Looking At Forever (The Rock Gods Book 4) (23 page)

Alex’s eyes burned into Wheland. He was about to speak again and Wheland shut him down a second time. Alex leaned closer to Rooster, but his angry glare never left Wheland. “Deal with your fucking boyfriend. I don’t have time for this shit.”

A moment later, Alex spun on his heels and stalked off.

Wheland knew that look and he also knew he’d be paying for this later, but right now he needed to get this shit finished with Trina once and for all. Wheland’s eyes flicked to Rooster. He saw him take a step forward and Wheland held up a hand.

“Sonny, please. I need a few minutes,” Wheland said. His tone was less abrasive from the one he’d used on Alex, but it was still tight, like he might explode any second.

“Let’s get something to eat,” Rooster said to Wheland.

Wheland shook his head. “I lost my appetite. Eat without me.”

“Is he your life partner?” Trina asked.

“Why the fuck would you assume that?” Wheland said, his gaze slamming back to Trina.

“Alex used the word boyfriend,” Trina said.

“Does that offend you?” Wheland asked, almost hoping it did just so he could have another reason to hate her.

Wheland stared at her with his nostrils flaring, as if fire might start shooting from them like a dragon. He wanted to snap her neck in to tiny pieces and watch her bleed out all over the floor. Several other ideas came to mind, too, and all just as irrational as the others. Truth was, his fucked-up youth had nothing to do with Trina and deep down he knew that. Even still, didn’t he have the right to blame her for ripping open the wound when she brought the truth to his attention?

“Your sexuality obviously wouldn’t matter to me, considering the charities I working for, and also... never mind,” Trina said.

“News flash, Trina. I don’t give a flying fuck what you think of me or who I sleep with,” Wheland said.

Wheland pushed himself off the concrete wall. He stepped back from Trina and rubbed at the tension in his face. Rooster was at his side now; a firm hand resting on his shoulder and squeezing the tight muscle.

“Hi. I’m Trina. Mick’s half-sister.”

Rooster glanced at Wheland, then to Trina. He took her slender hand and shook it. “Sonny Roostarelli,” he said.

“By the look on your face, I’m guessing you’re just learning about me,” Trina said to Rooster. “I’ll leave so he can explain it all to you.” She took two steps then turned to face Wheland again. “It doesn’t have to be like this between us, Mick. Regardless of what you believe, I’m not the enemy.”

Wheland couldn’t look at her. He still wasn’t able to speak. He remained frozen in place with his eyes cast to the floor. Rooster moved behind him and slid his arms around Wheland’s waist; his chin dropped to Wheland’s shoulder. Wheland’s body was stiff and unyielding until he felt Rooster’s warm breath on his neck.

“I’m here for you,” is all Rooster had to say, and Wheland’s entire body relaxed against him.

“Fuckkkk,” Wheland sighed.

Rooster turned Wheland in his arms and held the sides of his face. “Are you okay?”

Wheland nodded, his eyes shimmering with emotion. “I... I should probably tell you about... Trina.”

“When you’re ready, babe,” Rooster said.

Wheland wrapped his arms around Rooster and rolled his face into the warmth of his neck. The heat and scent of Rooster’s skin was like a soothing elixir.

“I’m sorry,” Wheland whispered.

“For what?” Rooster asked.

“I should have told you about my... family sooner,” Wheland said. “I wanted to, and there were so many times I almost did, but...”

Rooster held Wheland’s head again. “Mick, I’m not upset about it. I figured when you were ready, you’d tell me. If not, that was okay, too.”

“I want to, I mean, I
need
to tell you,” Wheland said. His eyes went to his wristwatch. “We go on first tonight,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of time.”

“That’s okay,” Rooster said. “We can talk after the show.”

Wheland took Rooster’s hand and tugged him from the alcove. They walked about twenty feet and rounded a corner, then stepped in to Wheland’s dressing room. Once inside, Wheland locked the door. The room was a small rectangle with a couch, coffee table, two chairs, and a metal wardrobe rack with several shirts and pants belonging to Wheland hanging from the pole. Two guitars sat in stands beside the couch and another guitar was still in its case.

Rooster took a seat on the couch and watched Wheland pace.

“Babe, we really don’t have to talk about this now,” Rooster said.

“I want to,” Wheland said. “Really, I do. I need to get this off my chest.”

Wheland took a seat in a chair facing Rooster. He rested his elbows on his thighs and covered his face with his hands. He tried to think of the best place to start, wasn’t sure exactly what he should include or not; everything was so fucked up.

“My childhood sucked,” Wheland said.

“It does for most kids,” Rooster said.

“Well, I lived a hellish existence with an... absentee father and a drunk for a mother. My father came around frequently enough to knock her up. Beyond that, he wasn’t good for much else.”

Wheland leaned back in the chair and finger combed his hair using both hands. “The day I hit your car, I was on my way to get drunk so I wouldn’t have to acknowledge a... certain anniversary. The memories I had of being a kid weren’t great. The few good details I might have had, Trina took them all away.”

“How so?” Rooster asked.

Wheland shifted in his chair. “About fourteen years ago, Trina showed up at one of Ivory Tower’s early performances in downtown L.A. Somehow she got backstage, found me, and proceeded to tell me who my father really was. I wanted to believe it was all lies but, when I confronted my mother she confirmed it all.”

“What’d she say, Mick?”

Wheland looked up at Rooster and held his breath. “Turns out my parents were never married. Trina was the one to clue me in on that piece of family history. They couldn’t marry because he was
already
married to some rich bitch, debutante on the east coast. Apparently the
wife’s
family was loaded with money and well connected to all the wealthy families up and down the eastern seaboard. There was no way that coward was going to leave the cash cow to marry his mistress. Why would he? He had it made. Best of both worlds!”

“Was he with your mother before he married the debutante?” Rooster asked.

Wheland shook his head. “No, my mother came along after he was married. My father traveled a lot for work and apparently he met my mom when she was working as a cocktail waitress. It didn’t take long for her to get pregnant with me. Knowing her, she did it on purpose to try and trap the stupid fuck. When she demanded they get married, my father told her he was already married. Surprise!”

“She didn’t know he was already married?” Rooster asked.

“She told me no, but I’d be the last person to know the truth,” Wheland said. “Knowing you’re knocked up by a married man would have turned most women away, but not my mother. Nope, instead she continued to be his whore on the side, took child support money from him when he remembered to send it to her and in reality, that money probably came from his wife’s family fortune! And the whole time my shit-for-brains mother kept listening to his lies about getting divorced. Every time he’d leave after fucking her, she’d have her head in the clouds thinking one day we’d all live together and be the perfect family. You have no idea how many times I heard that bullshit story. She was like a broken record with her pipe dreams. This went on for years. He’d breeze in for a night – or a weekend, if my mother was lucky, and I’d be stuck watching cartoons while the dirt bag fucked her into the mattress. There was never any father-son stuff. I hardly even knew the guy.”

“Trina looks to be about your age,” Rooster said.

“I’m a few months older than her,” Wheland said. “Do the math. That means my father had his wife
and
his mistress pregnant at the same time. How’s that for husband of the year? Seven years after I was born, my mother had twins by this asshole.”

Rooster shook his head in shock. “Jesus, Mick. I’m sorry you went through that.”

“I didn’t know any of it at the time. All I knew was I had a father that was never around, not unlike most of the friends I had at the time. We all came from broken families,” Wheland said. “It was Trina who shed light on all the family secrets when she came to my show. Imagine meeting your half-sister at nineteen and learning your father had another whole family, a well off family? While we were struggling to get by, that prick was feeding his other family using silver spoons. That’s a lot to swallow, even for a nineteen year old.”

“That was unfair, Mick.”

“Trina celebrated birthdays with ponies on a lawn that bordered the ocean and Christmas holidays with a huge extended family, while we had... pretty much nothing. After Trina came to see me, I Googled her family. Her last name should have been Kennedy or Roosevelt, for Christ sakes. Hell, they probably socialized with them!”

Wheland grew silent and Rooster waited for more of the story.

“Everything changed after Trina introduced herself to me,” Wheland said. “That’s when things really went to shit.”

“What do you mean?” Rooster asked.

“The reason Trina came to my show, was to tell me my dad had died,” Wheland said. “There were some papers in the lockbox with his important stuff explaining he was the biological father to me, and the twins. Trina was there to tell me her mother was refusing to continue paying for the bastard kids my father left behind.”

“Fuckkkk,” Rooster sighed.

“That meant, my mother was being cut off from any future child support,” Wheland said. “I was nineteen by then, so the support wasn’t for me, but the twins, they were only twelve.”

Wheland stopped talking again. A full minute passed that felt more like an hour.

“I had to be the one to tell my mother about my dad. About a week later, she got a letter from my father’s estate in the mail detailing no further payments would be made. My mother wanted to fight it in court, but I talked her out of it. That meant at the age of nineteen, I had to man up and figure out a way to support her drunken ass and the twins.”

“How did you do it?” Rooster asked.

“At first, I had no clue,” Wheland said. “Ivory Tower wasn’t exactly a household name back then and I had no other source of income.”

“It sounds like an enormous amount of stress,” Rooster said.

“There were some pretty bleak days, that’s for sure,” Wheland said. “Then, I started working odd jobs, in addition to the band and gave the money to my mom to help with the twins.

Wheland’s mind started swirling with the memory of Trina’s visit to his show all those years ago. He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers into the sockets. In so many ways he wished she’d never stopped by to tell him about his dad and the shitty lie they were all living. There could be no going back to change it now, and he sure has hell had made the best of it; somehow polishing the shit pile to make it shine. But that didn’t erase the memory from his head.

Wheland remembered the cold chill that swept over him when he and Trina left the club that night. He somehow sensed how irrevocably things would be changing for him. The life he had known up to this point was over. Just like that. At the age of nineteen, instead of planning for the next gig, hook-up, or an after show party, Wheland was left with the very adult burden of figuring out how to financially help support his alcoholic mother and twelve year old twin brother and sister. What the fuck did he know about that?

“They cut me off,” his mother had cried to Wheland. “You have to help me feed these kids!”

It wasn’t Wheland’s fault his father was a loser, posing as a man of money simply because he married into a well-to-do family with ties that ran deep into the ultra-rich social scene. How the man had time to set-up his mistress and young son on the West Coast and still live the life he apparently did with his half-sister’s mother on the other side of the country was beyond Wheland’s comprehension. Ironic how his father had managed to knock-up his wife, and his mistress, within months of each other. Wheland’s birth was their first mistake, which led to a second and bigger mistake when his mother gave birth to the twins.