Page 132 of Before You Fell

I keep the phone pressed to my ear long after she is gone, listening to nothing. The blunt still burns in the ashtray. The whiskey waits on the table. For once, neither of them touches my hand.

I put the phone down and pick up the guitar.

For a while, I just stare at it.

I have spent weeks trying to understand why I put that first pill in Willow’s hand. Why I smiled when I told her to trust me. Why I made poison appear harmless, because everything looks harmless when it is sitting in the palm of an arrogant dick who thinks consequences are for other people.

Now she is in rehab and some ugly part of me cannot stop drawing a straight line from my palm to that hospital bed.

I set my fingers on the strings and play the same progression as before. This time, the notes do not sound dead. They sound rough. Unfinished. A little drunk, a little wounded, and too stubborn to lie down and fucking die.

For now, that is enough.

Two weeks later, I am outside Willow’s rehab center at 9 a.m.

She told me ten. I’m early.

The tour brought us home last night, and I am running on fuck-all sleep and the kind of nerves I would punch another man for noticing.

I lean against the driver’s door, my sunglasses on and my arms folded, while the center sits behind low walls and trees.

Willow surprised the shit out of me by calling again the next day. Then the day after that. And every day after that.

Five o’clock suddenly became hers.

I didn’t care whether I was backstage, in a meeting, halfway through a mic check, being screamed at by Damon, or signing something stupid with a woman’s tits six inches from my face.

At four fifty-eight, I disappeared. At four fifty-nine, my phone was in my hand. At five, I answered like a man with manners, which was new and frankly alarming.

The guys figured it out by day three.

Jax said I’d better not fuck it up this time. He told me to treat her right, as if watching her almost die had not already beaten that lesson into me with a tire iron.

I didn’t tell him I’m not the same asshole anymore. Mostly because I still am and men who announce they’ve changed are usually one bad decision away from proving they haven’t. Instead, I told him I would shove a drumstick so far up his ass that he would tap out a rhythm as he walked.

Willow now laughs when we talk. She seems happy.

She tells me about her friend Goldie, Adrian Hayes’s widow. I know who she is. Everyone does. Apparently, she has also decided I’m an asshole, which is rude since she has never met me, and annoyingly accurate given everything Willow has probably told her.

I’m still cocky with Willow. Still tease and push when I know she can take it. I still say the wrong thing sometimes and have to shut my mouth before one bad sentence turns into a full fucking disaster. But something in me changes when her voice comes through the phone.

The noise drops out. The restless shit under my skin finally settles. All I want is to see her beautiful face.

I started counting down after the fourth call. Ten days. Nine. Eight. Every night, I crossed one off in my head before I slept, and every morning, one less remained between me and her.

Now there are no days left. Just one hour.

At nine forty-five, a man in a gray shirt walks over, looks at the car, then at me.

I already fucking hate him.

“Sir,” he says as he approaches. “Parking here is limited to thirty minutes. You’ve been here longer than that.”

“Sharp eye. They should give you a badge.”

“You’ll need to move the vehicle.”

I lift my sunglasses to look at him. “No.”