“Well,” he begins, and I realize now that I'm paralyzed, that I can't drag my eyes from his. I should be kneeing him in the balls right now, watching him suffer with glee, but instead I'm standing here and breathing in the smoke from his joint, gazing at him like one of his stupid groupies. Fuck me sideways. “I know that I love that kid. I know for sure, even without meeting 'em. I mean, with you as a mother and me as a father, how could we go wrong?” Turner tries to grin, but it falls flat. He's trying to come across as self-assured, but it isn't working. He's nervous right now, and he's thinking too much and too hard. My guess is that he's been thinking about this non-stop since I told him. “And I'd do anything for love.”
I swallow hard.
“But you know,” he begins as his fingers finally touch my skin, clamp around my bicep and pull me close. “That you can never really quit the music.” He shrugs and tosses his joint into some bushes behind me. “But the rest of the stuff … ”
I want to tell him; I have to. Not for him, but for me. For that kid he's so obsessed with that doesn't exist anymore, the one that I kind of wish still did.
“Meet me after the show,” I say as I make the second hardest decision of my life and step back, drawing my arm from Turner's grip and finding myself icy cold in the middle of all this desert heat. “Meet me after the show and I'll tell you everything.”
After talking to Naomi, I feel like I'm having an out of body fucking experience, floating above myself and wondering how I've let my life get the way it is. I have the chance and the opportunity to have everything, and yet, I still have nothing. I've had sex with over a hundred girls (I stopped fucking counting a long time ago), but I've never had a girlfriend. Never. Not once. Naomi makes me wonder what I'm missing out on at the same time she pisses me off and makes me see red. She's interesting, that's what it is. I find her so fascinating that I want to grab her and keep hold, make her mine just so I can see what it is she's gonna do next, even if I hate it, even if it pisses me off. And I don't even know her. I wonder if that has anything to do with it, if maybe after I get to know her that she'll be less interesting. See, the thing is, I have no experience with which to base this shit on.
So I convince myself that maybe I should find out and head back to the bus to slip on a hoodie. I hide in the back of the crowd, and I watch as Amatory Riot heads onstage, letting my eyes follow Naomi in her tight, black tank, her short shorts and her ripped tights. She's got on these steel-toed boots that look like they're meant to stomp the world into shreds, and I can tell that the crowd likes her, maybe even more than that skinny bitch at the mic. What's her name?
I cross my arms over my chest and let a smile slither across my face as Knox slips her guitar over her head and hits it, drawing the crowd – myself included – into the music so fast that it makes their heads spin. She bites her lip and she sweats so hard that she's splattering the crowd with moisture as she flings that axe around and destroys them. And when she does sing, her voice nearly overwhelms Skinny up there, and I know without a doubt that if she wanted to, she could steal the show same way she did when she challenged me.
My smile turns into a fat ass grin as I lean back against the wall and slip my hand down to the waistband of my pants. It's dark and crowded and sweaty in here, and I guarantee that I'm not the only one doing this. My fingers sneak open the button and fly on my pants, hidden beneath the baggy folds of the sweatshirt. When I finally get a good grip on my cock, a groan escapes me, melting into the collective moans of the crowd as they eat up the music, the words.
“Soaked in your betrayal, drenched with pain and disbelief, I wander. At first I walk, but then I run because I can't stand being here even a second longer. With you. With you. But most especially without you.”
I stroke the length of my shaft with strong fingers, using the sweat from my heated body to glide up and down with long, slow strokes, just the way I'd like to do to Naomi. God, I wish I could remember what she felt like beneath me that night, if things would be different if I could remember. I doubt that, Turner. You would have smiled at her and kissed her goodbye, tossed her a T-shirt and said have a good life. Count yourself lucky that you stumbled out of there before she woke up. I squeeze my dick harder and try to focus on the here and now. Like I said, fuck the past.
Naomi's desert eyes start out dry, but after the first song, they're moist as fuck, lit up by the wetness that leaks down her face and betrays the tight set of her jaw, the straightness of her knees, the screams that burst from her throat as she riles the crowd into a frenzy so powerful that I get swept away and have to button up my pants, climbing into the mass and getting into the music in a way I haven't been able to for a long, long time.