Breakdown Read online

  They didn’t know shit.

  I lived inside words and music. Both accepted me for the tortured, twisted fucker I was.

  And when I was pulled under, so deeply submerged that I couldn’t reach words or music or any semblance of equilibrium, I reached for drugs and sluts.

  “What do you want me to do with this piece of jailbait?” Peppers had asked, nudging the girl forward, unfazed by her swearing and stomping.

  I’d already turned away from it all—cameras, venue staff, management, athletes, celebrities, entourages—and had been lighting a cigarette in pursuit of my pickup truck. “Let security handle the bitch. I’m going to the hotel.”

  “Wait, it’s not like that,” she’d protested. It was the first sentence I’d heard her string together that hadn’t included a variation of the word fuck. “I turn eighteen at midnight and I’m probably going to be grounded for a fucking decade because I sneaked to an NBA game just to tell Atticus Creed something to his face.”

  Curiosity, and the kind of mesmerizing way cuss words sounded on her tongue, had me pivoting and pointing the cigarette. “Say it. Now.”

  She’d glanced at the orange tip and the smoke curling into the winter air. “You saved my life.”

  More than just an irritating child with a filthy mouth, and more than a random groupie in a pink coat, she’d stood in the parking lot staring at me. Through me. Into me.

  What she’d seen—a musician freefalling from one high and ready to chase another—should’ve scared her.

  Instead, she had smiled. At me. Through me. Into me.

  “Yeah?” Peppers had challenged, wearing a shit-eating grin as he looked from the girl to me. “How’d he save you?”

  “She wants to tell me, Peppers, so exit stage goddamn left.”

  Peppers had grumbled something about finding our bass guitarist, Skid, and taking off.

  “Today’s the anniversary of your mom’s death,” she’d ventured. As if I hadn’t fucking known that fact. She’d waited a few seconds in unspoken invitation for thanks or a smile or some other shit that wouldn’t happen. “In that VH1 interview a few months ago, you mentioned your sister. It was the first time you talked about her in any interview. Is she doing okay without a mom?”

  This girl had the perception and memory of an elite stalker.

  “Here’s what, kid. You didn’t wedge your cute little ass into my band’s ride to give me some fuckin’ parking lot therapy. You said I saved you. So how’d I do it? Quick, ’cause you’re boring me shitless.”

  “My parents’ divorce was just finalized,” she’d blurted, her mouth shaping the words as though she’d never said them aloud. “Merry Christmas to me, right?”

  “Must’ve been on Santa’s naughty list, then.”

  Pain scrunched her features. “It wasn’t my fault. They swore it wasn’t.”

  “My mistake. Bad shit happens even when you try to be good. What do your parents’ problems have to do with me?”

  “They fought a lot and it was hard to be stuck in the middle. So hard that it hurt. So much hurt that I got hooked on it, if that makes sense. Anyway, when things were really bad, when I wanted to stop breathing just so I’d feel nothing at all, your voice was all I heard. Your music pulled me through. Your voice and your lyrics.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Fan groups, Reddit, uploads from your shows—none of it is enough. I live in the comments section of every post about you. I know that’s fucking weird, but it doesn’t feel weird because it’s a connection to somebody who believes what he writes, what he sings. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  “All right. So you told me.”

  “Can…uh…can I touch you, Atticus?”

  “Why do you want to touch me?”

  “To see what courage and conviction feel like.” She’d stepped forward and stroked my neck with petal-soft fingertips. Under the stale odors of cold city streets and sidestream smoke was her peppermint fragrance.

  “Are you fuckin’ with me, kid?”

  “Uh-uh. It’s the truth. In one of my favorite movies, there’s this quote written on cue cards about telling the truth at Christmas.” Rising up on the tiptoes of her Chuck Taylor All Stars, she’d whispered, “And, since it’s Christmas, I’m going to tell you this truth. At night, when I push my fingers in my pussy, I imagine they’re yours. At school, I daydream that you’re playing and punishing me like your guitar. I soak my sheets and undies because I can’t quit thinking about you.”

  Holy motherfucking shit.

  She’d watched me intently, trailing her fingers…those fingers…up and down, skimming my Adam’s apple and settling at the base of my throat. “Your pulse is so fast. Your pupils flared. Are you hard too?”

  “It’s a bad fuckin’ idea to go around talking to grown men like this. One of ’em might fuck up and take you seriously,” I’d said, warning her. Warning myself.

  “Good,” she’d said, “because I seriously want to be taken.”

  Who the fuck was this girl?

  Earnest eyes as dark as twilight, fringed with ebony lashes. Pink lips that might be as soft as her coat. Hair like silk espresso, that fell to her hips and would obscure and shelter like the fall of a curtain as I pulled her on top of me. Slender legs that would fold around my waist when she welcomed me into her every depth.

  What the fuck was wrong with me, to want that, to hope for that, to prophesize that?

  “You’re scared,” she’d said. “I can tell, because I’m scared too. Destiny is scary as fuck.”

  “So, what, you’re after a VIP experience in a hotel room? Is that it?”

  She’d swallowed then, the movement a faint flutter of butterfly wings. “No.”

  “Okay.”

  “But you can drive me home.”

  Come midnight, she’d still be a naïve girl too good for a fucked-up musician.

  I would let her be my world if she’d let me into hers.

  It’d been midnight on the fucking dot when I showed up in front of the graffiti-stained Carter Street diner where I’d dropped her off only a half hour ago. She’d told me her father ran the place and she lived with him in the apartment upstairs on weekends and holidays, catering lunches and parties for rap label A-Town Sound based down the block. Through the week, she lived with her mother in Brookhaven and went to a private academy where her extracurriculars were fencing, art exhibit curation, and country club tennis.

  The girl had looked up from the beaten Formica counter she’d been scrubbing and stared at me standing on the other side of the door.

  A Sorry, We’re Closed sign had hung between us, taunting. Through the thick glass and despite the commotion of rap and traffic on the street, I could hear Slipknot blaring from the diner’s speaker.

  She’d dropped the rag, run to the door, and yanked me inside with wet, sudsy hands.

  “Atticus, oh my God, I was so fucking mad at you for leaving.”

  “I brought you home, saw you safely inside, and left. Be mad at my goddamn country boy manners.”

  “Feel out of your element in neighborhoods like this, country boy?”

  “No. A friend of mine came up in Grove Park. I spent a lot of time there.”

  “Where is he now? Wall Street? Silicon Valley? D.C.? Hollywood?”

  “Georgia State.”

  “Georgia State University? What’s his major?”

  “Georgia State Prison. His major’s felony murder.”

  “Oh.” She’d audibly swallowed, leaving sudsy trails on my leather jacket as her hands fell to her sides.

  “Want me to take off, now that you know the company I keep?”

  “You didn’t do it.” Her hands found me again, this time peeling the jacket off my shoulders. “Stay.”

  I’d glanced around, seeing shadows, vacant booths, and wal
ls that were covered with autographed photos of artists, producers, and actors who’d come through. “Where’s your father?”

  “Upstairs watching ESPN. I’m on cleaning duty, punished for violating curfew and lying about being at a friend’s house. I’m not allowed to go up until I’m done scrubbing the diner from top to bottom. Worth it.” She’d smiled up at me, but the purity of a sincere smile couldn’t burst through my dark need for another hit of pussy and coke.

  “What would your father say if he saw a strange man with tattoos for sleeves standing here looking at daddy’s pretty little girl with sex in his eyes?”

  “He wouldn’t say anything. He’d just serve up your special-order ass-kicking. Luckily for you, he’s already super pissed at me and won’t be coming down here to check on things.” She’d glanced away, almost shyly. “Um, I have my license, if you want proof that I’m…uh…that I’m, you know, legal—”

  “Don’t need to.”

  “You’re just going to trust my word?”

  “Yeah,” I’d said, ’cause it was damn simple. “If I don’t trust you, I shouldn’t be fuckin’ you.”

  She’d kicked the door shut and the clock mounted to a dingy eggshell-white wall had shuddered.

  12:01 a.m.

  I put everything on her, pushing her against a pinball machine, grinding and tasting her.

  Stripped of coat and Chucks, hoodie and jeans, bra and—what’d she called them? undies—she was smooth, unblemished.

  Except for the thin slashes of scarring across her wrists and forearms.

  “My girl’s been hurting herself. I don’t like that.”

  “I’m your girl?” she challenged. “Since when?”

  “Since now.” I traced her lips with my tongue, memorizing their shape and texture now, ’cause I’d probably never see her again. “Since this exact fuckin’ moment. I licked you, so you’re mine.”

  She pushed her hands into her hair to conceal the scars. “Pretend you don’t see them.”

  “Nah, can’t do that. I’m going to have you naked for me, birthday girl, and I’m going to look at everything.” I brought down her hands, licked the raised welts and crimson slashes. “Every fuckin’ burn and bruise.” I squeezed her plump tits, circling their dusky areolas with my tongue. “Every fuckin’ freckle.” I parted her thighs and sucked her clit into my mouth. “Every fuckin’ fold of this sweet, tight cunt.”

  Pussy and cocaine. Pussy. Cocaine.

  My father didn’t hide his indulgence in the pairing. He said it made him feel invincible to fuck a whore while cocaine was spinning through his system.

  It was the only thing he and I had in common, aside from DNA. But that was luck of the draw.

  I dragged myself away, leaving her draped over a pinball machine, not trusting that she alone could quiet the nightmares I battled every waking moment. Carrying a small square packet back to her, I saw her teeth capture those pillow-soft lips. First the top, then the bottom.

  She extended a hand, palm up. “Let me, okay? I’ve never done this before, but I can try. I can do it slowly, even look into your eyes as I roll it on. Like in a porno.”

  What?

  Oh. She was anticipating a condom.

  This wasn’t a condom.

  “Wait…what is that?” she murmured, and I could hardly make out the words over Slipknot and the hellish white noise in my mind.

  “Eight ball,” I said. She wanted honesty and I wouldn’t deprive her. I tore open the packet and the cocaine spilled across her breasts, dusting her in heavenly white.

  She moistened her lips as something bright, primal, and akin to panic widened her eyes. “But I don’t use.”

  “Not asking you to.” I leaned over her, squeezed her tits, and snorted.

  She put a hand to my shoulder. It was trembling. “About the condom,” she said. “The thing is, vaginal, anal, oral—I haven’t done any of it. You’re the one with the party hard, fuck-for-all rock star lifestyle. So…um…I need to know if you are…uh…”

  “Clean?” I supplied.

  She smiled timidly, brushing a fingertip across my nostrils. It came away dusted with coke. “Aside from the eight ball, of course. Are you?”

  “If I said yeah, would you trust me?”

  “Yes.” She said it with conviction. “If I don’t trust you, I shouldn’t be fucking you.”

  Those had been my words, but coming from her lips they were a refrain that sank into my soul.

  “I’m clean,” I said, and it was part of a larger truth that a fear-driven obsession had me constantly sitting in some doctor’s office waiting to see if the consequences of my fucked-up decisions had caught up to me.

  As the dust filled me, I filled her, hooking my arms behind her knees and shoving into her as though my way to freedom was through her body.

  She muffled a gasp with her hands, but I saw tears flood her eyes and spill. Pain snatched her—it was in the blush spreading across her cheeks, the quiver of her lips, the bluish vein called to the surface of her long neck. It clenched and collapsed her walls around me like a glove two sizes too tight. It flexed and writhed and transferred, attaching itself to me, darting straight through to my bones.

  Her hurt was my hurt. I caused it and I welcomed it.

  I pulled out and she bowed up, as though I’d sunk a blade into her middle only to maximize the damage by prying it free. So I drove in again, deeper, groaning as she failed at suffocating her cry. Rutting her faster, smashing her harder, frantic for closeness and for quiet, I did not stop until I made a cocoon for myself inside her.

  Eventually her hands stroked through my hair, cradling my head…consoling me.

  “Why the fuck are you touching me like that?” There was blood between us—painted haphazardly across her mound and thighs, staining my cock and the pinball machine like the crimson scrawl of a love note. The shock of color seemed more vibrant than the ink on my arms. “What kind of bitch wouldn’t hate someone for snorting coke off her tits and ripping into her pussy?”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re trying to find something and it hurts more than anything you can do to me.” She slipped a hand between us, winced, and brought a bloodstained finger to my lips.

  Sex wasn’t a sin, yet this sex, our sex, was the perfect sin. It was good, but intricately vile. As natural as life, but complexly illogical. Permitted in the words of Georgia law, but unremorsefully criminal.

  The diner’s ceiling lights twinkled against the tears in her eyes, and they reminded me of something vast and sacred, something watchful and accepting. Star scatter in a midnight sky. “It’s okay, Atticus.” She slipped her fingertip into my mouth, rewarding me with what I’d earned.

  It was bitter—her blood and secretions, my spit and semen. It didn’t carry a spicy tang or offer a sweet flavor. But what perfect sins did?

  Dipping my head for more of that metallic taste, I kissed her flat abdomen and the gentle protrusion of her pelvic bones, seeking her center. Then I started licking away her blood, erasing her pain with my tongue. She moaned and cried out, thrashing under my hands as I drank from her swollen, battered flesh.

  I was taller, heavier, stronger; yet she had a spirit that defied physics and might protect her from the worst of me.

  I stayed in the diner longer than I should’ve, ignoring my phone and obligations, riding out my high as I rode on her. Pinball machine. Tabletop. Wall. Floor.

  Naked and sweaty, painted with blood, come, and cocaine, she watched me put on my clothes and swipe a Coke.

  I dropped a hundred-dollar bill onto a table. Our table. The tables and booths were all trimmed with tinsel, except this one. The shiny red-and-green crap had been torn away when she’d clutched the edges of the table as I’d bent her forward, dug my fingers into her ass, and spread her for my
mouth.

  I raised the drink in explanation, in case she assumed I was paying for the fuck. Which, in the nastiest truth of truths, I was.

  “A hundred dollars? It’s a Coke, not a bottle of Dom.”

  Shrugging, avoiding her intense Georgia-soil eyes, I shoved the bill into my jeans and strode to the door.

  “It’s really cold out,” she said. “Stay inside. Your ride can call when he gets here.”

  Worried that I’d be reckless behind the wheel and would end up as some James Dean tragedy, she’d teased me with almost-kisses until I’d relented and texted my family attorney to collect me.

  “Thanks, but I’ll wait for my keeper outside.”

  “Atticus?”

  “What?”

  “Whatever it is you’re searching for, I know you didn’t find it in me. But I hope you do find it.”

  Fuck.

  Jesus, this girl.

  I didn’t know her name. She hadn’t volunteered it, and somehow that was the single boundary I respected.

  Again, the thought churned through me, defying my past and best-laid plans and the larger-than-life expectations that came with being a Creed. I would let her be my world if she’d let me into hers.

  “Hey,” she interrupted as I hauled open the door to confront the empty winter night.

  “What?” I said, praying for a reason to come back…terrified that of my endless anguished prayers, this might be the one God answered.

  “My name’s Sophie.”

  Music died a year later, the night I lost Sophie to Perversion and my father to lithium.

  Writhing in withdrawal—from drugs and from her beautiful, lying lips—I’d chased her from the Creed family mansion. First on foot down the gold-railed staircase, stumbling over her Chucks as she dropped them in her sobbing haste to get out of my crosshairs. Then on my death rock–blaring Harley, wearing just a T-shirt and unzipped jeans and the earthy caramel scent of her pussy, riding her Jeep’s ass; zigzagging through oncoming traffic to force her to swerve dangerously, gunning the hog ’til it leaped in front and gave her the split-second choice to stomp the brakes or take my life.