By the time G.B. got out of his second round of questioning, he had reverted back to his old ways, the ones he worked so hard to hide, the ones that had gotten him into trouble before.
Unfortunately, his submersion into himself so complete, he was having trouble seeing what was ahead of him.
Fury, as great and wide a divide as it had always been, owned him.
Getting into his car, he grasped the steering wheel and tried to focus. He could feel a plan developing in his head, and he had enough sense to know that it wasn’t a good one. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t tight.
And he was in enough trouble already with the whole Jennifer thing. But he couldn’t … concentrate … on … anything else—
As his phone rang, he fumbled with the thing, dropping the cell in his lap as he took it out of his inside pocket. He answered without checking, without thinking—
“Hello, G.B.” Female voice. Low. Seductive. “What are you doing, G.B.?”
The sound of the brunette he’d f**ked in that basement workroom pierced through the veil of his emotions, the fog of his anger, the clouds of his past.
“I’ve been thinking about you.”
As she spoke, he thought that he should say something back to her to let her know he was actually on the line—but she seemed to be already aware of that.
“What are you going to do about all this, G.B.?” she asked.
“About what?” he mumbled.
“What are you going to decide to do?”
God, how did she know? Because he was torn, the urge to act warring with the sense that it was in his best interest to let this shit with Cait go.
But his brother was in the way. His f**king goody-two-shoes brother was getting her. And he just couldn’t let that happen.
The shit with that whole Nicole thing had been for fun. But he actually liked Cait.
“You know she cheated on you.”
“Who …” he asked.
“That blond you like so much. She f**ked your brother last night.”
He frowned. “How … how do you—”
“You know she did. You saw him kiss her at the grave site. You think that happens between two people who are just friends? Don’t be naive.”
G.B. brought up a hand and started to rub his forehead, back and forth, back and forth, as if he were sanding the skin off. He had always hated Duke. Had come out of the womb detesting the guy. And yeah, sure, it had never been logical, but some things were so strong that you didn’t need to understand them. They just … were.
It was like he had a demon inside of him, and sometimes the evil needed to get out before it ate G.B. alive.
Like with Jennifer in the theater basement. A switch got flipped and … everything else disappeared except the malignancy—and keeping that inside? Impossible.
Man, one of the single biggest satisfactions in his life had been taking Duke’s boring-ass girlfriend away from him—seducing her right out from under his brother’s nose. God, so f**king pathetic—the pair of them had been so “in love,” parading around that college campus arm in arm, full of dreams. But there had been fractures in the relationship to exploit—Darling Nikki, as the song went, hadn’t been quite the nicey-nice girl Duke had believed she was. What a skank. And she hadn’t been on the pill—so when G.B. had poked holes in the condoms before he used them? Not long before she was nauseous every morning and then—oopsie! She’d had to tell her BF she’d cheated on him.
When Duke had found out, his first stop had been G.B.’s apartment—and the guy had beaten him so badly, he’d needed dental implants afterward. But it was so worth it—and the payback had lasted for years.
Was going to last at least until the kid was eighteen, right?
“G.B., I think you need to do something about all this.”
Coming back to the present, he shook his head. The brunette was right. So f**king right.
“Go to the mall, G.B. Turn your car on, and go to the mall. The food court, G.B. Go there, and find your path. I’ll be waiting for you at the end—and I’ve got a lifetime contract to offer you.”
He blinked, thinking that was a strange way of putting things. “What…?”
“I’m offering you what you’ve always wanted, what you sing about—I’m prepared to give you eternal life.”
“In the public eye?”
“You will be surrounded forever, G.B.—I’ll take care of everything. I’ll take care of you. Go to the mall, right now—think of this as your audition. Pass? And you’re in like Flynn.”
“I need to go to rehearsals.”
“Like I said, I’ll take care of it all.”
“I don’t understand how you—”
“You’re boring me, and wasting time. Stop with the questions. Start with the actions.”
The call was ended and he looked down at his phone. Man, those A & R people really did have a lot of pull, didn’t they.
Before he was conscious of making a decision, he found himself driving, his hands and feet doing all the right things as he made turns and accelerated down straightaways and slowed down for other traffic.
The Caldwell Galleria Mall was a huge, sprawling expanse of stores that was surrounded by a Ford Motor Company production plant’s worth of parking lots. He hadn’t been there in years, but he remembered, back from his orphanage era, being brought here around Christmastime … paraded around the red and green window displays … unable to buy anything because he’d never had any money.
Which was what happened when you didn’t know who your father was and you killed your mother in childbirth.
He and that fraternal twin of his had had such a great start, hadn’t they.
The food court was around the far side, and he found a parking space that was pretty close to the doors. Walking like a zombie, he zeroed in on the entrance, passing by the smokers who were standing around the trash bins, and the mothers pushing infants around in strollers, and the next generation of bar sluts with their prepubescent legs showing under postage-stamp skirts.
Something told him to tuck his ponytail in under his jacket, and hunch his shoulders while keeping his head down. He didn’t want any attention on himself, and sure as shit, there were probably fans here somewhere.
He entered through the side push doors, not the revolving center one, and hung back. There was quite a distance between him and the teeming trough area, a Kay Jewelers store, a RadioShack, and a Brookstone separating him from the stalls of high-calorie junk food. For a moment, his head cleared enough for him to wonder what the f**k he was doing considering rehearsal was no doubt waiting for him, but then, off to the right, he saw a pair of dark heads going along. One was about two feet shorter than the other, the boy who walked next to the man looking sullen, the man who was beside the boy wearing a hard expression.