Series: Cobalt Empire Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 220
Estimated words: 215301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 861(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 861(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
He’s stuck in the fabric. “Fuck you,” he grunts, fighting with his clothes and not me.
“Uh, hello?” The sudden feminine voice jerks my head to the doorway. A young girl holding a violin case says, “Are you Mr. Fraiser? I have a lesson at seven.”
“No,” I say just as Birdie emerges, taking off his button-down in a deep pant. He’s shirtless, tattooed, and out of breath.
She blushes. “Uh, okay, bye.” She darts away fast.
I fall back onto my elbows with a heavy breath and a growing laugh.
Birdie collapses backward too and laughs hard. Then as the noise fades with us, he sets his steel-gray eyes on me. Not in an apology, but the heat is extinguished. We don’t say sorry when we fight. Sometimes it just feels good to blow off steam with each other. He tips his head. “You know what they’ll say about those St. Pierre boys?”
“Mean as fuck,” I say.
“Dead upon arrival,” he adds.
We share the briefest of smiles.
It was our dad’s first critical review of Sophomore Summer. We were near Berklee’s campus, and we made the mistake of asking what he thought over dinner. “It’s a rock band,” he told us. “Set aside the fact that there are a thousand more just like you, do you really want to put more anger into the world? You know what they’ll say about those St. Pierre boys?”
“Not legends in the making,” I muttered with bitter bite, knowing our dad wasn’t about to praise us for anything surrounding a band.
Birdie stared unblinkingly at his soggy fish and chips.
“Mean as fuck. Dead upon arrival,” our dad stated. “You want that to be you?” We’d heard this cautionary tale nightly our entire lives. And still, we’d rather be dead upon arrival than never even try to arrive at all.
Birdie reaches out and shoves my arm more playfully.
I shove him back with the same lightheartedness, and I catch a peek of the tattoo on his wrist. The words play on are inked in small script. I have identical ink on my bicep. Flashes of that night in Boston burst in my head.
Us leaving that pub and our dad’s harsh realism, us melting the snow with each furious footstep side by side. We made it to the tattoo parlor that every drunken student went to for ink. Birdie held the door open, then said in his husky voice, “It’s you and me, Phoenix. Wherever we go, we go together.”
“St. Pierres till the day we die,” I agreed.
It’d been an easy promise to keep.
We’re both musicians. We’re both driven. We’re both sons of Miriam O’Toole and Philippe St. Pierre. We’ve both leaned on each other and competed against each other. And maybe up until a week ago, we could have stayed on the same road. But I joined The Carraways—and where I’m going, Birdie can’t come.
15
TOM COBALT
“Have you had sex with your hot drummer yet?” Eliot asks a reasonable question, considering I’ve mentally raced down the path like I’m an F1 driver every day this past week. Which was every day I met with Phoenix to work on the album.
Except for Wednesday.
Spending hours upon hours with him has been exactly what I feared when I first met him at the studio. It’s too much.
Too raw.
Too real.
Too incensed.
Too good.
Only good is starting to feel extraordinary. “Nuclear Winter” is one of the best songs I’ve ever created, and I wonder if it’s because it wasn’t all me. It was him. It was us. Together in a bedroom. Digging under each other’s skin.
Jeremy had the biggest grin on his face when he heard us play the finished arrangement. He clapped his hand against a can of Fizz, and he said, “Keep going. I like this momentum, boys.”
I love this momentum. I never want to slow down.
“No, dude,” I say to Eliot while I do a lazy sit up on the rubber flooring. Working out in the gym at our high-rise means waking at four a.m. so it’s not jam-packed. Right now, I’m so tired, I could curl up and sleep beside a rack of dumbbells. But I force myself awake to tell Eliot very firmly, “I am never having sex with Phoenix St. Pierre.” I point at Ben, who’s supine on the weight bench. “Write that down, Ben Pirrip. Notarize it. Seal it.”
“For all time,” Ben banters with a bright smile while hoisting a barbell and heavy plates over his chest. “Never to be reopened.”
I echo to Eliot, “Never to be reopened.”
Eliot towers behind the weight bench, spotting our little brother. “Never is an awfully long time.”
“He’s a bad temptation, Eliot.” I lie flat, then crunch upward. “The universe is testing me, and thankfully, I am, if nothing else, resilient and dedicated to my craft. Which is music. And not boning my insanely talented, moody, angry…” I trail off picturing Phoenix’s dark glare. “Dangerous, short-tempered…” I picture him pushing my jaw with two fingers, so my eyes meet his. “Hot drummer.”