TANTRIC (Book 3 of the Soundcrush Series)

Chapter 53: Frontmen Have A Religious Experience

A short and sweet treat for my readers. Happy Friday!

Leed

I've never considered myself a coward.

The Utopian summer I was fifteen and Mac wasn't quite twelve, I found her crying in the bathroom one night, while our mom was off the commune delivering a baby. Mac was freaking out—it took me a long time to get any sense out of her. Eventually I figured out she had started her period and she had no idea what was going on, because no one had bothered to explain the facts of life. I guess at eleven she was a little on the young side, or maybe my mom just assumed in a world with internet, that Mac was savvy.  The stepmother-du-jour probably assumed my mom was doing her job. Nobody had given Mac a head's up.

So it was up to me, like usual, to look after Macaroni. I had no qualms about folding down on the bathroom floor beside her and telling her what she needed to know. Then I went around to the neighbor's and borrowed some pads for her.

The night Angelo Moran sat in the back of the grungy HandleBar, I wasn't a coward then, either. I knew it might be our last shot. A bunch of other labels had passed on us, saying our sound was great, but that I just wasn't "unique" enough as a frontman.

So that night, I stopped trying to be Eddie Vedder—even though that's what I sound like and what I looked like back then, all big-boned and super long-haired and flannel. I went with my instincts and summoned the unique giants of the generations. I took my shirt off and oozed sex like del Marco, but showed my inner Cobain—yelping and growling and bleeding song like that misfit kid that still lives inside me. I tied it together like Bowie—making it my stage, my story—my theater. Trace nearly had a stroke at my sudden command of his ship, but it fucking worked. I found myself as a performer that night. Found the magic that grips the crowd, makes them listen.

When Soundcrush took the stage in our first arena show, I wasn't the slightest bit nervous then, either. Once you find what I found that night at the HandleBar, it doesn't matter if your audience is fifty drunks in a dive bar or forty thousand people that paid to see you. You know the magic is yours to make for them.

Not even finding Mac being choked or experiencing Ollie's birth made me fear. They made me feel and made me react—on opposites ends of the spectrum- but they didn't make me fear.

I'm almost always buoyed by the belief that I can handle my shit.

No, I'm not a coward. But as this private jet accelerates down the runway and lifts us skyward, and I know we are leaving the US and Ashlynn's newly re-established routine behind yet again, I'm scared shitless.

Ashlynn has been headache free for nearly ten days now, but what if this is a mistake? What if her headaches come back while we are living in a tree house? What if she has a seizure in the middle of the rainforest? I wanted to delay this trip, but we both knew delay was just a code word for "cancel."

We nearly had our first fight over this. It felt like a fight anyway. There was no anger, but it was the first time we've been on opposite sides of an issue and unwilling to budge.

Ashlynn insisted she's okay, and that there is no reason to believe her health isn't back on track like it's been for nine months. She wouldn't hear about bringing along West, either, which I thought was a good idea. Not because I'm worried about our safety in Costa Rica, but because I wanted someone I could trust if she fell sick and I needed back up. But she said a romantic trip in a tree house would be ruined by a bodyguard.

Over and over, we said the same things. She said travel was one of my dreams and that this is too important to cancel. Over and over I told her I'm scared of her headaches coming back from the stress of travel.