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“Well, come on in, you bastard.”
I chuckle, following her inside the stunning home. But it's not ostentatious. The place isn't gilded in gold, like all the ads for House of Rock portray the set of that show.
Alice’s home is ahome, and I smile when I look around and see framed pictures of Iggy on the wall. There are framed pictures of me, for that matter, and framed posters of tours I barely remember from almost twenty years ago.
A recording of a someone fantastic playing the guitar drifts from a speaker from elsewhere in the house—something I can't quite place even though it's fucking great. A Stevie Ray Vaughn live track, maybe?
I’m not sure. But I tune it out as I focus back on Alice. I follow her down a hall into a modern, light filled kitchen.
“You want some tea, or…”
She turns to look at me, raising a brow as if questioning this whole sobriety rumor she’s probably heard parroted somewhere.
“Tea is great.”
She grins as she turns to put the kettle on.
“You look healthy.”
“Yeah, apparently exclusively sustaining yourself on literal poison for almost thirty years is bad for the skin.”
“Huh. Never heard that before.”
“Yeah, I read it on a blog somewhere.”
She grins.
“Sobriety suits you; you know.”
“I’m trying it on for size.”
“Well, one day at at—”
When I groan, she chuckles.
“Yeah, I figured you wouldn't be doing any sort of steps.”
“You know me too well, Ally.”
“What, the annoying big brother I never wanted?” she quips, making me grin at the line she used to toss out when she and Iggy and I were barely teenagers.
She makes the tea, which I take black, and we sit at the counter letting the steam curl around our faces.
Alice clears her throat.
“Have you talked to Ash?”
I shake my head.
Even if I wasn’t coming back to “the world” under the shadow of what happened with Melody, and that fucking article, and the goddamn book, and Judy, and all of it?
Even then, being back from the dead is weird.
Some days, you just want to go back to your old routines. You want to go back to your old favorite bars and see if they’ve still got the same stuttering jukebox in the corner, and same cranky bartender slinging the same not-quite cold beers.
You want the same songs to be on the radio. The same talking points to be on the news. Some days, being “back” just feels like a reset—like you’re starting over from an earlier saved point in time.
But that’s just not how it works.
