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Kael
Day 7
The room they put me in isn’tthatbad. Not really. I expected it to be much worse. There’s a small bathroom attached, white marble, pristine. Expensive finishes. Inside the bathroom is a shower that could easily fit three of me, and considering I’m the better part of six-foot-two and weight close to 225 pounds, that’s impressive.
There’s a queen size bed and a double closet in the room, though none of my clothes are hanging in the closet. They took all my clothes from me, along with my wallet and my cell phone the day I arrived.
Why?Not sure.
Something about us all being equal on our road to recovery. Sounds like a load of privileged bullshit to me. But what the hell do I know, because at this moment in time, I’m sitting on the end of the bed wearing pale-blue scrubs and white ankle-socks on my feet.
Rochester Rehabilitation Center.
Rehab.
Yeah. That’s where they sent me. Can you believe it?
Fucking rehab.
Okay, yes, it’s a state-of-the-art, expensive as hell, 45-day program in a ritzy borough of New York City, the sort of rehab facility you see the rich and famous flowing in and out of on those stupid reality television programs.
But call it what you like. It’s still rehab.
I could kill Nick for doing this to me.
Nick Dundas, our band manager. He might be one of the best in the business when it comes to cutting Cold Neptune a record deal, but he’s a grade-A asshole when he’s got a point to prove. And man, does he have a point to prove with me. He won’t let something drop until he gets his own way. A dog on a bone, isn’t that how the saying goes?
And yeah, Nick’s a fucking dog for putting me in here. Talk about overreacting.
So, this is what happened, or at least this is what I think happened. There’s not a whole lot I remember about the events leading up to Nick sending me to rehab.
But I’ll give it a shot.
Cold Neptune had just finished up a three-month tour of the United States, playing sold-out stadiums and arenas from one coast to the other. The reviews started rolling in, and they were freaking amazing. The fans loved us. Every show was a complete sellout, and we left audiences screaming for more with Jaxon King, our drummer, and Quinn Tanner on electric guitar, yours truly on bass, and the one and only Mr. Reed Devlin standing front and center, we rocked out set after set, and the crowds went wild.
Reed has a set of pipes on him like no one else in the industry. He’s an absolute magician on stage, and his songwriting skills are out of this world.
As it turns out, though, he had it pretty bad for some chick back in New York—yeah, the same chick who accused him of stealing her lyrics, almost ruining his entire career (but that’s a whole other story)—and so he left us in Miami at the end of the tour, caught the first flight out of town, and headed straight back home again.
I don’t know what went down between the two of them, but Quinn reckons Reed had a plan to win her over and hoped to hell she forgave him.
I’m guessing that right there was probably the beginning of the end for me. Because in all honesty, Reed Devlin is the one member of our band who keeps a close check on me. He’s the warden of the group. But this time, he put his own needs before the needs of the rest of us.
And good luck to him, I say.
But with Reed out of the picture, we may have celebrated our success a little too hard. We drank, and we partied. We stayed out way too late, and we found ourselves some pretty young ladies to spend realquality timewith. Okay, we fucked them. No point sugarcoating things. We fucked heaps of them.
Or maybe that was just me.
Anyway, apparently I went MIA for a couple of days. A week. It was a week. And I don’t remember much about where I was that week, or what happened to me while I was there. All I remember is waking up on some guy’s crusty old couch in a sketchy-looking apartment with a busted lip and a mouth that felt as dry as the Sahara Desert.
Did I mention I was naked? Yeah, so there’s that.
The thought that maybe I’d gotten myself into something with this guy, something that I’m not normally into, caused me some alarm. But the guy who owned the place assured me unequivocally that he wasn’t into it either when Iverycarefully broached the subject with him.
Turns out, he’d simply recognized my face from a nearby billboard, and he felt sorry for me. He’d given me a safe place to crash before the paparazzi found me lying comatose in the gutter outside his apartment block, wearing nothing more than a bloodied lip and smoky kohl eyeliner.
Good times, Miami. Good times.
