Badd Motherf*cker(70)

Zane shifted his weight on the couch and rubbed his crotch. “And I’m sayin’ from experience…don’t fuck with her. The kick to the balls was what laid me out, but the moves she pulled to get the kick out were as fast and precise as anybody I’ve ever sparred against.”

I felt pride heat me up from the inside out, hearing a hardcore badass like Zane talk about Dru so highly. Zane didn’t hand out compliments easily—he was hard to impress, and very sparing with his praise.

I gestured at the TV. “Where’d the monster TV and the game system come from?”

Corin raised a hand. “That was us. We got here, saw your dinky little piece of shit TV from like the nineties or whatever, and the distressing lack of a PlayStation, and we had to rectify that poste-fuckin’-haste. That TV was so fuckin’ tiny I don’t even know why you even bothered. And no PS4? I don’t think so.”

“Who paid for it?”

Canaan answered. “We did.”

“World tour opening for Rev Theory, remember?” Corin added. “We got’chu, bro!”

I rolled my eyes. “As long as it didn’t come from bar funds, then whatever. It is a nice TV.”

“Nice?” Xavier said, sounding incredulous. “Seventy inches of ultra high definition picture, and you call it nice?”

“Yeah, it’s nice.” I eyed the twins. “Is the tour done with, then? I sorta had the idea you had a few more shows left.”

Canaan shrugged. “We were supposed to play a couple more dates…which cities was it, you remember, Cor?”

“Barcelona, Madrid, and Lisbon, I think. The original plan was to hook up with Beartooth in Paris and then do a double-headlining tour with them in the UK.”

My gut sank. “You had a headlining gig?”

Canaan shrugged again; the kid had an entire language of shrugs. They could mean ‘whatever’, ‘sure’, ‘why not’, or ’who cares’, plus a few more that were just sort of all around lazy I-don’t-give-a-shit. This shrug was a whatever shrug. “Yeah. Not a solo headliner, though,” he said. “Our manager was pissed at us for bailing, but family is family, right?”

“Fuck, man,” I groaned. “You gave up a headlining tour to come back here?”

That had been their dream since they first organized a band when they were thirteen. They’d played gigs downstairs on Tuesday nights all through junior high and high school, and eventually those gigs had translated into playing at other bars around here in Ketchikan, and then in Anchorage, and then down along the Pacific Northwest in places like Seattle and Portland.

Eventually a scout had caught their act in a shitty dive bar in LA. Man, they’d been so proud to have booked a gig in LA, and for good reason. It had been a big deal. One fuckin’ show in LA, and they’d gotten a contract. That was during their junior year of high school, when they were just barely sixteen. They quit high school to move to LA, spent a year recording a debut album while finishing their GEDs—that was Dad’s stipulation for letting them go, they had to get their diplomas before they could start touring.

There’d been talk even then, before their first album was cut, of national and even international tours. They were destined for the big time, and always had been. A tour co-headlining with a fairly well known band like Beartooth could have really catapulted them into the spotlight.

And they’d bailed on that to come back here.

Brock’s words from earlier came back to haunt me: the twins have to skip an entire year of touring…we knew we had to come back…wasn’t really much choice, not for any of us…

Fuck.

The twins didn’t need the money, they needed the touring experience and the spotlight on their talent.

Canaan was the more serious of the twins, and it was Canaan who leaned against me and wrapped a wiry arm around my shoulders. “Listen, big brother. We’ve been touring for more than two years. I’ve lost count of how many shows we’ve done, how many cities we’ve been to. Cutting the tour short wasn’t just about the will. It wasn’t even entirely about being here to help you out, so don’t get all caught up in feeling like some kind of goddamn martyr, okay? We were approaching burnout.”

Corin cut in without missing a beat. “We needed the time off. We recorded the album and then went right to touring and we haven’t slowed down since. We needed a fuckin’ break.”

I shook my head. “Bullshit. You guys were on the verge of really breaking out big. You need another album. You need—”

Canaan interrupted me. “All respect, Bast, but shut the fuck up. Since when are you a music industry expert? You’re not. This is our band, our career. And we choose to be here. If we’re sacrificing a little momentum to be here, then so be it. We can get it back.”