RUSH (City Lights, #3)(10)

Ten minutes later, I stymied the geyser and went back inside. I longed to go home and curl up under the blankets and find rest for my turbulent emotions. But my roommates were undoubtedly having an impromptu party and I needed the money.

Thankfully, Keith was back at his table and Melanie had returned, along with some other friends of ours from Juilliard: Mike Hammond, Felicia Strickland, and Regina Chen. They all recognized Keith, and surrounded me at the bar, like a protective barrier. My eyes threatened to turn on the waterworks again at their kindness.

“You missed it, Char,” Regina said over her martini. “It was an epic party—even by my high standards—but could have been even more epic if you had been there.”

Regina Chen’s parties were legendary among the Juilliard crowd—a music lover’s dream come true. She ran challenges over who could play the most complicated compositions while getting progressively drunker on Jagermeister, and a bunch of people would play the themes from popular TV shows. I’d attended a few before Chris’s death, and none after.

“I tried to drag her out,” Melanie said, “but—”

“But I was busy,” I said quickly. “Sorry, Regina. I’ll try to catch the next one.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Regina said. “I’m thinking late May. Save the date, Conroy, or your ass is grass.”

I smiled thinly. My Juilliard friends thought I was ‘taking a break’ from auditions. Only Melanie knew the truth. That I didn’t like to play in front of people anymore. Not when my music was so hollow now. Rote. Notes on a page and nothing more. But Melanie didn’t push it, kept me talking and laughing about other things, and before I knew it, my shift was over.

I closed the night with ninety dollars in tips. Pretty good but not quite enough.

Pretty good but not quite enough.

It was amazing—and depressing—how much of my life those days could be described with that sentence.





Chapter Four


Noah

I bolted upright from that same damn nightmare, the dream that was both fiercely terrorizing and mercilessly glorious at the same time. I gasped for breath, drowning on nothing, while trying to hold on to the images that painted my darkness with vibrant color. There was white snow and blue sky, gold sunset tints and blue-green water. In the dream I could see again.

Sometimes that made it worth the terror.

Sometimes it made me wish I’d never woken up at all.

I vaguely wondered at the time. It might have been morning. It might have been three in the afternoon. My sleep patterns were f*cked since the accident and what difference did it make anyway? Dawn or dusk, it was all the same black nothing to me.

I threw off my sweat-drenched covers. They stank and so did I. I needed a shower and Lucien needed to hurry the hell up and hire another assistant. It had been three days since some chick from that restaurant delivered food along with the news that Trevor—that useless prick—had quit. Good riddance. Trevor was slow, stupid, and if he’d walked out of here without stealing something, I’d be shocked.

Not that I’d even know.

I lay back on the pillows, a sigh gusting out of me, and listened. The street traffic was quiet. No voices. No cars. I guessed it was three a.m. and decided to check with the precious little wristwatch Lucien had given me. Especially designed for blind f*ckers like me, it chirped the time at the press of a button.

The time is 3:22 a.m. on March 31st.

Pretty close. I pushed it again. And again. The robotic voice filled the silence. I couldn’t handle silence. If I lay still enough, if I held my breath and didn’t move, I could pretend I was in a cave deep beneath the ground where no sunlight ever reached. Like that old mining cavern in Colorado I once visited. I remember thinking then that this kind of ultimate darkness was impossible. There was always light in the world, even in the blackest night. There were always shadows and shades, never just…nothing.

Ha. Life—bitch that she was—sure showed me.

But mostly laying perfectly still was a bad idea. I felt as if I were buried alive, a mind floating in the black ether. Bodiless. Weightless. And utterly alone.

I pushed the button again. Over and over, but it wasn’t enough.

“System, on. Play Rage Against the Machine.”

The voice-activated stereo system played “Killing in the Name Of”, and I told it to play it louder and louder, until I could feel the bass thumping in my gut like a second heartbeat. But only for a few seconds. If I got too loud, the neighbors would call the cops and then I’d have to get dressed. I’d have to make my way down two flights of stairs like the fumbling, clumsy idiot I’d become. I’d have to open my door to total strangers who said they were cops, but how the hell would I know?

I modulated the music to normal levels, letting the lyrics scream and rage for me. I wanted to scream too, but I sometimes worried that if I did, I’d never stop. The anger… the fury…

I clutched the pillows and clenched my teeth, my eyes squeezed shut so tightly my head hurt. Had to be careful there. Too much of that would awaken the Monster and that was the last goddamn thing I needed. But I needed to feel that my eyes were closed.

At least then the darkness made sense.

Finally, I couldn’t stand my own stink another minute. Another goddamn curse. Every sense worked in overdrive to make up for my useless eyes. Like hearing that girl from the restaurant call me a prick. I know she thought she had gotten away with it, but I’d heard. I’d heard and remembered. It was the last voice—besides old Lucien’s scolding—I’d heard in three days. She had a nice voice. Pretty. Better than that Trevor’s nasally whine, anyway.