Olivia Cunning - Tell Me

“We had fun today, didn’t we?” Nikki said, looking positively giddy with happiness.

“Yeah.” Melanie chuckled. “I think we melted my credit card with all that swiping, but it was fun.”

“Mel?”

“Yeah, hon?”

“I love you,” Nikki gushed. “I don’t think you’ll ever realize how much.”

“I love you too.”

“Always?”

“Always.”

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

Eyes closed, Nikki leaned forward and kissed Melanie. Not a peck on the cheek. Not a friendly brush of her lips on Melanie’s. A deep, open-mouthed, let-me-introduce-your-tonsils-to-my-tongue, sexually charged kiss.

Suddenly light-headed, Gabe stumbled backwards down the stairs, catching the handrail at the last minute. It was the only thing that saved his ass from meeting the pavement.

Regaining his footing, he stood outside the bus, thinking he should be angry, that he should be livid that Melanie had been hiding her romantic entanglement with Nikki from him. But he mostly felt a hollow ache in his chest and unbelievably stupid for not believing the signs. He’d recognized them—and they’d haunted him while he’d lain awake the night before—but he hadn’t believed them.

Apparently he should have trusted his gut.

Friends didn’t have the kind of dependent relationship that Nikki and Melanie shared. No simple friend would put up with Nikki’s drama for as long as Melanie had, not unless she had deep, romantic feelings for her. Roommates didn’t sleep in the same bed, cuddled together like lovers. People with platonic relationships didn’t kiss the way he’d just seen the two of them kiss.

Jesus, no wonder Nikki had kept trying to talk Gabe into a threesome. The two women probably picked up guys and did it all the time. He was just the latest dupe.

Melanie had played him for a complete fool.

And she had actually made him fall in love with her. The fucking bitch.

Melanie pulled away from Nikki’s kiss and stared at her in astonishment.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I told you,” Nikki said, her big blue eyes suddenly flooded with tears. “I love you, Mel. I love you. You said you love me too.”

“Nikki,” Melanie said. “Honey, you’re confused. You’re not attracted to me. We’re just friends.”

Nikki dropped her chin to her chest and whimpered like a wounded animal. “But you must love me, Mel. You’re the only one I care about who has never hurt me. The only one.”

Melanie swallowed the lump in her throat, knowing she was going to have to hurt Nikki now, when she was at her most vulnerable. Melanie was not interested in a romantic relationship with Nikki, and she didn’t know if there was a way to salvage their friendship with this on the table. She should have recognized the signs. She’d honestly thought that when Nikki made sexual advances toward her—and she’d been making them more and more frequently—that she’d just been playing around. It had never occurred to her that her best friend—a woman—could be sexually attracted to her. She was having a hard time processing that reality.

“Do you remember why we became friends?” Melanie asked her.

Nikki sniffed. “You mean when we were little?” she said in a tiny voice.

“Yeah. We met in the park. You were sitting under a bush, sobbing. Remember?”

Nikki swallowed and nodded. Melanie lifted a hand to brush Nikki’s hair back, but thought better of it. She clenched her hand into a loose fist and dropped it to her side. Melanie did love Nikki as more than a friend. She loved her like the little sister she’d never had. Someone to take care of. To defend. To cherish.

“I went over to see what was wrong and you had this huge bruise on your face,” Melanie said.

“My stepfather was an abusive son of a bitch.”

“But that wasn’t why you were crying. Do you remember why you were crying?”

Nikki nodded again. “I had found a beautiful blue butterfly. I held it so gently and stroked its velvety wings. And it died right there in my hand.”

“We spent the rest of that summer chasing live butterflies in the park.”

Nikki smiled. A slightly watery smile, but a genuine one. “And every time you caught one, you’d put it in my hair and say I was beautiful. No one had ever told me that before. Or made me feel beautiful.”

“You are beautiful, Nikki. Not just on the outside, on the inside. I knew it from the moment I saw you crying over a dead bug.”

“Butterfly,” Nikki corrected. “I wouldn’t cry over a beetle. Well, maybe if it was a lady bug.”

Melanie laughed. She so wanted to give Nikki a hearty squeeze, but a line had been crossed, and Melanie knew she had to be careful not to give Nikki the wrong message.

“I was sad when you moved away,” Melanie said.

“Yeah, well, sometimes abusive sons-of-bitches beat your mother to death and you’re sent to live with your alcoholic father.”

The alcoholic father who had sexually molested her for six years, but Nikki didn’t have to say it. Melanie was very aware of Nikki’s past. She just wished she could have been there for Nikki at the time, to help put her back together.

“I thank God that we ended up going to the same college,” Melanie said. “It must have been fate.”

Nikki dropped her head. “Not fate so much as me stalking your social media pages.”

“So you went to Wichita State—”

“To be with you. I never forgot you. Mel, the little girl with the kind eyes and the uplifting words who put butterflies in my hair.” She touched her hair as if she could feel wings flapping against her. “Memoires of those butterflies got me through a lot of very dark nights, Mel, even when you weren’t there.”

Nothing could have stopped Melanie from hugging Nikki then. She crushed her against her chest, squeezing until her arms began to tremble.

“Do you hate me for loving you?” Nikki said dully.

Melanie drew away and cupped Nikki’s face in her hands. She tried not to look at the scab on her lip, because it was a harsh reminder of even more pain that Nikki had suffered, and Melanie couldn’t allow herself to be wishy-washy about this.

“I don’t hate you—at all—I’m just not attracted to you. I don’t love you that way. Do you understand?”

Nikki lowered her gaze.

“I do love you unconditionally,” Melanie said. “I do. Nothing you do will change that. So stop testing it, okay? I’m not going anywhere. You’re my baby sister for life.”

“Are you sure?”

“If I haven’t given up on you by now, it’s not going to happen.”

Nikki laughed. “I’ll try to behave.”

“Just keep yourself safe,” Melanie said. “And if you kiss me again, I’m going to tell my boyfriend to kick your ass.”

“Okay. I don’t want an ass-kicking from a guy with a bad haircut.” She was laughing when she said it.

Melanie glanced around the empty interior of the bus. “Speaking of Gabe, shouldn’t he be back by now? He said sound check wouldn’t take long.”

“You should go look for him. I’ve been hogging your attention all day. I’m sure you two would like to be alone for a while.”

“Ain’t that the truth?” she said. This weekend hadn’t quite been the endless love-making session she’d envisioned. “You okay now?” she asked Nikki.

“I’ll get over you,” she said. “Eventually.”

Knowing Nikki the way she did, Melanie figured it would take her no more than twenty minutes or so to move on. “Stay out of trouble.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Backstage, Melanie asked several people if they’d seen Gabe. The rest of the band was in the dressing room, bull-shitting. Gabe was not among them, and no one had seen him since sound check. They all said he’d been headed to the tour bus with instructions not to disturb him. Melanie knew that he’d never made it to the bus. At least, she hadn’t seen him. Maybe they’d crossed paths somewhere.

When she saw Jordan in a hallway and asked if he’d seen Gabe, he pointed toward the stage. “I think he’s rehearsing.”

Rehearsing? Rehearsing what? When she concentrated, she could hear him playing, sticks hitting skins with such powerful, rapid percussion that it couldn’t have been anyone but Gabe.

She hurried to the stage and climbed the steps to watch him. She stumbled over a cord not yet taped down and then stood to the side of Gabe’s drum kit. His instrument was tucked away behind the equipment for the opening bands, far to the back of the stage where the overhead lights didn’t quite reach. His eyes were closed as he punished the drums; there was no other way to describe how he was playing. His face held none of the rapture, none of the fervent concentration she’d witnessed at the concert three nights before. There was only anger and retaliation.

She was afraid to interrupt him and would probably have stood gaping all day if the skin on his snare hadn’t ruptured.

“Fuck,” he said. He flung his ragged sticks between two of the drums and dropped his elbows to his knees. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, his fingertips digging into the wicked-looking dragons on his scalp. Gabe looked anything but wicked at that moment. He looked… broken.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” he yelled. And then he kicked one of his bass drums clean off the riser, taking a set of crashing cymbals with it.

Melanie was stunned and half-tempted to back away and pretend she hadn’t seen him. “Gabe?” she said quietly.

He tensed and turned, searching for her in the shadows.

“Is something wrong?”

“Yeah,” he said in a harsh, raspy tone. “Everything is wrong. Get the fuck out of here. I don’t want to talk to you.”