Rock N Soul (30 page)

“Well, cool, I guess.” I shuffled my feet. “So . . . where should I go?”

“He’ll go down to the kitchen first. Best to meet him there,” he said, then started walking through the house toward what I assumed was the kitchen.

I trailed along behind him, looking around and trying not to think about the fact that I’d just broken into a celebrity’s home and I’d be lucky if I wasn’t body-slammed into the floor by an overzealous burly bodyguard. My skin was tingling like I’d just slathered myself in aloe vera cooling gel, but I put that down to nerves and followed Chris into the kitchen.

It was a large room with big east-facing windows behind the counters and an island with expensive appliances—the kind of kitchen you’d see in a display house but wouldn’t necessarily expect to see in a hard rocker’s home.

“Does he cook a lot?” I asked, running a hand over the cold granite countertop of the island.

“What?” Chris looked up sharply.

“Sorry, dude, didn’t mean to scare you.” I motioned vaguely at the stove. “Does he cook a lot? Eric?”

He shrugged. “He cooks enough.”

Well, thank goodness we only had to make small talk for another fourteen minutes, because damn if Chris wasn’t making this whole thing difficult. I went over to a pub table in the corner of the room and sat down on one of the chairs. The minutes crawled by so slowly that I was sure I’d aged at least a decade in the fifteen minutes before a loud buzzing came from upstairs.

“He’s up,” Chris said, every muscle in his body tensing.

Not that I was noticing every muscle in his body.

I had a few more seconds to change my mind about the whole thing and bolt out through the front door, but I wasted them worrying about how Chris was going to handle all this. So by the time my feet got the message from my brain to
move right now
, Eric had walked into the room.

He was wearing gray sweatpants and a fitted navy-blue T-shirt, and my first thought was,
Wow, Carmen would lose her shit if she knew I’d gotten to see Eric Painter in his pajamas.

My second thought was,
Fuck my life, I’m going to prison for sure.

I didn’t have time to formulate a third thought before he saw me. He yelled, “Fuck!” and scrambled away, slamming his back into the refrigerator with enough force to knock the magnets off of it. They skittered across the floor like frightened mice.

I held my hands in the air. “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.”

He shook his index finger at me hard, still leaning backward against the fridge door. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house?”

“Okay, I can explain.”

“You sure as hell better start,” he said, straightening up.

“It’s a great explanation, but you have to hear me out all the way, okay?” I spread my hands again so he could see I wasn’t armed, with a weapon or a camera. “What I’m going to say is going to sound batshit crazy, but I swear I can prove it to you, you just have to give me a chance.”

“Talk faster,” he snapped. “Is it an exclusive? That’s what you want? Who’s paying you?”

“Nobody,” I said, then I took a deep breath and spoke really fast. “My name’s Tyler Lindsey, I’m from Boston, and I came here because I’m, um, being haunted by the ghost of Chris Raiden and he wants me to tell you some things so that he can go on to whatever afterlife awaits him. And I know there’s no way in hell you’re going to take my word for that, but I can prove it.”

There was a long silence. Chris didn’t even appear to be breathing, but I guessed that wasn’t a huge problem seeing as he didn’t even have physical lungs.

Finally, Eric gave me a death glare and growled, “Get the fuck out of my house before I call the police.”

“I’m serious,” I begged. I took a step forward. “It’s super hella cliché, I know, but you can ask me anything. Something only he would know. And I’ll be able to answer because he’s standing right here and he’ll tell me what the answer is.”

Eric stared at me. “You’re insane.”

“I wondered that myself at first,” I admitted. “But I’m pretty sure I’m sane. Otherwise how else would I have gotten in here? He told me your passcode.”

Chris was being very, very silent. I wasn’t even sure he’d moved a single muscle since Eric walked into the room. I wanted to ask if he was okay, but getting Eric to believe me was step one, and so I didn’t ask.

“You’re insane,” Eric said again. “I’m calling the cops.”

“Chris,” I said, looking deliberately over at him. “I need something, man.”

He forced his eyes over to me, and I flinched at the raw emotion in them. “I—I don’t know what to say. Maybe we should just go.”

“Dude, he’s going to call the cops,” I said, raising my voice a little. “If you wanted to bail, you should have done it ten minutes ago.”

Eric started inching in the direction of the door he’d come in.

“Wait.” I took another step toward him. “Just give him a second. He’ll tell me something.”

“Fuck you,” Eric said. “Fuck you for breaking into my house and for trying to cash in on my best friend’s death.” He whirled around and started stalking out of the kitchen.

Chris blinked several times and shook his head hard. “Eric,” he said, loudly, and then he took three running steps and grabbed Eric’s arm.

Sometimes in movies they do this thing where all the noise fades out, everything stops moving, and the whole scene grinds to a deathly silent halt, and I swear to God that’s what it felt like here. Eric froze in his tracks, Chris’s mouth fell open as he stared at his own hand gripping Eric’s arm, and my whole thought process shut completely down for a few heartbeats.

And then: “Oh, you
asshole
.”

For a moment there I wasn’t even sure who had said it. It was certainly something that could have come from any of us. But after further mental inventory, I decided that yep, it was me. Because Chris was a huge fucking asshole.

Standing there with his fingers curled into Eric’s biceps and his eyes sparkling like the whole goddamn world was a great place to be again. While here I stood, over in Eric fucking Painter’s kitchen risking jail time for him, and he didn’t even
tell
me. Not once, in all of our conversations about coming out here and talking to Eric, had he seen fit to mention . . .
this
.

I couldn’t even put a name to it in my own brain because I was so pissed off, but the look on Chris’s face was really all the name I needed.

“I should have fucking known,” I muttered. “I should have seen it. God
damn
it, Chris.”

Chris slowly released Eric’s arm and turned to look back at me. “What?”

“
That
,” I almost yelled, gesturing at Eric’s arm. “I’m guessing that probably means something. And I’m pretty sure I know what the something is, Chris.”

“You’re being hysterical,” he said. “I don’t know why that happened. I don’t know why it worked.”

Eric cleared his throat and faced me, moving very slowly. “I’m assuming that wasn’t you.”

“No,” I ground out. “No, it wasn’t.”

“Why didn’t you lead with that?” he asked.

I shot Chris the dirtiest look I could muster. “I didn’t know he could touch people. He’s never done it before.”

There was a long silence, then Eric spoke. “Tell him to do it again. While I’m watching you.”

“He can hear you,” I spat out. “Tell him yourself.”

Eric looked at the air near his arm and swallowed visibly. “Um . . . Chris?”

Chris lifted his hand and let it hang in the air for a moment like he was deciding where to touch, then let his hand fall onto Eric’s shoulder. Eric jumped and put a hand on Chris’s torso for a second before he pushed too hard and it went through Chris’s back.

“He can touch me too,” Chris murmured. “Did you see that?”

I ground my teeth. “I saw.”

“I wonder why that is?” Chris said, sounding like he was talking to himself.

“I don’t know,” I snapped. “Just tell me what you want me to tell him so I can go home.”

Eric looked over at me. His blue eyes met mine and I swear I felt legitimately sick to my stomach. “He’s really here?” he asked in a somewhat shaky voice.

I nodded, setting my jaw and crossing my arms. “Right in front of you.”

Eric reached his hand out again and laid it against Chris’s chest. Chris sucked in a breath I could hear from across the room, and I hated both of them.

“I’m going to need you to prove it’s him,” Eric said, leaving his hand on Chris.

And I’m going to need
you
to stop fucking caressing him
, but I didn’t say that out loud. “Fine.” I worked my jaw back and forth a little and then looked at Chris. “Anytime you’re ready, Christopher.”

Chris hung his head for a moment and then picked it up and met Eric’s eyes as best he could. “Tell him I remember the night when we were in Berlin and . . . and we were drinking together in the hotel and . . .”

He trailed off, and I contemplated what act of violence I would commit if the next words out of his whore mouth were
and then we made love in the moonlight
or some shit. Some light vandalism, maybe. Or maybe I would just scream until Eric called the psych ward instead of the police.

Luckily, though, the actual end to his sentence was less horrible than that: “And he told me that he’d written a song about my dad. About . . . how it was for me. The feeling like a monster for not missing him. And he sang part of it for me and I had to make him stop.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said. I repeated it to Eric anyway, who turned pale but nodded.

Chris kept his hand on Eric’s shoulder, digging his fingers in a little like Eric’s body was his only anchor to the world. He turned, though, and gave me a glance. “Tyler. What’s wrong?”

“Don’t fucking talk to me,” I snapped. I knew I was being incredibly bitchy, but I couldn’t bring myself to give a damn. “Talk to him and I’ll translate and then I’m going back to Boston and you can go to hell.”

Chris narrowed his eyes and tilted his head, and I
hated
that I found the head-tilting adorable, even under the circumstances. In a better situation I might have relented and forgiven him, but right now he had his damn hand on Eric like he was Prince fucking Charming and I wondered if I should go back to the same bar tonight to find Brandon and tell him I’d made a mistake and would he please fuck me up against a wall or something.

“Okay,” Chris said at last. “Well. Tell him . . . I’m sorry.”

“He says he’s sorry,” I repeated in the flattest voice I could manage.

Eric swallowed again. “Ask him for what.”

“Just talk to him, Jesus.” I narrowed my eyes at Eric. “He can hear you and this translating is exhausting enough when it’s just one-way.”

Eric frowned. “What are you sorry for?”

Chris turned back to look him in the eyes, for whatever good it did. “I should have listened to you. I should have stayed in rehab when you sent me. I should have been the friend you deserved.”

I repeated it after him, even using the
I
’s instead of switching them to
he
’s.

“Damn right you should have.” Eric’s voice was low-pitched and gravelly and he sounded like fucking
sex
and I wanted to throw something at him.

“I didn’t think it would kill me,” Chris said, his words breaking slightly. He lifted his other hand and put it on Eric’s other shoulder. “I meant to stop. I always meant to stop one day.”

While I repeated him, I even dropped the pissy monotone to try to match his tone as much as I could. Just because I was pissed at Chris didn’t mean that Eric didn’t deserve his closure. It wasn’t like any of this was Eric’s fault, even if my stomach insisted on giving a sick twist every time I remembered that Chris’s hands were on him. Which I seemed to remember at least twice a second.

Eric was answering. “I can’t believe that. If you hadn’t died you would have kept going at it forever. I was tired of giving you chances to change.”

Chris kept his hands on Eric’s shoulders and tightened his fingers, digging them in harder. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else I can say.”

Eric didn’t say anything when I repeated that, and after a second Chris spoke again. “Did you go to the funeral?”

“Of course I did,” Eric replied, furrowing his brow and scowling. “I loved you. You were my brother. You used to be my best friend before the drugs fucked that up. Of course I went.”

The way that Chris flinched when Eric said the word “love” gave my stomach another twist, and I wasn’t sure if this twist was sympathy or jealousy or anger or some screwed-up combination of all three. And the only thing that saved Eric from getting my fist in his testicles was that he’d definitely used the word in a platonic, brotherly sense.

Chris went for humor quickly enough that it was clear he’d had to recover from this sort of thing a lot in the past. “And then you hired Nathan Vale.”

Eric groaned when I repeated that. “Oh, for God’s sake. It’s not like bassists grow on trees, you know. And he was available and he already knew most of our songs.”

“Don’t you dare hire him permanently,” Chris growled.