Brian hummed and fired up the ignition. The engine purred like a kitten; the cliché was true.
“You okay?” His considerate question made double the impact because he was the one in trouble and she should have asked first.
Though she hadn’t eaten all day, the faint gnawing in her belly fled. She tried in vain to press a delete button and erase the thought about Brian being egotistical, but it wouldn’t vanish.
What was wrong with her? He wasn’t that egotistical, but the visual reminders of his fame and success threw her relative insignificance and litany of failures into relief. All of these logical points made sense, but intellectualizing didn’t help. “I’m fine. Tired is all. Long flight.”
“Well, relax and enjoy the ride in a custom-made One-Seven-Seven Aston Martin. While you’re here, I’d love to take you for a cruise down the PCH and show you what she’s made of. Rest assured, it’s not to creep through the traffic we’re about to hit.”
Face boyish in its delight, he yanked the gearshift into drive. He owned the stick, a firm and confident grip. Pulling the wheel in a similarly deliberate tug, hands at the ten and six position, he zipped out of the loading zone and onto the exit ramp. The tune he hummed triggered a memory. He was singing one of his own band’s songs.
Overcome by a low-grade stomachache, Helen resigned herself to emotional defeat as she sank into the swampy bile of her past.
A typical Midwestern girl growing up in the decade she had, she’d spent many a tweener night gazing up at the Fyre posters on her walls, coveting those hot-yet-nice British rockers, good boys playing at being bad who drove hormonal, star-struck girls to the brink of madness.
At thirteen, when she’d seen them live in some amphitheater in Bumblefuck, Minnesota, she’d sworn, as all female peers of her generation did, that Brian had looked right at her during that dumb “Deep Dark Woods” song.
Well, correction, it wasn’t a dumb song. It was a chart topper, a masterpiece, the single that earned Fyre a Grammy and made them a household name.
Her feelings, the meaning she ascribed to Brian and the song, were dumb.
An intoxicating spate of teenage fever dreams followed that false magic moment, school days and lonely nights in un-homes spent fantasizing, at times in embarrassingly specific detail, that she’d make her way backstage at one of their concerts, connect on a soul-mate level, and find herself whisked away from her shitty life by a sensitive rocker white knight.
And now here she was, fifteen-plus years later, riding in Brian Shepherd’s overpriced European car under outlandish paranormal circumstances. Ridiculous. Absurd.
Where was he when she was getting slapped around by that one drunk foster dad? Where the hell was he when she was showing her pussy and asshole for crumpled dollar bills? Probably getting his dick sucked in a car much like this one.
And now she had to save his life. But what happened to her glitzy, rock star savior fantasy? Where had that gone, why hadn’t the universe offered that up when she’d would have chopped off a finger to have it?
In lieu of fulfilment of her youthful wish, she got bungled witchcraft, a curse, and the toxic adhesive resulting from it binding her and Brian together. Helen swore sometimes that she was the butt of a cosmic joke.
She bit down on her tongue and stared into the space in front of her, a fleet of red taillights like alligator eyes peeping out of black bayous. God, she had a shitload of unresolved issues, and the present instant managed to trigger every single one of them.
Brian addressed her silence with a patient murmur. “You aren’t obligated to talk to me. It’s not lost on me that you’re putting yourself out on my behalf. This is stressful for you. I want you to know I care. And that if you want to talk, I’m here to listen.”
She crunched a mint, its wintergreen sting burning away the funk. Unfair to lash out at Brian because, after all of these years, she still sorta low-grade hated herself and the idea of him swirled around the outer orbit of that hate field.
In fact, allowing such toxicity to run amok was super unfair and messed up. Because as easy at it was to resent Brian for his money and status and inability to save a younger version of her, he was innocent. A victim of her mistakes.
“I’m trying to be more emotionally intelligent, more measured in my reactions to things, but sometimes I melt down and get really angry. That’s as best as I can explain it right now,” she said.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked as the car nudged forward.
In the slow-moving cell, there was nowhere to go. Nowhere to run and hide from the clusterfuck of her feelings, the decades of garbage floating up from her subconscious, the unbearable impulse to rapidly regress.
“No.” She scratched the tops of her thighs, the repetitive motion making a series of comforting friction sounds. “It’s hard for me to talk to people, to be vulnerable. Instead I get pissed off and retreat into this cyclic fixation on my grievances from the past. I swear I’ve had therapy. Probably not enough. Nothing is ever enough.”
Brian stroked the steering wheel in those practiced and deliberate touches of his, as if he wanted to massage meaning out of the leather circle.
“I can relate to feeling like nothing is ever enough,” he said.
Maybe if she eased up on the angst valve, a better version of herself could breathe in Brian’s presence. He’d oxygenate her potential by recognizing it. He was genuine, integrated, generous. A bit cocky, sure. But his pride was commensurate with actual meteoric achievements—the man was no
