The Bad Boys of Summer Anthology(186)

She blushes and my heart skips a beat. No, no, no. This is so very wrong. I can’t be attracted to this girl. This sister of the woman I’ve spent the last twelve months wanting, hating, fixated on, avoiding. She’s hot, but she is not for me. My life is so fucking messed up right now. Mel DiLorenzo is like adding TNT to a raging fire. Explosions of epic proportions are guaranteed.

Just then, Tammy walks up. “So you’re not hitting on my little sister, are you, Joss?” she asks with an edge to her voice that makes me want to tell her to fuck off.

“You know, Tammy, unlike a lot of people in this business, I don’t go around looking to put notches on my bedpost. I’m actually a one-woman kind of guy.”

Tammy looks uncomfortable, but then she smiles at Mel and ignores my remark. “Get your stuff packed up and let’s go, Little D. I want to take you shopping before we leave. You need some rock and roll touring clothes.” Mel laughs and Tammy flounces off without a backwards look at me.

“So you’ve got a serious girlfriend then?” Mel asks as she hoists her camera bag on her shoulder.

“No,” I say honestly. “I just made a deal with the devil and now I have to pay the price.”



I’m not sure when I started to think I was in love with Tammy DiLorenzo.

Maybe it was the day we were fifteen and Lucy Madison had just dumped my ass. Tammy showed up at my house with the keys to her dad’s truck and a six-pack of PBR she’d stolen from his basement fridge. We took the truck, driving without licenses, went to the old cement factory pond, and spent the afternoon jumping off the rocks in our clothes and drinking weak-ass beer. Without even saying it in words, she told me I was a good guy, someone girls wanted to spend time with, someone worth her time. She soothed my stinging heart and kept me from brooding over a rejection I might have otherwise. I decided that day that no girl would ever break my heart again unless she was every bit as cool as Walsh’s girl.

Or maybe it was the day she stood next to me at my mother’s grave, the Portland air sagging with moisture that mirrored the heaviness in my heart. Tammy gently took my hand as I stared at the fresh mound of dirt and said, “If I have a son someday, I want him to be like you. I’ve never seen a guy who cared for his mother the way you did, Joss. As a woman, I thank you for that.”

Or maybe it was six months after my mom’s funeral, when Tammy and I stood in a filthy gas station bathroom as I held Walsh around the waist while he was doubled over, vomiting blood on the floor. Tammy watched, eyes huge, tears streaming down her face as she talked on the phone. First she called 911 for an ambulance and then she made the arrangements for him to be admitted to Cedar Valley rehab center.

He had been drinking for twelve straight hours, even after being told he had a bleeding ulcer. He’d passed out in an alley behind a club after a concert, and it had taken us two hours to find him. When we did, his shirt was shredded, his wallet was gone, and his face was a fucking mess. We sobered him up enough to get him back on the tour bus, and then he started drinking again. Three hundred miles later, we stood with him in that bathroom, his girlfriend and his best friend, and we knew that, if we didn’t stop him, he was going to die.

Tammy and I went to hell and back with Walsh. Maybe that’s why I thought I was in love with her. Maybe I wanted to be in love with her because she loved him and he was all I had left in this world by then. I don’t know, but at some point, it all got tangled in my mind. I couldn’t discern between loving him, loving her, and loving me. We were knotted together in his pain, and the right kind of love, the brotherly love I’d always had for her, became something wrong. Once I turned that corner, I couldn’t seem to find my way back.

A week after we pulled him from the edge, Walsh was in the hospital getting treated for the ulcer and drying out. I sat with him for hours every day, trying to keep his mind off what he was doing. They kept him on medications that made the transition easier on his body, but no one could help what it did to his mind. The depression set in, and this guy, this brother of mine who had always been the happy one, the light one, the outgoing one, was now barely able to lift his head.

I remember one night I was dozing in the chair by his bed. Tammy had gone home to grab a change of clothes because she was usually the one who stayed overnight. I woke up to hear Walsh sobbing in the darkness.

“Walsh? Hey, are you in pain? Do I need to call the nurse?”

He hiccupped a few times as he tried to get himself under control. “No, man, it’s not that kind of pain. But it hurts, Joss. It hurts so fucking bad. How do you stand this? How do you stand feeling like this all the time?”

“Like what, Walsh?”

“Unhappy, man. Just fucking unhappy.”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ve never been all that happy, so I don’t have anything to compare to.”

“Yeah.” He sniffed. “Well, I’ll tell ya, if you’ve felt it, you’ll do anything to get it back. Even drink yourself to death. Nothing beats being happy.”

After that, he fell back asleep, and the next day he went into rehab. We never talked about it again, but if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have had a different answer for him. I’d have told him that I might not have ever been that happy, but I’d also never been that sad. The sad didn’t come until later. Until I slept with Tammy—and betrayed myself, and her, and Walsh. Until I got the love all scrambled in my brain and in my heart and had no love left for anyone, especially not for me.





Chapter Six

Mel



The night after I’ve been to Studio B to meet the guys, I sit in the completely overdone guest suite at Tammy and Walsh’s house on the big king-sized bed and look through the day’s photos on my laptop. I scroll past pictures of the band standing around Tammy, her long dark hair falling alongside her face as she bends over a paper Mike is holding, photos of the sound tech’s hand adjusting dials and buttons, and pictures of Walsh watching the love of his life as she talks to the guys. Then comes the final group, a series of photos of Joss during the afternoon meeting.

I zoom in on them one at a time, looking at the sheer male beauty that is Joss Jamison. The structure of his face is like a work of art, the planes and angles so geometrically perfect that he’s a flesh and blood sculpture. His golden skin fits across his bones like a glove, a piece of satin stretched taut. His dark blond hair is the perfect length, not long enough to be feminine but long enough to attract all things feminine.

In most of the photos he is looking down at his iPad. He wrote on it throughout the meeting, his brow furrowed in concentration, his lips parted slightly while he followed the stylus in his hand as it traveled across the screen.

In the midst of the series, there is one photo of Joss looking up to where Tammy and Walsh were sitting. I gasp in shock when I enlarge it to full screen because it shows me a glimpse of a man so torn asunder by pain and loneliness that it makes my own heart ache. The look on his face is sheer devastation, and his eyes are pools of despair. This is the rock star uncut. The man the fans never see. A man I never would have seen if I’d had my camera pointed a different direction or taken the photo a split second later.

I push the laptop to the side and lie down on the big bed, resting on my back, my right arm bent behind my head. My mind wanders to questions of what could make Joss Jamison so sad that he would mirror that kind of devastation. The beautiful, talented, sought-after man with fame and fortune and any woman he could possibly want at his beck and call. How does someone like him become so utterly bereft? I decide that one of the mysteries I will solve on this tour is the mystery of Joss. I want to know what makes him work as a human being, as a man, as a friend. I want to know what’s brought him such pain. And in the end? Some deep part of me wants to be the one to make it disappear.



Sunday comes quickly, and I find myself standing outside an enormous luxury bus, bags in hand, watching the chaos that is a rock band about to depart on tour. Tammy and Dave are running around, shouting like a couple of buskers at a carnival, and the guys are hanging out, leaning up against cars in the parking lot outside Studio B, where we’ve all met. Mike, Colin, and Walsh are eating doughnuts I brought them, and joking around with some of the crew. That is, until Tammy marches over and starts hollering at the roadies to get their asses in gear and load up their shit. Walsh laughs and tells them to take his word for it and do what she says.

Someone finally comes over and takes my bags from me to put them in the bus. Thankful to have use of my hands again, I make my way to the folding table that’s been set up with coffee and tea and grab a cup of Starbucks. I turn around just as a big black limo pulls up in the parking lot a couple of dozen feet from me. The driver hops out and walks around to the back passenger side just as Joss is stepping out. They chat for a moment and then the driver shakes Joss’s hand and they smile at one another.

As the driver goes to the trunk to get Joss’s bags out, I see Joss lean down into the open door of the car and talk to someone inside. Then he stands up and helps hand out a long-legged blonde wearing nothing but a mini-dress and fuck-me pumps. Her hair is a perfectly shiny curtain that hangs to her waist, and her breasts are so obviously fake that I almost spit out my coffee when I see them. How she keeps from tumbling over like a top-heavy cake, I don’t know.