Jesse offered to keep Emmie busy while we set up. I wanted to be the one to do it, but he spoke up quicker than I had and I didn’t want to argue over it. It was just a little alone time with Emmie after all. I wasn’t jealous, or even pouty about it. Not even a little bit…

Yeah, I’m a liar. I was completely jealous and more than a little pouty. I didn’t speak to anyone as I filled balloons with helium and helped hang the banner that read: Happy Birthday Emmie! I wanted to be with Emmie, picking out the new tattoo with her that she said was the only thing she wanted for her birthday.

“Drake!” Shane called from the back of the club where he and Axton were setting up the gift table. “Put the fucking bottle down and help us out, brother.”

I glanced over at my friend who was sitting at the bar watching us do the grunt work while he took a swig from an almost full bottle of Jack Daniels. I grimaced, wondering if Emmie would end up sleeping beside him tonight if the nightmares became unmanageable. I worried about Drake on a daily basis. Most days I prayed that he would hold on a little longer and be able to fight the demons that haunted him for just another day more.

“You got it covered, dude. There’s nothing left to do.”

He was right. The buffet table that groaned under the weight of all of Emmie’s favorite foods was set up. The bartender was making sure that he had enough liquor to handle a shit load of rockers—plus Drake. The gift table was loaded with gifts of all shapes and sizes. I had hung red and black skull balloons throughout the club, because Emmie was a freak for skulls. And the banner which had taken me and Drake twenty minutes to put up was hanging perfectly.

Now all we had to do was wait for the birthday girl.

Taking a page out of Drake’s book, I picked up a bottle and took a long pull from it. It was Patron, and I had learned that out of all the liquor in the world tequila fucked me up the worst. Tonight, I needed the numbness.

Six weeks ago I had realized that I wasn’t just lusting after Emmie. I was full blown in love with that girl… woman. She was a woman now. One hundred percent. Either way, I loved her. And if she showed one little hint that she felt even a little of what I felt, then I would jump through the fires of Hell to make her mine.

But she hadn’t. There was nothing to suggest that she even liked me as more than a friend, let alone wanted me. It was a hard pill to swallow, but I wasn’t about to disrupt our friendship—the only fucking link I had to her—by telling her how I felt when she obviously didn’t feel the same.

My head and heart were in agreement on that subject at least. My dick on the other hand? Not so much. I hadn’t had sex in nearly two months now, a record for me. Two months of being unable to respond to the girls lining up to let me between their legs. Two months of only getting hard when Emmie was in the same room as me. My right hand was getting callused from all the jacking I was doing now.

I was down to half a bottle of Patron when the bouncer gave us the signal that Jesse and Emmie had arrived. The club wasn’t overly crowded. All five of OtherWorld’s band members had shown up. They adored Emmie, some more than others if the way Axton kept sniffing around was any indication. Rich had come. We had invited him out of respect for our manager, not because we had actually wanted him there. The two bands that we were on tour with at the moment were also in attendance, plus the road crew that had been with us for four years now. All in all there was a total of about thirty people, with only about twelve of them being female.

The bartender dimmed the lights and Shane lit the candles on the cake while we all gathered around the pink and black skull shaped birthday cake. We heard the door open and Drake and I started singing Happy Birthday.

“What?!” Emmie exclaimed when she saw what we had done. Her eyes grew bright and she had the biggest smile on her face as she came closer with Jesse right behind her. “Oh Gods!”

Everyone joined in on the birthday song, and she was openly laughing as she stood over the huge cake. I pushed Wroth aside so I could wrap my arms around her tiny waist and kissed her cheek after I had finished the song. “Happy birthday, baby girl. Make a wish.” Wish for me! I silently begged.

Pulling her hair to one side, she bent over enough to blow out all twenty-one candles. When they had all winked out she turned and hugged me. “Thank you!” She kissed my cheek hard. “I love it.”

My hands tightened around her waist for a moment too long before I let her go so she could hug everyone else. When she had finally hugged Jesse she went willingly into Axton’s arms and let him kiss her on the cheek too. That was when I pulled my bottle of Patron back out and started chugging that shit.

“Okay, let’s see this new tattoo,” Shane commanded an hour or more later.

I raised my heavy head. “Yeah, let’s see.”

I regretted the words as soon as she started pulling her jeans down. All I could think was that Emmie was stripping in front of a room full of horny ass rockers. But my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and I couldn’t voice my protests. Instead, I was helpless to do anything but sit there and watch as she exposed her hip.

It was bandaged but she carefully pulled the tape back and exposed a black heart with demon wings. My heart constricted when I saw four names in red ink in the middle of the heart. Drake. Jesse. Shane… Nik. I skimmed a shaky finger over my name.

How did I get over the fact that my name was now on her beautiful body?

--

If you want the truth, I didn’t completely sober up after that night. I was half drunk for at least two weeks after that. As soon as the numbness of the alcohol would start to fade I would start drinking again.

We went through four different cities during that time. Today we had arrived in city number five and a whole day ahead of schedule, due to a snow storm in Memphis that had been bad enough to shut the state of Tennessee down.  Of course we had arrived to heavy rain showers in Tampa, and I was sure that it was going to start thundering soon.

Emmie’s fear of thunder and lightning made me dream of her. I had lost count of the times she had climbed through my window when we lived next door to each other as kids because of her fear of thunder storms. Thunder always made me think of Emmie and her cuddled close to me as we would wait out the storms together. Of course I dreamed of her often anyway, but tonight the dream was particularly vivid.

I was stroking my dick when my tormenter appeared in the doorway of my hotel room. Fuck she was beautiful with the light from the bathroom highlighting her auburn hair and porcelain complexion. She was barefoot, which was just fine with me, but normally in my dreams Emmie came to me in thigh high boots and very little else.