Neon Red [Order The eBook] [Zayn]

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(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)

(Playlist For Songs Referenced In This Book Linked In Comment)

February 2017

Hollywood Hills

The water had run cool. Two of the overhead lights were out, lending the stone the feel of an underground grotto. The walls still hissed with the steam from when I first stepped in. I liked to keep the temp just shy of boiling; that way it'd break down my sinuses and get a good sweat out of me. Draw away all the venom, like some dreadful detox straight out of the dark ages. I imagined I could watch it trickle out of my pores onto the floor to be washed away with the remainder of my impurities.

I'd been in there so long my hands were pruned. I ran them down my face and chest, and the skin on my fingers felt loose and lumpy—as if I was battling a premature infirmity. Nina Simone's "Lilac Wine" started up on the intercom and cast a spell throughout the house. I stood entranced, unable to shift in the slightest. Feet planted into the black granite on either side of the drain like I weighed a metric ton. Water spilled down my head, blinding me with my own bangs. They lay drenched and flattened against my skull like a satin veil.

Something about her cadence unnerved me, like I was listening to the articulation of a curse; or the anguished cries of an earthbound spirit. If sorrow was a sound, her voice would epitomize it. A sound like dereliction. It spoke of a lifetime of strife—adult strife, but indirectly girlhood strife. Chilling realities incapable of being formulated by a mind like mine. Our paths were not one. Our times were not the same, yet she spoke to me. Called to me in that achy timbre paralleled by nothing of this generation.

My throat twitched with what seemed misdirected emotion. I couldn't tell if I was feeling things on my behalf or hers. In an instant, I was submerged in the hideousness visited upon a musician of her gender, race, and era. I struggled not to become enraged. I had never felt so dispirited, like nothing I did mattered. That my existence was futile—loathed even. I wanted out. I was glad I could get out. I quailed to imagine what it would be like if I couldn't leave whenever I wanted.

My mind boarded a passenger train straight back into the 50s. I was sitting at the table closest to the stage in a dilapidated country tavern, lit only by a few sconces and an occasional candle. She was her own pianist; head sometimes bent drunkenly over the keys. Heart droning. This song had been covered a million times, but Nina didn't just borrow anything. She reinvented; she robbed; she revolutionized. "Lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love. Lilac wine, I feel unsteady, like my love. Listen to me, I cannot see clearly. Isn't that he, coming to me?"