TANTRIC (Book 3 of the Soundcrush Series)

Chapter 61: Front Men Get Drunk. Again. And Again.

Leed Three Mornings After Ashlynn's Double Date With Cam

"Leed. Leed. Bloody hell, Leed. Wake up!"

Riley pounds me on the chest. I smack at him like annoying gnat.

"Fuck off."

"I will not fuck off.  Get up."

I sift through the tequila haze. I lift my head off the couch and smack my lips. Pretty much everything north of my shoulders feels like sandpaper and everything south feels raw meat that's been through a grinder. My eyesight is blurry, too.

Benders are fucking murder on a body. Especially a diabetic body.

Some kind of equipment that sounds like a jackhammer erupts nearby and cracks what's left of my brain. "Fuck," I groan, putting my hands to ears and shooting a resentful eye to the cleaning crew bustling around this trashed out trendy club.

The horrific noise is a floor polisher. I snort. This place is more in need of a pressure washer. The immediate vicinity of the VIP smells like a garbage can spoiling in the sun, and even with blurry vision I see half eaten sushi pooling in trays of spilled drinks, smeared lines on the table, and a chic passed out on the opposite couch from me--in her own vomit.

LA clubs are a fucking disaster in the light of day.

I lay my head back on the sofa and close my eyes again, against the god-awful fluorescent lights.

Someone kicks my foot aggressively. "You heard the man. Get the fuck up, brother."

I laugh weakly. They are taking turns sobering me up each morning. Fun times. Preacher's on duty today. A mix of righteous indignation, tough love and daddy-guilt. But at least there will be cheeseburgers. Adam's hangover cure always involves grease.

I slide off the couch on my knees in front of the table, briefly consider scraping up the coke for a little pick me up, but I'm more drunk than hungover and to be honest I'd rather stay that way. I bypass the coke and reach for the tequila on the table, only to find Adam plucking it from my hand. "No fucking way, dude. No more day drinking at rehearsals. We haven't had a clean run-through yet. The fucking Grammy's are in two days, Leed. You gotta get right."

"Fuck you, Preacher. Who died and made you Lord of Leed?" I laugh at my own lame-ass joke.

I guess the guys are tag teaming today, because Bodie comes strolling through the club, with Marley picking her way behind him, eyes wide. She's seeing the drugs everywhere, but her face remains passive. Bodie, on the other hand, ignores the drugs and grins widely.

"Ease up, Adam. I got this." Bodes reaches out a hand to me. "Come on Big Dawg, I got the boards in the truck."

I eye Bodie lazily. Life is fucking crazy. Three months ago, I had my shit together and Bodie was a straight-up junkie. Now, I've been drunk for five weeks and Bodie—well he's still getting his fix, but methadone treatment is not the same as a heroin haze. He's on a regimen. He's alert, healthy and composed.

And he wants to go surfing. We haven't done that in years.

When we first came to LA, Bodie and I went full on So-Cal. We had the money and the enthusiasm to do it. We would throw down at the clubs all night, hotel a couple of honies who knew the game far better than we did. Before sunrise the girls would already be gone, and Bodie and I were on dawn patrol out at Zuma Beach.

It was the place where we put our crazy rockstar lifestyle in perspective. The place where Bodie and I became more than just bandmates. Straddling those boards, waiting for the perfect wave, we finally talked about all the things we'd written each other when he was in juvi. The things we were too shit-cool to talk about when he got out and we started hanging out in Athens, working at his uncle's bar. We talked about our shit pasts, our frustrations, our poverty, our burn to break out of the traps that seemed like steel, and how the newfound money and fame didn't erase that burn like we thought it would.