Page 63 of Naughty Dreams
Her initial glance toward Roy said she was being polite, offering even though he wasn’t a band member. A second glancemade her a little more enthusiastic about the idea. DJ didn’t blame her.
DJ kindly declined on their behalf, since Roy’s tight jaw and G’s sardonic smile didn’t bode well for their responses. DJ chatted the girl up, letting her put together a sandwich from the room service cart and take some chocolate-covered strawberries with her. Then he gave G a nod, and she escorted her out.
The control he’d held onto until she departed snapped. It also took his common sense with it, because DJ pinned Roy with a don’t-fuck-with-me-right-now look. “Yeah, I know. You’re not paid to protect a self-destructive asshole. You could have stepped out and let me deal with it. Except I’m the client. It’s a rock and a hard place. Poor you.”
Roy’s eyes narrowed. “Are you done?”
He needed to wash the blood and peroxide smell off his hands. DJ moved into his own bathroom to do that. He had no desire to return to Tal’s and see the several empty baggies and alcohol bottles, or inhale the smell of things that couldn’t be ignored.
He braced his hands on the bathroom counter and looked into the mirror. Roy stood in the doorway.
“Tal isn’t going to hurt me.”
“You’re smarter than that. When he’s on that junk, if he thought either of you was the spider, he’d have bashed your heads in or hurt you worse with the bottle. If you tell him you’ll cut him loose if he doesn’t get help, and you fucking mean it, he’ll do it to hold onto you. If he doesn’t, you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”
“You ought to make that your company slogan. You’d double your customers overnight.” DJ turned to face him. “I’ve told you how I feel about this.”
“Yeah. You’re a family. Have you considered the rest of your family? Steve and Pete, Moss, your roadies and techs, what you owe them?”
“Gee, no. That’s not something I think about every minute of every fucking day,” DJ said sarcastically.
“Then act like it.”
Rage and frustration boiled over. DJ barely stopped himself from taking a swing at the tower of self-righteous control in front of him.
He could see Roy recognized it. But he also realized they’d moved into far-too-personal swamp water, offshore from where Roy knew they were supposed to be. He took a physical step back, and when he spoke, his voice was even. “I apologize. I’m your bodyguard, not your conscience or parent.”
“But you are more than my bodyguard.” Roy may have stepped back, but DJ wouldn’t let him step back that far. Roy was his lover and the man DJ wanted to be his Master.
Tal was eventually going to do something awful, something DJ couldn’t fix. When it happened, DJ would face a million reporters shoving microphones in his face, wetting themselves with joy about a high-ratings tragedy story that the world would forget in a handful of days, while it would haunt DJ for the rest of his life.
After all that, if he had Roy, he’d have somewhere to go, someone to go to. That might give him the strength to handle it, and to hope he’d be able to learn to live with not knowing what the right decision was until it was too late.
Somewhere during that wishful thinking internal diatribe, he’d closed the distance between them and had his fists on the lapels of Roy’s jacket. Roy’s hands had landed on his hips to hold him there, and were gripping him tight, the conflict in his touch clear. Neither pulling DJ closer nor pushing him away.
“Take a breath,” Roy ordered.
DJ did, and it came with a self-administered slap in the face. What right did he have to put all that on Roy? They barely knew one another, and he was looking at him as an emotional safety net. Fuck, DJ wasn’t that much of a selfish asshole. He hoped.
The deep breath felt like cut glass. He stepped back, letting Roy go. “You’re right. This part of my life, it doesn’t involve you, nor should it.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Fuck, I’m tired, and the band has to be on a plane to Denver while I do the charity thing at Atlanta Mission.”
“Dory…”
DJ shook his head. “Let’s just leave it for now. Okay? I’m going to get some sleep. Then I’ll pull Tal together and get him to the airport.”
As he brushed past Roy, he resisted the urge to stop and bury his face in his shoulder, grab hold of his rock solid body and let it steady him. But he had to take care of his bandmates, which meant standing on his own two feet.
A few hours later, he’d gotten Tal into the limo and they were headed for the private airfield. His bandmate had on his dark glasses and was slumped down, rocking a bottle of Jack on his thigh. DJ wasn’t sure alcohol qualified as hair of the dog for a drug hangover, but he remained quiet until they got closer to the airfield. Because he was thinking. Thinking hard.
“Do you remember the girl last night, Tal?” he asked. “Sabrina?”
“Sabrina?” Tal rubbed his eyes under the shades. The fortunately closed bottle rolled to the floor. “I remember…fuck, she had a mouth. Was she the one with the beautiful tits? I came all over them. Blonde? Uh…blue eyes. Yeah. Blue eyes.”
“Blue eye shadow. Eyes were brown. Do you remember throwing a bottle at her head? Or breaking off another one and threatening her with it?”
Tal sat straight up, even though the move made him wince and twitch in an alarmingly seizure-like way. “Shit. Did I hurt her?”
“Some of the glass caught her face, but she was okay.”
