Von missed his girlfriend and his kid, and spent more time on Skype than he did in the bar. Catcher spent most of his time with the guys in Artifice, but really was just happy to be along for the ride, and Boone we all watched every day, to see if he was struggling at all with his long stretch of sobriety. Being on the road was hard, and for this long and this far from home, we all worried he might slip. I don’t think anyone was thinking about signing with the label and I was glad. The band was solid and I would have hated for us to break up because we wanted different things. That thought just hit a little too close to home right now for me.
Dario insisted we were the better band, that we could go places and do things Artifice had only come close to, and while I took it as a compliment, they were things I just didn’t want. The only thing I wanted, the only thing that mattered, didn’t think we were right for each other and that’s where I seemed to be stuck.
I lumbered to my feet, drunk but not drunk enough, and eyeballed the girl. I needed to get her under me or out the door, and my tired brain wasn’t sure which option it was going to go with, when my phone trilled the very screamy Jucifer from my back pocket. The time changes across the ocean still weirded me out and the fact that Shaw was the one calling me made my blood go cold. It didn’t even register to me that the girl in the bed was swearing at me in a foreign language, or that she hurled the remote at my head as I went into the bathroom to take the call. She was going to be a pain to get rid of, but I didn’t deserve anything less for some seriously piss-poor judgment.
“Hey, Shaw is everything all right? Is Rule okay?”
Worst-case scenarios were running through my head at a rapid pace and I couldn’t slow them down. Angry German was rumbling though the closed door along with hammering fists. If I had been just a shade more intoxicated, this entire situation would have been so ridiculously hilarious there was a chance I would have killed myself laughing over it.
“Hey, sorry to interrupt you, but I needed to call you even though Rule threatened to hide my phone if I did.”
“What’s up?” She sounded nervous, which made me nervous and mad that Colorado was an entire ocean away. Something really heavy hit the door, and I absently wondered if the girl had bothered to put on clothes before throwing her tantrum. It struck me as funny that no matter where I was in the world, a pissed-off groupie was still just a pissed-off groupie.
“It’s Ayden.”
And just like that the world stopped. There was no angry blonde in the next room. There was no band. There was no anything but Ayden, and the fact she was too far away. I stopped breathing long enough that the room got a little hazy and it took Shaw snapping my name to get me back in focus.
“What’s up with Ayden?”
I tried to sound casual, but knew I failed miserably when Shaw just swore softly.
“Look, there is a bunch of stuff she needs to tell you, that you need to make her tell you. I understand why she pushed you away and you just have to believe me that she really did it because she thought she was protecting you, but right now, she’s alone and she needs you. She wouldn’t let me go with her and she refused to let Cora go with her, but she needs someone, and honestly that someone is you.”
“Shaw, you realize I’m in Hamburg right now and I’m supposed to be in Berlin tomorrow afternoon, right?”
She sighed and what sounded like her head thunking against something hard came across the line.
“I know. But she needs you.”
“I think she made it pretty clear I’m the last thing she needs in her life, Shaw.” Something on the other side of the door shattered and I cringed. It looked like the cost of my room just went up exponentially.
“Her brother is in the hospital, Jet. He got beaten within an inch of his life and no one knows if he’s going to make it. Ayden’s mom is a flake, Ayden’s sitting in a hospital in Louisville all by herself, waiting to see if her only sibling is going to die. Come on, I know you don’t fully understand why she pushed you away and left you hanging but the reality is she just wanted to keep you at arm’s length so that you didn’t get hurt. She was trying to protect you.”
“From what?”
“Another situation that was ugly and full of really awful things. She’s in love with you.”
I ground my teeth together and absently kicked at the bathroom door.
“I didn’t even know she had a brother. If she loved me, don’t you think that would have come up before now? Shaw, I know you’re just trying to help, but I think you’re grasping at straws.”
Now she swore loudly, and I heard all kinds of Rule in her attitude when she snapped back at me.
“Stop being such a stupid guy! You don’t need to give her anything, all you need to do is show up. She just needs you to show up, Jet. It’s not that hard.” I didn’t get a chance to respond before she went on. “I know you’re hurting, but so is she, and the only thing that will make either of you stop is for one of you to realize that you just need to be together. Plain and simple. If you can’t see that, then you didn’t deserve her in the first place. I’ll talk to you later, Jet.”
She hung up on me, leaving me stunned and reeling in a bathroom, a million miles from home. My instinct was to throw everything in a bag and run off to the rescue, only the last time I had tried that, I had ended up in jail. I was so tired of trying to save people, women in particular, who ultimately didn’t want me to be their hero at all. The idea of Ayden suffering alone, the idea of her trying to handle something like that by herself, turned me inside out, but she didn’t want me. If she didn’t want me, there was nothing I could do for her that her girlfriends or Sweater Vest couldn’t do. Besides, I had a naked and very angry German girl I had to wrangle, and that was at least a tangible problem I could fix.