Page 24 of Beneath the Burn

Jay strode out of the airport terminal and choked on the humid Missouri air.

“Damn, dude. Seriously.” Laz zigzagged behind him, veering around the flow of pedestrians. “Slow it down a notch. Or ten.”

“Didn’t ask you to come.” He whistled at an approaching taxi, and it stopped at the curb.

“And miss watching you try to romance the girl who’s turned you into a faggot?” Laz held the cab door open and waved Jay inside, smiling like an asshole.

“Fuck off.” Jesus, he was wound tight, but he hadn’t seen Charlee in two months. How would she react to him seeing him? After all the unanswered voicemail messages, he could guess.

They slid into the cab, and Jay directed the driver to Kilroy Tattoo.

“I’m just here for the tat.” Christ, he needed to see her. “We’ll barely have enough time to finish it and fly back to L.A. for tonight’s show.” The ink on his back tingled. For the first time in twenty years, helookedat his scars when he took his shirt off. Not only that, sometimes he took his shirt offjustto look.

“You flew eighteen hundred miles on a redeye to get a tat?” Laz’s eyes danced. “Come on, man. Just admit you’re a lovestruck chump.”

Jay stared out the window but could only see her pearlescent blue eyes. He wasn’t lovestruck. It went so much deeper than that. Somehow she’d managed to dig her needles into his scarred up mind and leave them there where he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Maybe it was infatuation that first night, but all the nights since had burned into a heartsick, soul-saving kind of love. The kind of love chumps like him wrote songs about.

“Listen.” Laz shifted in the seat beside him. “The guys and I have been talking.”

He groaned. It was his preface for the lay-off-the-drugs speech. “Save your breath. I’ve been clean for over two months.”

Two months without his unhealthy coping strategies. Two months without setting off emotional triggers. Two months living clean, normal, and deserving of Charlee. And along the way, he’d decided she wasn’t just a cure. She was the secret fucking ingredient to happiness.

“That’s just it,” Laz said. “The smack, the self-loathing lyrics, the angsty sex…don’t look at me like that. The girls talk. The point is it’s all mellowed since you met Miss St. Louis. Since you won’t let me see the tat, I got to know. Was it her soul-piercing artwork or her brain-sucking pussy—”

“Jesus. I didn’t fuck her.”

“That might be true, seeing how you’ve lost your will to fuck at all.”

He stared at the roof of the cab. He hadn’t had sex since that night in St. Louis, and he couldn’t blame it on a limp dick. No, that organ worked just fine…when he thought about the pixie with huge blue eyes.

“I didn’t tag along to scold you, man. I’m here to help you catch your girl.” Laz’s hair stuck up every which way, and his eyebrows hopped behind his aviator glasses. Laz couldn’t scold if he tried.

“My girl? My encounter with her was so brief, I’m not sure I could even consider her an acquaintance.” He hoped his eyes impressed the words his heart rejected.

“Bullshit. What aboutHuntress?”

A prickling sensation stiffened his spine. “What about it?”

Laz clutched his chest, cleared his throat, and belted, “Huntress of the room in my head. Fearless and knowing. Your blue eyes plunder the depths of my song. Tonight is only the beginning.”

And that was the consequence of having no separation between his soul and his lyrics. “Don’t knock it, douche bag. It’s our bestselling single.” The song he wrote the night he met Charlee. Lucky fucking break. A record promoter caught wind of it, came to a live show to hear it, and ran with it.

“That song is carried by the brilliant guitar solo, my friend.”

He smiled. There wasn’t a musician on the planet who could shred a diminished chord in lowered fifth as drugging and eerie as Laz Bromwell. “Ah yes, the charms of the devil’s note.”

“And someday soon, women everywhere will cluster in overcrowded arenas chantingBromwell note.” He cupped his mouth. “Raaaaah.Bromwell note.With their shirts off, of course.”

“Of course.”

They shared a look, one born in high school where they met over a clutter of scrawled lyrics in a clichéd garage. Neither of them hid their expressions, their smiles overflowing with equal measures of excitement and uncertainty.

The driver slowed the cab. “Kilroy Tattoo.”

Laz paid the fare and twisted on the seat to look him in the eye. “Let’s go get the girl. And try not to fuck it up.”

He gripped the door handle. “Tone down the battle cry. I’m pretty sure there’s a boyfriend.”

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