Page 11 of Accidental Baby For My Brother’s Best Friend

I send a thumbs up emoji to signify that I’ve read the change and call Axel, noting that his contact icon on my phone is a dumb picture of him with his tongue out, holding up just his index and pinky finger in the universal rocker sign.

Axel Jermaine is about the closest to a stereotypical rock star that I’ve ever worked with, and that includes the time I played drums for Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band back in Tucson when they were on tour in 2018. I guess Bob is mellow compared to what he might have been if I’d been old enough to drum for him back in the ‘70s, but nevertheless, Axel puts him and his band to shame on a regular Tuesday.

Axel answers on the third ring.

“Finally!” His words are slurred just around the edges, so he must be sobering up, thank God. I didn’t want him puking on the ride back here.

“Some of us sleep, Ax. You need a ride, yeah?”

“Please, I’ve been sitting outside this strip club for like three hours now and the cops keep circling around. They probably think I’m a bum.”

I sigh and pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers.

“Axel, please don’t antagonize the cops. If you get arrested, Gemma will-”

“Gemma can do whatever she wants to me,” Axel answers and maybe he’s more drunk than I think.

I open my mouth and then shut it again, taking a breath through my nostrils.

“Send me your location, dumbass. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I hang up without waiting for his response, and despite his inebriation, Axel sends me his location and I make it there within half an hour. I don’t have the world’s best sense of direction and the GPS signal keeps going out.

I feel a jab of worry when I see Axel standing by himself outside the club, leaning up against the brick. The last time I saw Axel, he was with Jackson, and now he’s alone.

They can take care of themselves,I remind myself. But with Jackson, it’s a little different.

When I first met Jackson, three years ago, the first ten times we hung out, he was always at least a little drunk. Eventually, he straightened out and only drank after shows instead of daily, but since I know he has a tendency to slip back into the bottle when things are stressful, I can’t deny that this trip worries me a little.

Axel whoops when he sees me. Swaying a little on his feet, he hops into the car the hotel kindly let me borrow and I grin at him. There’s always a possibility that stress or a broken heart or something else will rattle one of us enough to go off the rails, but I know I can count on Axel toalwaysbe off the rails, and there’s an odd comfort in that.

His head lolls against the back of the Camaro’s leather seat as he looks over at me with glassy eyes but with a smile on his face, as always. He smells awful, an odd mix of tequila, cigar smoke, and women’s perfume.

“Good thing we don’t have a show tonight,” Axel comments thickly and I keep the car idling, looking around.

“Where’s Jack?” I finally ask when Axel doesn’t indicate that we should wait.

“Oh, he went home with a leggy brunette when the club closed at four.” Axel’s voice sounds extremely nonchalant and it irritates me, especially since Axel was around when Jackson wasn’t doing so well.

“Don’t you think you should be keeping a better eye on him?”

Axel snorts. “Sorry,dad.”

I roll my eyes. Axel clearly isn’t sober enough to have an adult conversation about this, and even if he were, I don’t think I’d get the response I want, not now.

Axel can be surprisingly level-headed when it comes to the band, despite how much he parties, and when I approached him a few months after I joined the band about how Jackson might be spiraling, he’d been instrumental in scheduling a meeting and talking to Jackson. He stopped offering to buy him drinks, kept a good eye on him. We all did.

I guess the difference is that I still do, and Axel seems to have switched places with Jackson from a few years ago—I worry that, behind the scenes, he might be drowning. I know that I can come off as cold, but inwardly, I worry about my friends.

“Everything good with you?” I ask idly, hoping that it sounds nonchalant.

“Five by five,” Axel responds, which is his standard response, but he usually only uses it when referring to amps or how his guitar sounds, not anything personal. In fact, lately, Axel doesn’t talk about anything personal at all. Not that any of us ever has, really. In a group of guys that are also rock musicians, there isn’t a whole lot of talk about feelings.

I’m not so sure everything is five by five with Axel, but he clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, closing his eyes and sleeping on the half hour trip back to the hotel. He manages to get to his room on his own, but I follow him up to his floor nonetheless.

He doesn’t complain that I’m watching out for him like he usually would - after all, it’s not like we’re more than a few years apart in age.

Axel stops at the door of his hotel room, grabbing onto the doorjamb as if for support and turning to look at me.

“Thanks, Locke,” he says softly, and for a moment, I think I should ask him what’s wrong again, find out what’s going on, but then he walks inside and shuts the door.

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