The Complete Groupie Trilogy Page 32

  He stooped to pick up the heavy bench and swing it almost as effortlessly as a baseball bat against the piano until it cracked right down the middle with a resounding bang which was loud and off key. He didn’t stop, even though the bench broke apart in his hands. He tossed aside the solid wooden legs and resorted instead to the iron fireplace poker to bash the hell out of his expensive piano, his grunts and shouts as loud as the musical instrument he was dismantling.

  It crumbled into kindling as he raged on blindly. Finally his hands surrounded the metronome – the gift that had meant so much to him, the one thing that had turned his heart in a way nothing before it had. It had been so thoughtful, like giving him a piece of his own heart. He knew in that moment she understood him in a way no one else had.

  He took the most precious gift he had ever received and hurled it against the opposite wall until it exploded and crashed to the floor in irreparable disarray just like the piano. Just like him.

  There was no one there to fix him anymore.

  It’d be Graham’s life she’d grace and his broken pieces she’d put back together. And if he walked again it would be her strength that would have healed him. Of that, Vanni was absolutely certain.

  He stumbled across the debris to his alcohol cabinet, stocked full. He grabbed the first couple of bottles he came to before he walked out onto the balcony facing the ocean. He couldn’t face the destruction he had wrought upon his new home. He needed air. He needed strength – a strength she stole the minute she turned him down flat. What he would do now that he was no longer graced with that strength? How many times had she saved his ass, even inadvertently? In an almost ironic twist of fate his massive success through Graham’s record company was due almost entirely to her. Hell, even this beach house was due to her in some way. Without her he’d probably be without a career, without his friends, living in his Brooklyn brownstone, working at an Italian restaurant and singing for tips. Jasper Carrington would have made damn certain of that.

  But here he was, in an expensive house on the beach he owned outright. He was making money faster than he could spend it thanks to millions of screaming fans all over the world, most of whom couldn’t wait to see Dreaming in Blue, and Giovanni Carnevale, just one more time. He had two hit songs on the radio, a chart-topping CD and offers pouring in from everywhere to use his voice and his image to sell anything from fast food to movie tickets.

  It was everything he had always wanted but nothing seemed to matter anymore. Not the music. Not the band. Not even facing another fucking sunset from this spectacular fucking patio.

  He slumped on the double sized hammock on his deck, cradling the bottles to his chest. It was a hammock built for two. From the moment he first tried it out he imagined how many hours they’d spend together kissing and cuddling with the Pacific Ocean as their backdrop. He could almost feel her in his arms. He loved the way she filled his embrace. She was so real. So solid. And she fit him completely.

  She’d been in his head ever since that first dance three years before. He got lost in those eyes and felt those curves mold to every single inch of him like a missing piece of a puzzle. Each touch demanded more. Once he held her he had to kiss her. Once he kissed her he had to make love to her. Once he made love to her he wanted to possess her, body and soul. With her in his arms he made sense. He wasn’t just some wannabe singer taking up space in a bar. In her eyes he was a superstar owning the stage for a faithful audience of one.

  He thought back to the whole debacle with Lourdes, or what he now knew was Mistake Number One. Initially he had been convinced it would be a great publicity stunt to be seen with a beautiful model in all the tabloids. It was purely a marketing move that hurt no one and helped catapult DIB out of obscurity and onto a national stage. Though it was convenient at first, it quickly became an excuse. Lourdes never appreciated being the “other” woman and with her fiery Latin attitude she made Jasper pay for it on regular occasion. When she decided to make a fake relationship a little more real just to make the entitled magnate jealous there seemed little harm in indulging her. Vanni was still a red-blooded – and single – American man and she was a gorgeous, sensual woman. Their relationship of convenience became a fun little dalliance, and it also had the added benefit of ensuring his inaccessibility. He couldn’t get serious with anyone else even if he wanted to. Though he flirted with Andy and wanted to be with Andy, he certainly wasn’t ready to commit to anyone, not for real.

  Lourdes was his first get-out-of-commitment-free card.

  His lies caught up with him that December. He had fantasized what it would be like to seduce the voluptuous vixen he couldn’t get out of his head, to rise like a god from her embrace. On his birthday, no less – like a brand new awakening. It was planned to be perfect. But after that untimely call from Lourdes Andy no longer looked at him with wonder and fascination. She didn’t open up to him like a sexual flower at his touch, she recoiled away from the disgusting cheater and liar and user and poser he was.

  He didn’t want to stop until that look went away, which it finally did in Las Vegas when they made love for the first time. It took his confessing the truth and of course his readiness to risk it all for the sake of his reputation. He was no deadbeat dad and wouldn’t play one on TV no matter how much Jasper threatened his newfound successes. His reward? Andy opened up and took him into her soul. It went beyond sexual release. When they were locked together in a passionate embrace he felt safe… protected… home.

  He truly did feel like a god.

  After that he was hooked. The more he had, the more he wanted. Close was never close enough, which is why he suggested they ditch the condoms on Christmas. He was a big boy who understood sexual risks, so he had never considered asking anyone to do that. With Andy it seemed right. He wanted to feel her, all of her, and take their relationship to that next level of intimacy.

  It was only after he went back to New York that he freaked out, knowing they had gone too far. That first night without her he had actually cried, which was a first. He knew right then he had given too much of his heart away. As a new couple they had hit heights he had never before imagined, Vanni knew there was nowhere to go but down. So he jumped out of the emotional plane first in some weird attempt to control the inevitable heartbreak. When he saw the familiar interest in Kat’s eyes that New Year’s Eve, he reverted to past behavior that kept him safe and noncommittal. The minute Kat reached for that first kiss at the stroke of midnight it drove him for the next conquest.

  He lied to Kat. He lied to Andy. Most of all he lied to himself that he could keep up the familiar games without anyone getting truly hurt. He didn’t know it at the time but he had started to buy his own hype. As doors started opening for Giovanni Carnevale, he started living by his own rules. He honestly thought he could keep it up indefinitely.

  All that nearly blew to hell the minute Andy fainted to his feet in San Francisco. When he thought she may have indeed been pregnant, he knew it was God showing him who was really in charge. Karma didn’t give a rat’s ass that he was some burgeoning star. In that moment he was like any other man who had rolled the dice and lost. A baby would have made him grow up.

  Only there was no baby.

  All Andy saw was the initial relief; she couldn’t have known that deep inside he wrestled with disappointment much like she did. That night he had dreamed of what their baby would have looked like, only to have it stolen away by his estranged father, a man whose face he could never see.

  It was a recurring nightmare for Vanni. In his dreams he’d finally get his happily ever after only to have it ripped away by the one person who had discarded him like yesterday’s garbage. His deepest fear was that he would never have anything of value because he’d never be anything of value. That was the ongoing lesson from an absentee father who hung just around the shadows of his psyche.

  He felt punished so he punished himself. He pushed away the one good thing in his life and instead focused on more superficial relations
hips. Neither Kat nor Andy knew about the other groupies he’d romance and even bed from town to town. That was just classic Vanni: a girl in every port. When he started to feel too much toward Andy he’d woo Kat. When he started to feel too much for Kat he’d seduce the prettiest groupie in the front row of any concert.

  They all looked at him like he could do no wrong and he desperately wanted to believe them. As long as he was invincible he could never be vulnerable.

  But then everything fell apart – again – in New York, when Andy busted him on his philandering ways. She was completely right of course, which made her even more of a threat. She not only saw him as a flawed man, she saw him as a cheating asshole, which, of course, he was. But as any cheater knows the minute one is caught one needs to deny and deflect. Vanni was quick to throw Graham in her face during their fierce argument, and then realized something very important: she never actually denied sleeping with Graham.

  The card she gave him after Vegas with Graham’s info had a hotel room number scrawled along the back. That, combined with her “expert” advice on how he needed to renegotiate his contract with Jasper, made him suspicious that something more than a dance in a bar had happened between them. He was no fool; he could tell Graham was interested in Andy by the way he held her in his arms on the dance floor. There was a look in his eyes, a tenderness to his touch. His sexual attraction to her full-figured beauty was palpable.

  Had she felt the same? This was a very powerful, older eligible bachelor, one who could romance her in ways Vanni had not yet learned. Had she done to him what he had done to her when he used people like Lourdes and Kat?

  After a while it became easier to believe she had. This was especially true once the band moved to L.A. Vanni knew Andy still did her P.R. work for the band, and he also knew Graham wanted to keep it that way.

  When he saw them together outside her hotel room locked in a passionate embrace, it just reaffirmed all of Vanni’s worst fears.

  Turn about was fair play, but he didn’t expect it to hurt as bad as it did… especially when she sent him from her hotel room that night. He didn’t hold back when he took her into his arms, but his power over her had apparently waned. She turned her back on him and left him cold.

  After that he threw himself into his relationship with Kat. In his mind she hadn’t betrayed him and deserved his loyalty. Yet he couldn’t get Andy out of his head. He wanted her so badly he ached. Nothing filled the void she left in him.

  As he tipped the bottle to guzzle more of the intoxicating liquid, he began to suspect that was still painfully true.

  What was worse was knowing that Graham had not made the missteps he had made. He didn’t romance anyone while Andy was away. He was content to be by himself and wait for the one woman he knew had captured his heart. He had nothing to prove, to the world or to himself. When Andy was in Los Angeles he courted her like she was the only woman in the world. More importantly was when she wasn’t in Los Angeles and he still managed to demonstrate the same. He was a wealthy, powerful man – but he didn’t show up to events with women on his arm. He didn’t date. He simply waited for the stolen moments with Andy.

  So naturally she owed him her devotion in a way that Vanni, if he were being honest with himself, would admit he didn’t deserve. When he started to make love to her in Graham’s house and Graham walked in on them, it was Graham she chased after to fix what had gone horribly wrong.

  Vanni, on the other hand, went back out to the party to find Kat. While Andy was at the airport, Vanni found solace in another woman’s embrace.

  He knew then Andy was too good for him, yet that only made him want her more. She was the one who helped him keep sane after Tawnie had committed suicide. She was the one who listened without judgment, even when he confessed his worst sins to her. It was an epiphany to truly be himself with a woman, no lies, no masquerade, and be accepted – even loved – anyway.

  By the time they went on the cruise together he knew he had to have her one more time… one more time before Graham swooped in and took what he wanted most in the world.

  The only problem was the minute he made love to her after that long, painful year apart he knew he could never let her go again. He was going to fight anyone, from Kat to Graham himself, to fit her into his life in some way.

  That she finally chose him only fueled his fire, especially after what it cost her with Talia.

  And it very nearly cost her everything with Talia, which swung the pendulum back to Graham. In all that Vanni was willing to do to keep Andy he dove away from the bullet that had finally done what nothing before it could do: it severed the tie that kept them together.

  Now she was in Philadelphia with Graham and he was alone on this stupid, lonely, expensive deck wishing he could turn back the hands of time long enough to grow a pair. He wanted to be her hero. Instead he was what he always had been: a phony. It really didn’t matter how many records he sold or how many groupies he had or how successful he had become. He was a pretty show pony and nothing more.

  He drained the last of the bottle he didn’t even know he killed, but it only left him hollow. Andy had been his savior, but she was gone. She had someone else to save now. And no one knew better than Vanni Graham deserved it far more than he ever could. He hadn’t stacked up a long list of betrayals and disappointments that had cost Andy so much over the years.

  That was Vanni’s cross alone to bear. He knew he would pay the price in loneliness that he so rightly deserved. And that was the bottom line. He was alone because he deserved to be.

  So as he popped open that second bottle he made a vow he’d never get involved again. He had learned a lot of painful lessons in the past three years. All his life he had he stared at himself through a cracked mirror, yet as flawed as he was she had loved him to the bitter end. He knew that there could never be anyone to take her place and certainly no one who could ever capture his heart again like Andy had done so effortlessly and so completely.

  He simply had no heart left to give. He left it in Philadelphia, in the hands of someone who knew now just how small of a man he really was.

  By the time he polished off another bottle he wore a snarl on his face. He swore before God no one would ever get close enough to see that ever again.

  Andy was the first… the last… and the only.

  The next morning he awoke to a loud and relentless pounding noise. At first he thought it was his hangover headache, but it was coming from the front door. He dragged himself from the hammock and trudged through his wrecked house in a leftover fog from his drunken stupor. Briefly he thought he might swing the door open to find Andy standing there on the step with her suitcase in hand and a smile on her face.

  Instead it was Leo Newman, the road manager for the band and their ongoing tour. He wasn’t young and luscious and lovely. Instead he wore a long silver beard, bald head and tattoos to go along with his middle age paunch. This was a rock and roll veteran who didn’t take much crap, especially from entitled stars like Vanni. “Where you been, man?” Leo asked as he brushed Vanni aside to enter the house. “Tonight’s the Hollywood Bowl, or have you forgotten?”

  “Of course I haven’t forgotten,” Vanni lied. He had forgotten because he hadn’t cared. “Last American gig before the big European leg of the tour.” He spun his finger around in a mock celebratory fashion. “Woo hoo. Party.”

  Leo glanced over Vanni’s unkempt appearance and the decimated piano scattered across his living room. “Looks like you’ve been partying already.”

  Vanni lumbered back over to his liquor cabinet. “You know me, Leo. I’m a regular party animal.” He pulled out a bottle of whiskey.

  “I don’t care what you do, man,” Leo told him as he reached for a glass. “Just make sure you make it to the Bowl at four o’clock for a sound check. This is the big time, not some Bar Mitzvah you can half-ass. Got it?”

  Vanni nodded as he watched the hardened road manager throw back his glass of whisky in one swig. He was all b
usiness and Vanni kind of admired that. “Whatever you say, boss.” He tipped his glass to Leo before throwing back his own shot and reaching for another.

  Leo regarded him carefully. He’d seen this before. “I tell you what. I’ll send a car. Whether you’re ready or not.”

  “I’ll be ready,” Vanni promised. “I’m always ready.”

  It was another lie.

  By the time the car arrived he had consumed half of the contents of his liquor cabinet. He hadn’t bothered to shave or even shower. He lay on his hammock listening to the sound of the surf and humming an old tune by Nazareth.

  The driver practically had to carry him to the car. Things got worse at sound check. The other guys had never seen Vanni in the shape he was in. He was so drunk he could barely stand. Leo tried to pipe him full of coffee while Iain propped him up backstage. That left it to Yael and Felix to work out the sound on stage.

  “What the hell is the matter with you, mate?” Iain demanded under his breath. It wasn’t enough this was the biggest night so far of their collective history as a band, but now Vanni had to add to the stress by being unintelligible and unmanageable too?

  “Fuck off,” Vanni said as he pushed him away. Iain didn’t understand what he was going through. He had his perfect little fucking family. “You don’t know,” he finally slurred. “You got it all. Everyone…,” he muttered as he thought of Graham, “everyone has got it all.”

  Iain sighed. “You got it all too, mate. Just pull it together. Don’t let her see you like this.”

  Vanni glared at him. He pushed him away again and staggered to his feet. “She can’t see me, can she? She’s not here. Is she?” He went over to the refreshment spread where he picked up the first bottle he came to. “But none of you need to worry. I’m the best in the biz when it comes to putting on a show. Ask anyone I’ve ever slept with.”