The Mixtape by Brittainy C. Cherry

5

OLIVER

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I awakened with the strongest pounding to my head, completely unaware of what had taken place the night before to get me to that level of pain. I groaned as I felt a repeated poking feeling in my left side.

I groaned again as I sat up on my elbows. My head felt as if it was splitting into two from the simple sitting-up motion, so I lay back down. Why did my face hurt so much?

“Hey, mister, are you dead?” a voice asked.

A small, tiny voice.

Why would I be in a place with a small voice? I opened my eyes and looked over to the tiny figure standing beside me. A young girl stood there repeatedly stabbing me in the gut with a Barbie doll.

“What are you doing?” I muttered. “Where the hell am I?” I asked, swatting my hand toward the doll for her to stop.

Her mouth dropped open. “You owe a quarter to the swear jar!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“That’s two quarters!” she exclaimed before stepping back a little. “Hey, mister. Are you dead?”

Based on how my body felt, there was a solid chance I had died at some point the previous night. The verdict was still out if I’d gone to heaven or hell. “If I were dead, would you be able to talk to me?”

“I don’t know, maybe. I never talked to a dead person before.”

“What is this, The Sixth Sense? Am I Bruce Willis?” I groaned, pinching the bridge of my nose. As I touched my face, more pain shot through me. I’d had rough nights before, but never one so painful.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” the kid remarked.

“Then, yes. I’m dead.”

She gasped and then hollered, “Mom! The man in my bed is dead!”

I opened my eyes once more and looked around. Why was I in a child’s bedroom? What happened to me the night before? What was going on? Who would put a stranger in their child’s bed?

Then it all started flooding back to me. The show last night . . . the show I abandoned. I ditched the performance last minute and wandered off to some random hole-in-the-wall bar to get plastered. Everything after that was a blur, including how I ended up in the bed of a child.

“Reese! What are you doing? I told you to stay out of here,” a woman’s voice whisper-shouted as she walked into the room. She grabbed the little girl by the shoulders and ushered her out as she complained the whole way.

“But Mom! There’s a dead man in my bed!”

“He’s not dead!” the woman remarked; then she glanced at me with a raised brow. “You’re not dead, right?”

I shook my head slightly.

“Oh, thank goodness. I couldn’t survive being responsible for that.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “See, Reese? He’s not dead. Now go brush your teeth. I don’t want to be late dropping you off at camp.”

She complained the whole way out of the bedroom. Seconds later, the woman reappeared in the doorway with a plate and a glass of water. On the plate sat a doughnut and a bottle of ibuprofen.

I pushed myself up to a sitting position and gripped the side of the twin-size mattress. The back of my hand brushed against my mouth as I looked up at the woman. She was stunning. Beautiful, without any effort at all.

Her dark kinky hair was pulled up in a thick messy bun with a few strays framing her face. Her eyes were wide as a doe’s. Her skin tone was a deepened brown that glowed all on its own. She was in an oversize Elton John–concert T-shirt and yoga pants. Her socks were mismatched, and she appeared as if she hadn’t slept a wink the previous night. The bags beneath her eyes revealed that fact.

Her brown eyes were beautiful. They were the best feature on her face, with a close second being her full lips. It was a shame I didn’t remember those lips sitting against my own.

Still. I hoped I hadn’t slept with her. Even though Cam and I weren’t a thing except on a surface level, I didn’t want to be that guy who stepped out on her—even if she stepped out on the regular. It wasn’t in my character. At least when I was sober.

“Here you go. I figured you could use this,” she said, handing the plate and water to me. “I would’ve made you coffee, but I’m all out right now.”

Without thought, I tossed the pills into my mouth and swallowed.

I cleared my throat. “What happened last night?” I pushed out, my throat dry and hoarse.

The woman raised an eyebrow. “You don’t remember anything from last night?”

“No, and other than my face feeling like complete shit, I have nothing to go on. I’m sorry—uh—I forgot your name.”

“No, you didn’t,” she mentioned, walking over to her daughter’s desk, where she picked up a handheld Disney princess mirror. “I never gave it to you.” She walked over to me and passed me the mirror, but I shook my head and pushed it away.

“I’m good,” I muttered, not wanting to face my reflection. I hadn’t looked in the mirror in the past six months. I didn’t want to start now. “I’ll take your word on what happened. So . . . what exactly happened?”

“Well, you got a bit wasted last night. A crowd formed. You got into a fight with a giant. You lost. Which explains . . . ,” she said, gesturing toward my face. “Speaking of, do you want ice for your eye? I have an ice pack I can grab if you need—”

I shook my head. “Do you have my phone?”

She walked over to a dresser drawer, picked up my cell phone, and then handed it over to me. “It’s dead. I tried to turn it on last night to call someone to get you, but it had already died.”

“Do you have a charger?”

“No. I have an iPhone, not an Android.”

Of course she did. Not that it was her fault. I put myself in this position, being a complete dumbass. I bet my manager and publicist were having meltdowns.

I massaged my temples, hoping the medicine would kick in sooner rather than later. “Listen, about last night, and, well, us . . .” I looked up toward her, and she had the blankest stare as she waited for me to continue. “Did we . . . ?”

She nodded. “Did we what?”

“You know.”

“I know what?”

“You know,” I urged. “Did we have sex?”

“What? No! Of course not!” she whisper-shouted again, slightly closing the bedroom door so her daughter wouldn’t hear too much. The way she grew flustered made me feel like an idiot.

“We didn’t?”

“Trust me, you weren’t in any shape to perform any kind of act like that. Plus, I’m not going to take advantage of a person who’s that messed up. Plus plus, my biggest concern was to get you to stop peeing in my houseplant.”

I peed in her houseplant? Way to be a drunk idiot, Oliver. “If we didn’t sleep together, then why am I at your house?”

“Like I said, you got wasted at the bar I work at, and the paparazzi crashed in and tried to bombard you. I was your only saving grace to get you out of that place after you got your butt kicked by the Incredible Hulk for being a smart-ass.”

“I was a smart-ass?”

“You told a guy you could screw his girlfriend better than he could.”

So, I was the complete opposite of myself. Wonderful. Sober Oliver could hardly gather his thoughts to form a sentence. Drunk Oliver had enough courage to get into a bar fight.

I narrowed my already swollen eyes as I tried to piece everything together, and still, it all blurred over. I stood up and scratched the back of my neck. “Can I use your bathroom?”

“As long as you don’t go peeing in my plant again, sure. First door on your left. And eat the doughnut. You need to soak up some of that poison you took in.” She definitely was a mother. She walked out of the room and shouted, “Reese! Shoes, now!”

The moment I reached the bathroom, I closed the door behind me, turned on the faucet, and splashed water against my face. Tyler was going to give me hell for missing the performance. I should’ve played the show last night. No, I never should’ve agreed to performing the damn thing in the first place. It was all too much, all too soon, but I thought it might help me to get out there and face the reality that Alex was gone.

You fucking idiot. You should’ve just performed.

All I remembered from the night before was sitting back there in the dressing room trying to get up enough nerve to walk out on the stage and perform songs I’d been performing for the past ten-plus years. All I had to do was get out of my own head, but I wasn’t good at that shit. My thoughts swallowed me whole every time I was sober, and like an idiot, I hadn’t had a drink that evening. I thought I could perform sober, like Alex.

Alex never walked onto that stage with a drop of liquor in his system. He didn’t need anything else to get him going. His preshow tradition was meditation and prayer—that’s all. No vodka, no whiskey, no temporary fix. Alex spent most of his life grounded. I was the opposite of my brother. I spent my whole life trying to float away as my anxiety spun me around at full speed.

Last night I tried to be more like my brother. I sat in my dressing room with nothing but a ceiling fan running. I needed to have complete silence, except for the sounds of the blades running around in circles. That was how Alex did it. That was how he prepped before a show. I tried to pray, but I felt as if no one was listening. I tried to meditate, but my mind was too loud.

How had Alex done it? How did he silence his mind when mine was always so loud?

As the ceiling fan spun above me that night, and my heart kept racing, I gripped the heart-shaped piece sitting around my neck. When I was younger, I thought it was kind of a dumb thing, but the older I got, the more I missed my parents and their gentleness when I was in a harsh, harsh world.

I didn’t get home to Texas nearly enough to visit my parents, so every time I held that necklace close to my chest, I thought of them both and their love.

Though, that night before the show, without the whiskey, without Alex, my thoughts were eating me alive. I hated thinking so much. I hated the silence. Sometimes my mind got so dark I wondered why I was even still breathing.

Then I thought about Alex. That shit only made me sadder.

When it was almost time to perform last night, I told Tyler I was going to run outside for a quick breath of air. Once I started running, I just kept going. Which brought me exactly to my current situation.

I sat in the bathroom of a stranger that morning, completely ashamed of who I’d become. The worst part of it all was I made the mistake of looking up into the mirror. I saw how faded my existence had become, I saw how troubled my life had been, and worst of all? I saw my brother.