I’d only been standing there a few seconds when an arm wrapped around my waist and a head leaned against my shoulder. I didn’t have to look to know it was Emmie, but I was thankful for her presence. “Okay?”

I wiped my tears away with the back of my hand and shrugged. “Who knows?”

Emmie made an empathetic noise and hugged me. “It gets better, sweetie. And for what it’s worth…” She lifted her head and met my eyes with a knowing light in those big green eyes of hers, “I’m pretty sure he’s suffered just as much as you have. And take it from someone who knows, when your man hurts, you hurt ten times as badly.”

Chapter 8

Wroth

I woke up with a splitting headache. It wasn’t anything new to me. For the last year I’d been waking up with a hangover more often than not. It was just easier to fall asleep when my mind was so numb it had no choice but to shut down. But the only thing it really gave me was a better understanding into the mindset that Drake Stevenson had had for so many years and why he had always been seen with a bottle in his hands up until he’d met and married Lana.

It was getting old though, this pounding that felt like I had fallen asleep on top of jackhammer. The bad taste in my mouth along with the nausea rolling in my stomach weren’t a plus either. How was I supposed to win Marissa back if I was sick all the time from trying to forget her long enough to grab a few hours of sleep? This man, the one I was right then with the taste of stale of beer on my tongue and my head and stomach debating which was going to be the cause of my death, was not a man Marissa would be proud of.

Groaning, I rolled over in bed and nearly fell out of the roost I’d drunkenly picked last night when I’d come back to the bus. Muttering curses that I didn’t let anyone else utter within hearing distance of Marissa, I carefully climbed out of bed and took a moment to let the little men in my head stop using my brain for a trampoline and my stomach to settle a little before taking another step.

The smell of coffee was prominent in the air and I slowly made my way through the bus in search of caffeine. The bus was still moving and a glance at the watch on my wrist told me it was just after one in the afternoon. Almost everyone was still asleep from the quietness of the bus, but there were two people sitting at the table when I finally reached the front.

Linc was wide awake with Liam sitting across from him at the little kitchenette table. To say I was surprised would have been the understatement of the decade. The old Liam would have been the last man to get up, he would have been holed up in his roost with an eight ball of coke or some meth and his pipe and we would have had to wait for him to be coherent enough to start jamming so that we could get our rehearsal in before we reached whatever venue we happened to be preforming at that night.

This new Liam was up at the crack of dawn, ready to work out with Linc and get his day started right. My little cousin wasn’t so little anymore. He was nearly as big as I was in the muscle department now and his once almost jaundiced eyes shone bright with a new passion for life. My surprise was replaced with pride for the man who I’d grown up with and loved like a brother.

“Dude, you need a shower,” Liam complained when I dropped down beside him at the table with a huge mug of black coffee that smelled like Jesse Thornton’s special concoction. “You smell like warm beer and something just as nasty.”

I lifted my half closed eyes at him for a fraction of a second, any longer and my aching head would have exploded all over the table. “Welcome to one of the joys that you used to put me through, cuz.”

“Go get cleaned up, Wroth.”

“When I’ve finished that pot of coffee over there I will,” I assured him as I took a long swallow of the scalding brew. When half the mug was gone, I was starting to feel a little more human and leaned back in the booth with a relieved moan.

“So is she okay?” Liam asked after a few more minutes of silence.

“She’s refused to talk to me about it,” Linc replied. “She never confides in me anymore, especially about him.”

My eyes popped open and my heart clenched thinking they were talking about Marissa. I’d left her last night with tears falling down her cheeks and gotten trashed in some bar on the cab ride back to the buses. Had I hurt her even more than I already had without realizing it?

“Rhett said that she was crying in the bathroom for over an hour.” Liam shook his head in disgust. “Devlin needs to get his head out of his ass, tell her he loves her, and put a ring on her finger before she really does decide to move on.”

Relief washed over me for a moment that they had been talking about Natalie and not Marissa. But it was short lived…

“Rissa wasn’t any better, man. Rhett’s worried about her. When I asked what was going on, he refused to tell me, but kept repeating that we needed to keep an eye on her.” Linc downed the rest of his coffee and set the empty mug on the table between us, his eyes telling me just how much he disliked me. I didn’t flinch away from that hard glare. I knew that it was my fault that Marissa was in so much pain. But I was trying to fix things, damn it. If she would just let me in for five minutes I could make her love me again.

I didn’t comment, however. Just finished my coffee and three more cups before going to take a shower. The coffee had helped with the little men jumping on my brain, but the shower woke the rest of my body up. I felt like a different man as I dried off and dressed in my favorite tattered jeans and an OtherWorld shirt that was at least five years old.

By the time I returned, most of the others were up and moving around. Liam was still sitting with Linc at the table and Zander was standing at the fridge with a box of cereal in one hand and a gallon of milk in the other. He was dressed in nothing more than a pair of basketball shorts and I was about to tell him to put a shirt on when I saw that Marissa was sitting on the couch with Natalie…

And sitting right between them was Rhett Fucking Tomlinson.

For fucking real? I knew for a fact that the bus hadn’t stopped any since I’d gotten up so that meant the fucker had been on the bus all night. All. Fucking. Night. Had he slept with Marissa last night? Had they had sex while I was passed out? I was going to tear him limb from limb if that was the case.

“What the fuck is Tomlinson doing on here?” I blinked, because while the words were screaming through my brain they hadn’t been spoken by me. Turning, I found Devlin standing right behind me, his aquamarine eyes like lasers trained on Rhett’s head. “Did he sleep here?”