“You wanna take a guess at how many scorpions we haven’t seen each day?”
“The fuck?” Tripp muttered. “That was the first god damned one I’ve ever seen and if the fates are willing, the last. Looked like a little fuckin’ alien! All that was missing was a second head.”
“Let’s not start picturing two-headed scorpions.”
“Why not? We can always picture one of them trying to eat the other.”
Snorting, Zakk shook his head. “My point was that they are here. They are probably in every shrub and meditation garden we’ve walked past. We’ve been joking about them for days. Now we see one and freak out. At least he was making himself obvious instead of hiding around waiting for one of us to find him.”
“You give entirely too much credit to an insect that was probably just wandering around doing insect things,” Tripp replied.
“I don’t think they’re insects. Pretty sure they are arachnids, you know, like a spider.”
“That is the evilest looking spider I’ve ever seen.”
“No shit. So how about we go inside and practice making me squirm again.”
“Nowthatsounds like a plan I can get behind.”
Chapter 21
Hold on
“You ever wonder if we’re trying to cling to something we’re not meant to have anymore?”
“Hrmmm?”
Tripp knew he sounded groggy, lost, and confused in the face of the sudden conversation that broke the silence of the night. What were they on, day three of not coming out of Zakk’s room?
Snacks, food, replacement candles for the ones they’d burned down, those had all been delivered, along with a do not disturb sign that he and Zakk had drawn together, complete with funny, stick figure cartoon sketches of all the reasons someone might think about knocking…and the admonishment not to, unless one of the drawings at the bottom of the page was taking place.
Now those had been fun to come up with. Rather than going for the tried and true, like someone rushing towards the door with their hair in flames, they’d brainstormed. Which was why there was a herd of frogs chasing one stick figure, a wheel spoke sticking out of the neck of another, and a third who was in several broken pieces.
“Think about it. What haven’t you accomplished yet? What haven’t I done that I wanted to do? We’re not chasing dreams anymore; we’ve exceeded them beyond the wildest depths of our imaginations. So why aren’t we content to sit back and enjoy whatever it is we’d do with our time if we weren’t constantly on the road or in a studio?”
The fuck?
Squirming, he flopped over on his back, struggling to work out where Zakk was going with all this.
“Tripp, are you listening to me?”
Oh great, how exactly was he supposed to answer that? Truth and admit to not knowing what the fuck was going on, or muttered lie and hope Zakk wouldn’t press it.
“Yeah.”
“Oh bullshit!” Zakk growled, nudging him.
“Why’d you ask if you already knew the answer?” Tripp groaned. Even to his own ears he sounded whiny, but it had to be somewhere around four or five in the morning, and he wasn’t ready to be asked to think about anything yet.
“I’m just wondering if it isn’t time to get off the road. Let Rocktoberfest, if we get in, be our farewell.”
“Do you really want to retire your keyboard?”
“Not retire the instrument, more like retire the band. We scrambled desperately to find a front man so we could do last year’s Rocktoberfest, and it was amazing to show Wade up, but what was the point in moving beyond that?”
“You tell me, you’re the ones who did it,” Tripp replied, starting to wish he’d kept his mouth shut about Dez and Saint’s Seduction, especially when Tattered Angel, which had been productive and actively looking forward to recording the new music they’d been working on, was now teetering on the verge of collapse.
It hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone that Dez and Riley hadn’t been seen in each other’s company, nor had Dez spent time with any of the Angels since the truth was revealed. Tripp had seen him waking with Winter a couple of times, always far away from everyone else.