"Who is who?" Annie said.

"You know who! My father, you slut!" The minute the words left my lips I regretted them, but I was too drunkenly pigheaded to apologize like I should have.

I watched Annie's face go white, her nostrils pinch together. I waited for her to scream at me.

Instead she slapped me full across the face. I was already unsteady from the vodka, and the force of her blow knocked me into a pathetic heap on the hallway floor.

Then Annie Blue, my mother, the woman who was supposed to love me more than anything else, stepped right over me, leaving me there to sputter and rage as she and her lover walked back to her bedroom, ignoring me completely. And that was the last time I ever asked about my father.

"Then what did you do?" Lily's chocolate eyes were as wide as saucers as she listened to me. Having her this close, having her hang on every word like this was the biggest fucking ego boost I'd ever had. Sure I was a cocky thing at seventeen, but Liliana Nesbit made me feel like I was king of the whole damn world.

"Well, I vomited all over the floor." She giggled at this, turning the most adorable shade of pink. "Then I stood back up again, and went to bed."

Lil Bit shook her head. "And you guys never talked about it."

"What's to talk about?" I asked her lazily, accepting the whiskey she poured in a glass for me. "Annie made it clear I was never going to find out, not from her anyway." I raised my glass. "But I'll tell you one thing, I never fucking touched vodka again."

Liliana burst out laughing, then padded over to me, her cherry red toenails sinking into the deep pile of the hotel carpet. I opened my arms, and she settled next me with a sigh, using my shoulder as a pillow. "Poor Jaxson," she teased, brushing her fingers down my face.

I was instantly hard for her. I walked around in those days in a state of perpetual hard on, and having her tight little body all snuggled up next to mine did nothing to help that. I was a typical seventeen-year-old, driven solely by lust and hormones, but with Lily it was something more.

Lily was worth waiting for.

"Poor me," I agreed, running my hand along the slip of her waist. "God, you are just the tiniest little thing, I think when we leave again, I'm just going to stuff you in my suitcase and take you with me."

"You probably could."

Her face was so deadly serious that I had to laugh.

"I'm serious!" she protested. "I used to play that game when I was a kid. I called it ‘The Invisibility Game.’ I stuffed myself into these impossible little places and see how long my parents would go before they noticed I was gone."

I leaned back. She told me stories about the so-called parents of hers. "How long?" I asked.

She shook her head, those chocolate eyes registering pain that I hoped that never see again. "Way too fucking long," she said.

"I can't even imagine," I told her, and kissed across her eager lips. "If my Lil Bit was missing for more than fifteen minutes, I'd call out the damn search party. I'd have detectives combing this area with bloodhounds in seconds, I promise you that."

"You are such a weirdo," she sighed.

But I could tell she was happy.

Call it young love, first love, puppy love—whatever the hell I had with her, we were happy. I was happy. Probably the happiest I had ever been. But that was before I made everything go to shit.

Now I was going to have to see her again.

I fully expected her to punch me in the face.

"All right, Jax, I think that's enough for today." Blackbird guy pinched the bridge of his nose, like my singing was causing him pain. It was causing me pain, I knew that much. Feeling relieved and angry in equal measure, I hung up my mic and slunk my way back toward the booth.

"You don't have to say anything. I know," I told Annie.

Annie didn't say anything, but Nails did. "What the hell happened in there?" the big guy asked, showing something like genuine concern.

What was I going to say? The thought of seeing his daughter again had me all thrown off? "Got a lot on my mind," I said curtly.

"I'll send the car, have them take you back to the house," Annie said. Periodically she showed signs of maternal feeling, and it always caught me by surprise.

"Fine. Just let me take a piss." The whiskey had traveled right through me without having any effect. I felt clammy with the stink of failure. I needed a shower, stat.

"I gotta go get Liliana at the airport." Nails smacked a gross kiss on my mother's lips.

"Come back to me soon," she simpered.

"Yeah, I'm out of here," I snarled and pushed my way into the men's room. The flickering fluorescent light made my reflection look sallow and unappealing, the bags under my eyes deep purple, the electric blue of my hair a sickly shade of green. This couldn't be the Jaxson who greeted Liliana for the first time in over year. I needed to get my shit together before she came home to me.

I straightened up and tried to shoot myself a cocky smile. "Hey, Lil Bit," I practiced. "How are you?"

Chapter Seven

Liliana

"Okay, I see you," I told my father, then hung up the phone, shaking my head.

He was in the van. I could not believe he still had that thing.

I was on the sidewalk outside of the airport, hysterically laughing at a van.

My father forced the sticky driver's side door open and emerged to find me nearly weeping with laughter. I wiped my eyes and try to explain, then dissolved into a fit of giggles again. "That's, that's the van…" was all I managed to say.

"Sure is," he growled, patting the battered old relic from the 80s with a fondness he usually reserved for guitars, and only occasionally, me. "She still purrs like a kitten too."

"That's the van you picked me up in." I was shaking my head at the symmetry of it all, wishing I had a notebook out so I could write it down.

But my dad didn't get it. "Yup," he rumbled, picking up my suitcase. "You wanna get going?"

"Sure, Dad." I nodded, my chest deflating slightly. He didn't remember picking me up from Graham's house in this van. The start of our wild adventure together. Or if he did remember, he wasn't sentimental about it like I was.

Stop it, Lily. I settled back in the cracked vinyl seat and tried to compose my thoughts.

But the noise from the radio won't let me think. My father has always kept the radio in the van perpetually on "scan." It was an irritating habit of his, left over from the days when he was an itinerant roadie, picking up jobs here and there. He liked to scan for the bands he'd worked for, then shout and crow about them while I nodded in mute, uncomprehending approval. This was going back to my very early childhood. Back before he got tagged by a friend of his to load amps for Annie Blue's comeback show and saved the day by recognizing that her amp stack was hooked up backwards.

"We headed to a hotel?" I asked my dad between bursts of static.

"A hotel? No, why in the hell would we do that?" My dad swore and I stiffened, before I realized he was trying to shove his way into a left turn lane at the last minute. When we were on the road, the guys called him Captain Rageball because every time he drove, the slightest thing would set him off.