Jet (Marked Men #2)(84)

“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.

We were on the train to Berlin the next day and I felt awful. I hadn’t slept at all the night before and getting rid of the St. Pauli girl on steroids had proven more difficult than I anticipated. I couldn’t get my mind off Shaw’s phone call, and being cooped up on the train with a bunch of hungover metal dudes and loud German families was enough to make me want to pull every last hair out of my head and run screaming for the hills. Von was sitting across from me, alternately napping and messing around on his phone, seemingly oblivious to the noise around us and I envied him the peace he seemed to just naturally have.

“You all right, man? You’ve looked ready to bail out the window all day.”

I shifted restlessly in the seat.

“I’m straight.”

“Really? I call bullshit. You haven’t been straight since things went south with you and Ayden. Your body might be here, but your head has been back in Denver since we picked you up.”

“I’m cool. Just takes time to get over someone like her, is all. I keep thinking maybe I should call her.”

“Dude, who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve know you since you were a punk-ass little kid. Girls were just girls, until Ayden. She’s different, we all saw it. Fuck, you sang oldies on Valentine’s Day, Jet. Do you think we’re all stupid? We knew who you were singing to.”

“She just got to me, is all.”

“Good. She’s smart, she’s a knockout, she has enough attitude to put up with all your moods, and I bet she isn’t scared of all the Keller family skeletons. Goddamn Jet, you write better music than anyone else in the world, you’re a better front man than pretty much anyone else who has ever stepped on a stage, and you’re an all-around really f**king good dude. You should have someone like Ayden in your life. Stop thinking you need to do some kind of crazy penance because your dad is a douche rocket and your mom refuses to see it.”