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Chapter 1
Jet
“Valentine Frontman Jet Valentine in Seclusion as Band Disintegrates Mid-Tour”
Fuck.
Jet snapped the magnetic cover of his iPad closed, wishing he could block out the words in the article as easily in his mind as he could on the screen.
One of the guys in the band must’ve talked to the press. There was no other way the story could’ve leaked. He didn’t know which of them it’d been, but that was only because he suspected all of them equally, not because he couldn’t believe it of any of them.
Jet’s publicist had put out the statement about him being unable to finish the tour because he was dealing with a personal problem. Keeping it vague, letting people speculate about what it might be. Bender. Rehab. Illness. None of those made him look great, but all of them made him look better than the truth.
He’d actually been kicked out of the band that he’d started. The band whose name was his damn surname! How was that possible?
Of course, technically, he hadn’t been kicked out. It was just that every other member had left. Simultaneously. So…same difference.
His whole life had blown up in front of his eyes the day before, when Angelo Daneti, the bassist, had called a band meeting.
Jet had stormed into it, loaded for bear. Who the hell was Angelo to call a band meeting? Was the band called Daneti? Fuck, no. It was called Valentine, and that was going to be the first thing he said.
As it happened, he didn’t have a chance. They walked in, accompanied by their manager Harry, and laid it all out, swift and sharp.
He’d been acting more and more like a prick for the past few years and even though people had tried to talk to him, it had only gotten worse. He’d missed shows with no notice. He’d wrecked hotel rooms and green rooms. His behavior was costing them close to what they were making some months, and leaving them open for legal action in others.
And they were done. End of story. No discussion.
Then they’d walked out. Walked. Fucking. Out.
He’d been seeing red, so livid he couldn’t even think straight. He kicked a couple of chairs and overturned a table.
How dare those assholes walk out on me? On me, of all people! I’m the fucking star! I’m the lead singer. It’s my goddamn band; just look at the name!
He picked up a vase and was right on the verge of smashing it to the ground– the first step in what was sure to be the latest in a spectacular series of hotel room trashings over the years– when something truly remarkable happened.
He heard a voice in his head, so clear that it could’ve been coming from right next to his ear, although he knew that it wasn’t. It couldn’t be, because the person it belonged to was his mother, and she’d been gone for over five years.
“Jet Valentine,” the words echoed in his mind, “how dare you behave this way. This is not the way your father and I raised you. I’m so ashamed of you right now I can’t stand it.”
The vase fell to the floor and smashed into a thousand pieces, but not because he’d hurled it there as he’d been planning. Shock had turned his fingers to ice and it slipped from his grasp like butter.
Tears sprang to his eyes, like they always did when he thought about his parents, who had both died the same night in a car accident. The grief was still so crushing, in fact, that he made it a point never to think about them, but to use booze and women and fame and performing as convenient distractions.
But now his mother’s voice rang through his thoughts with such bell-like clarity that they couldn’t be denied. There was no amount of Jack Daniels that would drown them out, and he had a suspicion that throwing a temper tantrum and trashing the room would only make them come through even louder and clearer.
In a sudden flash of painful insight, he saw his actions through his mother’s eyes– and not just the vase, or the destructive fit he’d been about to throw. He saw the childishness that he’d come into the meeting with, furious that anyone else in the band would dare to want to have a conversation if he hadn’t initiated it.
He saw how his first instinct had been to ignore all of their complaints, but rather focus on how he couldn’t believe they were treating the star this way.
Worst of all, he’d acted this way a hundred times in the past five years. Shit, probably a thousand times.
His belly filled with roiling shame, so thick he thought he might vomit it up. He squeezed his eyes tight shut, but found it impossible to shut the feelings out. After all, they were coming from inside of him, not in front of his eyes. It would’ve been so much easier if they were.
“What can I do?” he whispered. “How can I make it up to you?”
On some level, he realized that he was probably cracking under the stress of having lost everything he depended on in the space of about ten minutes. He was, after all, whispering questions to a voice he could only hear inside his head.
On the positive side, he didn’t fully expect to hear an answer. On the negative side…he really hoped he would.
