No Commitment (Capital Kingsmen #1) - Lisa Suzanne Page 0,11

what the fuck I’m doing, and that simmering anger forces it forward.

I clock him right in the jaw.

My fist stings immediately after I make that connection, but you know what? It’s better than the aching numbness I’ve felt for two long years.

He stumbles back at the punch, just out of my doorway, and I move by him before he has a chance to retaliate. Maybe that makes me a pussy, as he called me, and maybe I don’t fucking care because I have a flight to catch.

There’s only so far a man can be pushed before it’s just too far, and Tommy just crossed that line.

I get in my truck and drive, my knuckles aching. I probably need ice. It’ll probably swell. It might even make it tough to play bass next week when we get to the studio. Shit, the fight we just had might make that tough, too.

But he had it coming.

It isn’t the first fight we’ve had in the last fourteen years, and it won’t be the last.

It is, however, the first time I’ve punched him in the face on purpose.

He’s been egging me on for two years now, and I’m fucking done with it.

With him.

Except I can’t really be done with him because we share a career.

You never think at the start of this shit that life will start to come between you. Instead, you’re a little green and a whole lot naïve. You’re in that dreamland where anything is possible.

And then hard work and reality set in, and you find yourself fourteen years down the line in a situation that you can’t find a way out of.

Someone else owns me and my every move.

Well I say fuck ‘em.

We have to be in the studio in a week? I’ll be there. It’s my professional obligation to be.

But I own my time from now until then.

I can’t even remember the last time I drove myself to an airport. When we’re on tour, our manager arranges all our travel. If we want to take a tour of a place because we have a night off, Karl takes care of booking it for us. I haven’t even driven a vehicle in well over two years, and it feels liberating to be back in the driver’s seat again—in more ways than one.

I feel like I’m taking control of my own destiny.

I only have a week—less than that, really, because as Tommy mentioned, we have to make decisions as a band, but it still feels an awful lot like freedom. I lower my window and let the wind whip my hair as I do eighty on the freeway, and when I get to the airport, I head to the little-known private celebrity terminal, where I park my truck in a place I know it’ll be safe until I return.

I go through the private security and check in for my flight, and then I sit and wait.

I eat an orange. I wash my hands. I stare out the window.

I get into a chauffeured car that takes me right to the plane, where I get out and climb special stairs to grab my seat in first class.

I pull my hat down low over my eyes and stare out the tiny airplane window, folding my arms across my chest as reality crashes into me.

What the hell am I doing? I have no plan. I don’t even know where she lives.

But I know where she works. She stayed in Milwaukee because she loved her job. I have to believe that’s where she still is.

So I guess that’s my plan. I’ll go to the arena, and I’ll ask whoever I find first to help me track her down, and then we’ll reunite and I’ll apologize and it’ll be like no time passed between us, just like it was two years ago when we reconnected after a decade apart.

Hopes and dreams. I’m pinning this entire trip on those hopes and dreams, and I have no idea how the hell this is going to pan out. All I know is that I’m tired of living in the dark and wondering.

My hand aches from hitting Tommy. Whether or not he deserved it, I shouldn’t have done that, and I shouldn’t have run afterward. That’s not the man I am.

I don’t really know who I am anymore. I’m hoping that seeing Dani will help me figure that out.

For so long, I’ve only had Capital Kingsmen. I don’t know who I am without them, but I’m nearing thirty. I think it