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He narrowed his eyes as if he were staring at a stranger. “You don’t even want to fight to try to create our own music again? You don’t want to try?”
“I’ve tried my whole life, James. I tried with my parents, I tried with Hazel, and I tried with our music. Trying doesn’t work. We might as well just go with what they want us to do. It will be easier that way.”
“Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s worth it. You don’t mean what you’re saying. You just feel defeated, but you can’t let your pain weigh you down so much.”
“I don’t feel pain,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I don’t feel nothing.”
“Don’t you think that’s a problem?” he asked.
Maybe it was.
But I was too tired to really fucking care.
I lay in the darkest form of night. Even when I opened my eyes, I felt as though I were still staring into the blackness of my eyelids. How long had I been lying in the shadows? How long had I been in my current state of affairs? I shifted a bit, and my lower back stung. My whole body ached from head to toe, as if I’d been hit by a semitruck. What the hell had I done yesterday? Run a marathon? Fought a grizzly?
Oh yeah, I’d gotten drunk as hell after leaving the meeting at Mindset Records.
I rubbed the palms of my hands against my eyes, completely dazed and confused as I tried to piece together the last few hours of my life.
Dammit, Ian. How did you get here?
I didn’t mean that in a superdeep, profound, meaningful way. What I meant was, How the hell had I fucking gotten here? And where, exactly, washere?
My head pounded at a vomit-worthy speed as I tried to swallow down the crashing memories of the meeting at Mindset Records.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, and before I could sit up, two pairs of arms wrapped around my body in the darkness.
Two big, strong pairs of arms lifted me up from my bed. As I went to holler, someone covered my mouth with one hand and my eyes with the other as the arms carried me away. I began kicking and trying to shout as I was hauled to the hallway of the hotel, in a complete panic as these men carried me away.
Was this some kind of fanatic kidnapping? Was someone going for me because of my money?
I bit the hand that was covering my mouth and heard a shout of pain. “Dude! What the fuck?”
“Shut the fuck up, will you?” the other hissed.
“He fucking bit me!”
That voice ... was that ... Eric?
“I don’t care if he fucking bit you. We aren’t supposed to talk!”
“Well, you weren’t the one who was freaking bit!”
“I told you to duct-tape his mouth!”
“I’m not some freaking psychopath! I wasn’t going to duct-tape his mouth!”
“That’s why you got bit, you idiot!”
Eric and Marcus?
I’d know that bickering from miles away.
“What the fuck is going on?” I yelled now that my mouth was uncovered.
The hands dropped my body to the hallway floor, and when I was allowed to look up, I saw my three bandmates dressed in all black like fucking ninjas. What in the ever-loving hell was going on?
“What the hell is going on?” I blurted out, rubbing the back of my head, which had smacked hard against the floor.
