Firelight flickered against the stone mantle of the fireplace, yet despite its warmth, Jesse still shivered and huddled in the blankets he’d wrapped around his shoulders. The winds outside had picked up, he could hear them howling like the crowds in the stands at every show he’d ever played. Now, as he sat staring into tear blurred flames, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever climb up on a stage again. His fingers itched to touch his guitar, but what was the point in creating anything with the way his bandmates had turned their backs on him.

​

“Way to go.”

 

The sarcasm in Tish’s voice was unmistakable. Whirling, Jesse turned to glare at her.

 

“You think I did that on purpose?”

 

“What are we supposed to think!” she snapped, crowding into his space. Doesn’t matter that she was shorter, she had a way of getting right in his face. “The way you played tonight was abysmal. The fans didn’t deserve that. WE didn’t deserve to have you out there ruining the set like that. You let everyone down tonight, so instead of making excuses, why don’t you tell us what the hell you’re on so you can get the treatment you need!”

 

“I’m not ON anything!” he roared, then Kyle and Griffin were there, crowding him back against the wall.

 

“You garbled half the words to songs YOU wrote!” Griffin shot back.

 

“Not to mention how many times you were off key and singing in an entirely different pitch then you were supposed to!” Kyle followed up, staring into his eyes. “Were you drunk up there? High? Are you high now?”

 

“It was a bad night, okay, why the hell can’t you all leave it at that.”

 

“One night is a bad night,” Tish remarked. “Hell, even two nights out of an eight month tour, but this was what, the eleventh, twelfth time you’ve fucked everything up.”

 

“Fourteen,” Griffin said. “You’re forgetting the show he had to cut short in Reno and the one we had to cancel in San Diego when he called and said he couldn’t perform. Couldn’t even bother to come tell us to our faces he was so strung out.”

 

“I. Don’t. Use.” He’d snarled, exhausted, throat hurting as they’d loomed over him like vultures ready to pick him apart.

 

“Then tell us what the fuck is going on!” Kyle snapped.

 

Jesse shook his head, defeated, as he stared up into the eyes of his oldest friend. “I-I can’t.”

 

“You mean you won’t!” Tish jumped in. “And you’ll drag all of us down with you as our band, our dream, fizzles and burns.”

 

“It’s not like that. That’s the last thing I want.”

​

“Could have fooled me,” she snapped, sidestepping him and walking away, leaving the rest to follow her.

 

“I just need time to work some things out,” he called after them, cringing at the burn in his throat any time he tried to get loud. None of them even so much as turned back to look at him.

 

Pain sliced through his insides like broken glass and he cringed and curled inward, rocking to try and ease the ache. It wasn’t fair, he’d never tried to do anything that would hurt the band or their music, never meant to get up there and fail or worse, not make it up there at all, but he’d screwed things up in all the worse ways possible, well, all accept the ways they’d thought. He wasn’t stupid, he’d never use, he knew what it could do to bands, and he didn’t drink to get drunk, despite how free flowing the whiskey and liquor got. They knew him, they knew how deeply he loved the music, how it was all he had aside from them, and yet….

 

Did he even have them anymore?

 

That thought alone only served to double his pain, and all he wanted was a way to make it stop shredding his insides. The wind screamed and he raised his head, stared out the window, watched the trees wave like angry shadows across the sad gray sky, before turning his attention back to the song he’d been struggling to write all day. The half-filled page in the journal on his lap taunted him with all its unfilled lines.

 

Too soft. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t anything but another feel good fluff piece like the rest of the shit he’d been writing for the past year. With a growl he ripped the page out, crumpled it and tossed it into the flames. Orange licked around white, curling the edges, blackening them before devouring it completely.

​

Good riddance.

 

Glaring down at the previous song, he skimmed a couple lines, then ripped it from the journal and hurled it into the fire too. The sound of tearing paper brought some sick kind of satisfaction, and he ripped out several more and consigned them to the flames, leaving nothing but some of the darker pieces he’d penned earlier in the week. Now those words he could connect with.

 

“Holy shit guys, do you know what this means?”

 

They all turned their attention towards Kyle, who was still bent over the contract on the table, rereading every line of the document they were preparing to sign.

 

“Yeah,” called out Griffin. “It means no more Ramon noodle stew and day old Bolivian creams, we can finally buy the fresh ones instead of the stale .59 cent kind.”

 

They all broke into laughter then, the energy level in the room so high everyone was vibrating with it. Tish moved to stand behind Kyle, hugging him from behind and rereading the contract over his shoulder.

 

“Means we beat the odds,” Tish said, her voice trembling with awe. “We really did it. We got a record deal.”

 

“Hell yeah we did,” Jesse remarked, high fifing Griffin, who caught him by the wrist, yanked him into a headlock, and proceeded to muss up his hair, which turned into a wrestling match that Jesse had no chance of winning, so he’d resorted to tickling Griffin instead, their drummed writhing on the carpet as Tish decided to get in on the action and tickle him too. Of course that had led to Kyle tickling her and all of them eventually collapsing into a laughing pile beside the couch.

 

Now, as he poured all his angst and rage onto the page, he found it impossible to remember when the last time they’d laughed together was. Back in the studio, maybe, when they’d recorded their last album before the tour? He tried to think back that far, tried to temper the darkness of the wound be song with some thin tendrils of lightness and hope, but the only images he could conjure up in his mind were angry ones. Bitter accusations hurled at him the way he was hurling sarcasm and ire at the page, dotting it all with a heavy dose of scorn and a metric fuckton of guilt.