“See you tonight,” I said with a pitiful smile.
“I have the day off.” She jutted her curvaceous hip. “The mister is taking me out to dinner and salsa dancing.”
“Salsa?”
She winked and waved her fingers as she walked toward the door. “Hold down the fort, honey.”
I yawned and took a sip of warm water from my glass. Only a few customers remained, mostly drifters. We stayed open twenty-four hours since some immortals worked odd shifts and had no qualms about having a few beers at six in the morning with their breakfast plate of sausage and eggs. Because of the tumbleweeds that blew through this time of day, only one girl worked the floor from five to nine. From what I’d heard, moms brought their kids in for breakfast, but they weren’t big tippers, so most of the girls didn’t want to waste their time working the early shift.
Remembering how Jericho had sung that Beatles song gave me the shivers. Hell’s bells, he was phenomenal. I’d heard him sing plenty of rock songs, but the ballads had always been my favorites, especially that one. He used to play it in our hotel room late at night when he thought I was asleep. His voice had poured through the microphone like smooth bourbon, and I’d become drunk listening to him. But for a fleeting moment, I could have sworn he was looking right at me. I knew Jericho often looked toward the back when the women became a distraction in the front row, but it just felt like his eyes were on me.
It was a good thing they weren’t, or he would have seen me running to the bathroom in tears. I’d stayed in there for another full song and finally found a way to pull it together and put the past behind me.
It wasn’t just that he’d slept with that woman all those years ago, because we had never been exclusive or even in a relationship other than being friends. But walking in on him having sex had made me realize I didn’t matter to him. I’d falsely believed I was special, and when things had heated up between us the night before, I’d thought it meant we might be moving in a serious direction. To be fair, I was young and too foolish to realize a man like Jericho could never settle for just one girl.
All that history shouldn’t have mattered now, but it did. I couldn’t endure losing him twice—once was hard enough. If I had to go through that again, it would break me. After the night I left him, I’d never once dated a musician. How could I expect a man who had the most beautiful and available women at his disposal to be monogamous?
Jericho had addiction problems: sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. A drug addict must abstain from all drugs to be clean and sober, but it was unrealistic to ask someone to become celibate. By no means did I think I was vastly superior to him—I had my own drawer full of dirty socks. I just didn’t air my laundry out in the open the way he did.
A plate of scrambled eggs and bacon appeared in front of me. Jericho stood across the table and spun the chair around, straddling the seat and folding his arms over the back. He was wearing a black suit jacket with no shirt, and the hickey on his chest soured my stomach.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Just the way you like it. Bland as all fuck.” He shoved a saltshaker toward me. “Go on and eat. You’ve been passed out for the last thirty minutes, and I don’t remember seeing you eat dinner earlier.”
“It’s hard to serve on a full stomach.” I lifted the fork and shoveled in a few bites. “Usually I just snack on protein bars and save the big meals for the afternoon. What are you still doing here? Your show ended hours ago.”
He reached across the table and broke off a piece of my bacon. I noticed most of his eyeliner had smeared off. “Decided to hang out for a while and play a little pool with one of my brothers,” he said, chewing on the bacon.
“Is he the one who sucked on your chest?” I asked, pointing at the purple bruise.
Jericho pulled open his jacket and glanced down at his left pec with drowsy eyes. Then his mouth widened in a fiendish smile. “We spilled popcorn. I had a mishap with the vacuum cleaner. Swear it.”
“How come you never talked about your brothers? They seem decent, and I only remember you mentioning them once or twice.”
He slowly licked his finger and then sucked off the remaining bacon crumbs. “I was in a different place back then. Austin was just a kid, and my parents didn’t want me around; they thought I’d be a bad influence. They were right. By then we were all living on our own, but the other guys would return home for long intervals to bond with Austin. It was always weird when I showed up. I got a lot of shit from some of my brothers for not visiting as much, and I guess they could see what I’d gotten mixed up in. Reno was afraid I’d get too famous and people would eventually notice I wasn’t aging. You know how the Breed feels about fame.”