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“Think of this as an intervention, Tan. We want you to head up the band, but more than that, we want you to be our brother again. We miss our best friend. You’re so fucked up all the time and you’re fucking everything up for us. Give us six months. You owe us that,” Gray argued from the back of the room.
“If you don’t think you can go cold turkey, we will shut down the tour and you can do it in rehab, Tanner. We want you to be safe and feel better. Finding you when you overdosed, it’s not something I ever want to see again. I thought you were dead. We will do anything it takes, but you have to try. It has to be your choice. You want to carry on like you’re going and we will all bow out and leave you to get on with it. If you want to blow up your life and risk your health, you do that on your own. How do you want to play it, Tan?” Addi asked, folding her arms over her chest defiantly, waiting for my answer.
I peered around at my family and sighed. As I ran my hand through my hair, the cannula buried in the back of my hand reminded me what I’d done last night and just how close I’d come to dying, but even so the thought of doing this life sober felt too much to comprehend.
“No moderation, no cutting down? You just expect me to go cold turkey and be okay to show up each night on stage?”
“Tanner, you show up every night off your face and manage to make thousands of people fall in love with you. You can sober up and still charm the pants off everyone,” Frankie spoke, her eyes not looking as angry or hate-filled as they normally did. Out of everyone in this room, she was the person I wanted to forgive me for my past behavior the most, but I knew I needed to make it up to all of them.
“Fuck, fine. I’ll do it. Six months. Sober. I won’t drink, I won’t do drugs. I can’t promise no women, but I promise no parties. No bad press, no drama, no fucking up when we play. I have some conditions, though.” I paused, looking around, noticing their shocked faces that I was agreeing to this. “I need it to be a dry tour. If I see a drink or a drug, I will slip, so nothing can be backstage. I want everyone around me sober, too. If I’m doing this, we are all doing it. The crew, the staff, everyone.”
“What? You suffer, so we all have to suffer. Is that it?” Mav cried out, his eyebrows pinching, obviously shocked by my demand.
“Yeap. And I won’t apologize for it. I’ve been drunk for most of the last decade. I don’t think I need rehab, but I won’t lie, going cold turkey is going to be hard. All I’m asking is you make it a bit easier for me. Please.”
There wasn’t even a pause before I felt a hand grab mine, squeezing it. “We’re all in, Tanner. All of us,” Frankie promised.
Staring down at my little sister’s fingers in mine I exhaled, wondering whether this might actually be the change we all needed to help us become the band and the friends we once were. “Okay, Addi, find us someone to write our story, and let’s see what magic we can make happen in the next six months.”
Chapter 3
Emmy
Sittinginthecoffeeshop, taking a break from writing, I waited for the caffeine from my double espresso to awaken my sleep-deprived brain. Being stressed about the apartment had kick-started my insomnia. I used to sleep like a baby, but when Mum died four years ago, it was like I forgot how. It had always just been me and her, so her death felt like I’d lost half of myself and I didn’t know how to live in a world where she wasn’t. She gave me confidence, made me brave, cheered me on, and celebrated my successes. She was my safe place. Her death left a hole in my heart, sucking my self-worth, erasing my confidence, and wiping out my bravery. I shrank into myself and lost my spark. I didn’t have many friends, so no one really noticed, but I did. My space in the world got smaller, and I felt like I needed to apologize for my very existence.
I moved into a shared flat in London a year after Mum died, thinking that a new city and a busier pace of life would help me heal. I wasn’t there long before my already fractured life broke completely.
I lived with three girls who were slightly older than me. From the city, surrounded by friends, they liked to party a lot. Usually in our apartment. One Tuesday, there was a party they didn’t even invite me to. My noise-canceling headphones worked for a while, but by 1 am, I’d had enough. I left my room without thinking, just needing them to turn down the music because I had to be awake early in the morning to meet my deadline for a book I was writing.
Wearing a baby pink tank top and some matching sleep shorts, I left my room to find my flatmates. I liked to sleep in a bra and I never slept without pants on, so I didn’t feel like I was wearing anything inappropriate, but apparently other people had a different idea.
I searched around our four-bed apartment, looking for one of them. I could have turned the music down myself, but I didn’t want to bethatperson. I wanted them to understand that it was bothering me and why they needed to be more considerate. Looking around at the sea of faces I didn’t recognize, I felt uneasy.What possessed me to come out here in my sleep wear?
Heart racing, I started to move back to my room, deciding there and then that I needed to move out as soon as possible. Flat shares, or at least this flat share, weren’t for me.
Walking through the throng of people in my kitchen, a large hand grabbed my forearm, fingers digging into my skin painfully. I wanted to scream, but I wasn’t sure anyone would notice or care. Before I could try to move away, a tall, dark-haired man shoved me back against the wall. The light in the room was low, but I couldn’t help but notice the glazed look in his eyes that told me he’d taken something and the thin smile spreading across his lips made me realize that I was in trouble.
Slamming his body weight against me, he pinned me to the wall. “Hey, beautiful. Did you dress like that for me? Look how desperate you are to be noticed. I see you, pretty one. I know what you want. I can give you it all. He wrapped his hand around my long hair, yanking my head back, exposing my neck, licking along my jaw.
I shuddered.
“Ah, you like that, don’t you? I knew you wanted it. Wanted me.”
I tried to speak, to argue, to fight back, but I couldn’t find my voice.
“I wonder how wet you are for me. Shall I slip my finger inside you and find out just how desperate you really are?”
Forcing his knee between my thighs, he spread my legs, shoving his hand under the waistband of my shorts. Cupping me over my panties, he groaned loudly into my ear. Tears spilled down my face, but no one stepped in to help me.
“You look so hot in those shorts. Did you put them on to show everyone how desperate you are to be fucked? Let’s see if I’m right.” He wrapped his hand over my mouth, yanking my panties to one side, plunging two fingers inside me. I screamed, feeling like I was being ripped open by the intrusion, but his palm muffled the sound. He sucked my neck as he rubbed his swollen cock against my hip, thrusting his fingers in and out of me, grunting as he pushed in a third. “Fuck, bitch, you’re so tight. You need fucking so hard. I want to make you scream. I want to see you fall apart because you know it’s what you deserve. You were asking for this. Coming out here like this. You’re a fucking tease. You’re getting exactly what you wanted.”
Removing his hand from my mouth, he undid the fly on his jeans, pulling his cock out, wrapping his hand around it, working himself, while he continued to slam his fingers into me. It started to feel like an out-of-body experience; as if I was watching it from above, numb to it all. Unable to stop him. Unable to find help. Unable to fight back. He ripped his fingers from inside me, trying to pull down my shorts, and I heard my mum’s voice screaming at me to fight. My brain snapped back, and suddenly I felt everything. The danger I was in, his body forced against mine about to rape me in a room full of people. I lifted my knee, slamming it into his balls, watching his face crumble at the same time as his legs give way and he hit the floor.
“Fucking bitch, I will find you and I will make you pay for this,” I heard him screaming at me as I fled. I ran from the apartment, down the stairs, and straight into the arms of Quinn. She took pity on my tear-stained face and although I couldn’t tell her then what had happened, I did later… much later. When my outfits changed, when I stopped wearing makeup or getting my hair cut. When I started hoping the world would stop noticing me so I would never be in danger like that again.
Quinn saved me that night, but I lost whatever was left of me after the death of Mum to the monster who forced himself on me and the people who stood by and didn’t do a thing to help.
I couldn’t afford to just leave, so I stayed in the apartment for three months while I saved every penny to get my own place. Quinn let me stay on her sofa whenever there was a party, which helped me survive, even though I felt like I was drowning in fear most of the time.
