“The fuck…” Dez sputtered.
“I think the part that’s hardest to digest is learning that one of the reasons Saint’s Seduction has been trying to blow up your phone, and putting some serious milage on James’, is because you never left them with the music to the pieces you wrote, and their guitarist hasn’t been able to recreate it.”
The snort Dez gave pissed him off to no end. There was nothing funny about a band losing a whole album worth of songs, especially not at a time when so much else was falling apart for them.
“I fail to find anything funny about it,” Zakk snarled, shoving away from the cabinet he’d been leaning against.
“I’m not laughing.”
“Sure seems that way to me!”
Zakk glared up into Dez’s eyes, reminded of how unsettling it was to see flat, unreadable color there.
“There’s nothin’ special about those rifts,” Dez snarled. “They just need to try harder.”
“Really?”
“What the fuck is so hard about the base rift in E minor backwards and up beat by a half note.”
When Zakk glanced at Damian, then over at Riley, the looks of disbelief on their faces mirrored the one that had to be plastered on his own.
“You can’t seriously think that?” Riley murmured, the uncertainty in his voice plain as day. It was clear that at least on some level, he knew Dez was being serious.
“There’s nothing difficult or exceptional about it,” Dez snapped. “And no reason at all they should need me to write it down. It’s just some bullshit ploy to get me on the line.”
“And if it isn’t?”
Dez left the question hanging in the air between them, unwilling, or unable to answer it.
“Zakk, we went through an extensive vetting process when we brought him in, no one who’d ever played with him, even on short, fill-in gigs, had anything negative to say about him. Even the guys from Carrion said they wished they’d given him a better shot and hadn’t spent so much of his time with them hazing him and being assholes,” Riley remarked, jumping to Dez’s defense, though it was interesting to see them keep their distance and not even look at one another.
“I’m aware. I’ve been talking to members of Saint’s Seduction, and they still speak highly of him, even if he won’t take their calls, and that’s what I don’t get. There’s this contrast of anger and frustration over his behavior and people’s genuine feelings about him, which are all extremely positive. Those guys miss him, same way we all would. Yet he’s gonna stand there and act like he doesn’t care. How are you guys gonna feel when he does that to us?”
“He’s not going any place but with us,” Damien declared, turning to look at Dez, his tone turning to a hopeful plea. “Right?”
“The only way to prove to you that I’m not going anywhere is not to go anywhere,” Dez muttered beginning to pace a little. “How am I supposed to do that if there’s no more band? There’s no way I can. You’re counting on that, aren’t you? What did I ever do to make you turn on me like this?”
“I’m not turning on you. I’m making sure there’s distance enough between us that the fallout of you being you won’t suck so much. Remind me why you’re fighting so hard now when you’re notorious for going ghost when the mood hits you?” Zakk asked pointblank.
There was real pain in Dez’s eyes now, and Zakk hated putting it there, but he needed to know, with all certainty, what Dez felt about Tattered Angel and if they could trust that he wouldn’t one day up and vanish on them, vanish on Riley, who’d never put this kind of effort into a relationship with anymore. Zakk was finally seeing real change in his longtime friend, a continuous effort to change the behaviors that had sabotaged entanglements for him in the past. Dez hadn’t said a word, just stood in front of Zakk, occasionally casting glances at the others.
“I…I thought I belonged here,” Dez stammered, scowling. “Why the fuck wouldn’t I want to stay?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell us why you want to stay?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not a difficult question.”
Soundlessly, Dez gestured towards all of them like it should be obvious, even when it had been made clear to him that they were having doubts.
“If you have something you would like to say to us, now would be the right time to say it,” Damien prompted.
“Okay, yes, I came to the audition planning to turn you down if you offered the spot to me,” Dez blurted. “I wanted to play. I want to see if I was still good enough, but I didn’t want to be at the mercy of people who could one day take it away.”
When Dez paused, Zakk made a little go-on motion, hoping to keep him talking.
“With the Saints, I had it in my head, almost from the beginning, that if I played balls to the wall every night, proved that I could write songs and contribute, they’d keep me on. I knew what I’d been hired to do, but I was more versatile, with greater range than their original singer and I figured they would choose the music over everything else.”