Collaring Chaz (Dante's Infernal #2) - Joel Abernathy Page 0,58
get someone to fill in for you until they give the go-ahead for you to come back. There’s no covering up the fact that you went behind our backs after that press conference, so the official narrative is that Sterling took advantage of your friendship with Alicia at a low point to get at Drake. And, really, that’s pretty much what happened.”
“Right,” I said, standing once I trusted myself not to just fall on my face again. I brushed past him and found my clothes in a plastic bag on the food tray. They weren’t the ones I’d been wearing, so I assumed Raf or Cash had dropped them off. “Because no one could possibly see potential in a worthless fuck-up like me.”
He frowned. “That’s not what I said.”
“Yeah, it is,” I said, shrugging out of the hospital gown and changing into my jeans, since it was hard to make a dramatic exit when your ass was bared to the world. “You’ve been saying it for years. Between the lines, maybe, and in nicer words, but it’s what you think, so why hide it?” I pulled the clean T-shirt over my head and my shoulder stung, so I knew I hadn’t fallen gracefully. “At least your dad is man enough to just come out and say it.”
Dante’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not yourself, and you haven’t been for a long time, so I’m not going to hold it against you, but you should watch it before you say something you can’t take back.”
“Like what?” I challenged, walking to stand toe-to-toe with him now that I was dressed. “Like how I’m still just a ‘garage band’ bassist? How it’s becoming ‘a problem’?”
In a strange way, I relished the shock on his face as I repeated his words back to him verbatim. I relished it in the same way as I relished the pain Rafael inflicted in our intimate sessions, except afterward, there was no rush of relief or safety. Just a deeper ache in the pit of my stomach.
“You weren’t supposed to hear that,” he finally said, his tone as blank as his expression.
I laughed, which seemed to catch him off-guard. “Of course not. I was just supposed to pick it up in bits and pieces, through all the little sighs and not-so-veiled remarks. Or the fact that you treat me like some groupie you’ve been trying to shake for years.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Is it?” I tilted my head. “I always felt like the third wheel when we were kids, but I thought it would be different with the band. I was okay with making Dante’s Infernal my life, because I thought I finally belonged to something that belonged to me in turn. Not as much as it belonged to you or Raf, but just a sliver. I thought we belonged to each other, but it didn’t matter, did it? All the years of sleepless nights spent dictating music for you since you were too coked out to hold a pen. All the times I dragged your ass home from the bar, or held your hair back sitting on the filthy bathroom floor at whatever rest stop we were at that night. Hell, I even dropped out of high school just so we could go on tour sooner.”
“No one forced you to do any of that,” he snapped. “None of that shit was in your contract.”
I stared at him in disbelief, and the last bit of hope I’d been holding out that there was a way to fix this dissolved. It wasn’t just impossible--I didn’t know why I was trying in the first place. It was obvious it meant nothing to him. Nothing more than words on a page.
“No,” I agreed once I’d found my voice. “No, it wasn’t. And the joke’s on me, because I didn’t do it for Dante Jung, international sensation. I did it for the Dante I thought I knew, who had my back in return. The one I thought was family.”
He said nothing for a while, and I almost gave up waiting.
“So, what,” he finally said, “you want to quit the band so you can go build a career off some song you wrote because Rafael doesn’t love you back? You’re just going to throw all these years down the drain?”
It was another punch in the gut, but in a way, it felt good. It was the first time he’d ever been completely honest with me, and at least now I knew where I stood.