Say it Louder
Authors: Heidi Joy Tretheway
Tags: #new adult, #rock star, #contemporary romance
CHAPTER ONE
I’m shaking as I leave Tyler’s loft. Shaken to my core as I go through the motions: hail a cab, rattle off the address of my Brooklyn brownstone, swipe my credit card. Shaky fingers aim for the door lock and miss; I drop my keys and bite back a curse.
I’ve had a curse hanging over me for years.
Her name is Kristina.
Fuck.
Why didn’t I kick her to the curb once I realized the dirt she was collecting on me? On all of us? Why didn’t I man up, take what was coming to me, and get through it?
Because I’m a fucking coward, that’s why.
I punch at the lock again and my key connects this time. The door swings wide to music from the stereo and the smell of garlic.
Italian?
It’s far too early for dinner, and the kitchen has nothing but a half-opened beer on the counter.
My beer.
Since when does Kristina drink my beer?
I snag the bottle and take a swig. I might as well drown in it. Or kick up my feet, shove headphones on my ears and play the shit out of Call of Duty.
Right now I want to shoot something, punch something—
anything
—to feel something other than absolute terror over what I have to do.
I have to cut her loose or lose the band. Lose the one good and real and true thing in my life. Because everything with Kristina is a lie. Even this house—
my
house, if you go by who pays the massive mortgage bill—is a lie because it’s not me who decides how to keep it.
It’s her. I’d given her the reins to my house and pretty much everything else in my life.
Everything but the band.
Just as I plant my ass into the familiar dent in my couch, a strange noise from upstairs unsettles me. It’s a moan, low and needful.
My stomach roils as I listen, the swallow of beer souring in my gut.
I climb the stairs, first a hesitant step, then faster, until I’m sprinting up the flight as bass from the stereo pounds in my brain. Adrenaline forces me up, and then I
see see see see
everything through the half-open door.
A pale, naked ass tilted up, the man’s ball sac pendulous between his legs. The grunting, the slapping of flesh, her moaning, facedown—Kristina’s spray-tanned skinny legs splayed as he bends over her body.
His back is white with a curling dark hair on his shoulder blades. He grunts and his hand smacks the side of her ass hard, leaving a red welt that blares at me like a stoplight.
Stop. Stop!
Ohgodpleasestopstopstop.
But I’m rooted to the spot in the hallway.
“Yes! Harder!” Kristina begs. I can’t see her face buried in the bedclothes, but her stripey blond-and-brown highlights are unmistakable.
“Like this?”
Smack.
His hand connects with her flesh again and I know that voice.
I know that voice.
I hear it every week. It’s that voice and the sound of rutting and slapping flesh and the smell of sex in
my
bed and
my
house. It’s the sight of
my
girlfriend being fucked doggie-style by
my
manager.
I snap out of the haze. My foot connects with the door, slamming it open, the knob shattering the plaster wall behind it. The door vibrates on its hinges and for one perfect moment there is silence.
No smack of flesh, no grunts or moans.
And then she screams.
“What the
fuck
is this?” I roar, and they roll and scramble to disentangle from each other. Chief’s dick bobs away from his body, glistening with her wetness, and he scuttles off the side of the bed opposite me and attempts to shove his legs in pants, wary of what violence comes next.
Kristina pulls the sheet over her rail-thin frame, hard nipples jutting through the fabric as she narrows her eyes at me defiantly. “What are you doing here?”
What am
I
doing in my own damn house?
Right now, I’m supposed to be at band practice. Perfect timing for her to have the house to herself. My face creases with hatred, but instead of getting louder, my voice gets dangerously soft. “Get the fuck out.”
Chief’s already got his feet in his shoes, his shirt in his hand, and he’s rounding the bed cautiously, as if I’d give him a push down that steep flight of stairs to our front door. I stand aside, but then turn and spit, “You’re fired.”
He descends the stairs rapidly, but when he gets to the bottom, he raises his hands as if in surrender, his shirt a white flag. “Hey, Dave, let’s talk about this when you cool off, OK? We’re all adults here.”
I snarl and he’s gone. I hear the front door open and close, then whip my gaze back to Kristina, who hasn’t moved an inch. I drop my voice lower, almost a whisper, but it seethes with hate.
“I said: Get. The. Fuck. Out.”
“Me? You can’t throw me out of my house.” Kristina has the nerve to pout, her lower lip quivering as if she’s about to cry. But I know those eyes—tearless, calculating, all the mercy of a cobra.
“It’s
my
house, and I just did.” I yank open a dresser drawer and throw some clothes at her. “You’ve got ten seconds to get dressed before I throw you out on the street naked.”
“You wouldn’t dare. I’ll call the cops.”
“And tell them what? That I caught my freeloading
bitch
of a girlfriend in bed with my fucking backstabbing manager? Go for it, whore.”
When the last word lands, Kristina’s brittle pout is dismissed, replaced by haughty narrowed eyes. Her chin lifts.
“I think the police would be very interested to know things about us,” Kristina says, grasping for control. She pulls a shirt over her head, something I’m sure she charged to my platinum card. “Like that night in February.”
A chill snakes down my spine. “You can’t.”
“I can do anything I want,” she sneers, throwing more clothes in her massive designer handbag. “Lucky for me, fucking Chief is no crime. Unlucky for you, manslaughter is.”
***
She snags the keys to my Audi and slams the door. The house echoes with emptiness and I trip to the bathroom, just in time to retch into the toilet. I heave until it’s all gone, then heave some more.
When I’m sure my stomach is as empty as my house, I raise my head, run my face under a full-blast faucet until it throbs, and then grip the sides of the pedestal sink as I search my reflection for an answer.
It’s not there.
Haunted eyes stare back at me, bloodshot from the force of vomiting. I look a decade older than my twenty-five years and I have no fucking clue how, when I’m supposed to be on the top of the world with my band and our music, everything has fallen apart.
I’m one police report away from being a suspect and maybe even a prisoner.
I walk back to my bedroom and see the rumpled sheets and a bottle of lube on the bedside table. It almost sends me back to the toilet for more dry heaves, so I quickly descend the stairs, aching for an escape from this place.
But I have nowhere to go.
Jayce hates me—or at least he isn’t ready to forgive me for how Kristina betrayed his girlfriend Violet by outing her naked pictures to the media.
Tyler’s on his side, too. He always is, and sometimes it feels like those two gang up on me simply out of solidarity, rather than siding with what’s right for our band and our careers.
So I call Gavin.
“Did you do it?” He doesn’t even bother with a hello. He needs to know if I’ve cut Kristina out of my life yet, because she could set off a chain reaction that could go very, very badly for him.
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s not. Dump that bitch. We can’t trust her.”
“You can say that again.” My lips twist with black humor. “I threw her out of my house, but not because of what she knows about us.”
Gavin’s line blares with traffic noise. “Hang on. I’m just getting back to my place. It gets patchy in the elevator.”
I pace my kitchen, trying to decide my next move.
“So start over. Tell me what happened,” Gavin says. He’s calm like I need to be, and so I tell it like a news report, like I’m not invested in this shit at all. When I finish, he lets out a low whistle. “Oh, man. There’s more what-the-fuck in your fucking story than in the history of fucked-up clusterfucks.”
I bark out a laugh, loving Gavin’s ability to drop the F-bomb in virtually every part of speech. It releases some of the tension from the tight band that’s compressed my chest steadily since Kristina slammed out of here, like I’m rising higher and higher into the atmosphere, where the air’s so thin every movement feels like a marathon.
“I don’t know what to do,” I confess.
God, I feel like such a wimp to admit it. I’m the sure one, the sharp one, our band’s first manager and the guy who
always
knows what to do in a bad situation.
I knew what to do when Lulu died, even when Gavin panicked and fled. And now I’m just … lost.
“You know what? Neither do I. But I do know we’re going to fire Chief’s ass—formally—and get you as far away from Kristina as possible.”
“Then what should I do?” I pound my fist on my kitchen counter in frustration.
He rattles off an address. “Go see Stella.”
CHAPTER TWO
Two ridiculous giggling girls bust through the peace of Righteous Ink as I’m cleaning up after my last client. I aim for a stern look, but I can’t help it. Their laughter is contagious and the corners of my mouth tug up.
“You two are a menace, you know that?” I wipe down the reclining chair and push my rolling tray against the wall.
