Rock N Soul (28 page)

“Okay,” he said, sitting down on the rumpled bed. “Hurry up, though. I’m already bored.”

I rolled my eyes and turned on the TV for him, then took my shirt in the bathroom. I’d already showered once that day—like I could forget after what I’d learned about myself as a result of
that
shower—but I felt gross and I probably reeked of cigarette smoke from the bar, so another one wouldn’t hurt. I stripped out of my clothes and jumped in the shower, letting the water run over my skin and wash Brandon’s fingerprints off of me.

I did seriously consider jerking it in the shower again, but it didn’t seem quite right since . . . since whatever had just happened. Which was also fucking ridiculous. I’m not some kind of raging horndog or anything, but it wasn’t like I could be celibate for the rest of my life, especially if I was going to be faced with a famous sex icon in my room every morning.

I finished rinsing myself off and climbed out of the shower, then tied a towel around my waist and reached for my phone. Between the noise from the bathroom fan and the chatter of the TV, I hoped I could risk a quick call.

I tapped my fingers on the cheap laminate countertop beside the sink while I waited for Gemma to answer.

“Hi, Tyler,” she said. “Aren’t you in California?”

“Yeah,” I said, keeping my voice low just in case. “Hey . . . I have a favor to ask you.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

I took a deep breath and stared into my own eyes in the mirror. “I need you to do some research. Find some, you know, credible-sounding sources. As much as any source about ghosts can be credible, I guess.”

“I’ve been doing some research already. It seems like the whole clichéd unfinished business thing is the consensus, as far as I can tell. So you’re doing the right thing.”

“Yeah, well . . .” I sighed. “I need you to find out if, um, anyone’s ever touched one. And how they did it, you know?”

There was a beat too long of silence. “Oh,” she said. “I see.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I’m also going to need you not to
see
.”

“All right, all right,” she said, laughing a little. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I wish I knew what the hell I was doing.”

“Do you want me to do a reading for you? I just got a new tarot deck and I’ve been wanting to try it out.”

I thought about that for a second. On the one hand, yes, I absolutely wanted to know what the hell I was doing and what was going to happen. But on the other hand, I was sort of afraid of what cards would come up. I didn’t know much about tarot beyond what she’d told me before. Maybe there was a card called “Just a Heads-up that the Bellboy is Making Googly Eyes at You Behind Your Back” and if so, Chris really didn’t need to know that. His ego was too big to fit through standard doorways as it was. But still, if we were doing readings about Chris’s business, then he deserved to be in the room to hear it, so I’d just have to hope she wouldn’t pull any especially embarrassing cards to describe my feelings.

“Tyler?” Gemma prompted.

“Oh,” I said, blinking myself back into reality. “Um, sure. Can I hang up and call you again in a couple of minutes?”

“Okay. I’ll get my deck out and get ready.”

“Thanks.”

After I hung up with her, I finished drying off and making myself presentable, then started toward the door before I stopped and opened my toiletry bag. Chris’s ring was tucked inside and there was some other assorted jewelry in the bag too. I didn’t wear jewelry that often, but every once in a while I put some on, and there was a punk-looking chain necklace in there that I wore when I was trying to come across as badass. I pulled out the ring, threaded it onto the chain necklace, and then put it over my head and tucked it into my shirt.

Before I could change my mind about how ridiculously sappy that was, I made myself go out into the hotel room. Chris was sprawled on the dingy couch watching some action movie with a lot of motorcycles and explosions, and it really wasn’t fair how sexy he looked when I couldn’t do anything about it.

“Up for a long-distance tarot reading before we head out?” I tried to keep my voice normal.

“That could be useful, I guess,” he said, standing and giving me a lopsided smile. “By the way, that douche stole your lube.”

“Shit.” I glanced over toward the bed. “Well, I guess he can have it.” It wasn’t like I was going to be using it. Unfortunately.

Chris watched me for a few seconds. “Thanks,” he said, putting his hands in his jeans pockets. “For, you know, stopping.”

I shrugged. “No problem, man. I’ll call Gemma back, and she’ll help us figure out what we’re supposed to be doing.”

He sat back down on the couch, and I sat on the other end, keeping as much distance between us as I could manage. Touching or no touching, it would have felt kind of weird to sit close to him after whatever had just happened. Whatever that had been.

Now that he’d seen me naked, I wondered what he thought about me, how I stacked up to the others, but I couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t sound
way
more than five percent homo, which seemed to be the rule in this relationship. Or at least it was the rule in the spoken-out-loud part of the relationship, “I wish it was you” notwithstanding.

Shit. Maybe that rule was shot to hell now. Maybe we should up the percentage limit to twenty percent—even though to be honest, we were probably way past that too.

“What did you mean earlier?” Chris said. “When you asked if you could have saved me?”

I pulled out my phone and focused on the screen instead of on him. “Nothing.”

He angled his body toward me. “It’s going to bug me. Did you mean could you have done CPR or something?”

I sighed. “I meant . . . if I’d gotten to your room faster. Before you shot up. If I’d said fuck the seedless grapes and taken you the steak. I just wanted to know if I could have saved you.”

“Probably not,” he said after a moment. “I would have just shot up later.”

That was a bit of a punch to the gut even though I logically knew that’s probably what would have happened. “I guess dying is one way to kick the habit.”

“Yeah,” he said, then leaned back against the couch and looked up at the ceiling. “Probably not the
best
way, though. But I never really did what was best for me.”

I pulled up Gemma’s number and tried not to think about Chris’s body lying on the floor with blood on his arms. “I’m calling her now.”

She answered quickly. “Hi again.”

“I’m putting you on speaker,” I told her. “So Chris can hear you too.”

I pressed the speakerphone button and set the phone between us on the couch. The sound of shuffling cards came through the receiver and Gemma said, “Hi, Chris.”

“He says hi,” I said, even though he hadn’t. “So what’s the plan?”

“I figured I’d just do a basic reading,” she answered. “You know. Past, present, near future, ultimate outcome. And then something about what you want and what you’ll need going forward.”

“Can we leave out the ‘what you want’ part?” I asked, and Chris snapped his head up to look at me, but I refused to meet his eyes.

“Um, sure,” she said. “All right, so let’s do this.”

“What is it that you want, Tyler?” Chris said. He was still staring at me. I could feel it.

“Nothing she needs to know about,” I mumbled.

He seemed to accept that as a legitimate answer, which was good because like hell was I going to really get into it.

“Okay,” Gemma said. “So first. Your past.” There was a pause and the rustle of a flipping card. “Eight of Swords. That’s a card that means stagnation, being trapped.”

“Makes sense,” I said, “especially for Chris. Being as he was dead.” I looked up at him and corrected myself. “Still is dead. But I mean when he was dead and not a ghost yet.”

He smirked at me, and I made a face at him. Gemma continued, “Okay, the present. Page of Cups.”

“Wasn’t that what I drew for Chris before?” I asked her.

“No, that was the Knight of Cups. This is the Page. This one means the beginning of a journey.”

Chris said, “That’s a little on the nose, don’t you think?” at the same time I said it. I groaned, and Gemma asked what was going on.

“Nothing,” I told her. “We just said the ‘on the nose’ thing at the same time. It was gross. Okay, cool, next?”

“Well, let’s do what you need going forward first.” A flip of a card. “Tyler, you got Strength. So that’s what you’ll need going forward.” She paused. “It means more or less what you think it means. Be strong. Be brave. All that. But it also means that you need to have faith in yourself. To believe that you’re important, even if you don’t feel that way.”

Chris winked at me. “You’re important, dude. Don’t worry.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Chris says he’s a prick,” I told Gemma. “Next?”

“And for what you need, Chris,” she said. “The Eight of Cups. It’s a card about letting go of past relationships and finding happiness somewhere else.”

“Noted.” I looked at Chris and shrugged. He shrugged back. “Do you think that means you need to talk to Tori after all?”

He snorted. “No, I’m pretty sure Tori and I are not unfinished business. We were about as finished as you can get.”

There was no rush of dread when he said that like there had been the one time we’d talked about procrastinating on important things, so I decided he was telling the truth. “He says no, Gems. I’m guessing all of that will make sense when it’s important?”

“Hopefully,” she answered. “I mean, sometimes it doesn’t make sense until it’s all over. Hindsight and everything.”

“I guess that’s better than nothing,” I said.

“Okay, so near future.”

While we waited for her to flip the cards, I smiled at Chris, getting a smile back that made my blood race more than I wanted to admit.

“The Lovers,” she said, then kept talking really quickly. “That doesn’t necessarily mean romantic love. Kind of like how Death almost never means death? I read the Lovers as a choice card. You’re going to have to make a choice.”

Chris frowned at the phone. “What choice?”

I repeated the question to Gemma, and she responded, “I don’t know. But it will be a big one. And a hard one to make. But after that . . .” The sound of a card flipping again, then nothing.

“Okay, I’m really not liking the ominous silence when you flip a ‘future’ card,” I told her, trying to infuse my voice with a stern edge.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t know what to tell you. See, I do this thing where I use a blank card. Remember when Chris said that one of the cards I held up was just a list of contact information?”

“Yeah, I remember. So what does that mean? Basically ‘Hell if I know’?”

“Pretty much,” she admitted. “It’s a blind spot. Something that we can’t see for some reason. It could be because the Lovers’ choice will make a difference on what happens.”

Or it could be that Chris would be gone, and the cards couldn’t see into the afterlife. Somehow that made more sense to me than the easier explanation that we just didn’t know yet. And the possibility that the cards knew he was going to be leaving turned the acid in my stomach to ice.

“Well, those are the cards,” Gemma said. “I’ll do some more readings and I’ll keep up my research and keep you posted, okay?”

I thanked her and hung up, then smiled at Chris with a little more cheer than I actually felt. “Well, that wasn’t terribly helpful. Ready to go to the movie?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Lead on.”

We headed back into the dark that had fallen over the city. And if, while we walked, our fingers stretched out toward each other like they didn’t understand that they couldn’t touch, neither of us mentioned it.

The next morning, we got up early and went downstairs for the hotel’s crappy free breakfast. The east-facing windows of the hotel lobby were too bright to look at, so I found a table in the corner of the lobby that faced away from them and sat down to eat rubbery eggs and weirdly dry sausage. None of the other guests had come down for breakfast—which probably should have tipped me off about the quality—and the desk clerk was nowhere to be seen, so I didn’t worry too much about being overheard while Chris and I talked.

We knew Eric was in town. He had a house in Los Angeles where he stayed while he wasn’t touring, and he was there now. I’d made sure of that before I booked the trip—entertainment news was good for something after all. But I had no idea how I was going to get in to see him. Chris, of course, was no help.

“Just text him,” he said as he watched me eat. “Tell him you want to talk to him.”

“He doesn’t know my number, dude. He’ll just think I’m some creepy stalker fan who hacked a database to get his cell number.”

Chris pursed his lips. “True.”

“I could try to talk to the band manager,” I suggested. “I might be able to get through to him, and then I could convince him to get Eric to call me back?”

“No good,” Chris said. “Woman’s a hard-ass. She’d never let you through. She’d brush off God himself instead of getting him an interview. And she’d be
really
pissed that you called her a ‘him.’”

“Well, I guess I could try to stalk what club he goes to and happen to show up there,” I said. The coffee was terrible, but it was coffee, and it was free, so I forced it down. I had the feeling I would need it.