Page 15 of Grand Romantic Delusions and the Madness of Mirth, Part One

I get my dick slick with the cream, giving it a few experimental tugs. Just to see if the next step isn’t necessary.

It feels like a numb hunk of wood in my hand.

Sighing, I type a password into my phone with my clean hand.

It takes only a couple of flicks to find the vid I’ve buried deeply among other files.

It came from a longer clip that I stumbled upon only because one of the label’s publicists actually tried to release it to the press — for a hell of a payday.

I fucking fired her after demanding to see the vid myself .

It took me over an hour, because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with most tech, but I cut it down into a three-minute loop.

Three minutes of her.

Her looking at me. Watching me. Dancing and singing along during the band’s last impromptu— which is to say, totally staged— appearance in an underground London club.

I don’t say no often. I don’t resist or restrict what the label wants to do with our publicity. I really just don’t fucking care. I don’t manage my own social media accounts. I don’t post. Don’t worry about branding.

I am the brand, after all.

I built the band.

I write the songs.

I sing.

But my family — blood related or not — is off limits. Complete media blackout.

I tap the Play icon on the phone. The brother and sister who immediately appear on-screen, the footage grainy and lit only by stage lights, are practically identical.

Thick dark-brown hair that’s usually corralled into controlled, pristine cuts or contained in a complicated-looking French twist. Cream-colored skin.

Huge eyes set almost too far apart over striking cheekbones, and jawlines that lean more toward square than round.

But they aren’t identical.

He’s the older by two years.

Was.

Was the older.

The grief punches me hard in the gut. As I knew it would. Every time I open the vid, I hope it will have lessened .

Because I fucking hate him as much as I love him. Loved him.

Because whether it was deemed an accident or not, he chose — less than three weeks after my last concert — to become a was, not an is.

And Mirth no longer has an almost-twin to shelter her, protect her.

No brother to drag her to my underground concerts and force her to dance right up front, close enough that I might have even sweated on her.

She has no reason to see me, to speak to me, without Armin as a buffer, as the reason I get to be anywhere near her. We aren’t friends, though she faked it so well whenever Armin shoved her into my presence that sometimes …

Sometimes I almost believed.

I want to believe. To take whatever she gives me, even after what I’ve done.

I’m fairly certain she doesn’t know the worst part of my cowardly rejection. What I’ve truly done to the both of us. I don’t let myself believe it most days.

I haven’t played, haven’t picked up a guitar since I heard Armin was dead. A death, a terrible, unbelievable accident that I still haven’t truly acknowledged my fundamental complicity in.

Because I know why .

I know why a powerful telekinetic didn’t survive an avalanche, no matter how sudden or how widespread it was. I can’t actually acknowledge that in any significant way, of course, because then she would know, and her knowing … if she knew …

That would smother the last embers of … what could never have been between us. No matter how desperately I wanted it. Want it.

I hadn’t released a new single in the year before that terrible morning. Not one song written in over eighteen months. Because even before losing my best friend, I was slowly disintegrating in the emptiness of it all.

All of it based on that one fundamental lie. And I can’t keep it up. I can’t keep going. I can’t even fucking ejaculate without her.

I let the video play out, then start its second loop. I lift my free hand, blocking the left edge of the screen. When I did my amateur edit, I couldn’t crop out all of Armin without loosing too much of Mirth.

She’s removed her top or jacket or whatever she was wearing that night, dancing only in a soft pink tank top that’s thin enough I can see the outline of her lacy bra.

There’s a moment right at the beginning of my edit, if I watch closely enough, that she bounces to the beat of the song I’m playing — once, twice, three times.

And her nipples harden, jutting through the confines of the lace against the thin fabric.

I drag my hand hard and fast over my rock-hard dick, tightening and twisting over the crown. And it finally feels good. Watching her, touching myself, even while dampened by the drugs still raging through my system, finally makes me feel … something.

The room was warm that night. Just an impromptu riser set up at one end as a stage, minimal kit for the band, black-painted walls and curtains.

I’m shirtless as I whale on the Goldtop as if I’m desperately imagining finger-fucking Her Royal Highness Princess Euphrosyne, the spare heir to the entire fucking United European Nation, in the middle of the jam-packed dance floor.

Because I am imagining it.

I want my fingers buried in her pussy. I want her holding onto my wrist, fingernails biting into my skin, urging me to go faster, harder. I want to know if her purple-hued eyes glow when she comes.

In the vid, a slight sheen of sweat teases Mirth’s hairline.

And I watch — as I’ve done dozens of times now — as a single bead of sweat snakes down from her temple, across that fucking sharp cheekbone, past lush lips that I want to bite, under her jaw, then finally down her smooth neck to get lost between her tiny perfect breasts.

My tongue darts out as if I could actually lick the screen. As if I actually have any idea what she tastes like.

I don’t.

I never will.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because the sight of Mirth dancing, nipples erect, and a single fucking bead of fucking sweat is enough to get me off.

I clench my teeth around a shouted groan as I punishingly stroke myself through spurt after spurt of come.

So much that it’s obvious that I haven’t ejaculated in at least a fucking week. Likely longer.

Relief floods through me.

I’m a fucking creep.

A perverted degenerate creeping on one of the best people, one of my best friends, in the entire world. Literally, she fucking rescues baby animals, teaches kids how to fucking read, and funds important medical research and shit. Well, her charities do.

My dick finally softens. And along with that physical relief comes the regret. As expected. The pain of it hasn’t remotely eased in the eleven years that have passed.

The regret, the pain, that comes from me being the one to reject her. No matter that my reasons in the moment were based in fear— and my reasons in the now are completely practical.

Mirth will never gently place her hands on my shoulders and lean over to brush a kiss against my lips. Not ever again.

I will, however, jerk off to the vid of her dancing over and over. Because I’m a complete fucking asshole with absolutely no motivation to change.

I’ve lost the two people who might be worth changing for. No one else needs me. I bring nothing with me, everything I’ve created is based on a fundamental lie, and I’ll end up with nothing.

The main living area is thankfully cleared of other assholes by the time I pull on some sweatpants and wander out to the kitchen to see if I can force myself to eat something.

Or if there’s any food around at all. The living room is fucking trashed.

The entire entertainment system looks like someone went over it with a baseball bat —

I trip over something by the shredded couch, somehow managing to not face plant. I assume that spilling a load in the sink might have come with some beneficial side effects— specifically, my inherent shifter nature rising up to compensate for all the shit I do to perpetually dampen it.

I pull a twisted microphone stand out from among the debris littering the floor. Okay. Mic stand, not a baseball bat.

Even stoned out of my mind, there is no fucking way I trashed my own place. Fucking Gustave is going to pay for every fucking thing. Plus the cleanup.

By comparison, the kitchen is pristinely clean. Though the garbage is spilling over in a way that implies someone was trying to clean up for a while. One of the women, maybe .

I still don’t bother feeling bad about kicking them all out.

I wonder how many days I’ve lost to this latest binge as I search the cupboards. Honestly, the full-on binges, as compared to my regular light-but-steady consumption, are running into each other now that I don’t have anyone pulling me free of them. I don’t have Armin. I never really had Mirth.

I score some kind of sugary cereal in the second place I look. The box has been opened, but it doesn’t smell stale.

I realize I need to change the building’s alarm codes, switch the system back to essence-only scan.

It might be time to go home for a bit. I haven’t been back for the same amount of time that I haven’t played my guitar or sung a single note.

I eat a dry handful of cereal. I can’t handle the idea of adding any kind of milk to it, assuming there even is any.

I contemplate never picking up the guitar again. I think about setting fire to the notebooks scattered around the place, mocking me with their half-empty pages.

What would happen if I just walked away?

I try another handful of cereal, but my stomach rebels as I’m halfway through chewing the mouthful, and I end up spitting it into the sink.

I pause, hovering there like a fucking moron while I wait to see if I’m going to throw up again.

I don’t. So I run the water until it’s super cold and drink directly from the faucet.

I eat another fucking handful of the cereal. It tastes terrible, but if I’m anything, I’m a stubborn bastard.