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  “You clocked him,” I agreed, remembering the shocked look of betrayal on the man’s face. Granted, he was being a giant dick at the time and kind of deserved it, but given Tyler’s past behavior, why would Harry think anything different? “Are you really going to let him go?”

  “I guess I’ll unfire him in the morning.” He sighed. “But the truth… if you want the truth—I’m not willing to share you, Katie.”

  My heart soared at those words. Did he really mean them? I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I could feel him, the waves of confusion and anger and possession he didn’t quite understand radiating outward, covering me like a warm blanket. Strange, but true. I wanted him to be jealous, to keep me for himself. I wanted to be different from all the other girls who had come—quite literally—before me.

  So, I dared to say what I was thinking, what I was feeling.

  “I’m not willing to share you either, Ty.”

  His arms tightened around me, his mouth finding me, crushing mine in the darkness. He bruised my lips the same way he bruised my heart, and I kept coming back for more. It hurt so damned good.

  “Katie, I don’t know what this is,” he confessed in a whisper. He smelled and tasted like cold medicine and alcohol. And licorice. Always that. “I’ve never felt like this before.”

  “Me either,” I whispered, kissing him again, as if I could seal up all of our feelings and keep them between us. “Tyler, tell me the truth—did you want me to come on this tour?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t hesitate to answer me. “Oh, my fucking God, yes.”

  “Then why...” I puzzled over it, forming the words in my head. “Why did you leave it up to chance? To… poor old Gerald?”

  I held my breath, waiting for his answer.

  “The truth is, I was afraid.” He swallowed, his throat clicking. “I’m still a little afraid of how much I feel for you.”

  “Really?” I breathed, touching his cheek, rubbing that sweet stubble.

  “Yeah, really.” He nuzzled my neck, rolling so his thigh nestled between mine. “The truth is, I didn’t want you to know how much I cared. How much I wanted you.”

  Oh, how I understood that feeling. How risky it was, to care. To let someone else know how much they could hurt you, with just a glance or a word if they wanted to.

  “What if Gerald hadn’t known who SpongeBob was?” I teased. “What would you have done then?”

  “I would have found another way to make it look like nothing, when the truth was, to me, it was everything,” he whispered in my ear, his cock lengthening against my hip, solid proof of just how much he wanted me. “Goddamnit, Katie, do you need me to say it? I fell for you so hard it still hurts.”

  I ached all over with wanting him. Him, and only him.

  “So, no sharing,” I insisted as I welcomed him into me, pausing only briefly so we could fumble on a condom, the only barrier that remained between us anymore.

  “No sharing.” He lowered his head to mine as he began to fuck me, his possessive words thrilling me just as much as his plundering cock. “Not now or ever. You’re mine.”

  He had no idea how much truth there was in those words, and I realized, even as he called my name and held me close, that he might never fully know it—but I knew. I’d probably spend a lifetime remembering his words, hanging onto them, wishing he’d been as much mine as I was his in that moment. I had hundreds, thousands, of women to be compared to, but for me, there was only Tyler Cook. He was my entire world, and I would live there as long as I possibly could.

  Chapter Eight

  Harry was unfired—he and Tyler mostly made up the next day—but he gave me a wide berth after that. All the roadies did. The rumors spread fast and they all got the message that I was off limits. Lana might get passed around more than a bottle of Jack, but I belonged to Tyler. The tour changed for the two of us after that. We’d been insulated before, but now we became inseparable. We shared everything together from our meals to our bed to our innermost thoughts. I confessed everything to Tyler—my jealousies, my insecurities, my secret fantasies and wishes. And I thought he was sharing everything with me too. I had no idea how wrong I was.

  It was in Missouri that I first discovered that Tyler was keeping secrets from me.

  We were backstage, hanging out, when it happened.

  We did a lot of that. Celeste hadn’t been joking. The whole thing ran like clockwork, though, thanks to a lot of organization and planning. Every day there was a schedule posted on the bathroom door of the bus, telling us where the band had to be and when. Sound checks and meet and greets in almost every city, rarely a day off. We were on the bus so much I felt like I was always moving, even when I was standing perfectly still.

  Tyler had been quiet for a couple of days. Just off. Very short with everyone, even me. He was sleeping a lot, even during the day, and I’d overheard him talking to one of the roadies, a gentle giant named “Cliffie”—short for Clifford, nicknamed after the big red dog, both for his size and his ginger hair color—that he desperately needed more bracers. I could guess what those were. Ty had been lulling himself to sleep with Oxy since Detroit, and I thought he was taking them during the day now too. They were putting him to sleep in the afternoons and that left him groggy for the show. So, he wanted Cliffie to hook him up.

  But that wasn’t the secret.

  I knew about the drugs. I mean, who didn’t do drugs on the road? I’d expected it, and there was plenty of it. We smoked weed all the time. The smell of it on the bus was overpowering, even though Rob had banned the stuff. He complained about it, but no one ever did it around him. If he couldn’t catch anyone in the act, he couldn’t direct his anger anywhere. We were all just really careful to keep it away from him.

  The secret came out that afternoon, while we were waiting backstage for the roadies to be ready for a sound check. I was bored and wanted to go shopping, but Ty said there wasn’t time. Besides, he was tired, he said. He was going to catch a nap backstage. I found him tucked away in the corner of the dressing room, his guitar in his lap—the acoustic—and his hands bent like claws in front of his face.

  “Ty?” There was no one back there. Rob and the other guys were already on stage. They told me to come get Tyler and tell him it was time for sound check. “Are you all right?”

  “Katie?” He blinked at me, looking dazed. High. Like he didn’t quite know who I was. Then his face relaxed and he swallowed, pushing the guitar off his lap. It clattered on the floor. “Fuck!”

  “What is it?” I came to sit beside him on the little bench—it opened up and there were cushions inside we’d had strewn around the floor the night before during last night’s meet and greet—picking up the guitar and propping it up in the process. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t play.” He closed his eyes at this confession, hanging his head. “It fucking hurts too much. I can’t do it.”

  “What?” I ran a hand through his hair, feeling his forehead. He was cold. Clammy. “What do you mean? What hurts?”

  “My hands.” He opened his eyes, those sweet, dark eyes, and gave me a bitter smile. “What good is a lead guitarist whose hands don’t work?”

  “What are you talking about?” I reached out to take his hands, but he pulled them back toward his body, shaking his head.

  “Don’t. They’re bad today. I can’t even bend my fingers.”

  I blinked at him in surprise, seeing how he cradled them against his body. He was clearly in a great deal of pain and had been hiding it. Covering it up. Self-medicating.

  “Have you been to a doctor?” I asked softly.

  “Several.” He closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the wall.

  “What is it?”

  “Rheumatoid arthritis,” he confessed hoarsely, not looking at me.

  “Oh Ty,” I breathed, my heart sinking to my toes. I had an aunt with rheumatoid arthritis. It had made her hands and joints effectively useless. My uncle even had to tie her shoes. Tyle
r Cook was the lead guitarist to what might become one of the biggest rock bands of all time—and he had a crippling disease that might render his hands ultimately useless. This was bad. This was very, very bad. “No, no, oh no...”

  “Yeah.” He sighed, finally opening his eyes to look at me. The pain there was overwhelming, and it wasn’t all physical. “That’s what I said when they told me at fifteen.”

  “Fifteen?” So young. My aunt hadn’t been diagnosed until she was thirty, and by the time she was forty-five, it was all but over. She had good and bad days, but it was very debilitating.

  “It comes in waves,” he told me. “There are times I’m fine. I can go months. Sometimes a year. Then it comes back, and it’s like getting hit by a fucking train.”

  “How long has it been going on this time?”

  “A week or so, I guess.” He had been hiding it from me, and well. I’d suspected something was wrong, because our strenuous sex schedule—which was, like, at least once a day, sometimes more—had slacked off. And here I’d been worried some starry-eyed fan had caught his eye or something.

  “Can you move them at all?” I asked, looking at the way his hands were curled against his chest. How was he going to play tonight?

  “The Oxy helps with the pain.”

  That explained a lot. I just nodded. He’d been taking more of it at night to get to sleep, but clearly insomnia wasn’t the only problem.

  “There are these shots they give me sometimes,” he told me. “But I haven’t gone back to the doctor for a while... I was doing okay...”

  “Let me get Rob,” I stood, now a woman on a mission. Whenever we had any real issues or problems, Rob was the one we could count on. He’d know what to do. “He’ll call a doctor, we’ll—”

  “No!” Tyler grabbed my wrist, squeezing hard, and winced. I knew it had to hurt him to do that, but he wouldn’t let me go.

  “He doesn’t know, does he?” I asked softly, meeting his panicked eyes.

  “No.” He gritted his teeth against the pain. “And you’re not going to tell him.”

  “Okay, okay,” I soothed, sitting back down on the bench with him, running a hand through his hair, thinking. He relaxed in my arms, his head dropping to my lap, body curled up beside me on the bench. I just wished I could make it all better.

  “What about Celeste?” I suggested, stroking his hair away from his forehead. That little wrinkled spot on his brow always made me want to kiss it when he was like this. “Maybe she can get a doctor to come here...”

  “And what do I tell her it’s for?” He shook his head, not opening his eyes. “No. Just no.”

  “I’ll tell her it’s for me,” I offered, thinking, I volunteer as tribute! I’d do anything for this man. If I had to pretend to be sick and in need of a doctor’s attention, what was the big deal? “We’ll have the doctor come to our room. No one else needs to know, Ty. She’ll do it.”

  “Would you?” He opened his eyes, frowning.

  “Yes. Of course, I will.” How could he even doubt it? I stroked his stubbly cheek—he’d been increasingly lax about shaving lately and now I knew why. “How are you going to get through tonight?”

  “More Oxy.” He sighed. “Go in the front of my guitar case. There’s a pick case in there.”

  I did as he asked, and when I opened it, I gasped. It was full of tiny little pills, no bigger than a baby aspirin, except I knew exactly what they were. The street value of this stuff, just the dozen I held in my hand, had to be over five hundred dollars.

  “Give me twelve.”

  “How many?” Even I would only take two, sometimes three, and that was only on nights my insomnia was out of control and the rocking motion of the bus and the sound of the wheels had the opposite effect of soothing me to sleep.

  “Just give me the damned case.”

  “Okay, okay, twelve.” I didn’t want him to take more than that. The tolerance he’d built up was incredible. What was he doing to his liver? I put the pills in his hand and he sat up and swallowed them down with a swig of Mountain Dew. At least it wasn’t alcohol, I told myself. “How are you going to stay awake?”

  “These.” He pulled a plastic baggie out of his jeans pocket and waggled the bag at me before putting it back. “That should get me through the show. But I’m going to crash for an hour. Can you tell Rob I can’t make sound check?”

  “Yes.” I touched his cheek, saw him attempt a smile through the pain, his eyes half closed already. “Just rest here, take a nap. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You can’t tell him, Katie.” He grabbed my arm, wincing again at the pain. “Whatever you do, don’t tell him...”

  “I won’t,” I promised, wondering if he’d told anyone else before, ever, aside from whatever doctor had treated him. “Sleep, baby. Feel better.”

  I kissed his forehead, kneeling beside him on the floor and stroking his hair until he dropped off. Then I put his guitar away and went to tell Rob and the band that Tyler was coming down with something and needed to rest before the show. Rob frowned, all concerned, ready to come backstage, but I managed to stop him, telling him Tyler was sleeping already and shouldn’t be disturbed.

  I didn’t have to find Celeste. She found me, pulling me aside to ask what was really going on.

  “Can you have a doctor come to the bus tonight after the show?” I asked. “Can you find someone who makes house calls?”

  “For Tyler?” She frowned, already going all Mother Hen on me. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s for me.” I leveled a look at her. “When Rob asks, tell him it’s for me.”

  She gave me a knowing look, pursed her lips and nodded.

  “What should I say you’ve got? Rickets? Lyme disease?”

  “Make something up.” I shrugged. “Tell him I need an abortion for all I care. Just don’t tell him it’s for Tyler.”

  “Is he okay?” She looked really concerned, and I didn’t blame her. She really did love the guys, all of them, but Tyler and Rob most of all.

  “I think so.” I was far less worried about his condition than I was about the amount of Oxy the man had to take to dull the pain. He could live with arthritis, but that many meds could kill him.

  I think I was the only one who could see the pain on his face that night while he played. I stood backstage in the shadows, tears rolling down my cheeks, watching his fingers fly over the neck of the guitar, knowing every motion had to hurt. When the show was over, I took him back to the bus. Celeste said she’d found a doctor and he was waiting for us. She also said she’d make our excuses to Rob as to why we missed the after-show meet and greet.

  The doctor was a nice enough guy, dark skinned, Indian, wearing street clothes, not a lab coat. He introduced himself as Dr. Kohli. He asked Tyler a lot of questions, then made him strip down to his boxers and listened to his heart, his lungs and took his blood pressure. I could tell Tyler was hurting again—the Oxy was wearing off, and whatever uppers he’d taken to get through the show were too. He looked exhausted.

  “I’ll give you an oral steroid prescription.” The doctor wrote something on his pad. “But you’ll have to go into the hospital if you want to get the injections again.”

  “Isn’t there a way I can do them?” I asked. “We’re on the road. We just… we can’t stop.”

  “They’d have to be administered by a medical professional.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how...”

  “We can hire one,” I interjected. “To come in and do the shots. Would they help?”

  “Did they help before?” Dr. Kohli asked.

  “Yeah.” Tyler nodded. “A lot.”

  “All right. I’ll have someone come by in the morning.”

  “We’ll be gone by then,” I explained, glancing at the clock. We had a schedule to keep. The show had to go on and all that. “Roadies are packing up now. We’ll be on the road by five.”

  “In the morning?” Dr. Kohli blinked in surprise.

  “A. M.” Tyler nodded.<
br />
  “That’s quite a schedule you keep. And I thought being on call was bad.” Dr. Kohli tapped his pen against his very white teeth. “Tell you what… I’ll call one of my residents at the hospital and have them meet me here. Unless you want to come to the hospital with me?”

  “No.” Tyler was adamant, shaking his head. I knew what that tightening of his jaw meant. Stubborn man.

  “He doesn’t want his band mates to know,” I confessed to the doctor, ignoring the sharp look Tyler gave me.

  “I see.” The doctor gave a short nod. “Well, let me make a call. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Can I get something for the pain?” Tyler croaked as Dr. Kohli turned to go.

  The doctor frowned as he glanced back, eyeing Tyler sitting on the edge of the bed in his boxers.

  “I have a feeling you’re self-medicating, young man,” the doctor said in his accent with the shake of his head. “And I also have a feeling there’s more where that came from?”

  “Well you wouldn’t be wrong there, Doc.” Tyler gave a little laugh, waving him off. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  The doctor gave another little nod, but he left without writing a prescription.

  “It hurts, Katie.” Tyler put his head in my lap.

  “Shh, just close your eyes. Rest. The doctor is going to come fix it all up,” I promised, stroking his hair. I’d never felt more like crying, but I held it back. I wanted to be strong for him, as strong as I could be. “It’s gonna be okay. I promise. It’s gonna be okay.”

  “Don’t stop doing that,” he murmured.

  “What?”

  “Telling me.”

  Oh, my fucking heart. He could break it in one breath.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” I whispered, smoothing his hair back from his forehead.

  I promised him, over and over, until I thought I might begin to believe it for myself.

  The shots worked. It was a blessed relief. It took us three hours to get to Wichita and that was just enough time for the cortisone to work its magic. I woke up to the sound of Tyler’s guitar—not his electric, which could plug into the bus’s sound system and be heard through all of the speakers—but his acoustic one. He was playing some fun, intricate melody with a lot of changes and I smiled, still half-asleep, realizing it meant he was better.