Dirty Like Seth: A Dirty Rockstar Romance (Dirty, Book 3) Read online

  Just like the other guys in Dirty, he was a man born to be a rock star.

  As he reached the end of the song, he started into a classic Dirty tune, “Runaround.”

  Then he seemed to sense me standing here and faltered; he glanced over, at my sun dress flickering around my bare thighs in the breeze. His hands went still on the guitar and his eyes met mine.

  “Woo said I could help myself to the guitars in his studio,” he said, like he felt the need to explain. Then he removed the guitar from the chair beside him, clearing a space for me.

  “He must hold you in high esteem,” I told him. “Those are his babies.” I sat down in the empty chair, facing the fire. “You spoke to Woo?”

  “This morning. Thought I should, since I’m here.”

  I wondered what else Woo had said to him, but I didn’t ask. “Have you slept at all?”

  “Not yet,” he said. Then he added, “Didn’t really feel like I could.”

  “Why?”

  His eyes left mine. “Hard to sleep, thinking you might hate me.”

  My stomach turned. My chest squeezed as I said, “I don’t hate you, Seth. You can sleep if you want to.”

  He nodded, but didn’t look at me. And my heart ached. My throat constricted with emotion, with sympathy for him.

  I cleared my throat and offered, “You know… I know ‘Dirty Like Me’ gets all the girls tied in knots, but ‘Runaround’ was the best song you ever wrote. If you ask me.”

  “I wrote it with Jessa.”

  “Yeah. You two were quite the creative team.” That was putting it mildly.

  I had no idea if he knew that Jessa was back with us, writing songs with us again. Or how he might feel about that if he knew.

  My gaze dropped to the mug, half-full on the small table next to him. He’d been drinking coffee again. When I looked up, our eyes met.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I keep doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Inspecting what you’re drinking. It’s like I keep checking to make sure there’s no beer can or crack pipe next to you.” I was embarrassed to admit it, but there it was.

  “Well…” he said, processing that, “caffeine’s my only real vice these days. And crack was never my thing. Sorry to disappoint.” Then he smiled a little, the dimple flickering in and out of his left cheek.

  It was the first time I’d seen that dimple since we’d played together in Vancouver earlier this year. I’d almost forgotten he had one.

  “I’m sorry, Seth,” I repeated. And maybe I was apologizing for a whole lot more than just scrutinizing his coffee.

  “Don’t be.”

  I watched as he lay the guitar he’d been playing back in its case. He was wearing the BADASS cuff bracelet I gave him when he joined Dirty ten years ago. He was always wearing it, every time I saw him, and in every photo I’d ever seen of him over the years. It was pewter, a little worn now; I would’ve thought he’d replace it with something… well, more expensive.

  But he never did.

  “It was a lot of fun,” I told him, “playing with you again, at the show in Vancouver.”

  “Yeah. The big reunion.” He settled back in his chair. He was wearing linen pants now, rolled up below the knee, and a pale-green T-shirt with the logo of a local restaurant on it; in the early-evening light it made his smoky eyes look more green than usual as he studied me. “I was glad you all let me do it.”

  “Me too,” I admitted. “You fit right in, just like you always did.”

  He did. Right from that very first day Zane brought him home to jam with us at nineteen. So quiet, kinda shy… until he strapped on his guitar and plugged in and played “Free Bird”—and we all flipped our shit over him.

  All the way to that last night… the final show of the first world tour, after which we’d fired him because he was such a fucking mess.

  A mere month after he’d OD’d on the tour bus.

  He’d come back from the hospital strong, telling us everything was fine, that he was off the heroin. Lying to us, the way addicts did. But we all knew he was sliding down a very deep, dark hole, and none of us knew how to save him from it. We were young enough, maybe, to think we could, for a while.

  But then that night, after the last show, he’d gotten high again. Disastrously high. And the rest… was history.

  “You were clean at the Vancouver show,” I said bluntly, because he was. I could see it in his eyes. “You’re clean now.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “How long have you been clean?”

  “Four years. And four and a half months, give or take a day or two. I used to track the days. Now I just do the months.” He was looking at me, squinting a bit in the setting sun. “But you know that. We went over it when you guys hired me back. I told you everything then.”

  He did. He’d sat down with the band and Brody and told us exactly that. Still…

  “I’m asking you now,” I said.

  And so he told me.

  For an hour or so I just sat and listened while the sun went down and the stars started to come out, and he told me everything. What happened after he was dismissed from the band. The almost three years of bouncing in and out of rehab, trying to get clean, trying not to get clean, and the last time, when he actually did get clean—and stayed that way.

  I wanted to know about all of it. I wanted to know what it took to overcome that kind of addiction. And when I asked him, he simply said, “Underneath it all, my motivations had to change.”

  “What were your motivations for using?”

  He seemed to consider that for a moment, searching for the right words. Then he said, “I had some demons to battle. Getting fucked up was one way to avoid that battle.”

  “What kind of demons?” I asked, though I had some idea.

  Demons from his life as an orphan. As a foster kid. As a street kid. Demons from his rapid-fire launch into fame. And demons, maybe, that looked like Jessa Mayes.

  But he just said, “All kinds.”

  So I left it at that.

  Instead, I asked him about what he’d been doing, musically. I had some idea about that, too, but not much.

  He told me about the various other bands he’d played with, none of them lasting. Right up until the day when he ran into Zane on the beach in L.A., and Zane asked him to jam… which led to reuniting with Dirty this year.

  “He was excited about reconnecting with you,” I told him, remembering the call I’d gotten from Zane. “I think he was relieved, thrilled to see with his own eyes what we’d all heard about you, but been afraid to trust. That you were clean. That you were doing well.”

  Seth’s gaze held mine in the firelight. “And how did you feel about that?”

  And I told him, honestly, “Happy. Actually, it was the first time I felt truly happy this year.” I pulled my legs up into my chair, hugging my knees, remembering that feeling. “January twenty-second. That was a good day.”

  “That was just after Jesse’s wedding,” he noted.

  “Yeah.”

  He was studying me, and I felt the male appreciation in his gaze as it skimmed over my legs. It wasn’t a forward thing. More of an involuntary thing, like he couldn’t help noticing my bare skin.

  And I wondered, had Seth ever looked at me like that, in the past? And if so, why hadn’t I noticed?

  “What was it like watching him marry someone else?” he asked me.

  I cringed a little, because it still wasn’t my favorite subject.

  “What was it like getting kicked out of Dirty,” I asked him, “and watching us play your songs without you?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was heartbreaking,” he said.

  Yeah. Even as I felt the blow of his words, I knew that much.

  Because that’s how it would’ve felt for me, if I was in his place.

  “It must’ve been terrifying,” I ventured, because that’s also how I
would’ve felt. “I mean… you had us. You had management, lawyers and accountants, security, a crew, and then…”

  “And then, overnight,” he finished for me, “I had nothing. Nobody would talk to me.”

  That part, I couldn’t even imagine. I didn’t want to.

  It still flooded me with guilt.

  “I felt alone, for a long time,” he said. “Abandoned. I had no idea what I was gonna do. Dirty was everything to me. The band was the only place I’d ever felt like I belonged. It felt like I’d lost everything.”

  “I can’t imagine,” was all I could say. I still felt deep, deep regret over the whole thing, but I knew he wasn’t telling me these things to make me feel bad. He was just being honest, which was what I’d asked him to do. “But I’m glad you kept playing with other bands.”

  “Yeah. I kept playing,” he said. “But none of them could replace what I had with Dirty. So I never stuck around for long. I always found some excuse to leave, or to make them ask me to leave. I think I was holding out for Dirty, even if I didn’t want to admit to myself that’s what I was doing.”

  “You still wanted to play with us? All that time?” That surprised me, actually. “After we’d fired you?”

  “Shit, yeah,” he said. “For years I wanted to do some kind of reunion with you guys. I became kinda obsessed with it. I tried reaching out to Brody, to Zane, to all of you. I just wanted to have my moment, you know? To play with you again, even just once, to prove to all of you, to the fans, and to myself, maybe, that I wasn’t just some pathetic junkie. I wasn’t a fuck-up. I hadn’t destroyed the best thing I had going in my life, to the point of no return. That I could still be a part of it again. But no one would have that conversation with me. Zane was the only one who talked to me at all, and he wouldn’t go there. So at some point, a few years back, I stopped asking. I figured you guys would come back to me, when you were ready. When the time was right.” He shook his head. “I convinced myself that had to be the reason why you never really replaced me. Because you were still holding the spot for me.”

  “Maybe we were.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, just stared at me. I wasn’t sure if I’d shocked him or what. Maybe I’d kinda shocked myself.

  But it was true enough.

  We’d never said so, never talked about it like that, but there was definitely a hole left behind by Seth that none of us had truly attempted to fill until this year.

  “What about Jude?” I asked. “Did you talk to him? Over the years?”

  “Sometimes,” he said. And I got the feeling that was all I was gonna get. Seth wasn’t the kind of person who’d want Jude catching shit for talking to him, and I knew that. So I let it lie. Even though I was incredibly curious.

  If Jesse wasn’t even talking to Seth, why was Jude?

  “And how was the reunion in Vancouver, for you?” I asked him instead. “Was it everything you hoped it would be?”

  “Sure,” he said. “In a way. But it was pretty bittersweet. I got to work with all these amazing people again. Not just the band, but some of the crew I knew from the old days. And Brody. Got to meet Maggie. Met Jesse’s wife.” He paused there, like he was waiting for me to say something about that, but I didn’t. “But I only got to play the one song. And I’m not gonna lie, that was hard for me.”

  “Yeah. I guess it would be…” It hadn’t really occurred to me, until he’d said it, how hard that would be.

  Standing in that bar, watching the show. Watching Ash play his songs, standing in his place.

  “It stung. But I just tried to be graceful about it. Be grateful for the moment. Being invited up on that stage at all… Having your trust again, even in some small way.”

  “It wasn’t small,” I told him. “We don’t invite just anyone onstage with us, Seth.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I kept telling myself. And it did give me some closure, in a way. Just like I’d told myself it would. I told myself I could move on now. Let the past go. Leave all my bitterness and that haunting feeling, that things were still left undone, behind. Stop fantasizing about playing with Dirty again. I could play with other bands and really commit myself to it the way I never had, because I’d been holding out for Dirty. I was finally free to move on.”

  He looked away. Far away; out over the dark of the ocean.

  “And then you did ask me back,” he went on, his voice low and thick with emotion. “And it turned my world upside-down. Everything changed overnight. I thought I had it all back.” He looked over at me. “Then it got ripped out from under me again. I got dismissed, all over again.”

  I cringed; I couldn’t help it. It was so awful. The entire thing. Losing him again. And Brody’s allegations…

  “You must’ve been pissed,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah, I fucking was. But mostly at myself. I still loved you guys.” His voice broke a bit when he said, “I always loved you.”

  I did not know what to say to that. We loved you, too seemed pathetic, given what we’d done to him.

  What we’d taken away from him.

  He cleared his throat. “These last six months, I played with some other guys,” he said. “Mostly because I had to. I had to keep playing for my own peace of mind. But it wasn’t right. It wasn’t Dirty. The whole time, I think I was really preparing myself to come back, somehow. I thought I was done, but I wasn’t fucking done. When I saw the call for auditions, something just snapped in my head. I knew it was my time. It had to be. This was my shot. And once I got that into my head, I wasn’t letting it go for anything. Jessa was wrong about me. Brody was wrong. The whole band was wrong. You were all wrong about me, and I was gonna prove it. To you guys. To the world.” He shook his head, sighing. “I really, totally believed that. I believed it when I convinced Jude and Liv and Maggie to give me that shot. I believed it when I stepped out onstage, and when I played…”

  “I know you did,” I said. “I could hear it.”

  His eyes held mine, just like they did when he’d stood up on that stage.

  “But then I saw the looks on your faces,” he said. “When you saw it was me. Jesse. Brody. They didn’t want it to be me. They were so fucking disappointed that it was me. And it broke my heart all over again.”

  “Seth. I’m so sorry about that…”

  “That was the moment I was done. I think the first time I got kicked out of the band, I was too messed up to fully process the loss. And the second time, I was overwhelmed, kinda blindsided by the whole thing. But I wasn’t done. When Brody told security to kick me out on my ass after I played my heart out for you at that audition… and I saw you looking at me, so shocked and confused and, I don’t know… betrayed… I was done.”

  The finality in his words sank into me, filling me with a heavy, dreadful sadness. Just like at the auditions, I did not like seeing him give up the fight.

  But I also didn’t like seeing him fight… and lose the battle.

  I hated the way things had gone down at that audition, the way he’d been treated. But I couldn’t force the other guys to change their minds about him.

  “What will you do now?” I asked him gently. I didn’t want him to think I pitied him. I didn’t. I respected him, immensely. “Where will you go after this?”

  He shook his head and gave up another heavy sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe go up to Vancouver, visit Ray. Lay low for a while. He was pretty happy when I told him I was coming up for the auditions. Pretty disappointed when I changed my mind and auditioned in L.A. instead.”

  “I didn’t know you did that.”

  “I wanted to be last,” he said, shaking his head again, like he couldn’t believe his own foolishness, “so you wouldn’t forget me.”

  “We’ve never forgotten you,” I told him.

  A silence fell, filled only with the soft roar of the ocean and the crackle of the fire. Seth’s eyes held mine, shining a little in the firelight, and he nodded slightly, as if to say Thank you for that.

  I
swallowed, trying to loosen the knot in my throat. I hugged my knees tighter against me, though it wasn’t cold. “I’ve popped in to see Ray a few times over the years,” I offered, looking to change the subject a little.

  “I know,” he said. “He told me. You never returned my calls, though. I would’ve thanked you for looking in on him. I remember you did that, back then, too. Even when I couldn’t.”

  “I always liked Ray.”

  “He likes you, too.”

  I knew that was true. And maybe, part of the reason I’d felt it was important to look in on Seth’s foster father whenever I could was because Seth would’ve liked that. I always knew if Seth wasn’t so messed up himself, he’d be looking in on Ray more.

  “I’m sorry I never took your calls, Seth. I guess… I just wasn’t ready,” I told him honestly, “to move on from the way you’d hurt us. It still felt too fresh, even years afterward.”

  “I never meant to hurt you guys.”

  “I know,” I said. “But you did.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then: “I’m sure there was no love lost for Brody.”

  “Don’t say that. Brody always liked you. It’s just… you know how he is about Jessa.”

  He didn’t say anything, just nodded and looked out over the ocean.

  “Anyway, I’m not talking about Brody. Or Jessa. I’m talking about the band.” But the words didn’t feel quite right, and I amended: “No, actually, I’m not. I’m talking about Zane, and me. Losing you was… brutal… for the two of us.”

  Our eyes locked again, and in that look, I could see Seth’s regrets. How much he’d suffered over hurting us. I knew in my heart he never wanted to do that.

  His drug abuse was never about us. Overdosing was never about us.

  He was headed down that road long before he met us.

  And Zane went down a somewhat-similar road himself, before he got sober. We had a lot of growing to do, personally, and as a band. We were such kids when we started out.