart.

“Family comes first, Hawkin. Always.”

And it’s the way he says it that causes the pang in my chest. Family. “Well that depends who you’re talking about since you guys are more my family than …” I let my voice trail off and pause a moment before I continue. “I know with where my priorities are right now it doesn’t seem like it, but you are….” That’s all I can say because it’s been a shit day and fuck if I want to think about how someday I know Hunt will be in jail and my mom will be gone but the guys—Vince, Rocket, and Gizmo—will still be here.

Life and reality suck sometimes. I learned that the hard way a long-ass time ago and it still kicks me in the teeth on a regular basis regardless of how much success comes my way.

“I know. We know.” The resignation in his tone is an echo of how I feel.

“Hunter has to get help, see a therapist, something. I made that a stipulation to all of this.” That’s as close to a confession that I’m going to make in regard to taking the blame for my brother’s stupidity the night I was arrested.

“Uh-huh.” And that inherent part of me that’s always ready to defend my brother bubbles up before I rein it in. Yet Vince deserves to be skeptical after the numerous fallouts he’s had to deal with over the years. “Dude, if kicking him out of the band didn’t sober him up, nothing’s going to. Shit, it’s almost worse now. Him being high, missing a rehearsal, being too coked out to perform is one thing … but now, it’s like he has a vendetta against you to fucking take you down too, except he knows he can’t get to us, so he goes after everything else he can,” he says.

The urge to punch a wall returns; my hands fist, and jaw clenches as I’m reminded of the fallout years ago before we became successful. The decision the band ultimately left up to me when it came to my brother. The choice I made that still eats at me, still causes guilt, and that my brother uses every chance he gets to remind me of it. To try to pay me back for kicking him out of Bent because he couldn’t control his habit and was risking our chance at a record deal.

One of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made was whether to push him away or try to help him and at the same time save me in a sense. I close my eyes momentarily, Depeche Mode’s lyrics to “Halo” running through my mind: You wear guilt like shackles on your feet, like a halo in reverse. The words serve as a reminder that the one constant in my life, besides music, has been guilt.

And then I look at my other constant, Vince and his unwavering friendship. “Man, I’m doing the best I can.” I blow out a breath, staring at my hands for a beat, knowing I’m going to say the words and Vince isn’t going to believe them but I need to say them anyway. “I told him he has to set something up and follow through by next month.”

Vince just meets my eyes with a disbelieving nod. “Whatever you say, Play.”

“Fuck, I told him if he didn’t, I’m going to Ben and telling him what happened that night….” My words drift off as I realize what I just said. The combination of Quin and the fight with Hunt and the alcohol and … just fucking everything had scattered my thoughts and it took its toll on me in the form of a semiconfession.

Vince’s eyes flash over to mine, the I fucking knew it written all over his face, but he doesn’t say a word. He just twists his lips in thought and takes a deep breath as he digests the admission that he already knew. I know he wants to chastise me, get in my face over what he deems is my stupidity, but he knows me so well, knows that this was a slip I never intended to make, understands that I’ll shut down and take the fuck off for a while so that I don’t have to deal with everything, so he bites back the bitterness on his tongue.

Little does he know at this juncture I’ve fucked myself to the point that if I do change my story, there will be repercussions—perjury—so I just keep my mouth shut. The giant wave of guilt crashing into my conscience once again.

“I promise man, I’m not going to let his shit affect me or the group.”

Vince sighs and the room falls quiet for a moment, only the second-hand click of the clock hanging on the wall breaking through the silence. “You don’t go back on promises and we believed you when you told us that Hunter’s bullshit won’t come into our house again. I don’t know how you’re going to do that man but we believe you will.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I say, lying back down and bending my arm over my eyes, wanting to shut this all out. Wanting to shrug out of the responsibility that fell on me at much too early an age to take care of my mother and Hunter.

It all flashes in my memory like it was yesterday—his voice, his words, the images. My dad’s grown-up rant to my nine-year-old ears. How love makes the strongest person weak, can ruin them, make them lose their way. I remember my confusion, not understanding what he meant, why tears were streaming down his face as he told me over and over that love would make me weak.

That he was weak.

I can still hear my voice asking him how love can make you weak when Mommy loves him and he wasn’t weak. The tears came harder then from him and me as he knelt down in front of me and looked me in the eyes, made me swear to take care of them because I was the strongest of all. He went on to make me promise that no matter what, I’d do all I could to protect them because weak people made stupid mistakes and only brave men—me—could try to help them.

And I remember how the nine-year-old me was so proud that my dad had called me a man that I nodded, I agreed with everything I had, I promised faithfully because I had no idea what would happen next.

So I swore to protect my own blood at all costs and if I didn’t, I would be weak too. My only choice would be the same as his. He rambled on, scaring me with his words, his sudden anger that turned back to tears, shaking me by the shoulders to reinforce them. I kept glancing at the door, wondering when Mom and Hunter were going to come home because I didn’t know what to do, how to calm him. All I wanted when I came downstairs was my Transformers and yet I was scared to move and go get them from where they sat on the fireplace.

I remember glancing at the hearth and then back to him just in time to see him load the bullet in the gun I was never supposed to touch. The taste of the fear was like acid in my mouth and yet I couldn’t swallow. He looked me in the eye and told me that if I was weak, if I let him down by not being strong and taking care of them, then I would have to do what a weak man does. And then he put the tip under his chin as I whimpered and cowered. He yelled at me to stand up, to show him how strong I was by watching because if I didn’t, I’d be just as weak as he was and earn the same fate.

I stood tall, so afraid to let him down despite the tears sliding down my cheeks and the taste of vomit in my mouth from fear, and looked him in the eyes, and said the words, I promise, Daddy.

Then he pulled the trigger.

Vince calling my name shakes me from the memories that have scarred me like a brand, deep and irreversible. The Jack and Coke no longer sits well in my stomach and yet I’m sure as fuck going to have another to quiet the shit in my head.

“Yeah, what?” I ask as he eyes me, trying to determine whether I’m okay. I just shake my head at him to drop it as I scrub my hand over my face to try to rub away the memory that’s etched in permanent ink.

“I’m gonna be honest, man. You’re toeing that fine line with everything—Hunt, Quin, the other shit,” he implies without acknowledging. “The sucky thing about lines though is once you step over the edge, you can’t always find your way back.”

I stare at him, unsure which of those lines he’s talking about specifically but I don’t even want to venture a guess because I’m just glad it drags my thoughts from my past. “Maybe I don’t want to find my way back.”

“You talking about Trixie now?” He chuckles.

I’m not talking about anything in particular, just that unsettled feeling in regard to everything tumbling out of control around me … everything except for our music. My one and only constant through life. And I don’t really want to sit here and talk about this shit with myself let alone Vince so I hold on to the comment and use it as an out.

“I would definitely toe any line with her especially if I can use it to tie her to the headboard and have some fun.” The smile that graces my lips is genuine in what feels like the first time since the moment Quin left the house.

“You’re a sick fuck but I love the way you think.”

I laugh with him. “Living the dream, man.”

He laughs harder. “You’re going to be living in a tattoo shop pretty soon if you don’t set things right with little Miss Q.”

“Things are fine,” I correct him even though I know I was an asshole to her. Fuck. What I’d give to have her here right now since my anger has been thoroughly taken out on Giz’s drums. “I’ll fix it,” I say, and then realize I didn’t tell him anything about how the two of us left things. I shift to sit up and stare at him, eyes narrowed, lips pursed so that I don’t even say a word and yet he knows what I’m thinking.

“Yep. I spied,” he confesses with a smirk. “Gotta know where I stand so I know when I’ll be needed to step in. Dude, being a third wheel never sounded so fucking appealing. I still think she’s going to grab you by the balls and add a little twist when telling you to fuck off after how you handled her tonight, but I’ll gladly take the extra ring around my tattooed heart because she’s hot.”