And Lily.

Fuck.

Liliana. Nails' daughter. This whole sordid and sorry state of affairs would make my Lil Bit—my secret shame, my sorry obsession—my fucking sister.

Chapter Five

Liliana

One of the main reasons why I've never been able to hold down anything resembling a "real job," is my utter inability to arrive anywhere on time. Everyone knows you should be at least two hours early for any flight if you want to have a prayer of getting through security on time.

I arrived forty-five minutes early and was extremely impressed with myself. That is, until I saw the line snaking through security.

The crowd was packed tightly around me as we moved through the maze of crowd control barriers that I felt like a cow on the way to the slaughterhouse. "Moo," I muttered under my breath. The old lady in front of me with the tightly curled perm darted a startled look over her shoulder, and then shifted forward to give the crazy lady some space. I took a deep breath, feeling the claustrophobia dissipate a little with the extra space. Maybe I should always pretend to be a crazy person. Maybe it would keep people from crowding around me like this.

I don't like crowds, or audiences. Or really, people in general. My father, though—he lives for that sort of thing.

They say rock 'n roll dreams never die, and never was that more true than for my father. I knew he loved me, somehow, the way small children instinctually can tell these things, but he was never any good at showing it. I was an afterthought, not so much of a hindrance as something he never really considered in the first place. My only memories of him being at home with us were of him smoking out in the garage, a guitar on his lap, and a faraway expression on his face. "What are you doing out here? Go find your mama," he would always say, if he noticed me standing and staring at him at all.

After a sad and futile stint at being a normal, suburban father, Lyle Nesbit succumbed to his rock 'n roll dreams once more, leaving my mother to raise her three-year-old daughter by herself.

"I don't hate him, honey," she used to sigh when I'd ask her, but she never could quite muster up the conviction to make me believe her. My mother married Graham, my stepfather, when I was five, and she and I moved into his big corner house. On that day, I got a new dad and two new stepbrothers in one fell swoop. But if I thought that would mean someone would notice me, I was sorely mistaken. Graham's boys were utterly wild, perpetually in trouble, perpetually fighting whether in fun or in earnest, with Graham shouting from the sidelines ‘til his voice grew hoarse. I stayed in the background, honing my talent at being completely ignored by father figures.

Graham was useless, all prim and proper, so unlike my father that it was almost comical. He fancied himself a scholar and took great pride in the shelves of leather bound volumes I never once saw him open. He was more of background noise in my life than a father figure, but one thing I did have to give him credit for: my motto. He grimaced it at me once after I verbally dressed him down, halfway out the door on the way to a friend's party.

"Though she be but little, she is fierce."

Shakespeare. Midsummer's Night's Dream. Of course I recognized it. I devoured any book that I could get my hands on, transcribing the bits that spoke to me into reams of journals that I scribbled in night and day. It made me stop and consider Graham in a different light for one moment.

Then he went right back to being an ass hat and the moment was lost.

Still, little and fierce. That's what I was. How I defined myself even when fierceness seemed far out of reach. When the tears pricked shamefully at my eyes and I lashed out rather than see them fall, I was always reminding myself: fierce. It was the mantra I believed in even when I didn't believe in myself.

I had daydreamed my way right to the front of the line. "Shoes off," the bored TSA agent intoned mechanically. "Put your belongings in a bin and step over here."

Everyone hurried to obey, grabbing the gray bins and slinging them about like toddlers with stacking toys. I had to duck out of the way before I got taken out. "Hey, watch where you swing that thing!" I barked at the harried-looking businessman.

He looked out, and then down. "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't see you down there."

Then the bastard grinned at his own joke.

"I'm the perfect height for punching you in the nuts," I retorted loudly.

He opened his stupid mouth a few times, gawping like a fish. I seemed to have that effect on guys like him. The self-important ones who couldn't imagine that someone who looked like me, all small and elfin, could actually have a temper. Guys like him tended to be speechless when faced with ferocity. That was part of the reason why I was, as yet, still single.

Jaxson never condescended to me.

What the hell? Shut up.

Apparently my traitor brain, eager at the prospect of a reunion, was deciding to replay only the highlight reel of my former life. With a mental yank, I forced myself to relive the bad shit too.

Because there was a lot of bad shit. And as I settled into my seat on the plane, I knew that there was going to be no way I could stem the tide of memories.

Life in the corner house moved on with its predictable boringness. The only time I experienced anything approaching excitement was what my father decided to drop by. It was irregular and infrequent—two, maybe three times a year—but it gave me something to look forward to besides counting down the time until I could move out.

Seeing my dad was something that I always looked forward to… no matter how many times he disappointed me.

He'd eventually given up on being a rock star in his own right, and had started working as a roadie. He was perpetually broke, and perpetually on the verge of homelessness, but I had never seen him happier. He'd bring me souvenirs of life on the road and I'd sit on his lap, hoping like hell that this time he'd take me with him.

But just because he was happy didn't make him any less of a shitty father. As quickly as he dropped into my life again, my father would always vanish, called back to the road like a man possessed. Sometimes I would wish that he would fail completely, and give up to come back home to me.

But instead he met Crusty Pete Dillingham.

The story of that night is now part of my own personal legend. My dad went to see a show at a local dive bar. When they started the show, nothing came out of the speakers except ear-splitting feedback. The tech ran backstage in a panic. While everyone else was covering their ears, my two-hundred and sixty-pound, bearded father vaulted the stage like an Olympic high jumper and ran back to switch out the mis-plugged cables.

"The first thing I noticed was that his stack was a mess. The second thing I noticed was the stench." My dad would always grin at this point, slapping Crusty Pete on his back.

"I thanked him and told him we just lost a guy," Crusty Pete would add, gamely playing his part in the story. "And if he could get his fat ass up early enough in the morning, we'd have more work for him."

Pete introduced my dad to Bash Gills, the drum tech extraordinaire. He was slumming it in between tours, picking up club gigs here and there. But once his real gig started up again, he'd be able to use a guitar tech that was as fast on his feet as my father.

Right here in the story, Bash always made a point to look up and down my father's considerable bulk. "How the man eat so much and still move so fast, I'll never even begin to understand. It defies both logic and physics." Then my dad would guffaw like it was the first time he'd ever heard that joke, and me and Jaxson would roll our eyes so hard they may as well have fallen out. Then we'd start laughing at each other’s, reactions, goaded on by our shared experience of being teenagers in the weirdest fucking place to be a teenager… ever.