“If it’s any consolation, it shocked me too,” Tavis admitted. “I figured Winter was too shameless to ever let anything throw him, at least, not in the bedroom.”
Snorting, Winter flipped them both off.
“I wouldn’t mind a round three,” Tavis shot back, and holy shit, his brother blushed a little. Before tonight, Tripp wouldn’t have thought that possible, considering all the debauchery Winter got up to. Then his brother spoke and Tripp went from shocked to stupefied.
“I wouldn’t mind more than just another round.”
Had Winter actually said that? Judging from the way Tavis was staring at him, mouth hanging open, eyes wide, he didn’t seem to know what to make of Winter’s words either. It was like everything was moving in slow motion as Winter locked a hand behind Tavis’s head and tugged him into a rough, possessive kiss that left no doubt about his intentions.
Tripp just sat there, dumbfounded at the display until they finally came up for air. Even then, they had eyes only for each other, Tavis crushing Winter’s jacket in both fists, holding him in place so they were nose to nose.
“Ignoring me is a dealbreaker,” Tavis said. “You’ve had your one and done, got it?”
At first, Winter just nodded, but a heartbeat later he leaned in. “It won’t happen again,” he breathed, before kissing Tavis as savagely as he had the first time.
Tripp started to edge away, intending to give them their privacy, when they broke apart, bumped foreheads, and slowly let each other go.
Tavis still had the joint, which he took a long drag of before leaning in and kissing Winter again, passing the smoke to him. Tripp could see a thin trail of it escape from between their lips, and stumbled to his feet, intent on making a break for it before things left the PG zone.
“Now you need to tell us what’s going on with this article,” Tavis insisted when he eased away. So much for leaving. This was the part he’d been dying to hear.
Sighing heavily, Winter looked from Tavis to Tripp. “A whole lotta pillow talk that should never have gotten published. I was venting about the way it felt like nothing ever went right for me unless it was on a stage and how I felt likeIdidn’t matter to anyone, that all anyone cared about was that I performed exceptionally, and often. I might have said that what the band needed was a robot, not a person, and that it sucked when you came to hate something you used to love. I said that one day I was gonna vanish and no one would ever find me. That I’d become a beachcomber or a fisherman, be the weird guy who wandered around barefoot wearing seashell necklaces, talking to his pet gull.”
Groaning, Winter scrubbed a hand over his face. “I said that one day I was going to walk into the water, let it close over my head, sink down into the nothing and let the world fade away. I didn’t mean it the way they took it, but…”
Fishing into his jacket, Winter pulled out his phone, turning it so Tripp could see the headlines implying that Winter was a danger to himself and that someone needed to intervene before he became another rock and roll statistic.
“I made sure Tish and the rest of Wild Child knew there wasn’t any truth to that, made sure our management knew too, considering they were blowing up my phone, wanting to send someone out for a wellness check and an assessment.”
Sucking in a breath, Tripp drummed his fingers on his knee, waiting for Winter to spill the worst of it, ‘cause if there was one thing he knew about his brother, it was that Winter tended to build up to the grand finale, hoping that by the time he got there, his audience’s nerves were already too frayed for them to come out of pocket on him for whatever fuckup stood at the top of the heap.
Only….the moment he thought it, he was reminded of his promise to do better, and figured that had better include his thinking too, or his first response would always be to blame Winter, without giving any consideration to what had taken place.
Winter turned the phone back around to himself and brushed a fingertip over the screen, but when he tried to turn the phone back around, Tavis gripped his wrist, pinning it in place. Tripp could hear him breathing, and the low growl rumbling from deep in his chest. For his part, Winter wouldn’t meet his gaze, or Tripp’s, which was concerning.
“He took these,” Tavis snarled. “That reporter?”
Winter nodded, but he still wasn’t looking at them. Instead, he seemed to huddle against the back of the couch.
“I thought he was just this guy I was shooting pool with,” Winter murmured. “He was a disaster at it, and I wound up giving him pointers. We were drinking, laughing, he kept getting worse, even with me helping him. We started joking about him hitting every ball on the table but the one he aimed for. It was…light. Easy. The way he talked to me. He didn’t act like he knew who I was.”
“Of course he didn’t,” Tavis growled. “Had he flashed credentials he knew you’d give your standardno commentortalk to our press agentand leave so he couldn’t pester you.”
“No shit.”
Impatient, Tripp reached over the coffee table to pluck the phone from Winter’s hands, nearly dropping it when he saw what was displayed on the other side.
The shots were captioned,Fading Light, the downward spiral of a metal icon. In it, Winter was shown sitting alone in the sand. From the angles, it was clear he was unaware that he wasn’t alone. That wasn’t the most troubling part though. It was all the mini-bar bottles scattered in the sand around him, and the mid-sized bottle in his hand. It was the fact that Winter was seated in just his boxers, tattoos on display, including the jester backpiece with its demonically leering face. The images were in black and white, which gave the moment a stark, desperate feel. The moon in the distance was almost full, and the light it slashed over Winter highlighted the crimson of the blood that spilled from the skin he parted with a broken piece of glass.
An X was carved directly over his heart, one of the few places on his chest that wasn’t tattooed. Tripp knew it was because Winter had a drawing squirreled away, of an anatomically correct heart with a window in the center of it, where he intended to put a face.
Tavis tugged at the jacket, unzipping it, and yanking it open, rucking up the t-shirt Winter wore beneath it, to reveal the still healing scar.
Running his finger over the screen, Tripp revealed the final two images. One, of Winter walking into the water, blood dripping down his chest from the gashes. That had to have burned, getting salt into the wound, but the last photo was the one that cut Tripp to the core, because it was a closeup of just one half of Winter’s face, and the lines of tears shimmering in the moonlight, that were running down it.
His brother looked devastated, lost, and broken in a way Tripp had never seen before. Not from his devil may care, watch me, watch me, always glittering in the spotlight twin who things never seemed to faze. Could it be he’d been looking at Winter through the skewed haze of his own insecurities? If that was the case, he owed Winter more than an apology. He owed it to his twin to get to know him again.
Chapter 10