“All right, Mama. Just be careful, okay.”

“You worry too much, girl. Being at that fancy school hasn’t done nothing but made you like all those folks from here you used to turn your nose up at and run circles around.”

I sighed and closed my eyes and tightened my fingers around the phone. “Things change.”

She snorted. “No, baby girl, people change. Things just stay the same.”

That was the attitude that was going to keep her in a trailer in Woodward the rest of her life. I hung up the phone and was getting ready to climb in the Jeep and head to work when I heard my name. Shaw was running across the parking lot and talking rapidly into her phone. I tossed my stuff in the passenger seat and rounded the hood so I could meet her halfway. We worked the same shift so I assumed that she was having car problems or that something had come up with Rule and she was going to call out. What I wasn’t prepared for was for her to grab my arm and gasp, “Jet’s in jail!”

At first I thought she was joking. After all, I had left him snuggled up and satisfied this morning on my way to class. I couldn’t figure how he had found himself in enough trouble to get arrested between then and now. I laughed a little.

“You have to be kidding.”

She shook her head, blond hair flying in all directions. “No. Cora just called me. All three of the guys just left the shop. I guess he called Rowdy to bail him out but they all went. She said she had to threaten Nash with bodily harm to get him to tell her what was going on. She tried to call you, but it went to voice mail.”

I looked at the screen of my phone and did indeed have two missed calls from Cora while I had been talking to my mom. I just blinked at it stupidly, while trying to piece together what was happening to my once orderly life.

“Why is he in jail?”

“She couldn’t say. The guys all left in the middle of appointments and she was scrambling to reschedule and hold down the fort. Do you want me to take you to the police station? You look a little pale.”

I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I wanted to run away to a place where Asa was back in Kentucky, to a place where I lusted after Jet in silence and pretended that I could make a relationship with Adam work out. I shook my head and turned back to the Jeep.

“If he wanted me there, he would have called me and not Rowdy. I need to get to work.”

“Ayden?” I could hear the question in her tone, but I just held up a hand. I needed some sense of normalcy, some kind of pattern that I was accustomed to, back for just a second.

“Not now, Shaw. I’ll talk to him when I get home. I don’t know what’s going on with him, but if it was bad enough to get him arrested, chances are the boys are a better fit for him right now than I am.”

She frowned at me, and for the first time since we had met when we were freshmen, I could actually see her judging me and finding me lacking. “I don’t know that I agree with that, Ayd.”

I just shook my head at her. “Well, it isn’t up to you. I’ll see you at work.”

I saw her knit her brow in confusion as I pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the bar. My mind was spinning in a million different directions and I was having a really difficult time putting all my thoughts in their assigned boxes. I was worried about Asa, worried about Jet, and maybe, more important than either of those things, I was worried about myself.

I could feel the control slipping away, feel the walls I had erected to prevent these very things from happening start to crumble, and I was holding it all together by only the skin of my teeth. Who I was and who I wanted to be were being torn into separate parts, and the me that was left was vulnerable and raw. I had no idea how to stitch it all back together again, or even if I wanted to.

Chapter 10

I should have known when my mom called me hysterical and crying that it wasn’t going to lead to anything good. Normally, she was too beaten down, too cowed to do anything other than be dejected and disheartened. Not today. Today she was sobbing and rambling on and on about how Dad was going to kill her, and while I would have much rather been basking in the afterglow of some very fine morning sex time, I was instead frantically pulling on pants and rushing across town to see what the hell was going on over there.

I brought the car to a screeching halt in front of the house and ran up the stairs like the house was on fire. I didn’t bother knocking, just shoved the front door open, and before I could stop to get my thoughts in order or do a thorough survey of what exactly it was that I was dealing with, my dad came barreling out of the kitchen and knocked me back out the door. I landed with a dull thud on the cracked concrete of the sidewalk and saw stars for a second as my head banged hard on the ground. Before I could get my wits about me, or even get my hands under myself to get up, my dad launched himself at me, and his fist connected with the side of my face. I felt the skin on my cheek split wide open and jerked just in time to avoid the blow that would have surely broken my nose. I grabbed at his flailing fists and felt my stomach turn over when I smelled the stale booze and pungent fury coming out of his every pore.

We were about the same size, only I was sober and had been in enough fights in my time to know how to get the upper hand. I shoved him off me and scrambled to my feet, so that I was looking down at him. I poked at my bloody face and glared down at him.

“What the fuck, old man?”

He started to yell something at me, but my mom chose that moment to come running down the stairs. She was a mess. Her shirt was torn and her hair was everywhere, but what made me see red, what made the fire I tried so hard to contain burst forth in an eruption of flame and rage, was the fact that not only did she have a black eye, but also a split lip and tear tracks running down her too-pale face. It was clear that, whatever had set my dad off on his drunken rampage, I wasn’t his first victim of the day. She was wailing that we had to stop, that we needed to go inside before the neighbors called the police, but I didn’t care.

I spit out some of the blood that had trickled from my cheek to the corner of my mouth, and told my dad, in all seriousness, “I’m going to kill you.”

He staggered to his feet and glared at me like I was the one at fault.

“Kind of like you killed my dreams? If it wasn’t for you and that stupid bitch, I coulda kept on doing what I wanted. Touring the world, seeing great bands. You ruined everything, you selfish little prick. I asked for one thing. Look what you made me do!”

His words made no sense and they didn’t matter anyway. All I could see was my mom crying and hear her asking him to stop. There was no stopping it anymore. The flames were raging and I didn’t care if they burned him to a charred remnant of himself.

He was still pretty loaded, so when I hit him he went down easily. I heard my mom scream my name from somewhere really far away and felt immense satisfaction that he wasn’t nearly as quick as I was. My blow to his nose landed with a gratifying crunch. I don’t know how many times I hit him. I don’t know who called the cops, or if my mom was crying over me or over him. It wasn’t until the handcuffs clicked into place, and the cop who looked like he was the same age as me was shoving me into the backseat of his cruiser, that I realized what I had done.

My dad was lying still as stone on the walkway. His face was covered in blood and a paramedic was strapping an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose. My mom, my poor mom, in all her black-and-blue, tearstained glory, was holding on to his limp hand and telling him everything would be all right. I think something inside of me officially died when she climbed into the back of the ambulance with him to go to the hospital. The young cop gave me a steady look, like he had seen this a hundred times already today and asked, “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

I sighed and let my head fall against the back of the seat. It wasn’t the first time I had been in the back of a cop car, but I had a sinking feeling it was going to be the most serious reason I’d ever had had for being there.

“He hit her. Normally, he just treats her like shit, and makes her feel bad and worthless, but this time he put his hands on her. I just lost it.”

The cop watched me closely. “He do that to your face?” I had forgotten about my cheek and prodded at the inside with my tongue. It still stung but it wasn’t dripping blood anymore, so I didn’t think it was going to need stitches or anything.

“Yeah. Sucker punched me when I first walked in the door.”

My hands were starting to throb, with my knuckles undeniably split open and torn. The reality of what I had done was starting to settle heavily on my shoulders.

The cop nodded and tapped the roof of the car. “They’re both saying you started it. The old man wants to press assault charges.”

I groaned. I bet he would be willing to drop them the second I agreed to hook him up with Artifice and send him on tour.

“We have to take you down to the station and book you. You have anyone you can call to get you bailed out?”

I nodded and had him call Rowdy. I gave him the CliffsNotes version of events and had no doubt he would bring the cavalry with him, but I had been in enough situations with the law during my misspent youth to know that no matter how quickly he moved, I was still looking at a solid day spent in lockup.

I appreciated that the cop didn’t grill me or try to give me a bunch of unwanted advice on the trip to the station. I also appreciated that he didn’t ask me over and over if I wanted to know how my dad was doing. I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t want to know what my mom had to say about it. This was the last straw. I was going to go on the European tour. I was going to look at signing with a label, if that’s what the guys wanted. I was going to do it all, everything I held back on because of her. What I wasn’t going to do was try to stand sentinel between my mom and that bastard anymore.

They booked me, ran my prints, took my rings and my belt, my wallet and my phone, and put me in a cell with a dude who was clearly in for some kind of drug thing. He was twitchy and kept asking me if I had a smoke, even though there was obviously no smoking when you were locked up. I sat on the hard bench and stared at the ceiling for what felt like hours. As the time passed, more people were ushered in and out of the cell, and I just kept still. I was just trying to blend into the brick walls and make this day go away.

I didn’t even want to know how I was supposed to explain any of this to Ayden. We weren’t exactly at the “bail your boyfriend out of jail” stage of our relationship. Hell, I didn’t even know if we were at the relationship part of the relationship. Something told me this little road bump was going to go over like heavy metal at a funeral. She already couldn’t see anything beyond a good time in bed with me, and the last thing I needed to do was prove her right.

It was well after dark when they were finally able to post my bail. I had to show up in court the following week for sentencing, and the same cop who had arrested me walked me to where Rowdy was waiting with a handful of paperwork. He had a serious look on his face and I could tell he wasn’t happy. The cop handed me a bag that had all my crap in it and shook my hand.