Sad_Girl
Blue Crack Supplier
U2, unfortunately, are not mine. They are real people who I have written about here in a fictional situation that never happened. I don’t have their permission to use their likenesses, but I make no money from the story and it really is just all meant in good fun. Remember, please, that this is just a twisting, turning story out of my imagination which should not reflect upon the band or the individuals within it. It’s only make-believe. There will be some adult themes within this story, and almost undoubtedly a lot of offensive language. Read at your own discretion.
Catalina Chronicles Book 4:
Someone else’s dream
Chapter Eight
Have you come here for forgiveness
Have you come to raise the dead
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head
Did I ask too much
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it's all I got
We're one
But we're not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again
from ‘One’ by U2
Trine knew it was wrong, on many different levels. The age difference wasn’t really bad, though there was a gap between them. It was his history, mostly, that made it dangerous for her to accept his invitation. He had broken the heart of one of her good friends, and had abandoned a boy whom she loved like a brother.
No one would approve, if they knew.
It was exciting, though. Trine liked having secrets. She liked to push her luck, see how far she could go before turning back. She liked the plunge into the darkness, not knowing where the bottom was or what was waiting there. It made her feel alive.
She had tried to resist, though. She was convinced that she deserved some credit for that, at least. She had waited until the temptation had just been too strong, and then she snuck out on Cat’s bike to meet him at one of her favorite clubs. Cat would never know, she’d taken off suddenly to go back to the states, and Adam had his hands full taking care of Lawry.
Meeting him in a public place was also a consolation. It wasn’t like she was knocking on his hotel room door or anything. Her whole body thrummed with energy as she entered the club; she felt like a blinking neon sign had replaced her veins. If she had still had a chance, it was gone as soon as she saw him standing at the bar, smiling at her from across the room.
She smiled back and waved before hurrying to join him there. The last thought in her head before that dark oblivion of adventure swallowed her whole was ‘damn, Simone does get the hottest men!’
***************************************************
“You look like shite,” Bono greeted Edge from the doorway of his home studio. Edge looked up at his friend numbly, the bags under his sea green eyes deep, dark and nearly as hollow as his eyes themselves. He held on to his 1962 Gibson Dove guitar as if it were his lifeline, and Bono could tell he’d not put that guitar down in hours. If he wasn’t already accustomed to playing for hours upon hours, his fingers would have been blistered and bleeding. As it was, Bono knew they must ache.
“What do you want, Bono?” Edge replied, sighing and returning to the heart-breaking melody he’d been composing.
“Tessa called Laney. She’s worried about you,” Bono said, moving into the room to settle on the couch beside his mate, despite the chilly reception. “Says something, doesn’t it? That she’s worried about you. More than she is about herself, I’d say.”
“She wants to go through this by herself,” Edge replied, his eyes still fixed on the fretboard of his guitar as he picked out the new tune. “She won’t let me go with her to the hospital for her chemo therapy or even to sit in the waiting room during surgery.”
Bono didn’t know what to say to his closest friend. The circumstances certainly were unusual, and he couldn’t claim to understand. Tessa had been diagnosed with breast cancer. He’d lost people he loved to cancer, so he did understand the fear that Edge was feeling. What neither of them could fully comprehend was that she wanted to undergo the treatment on her own.
“I don’t understand why she would not want me to be with her!” Edge repeated, this time tossing the guitar aside and rising to pace in frustration. He rubbed the back of his neck with both hands in a gesture of helpless anxiety. Bono sighed and ran a hand over his neatly cropped hair, the situation stirring up unpleasant memories of his own.
Edge glanced over at his friend and realized that Bono was probably the one person in the world who did understand what he was going through. He looked so small, suddenly, sitting there on the sofa feeling utterly helpless. Feeling like a bit of an ass, Edge sat down beside him again. Bono’s father had died of cancer, not long ago. The way he had pushed everyone away had been something Bono had grappled with ever since.
Writing and recording the song ‘Sometimes you can’t make it (on your own)’ had helped somewhat, to bring Bono the closure he needed. It gave him the opportunity to say the things his father had been unwilling to hear, and the chance to face his own powerlessness in the face of it all.
There was nothing Edge could say to him, in that moment, it was all too raw. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose to fend off the headache he knew was coming when the tears he’d been holding on to started to spring free. Before the first tear had been caught in the whiskers of his beard, Bono wrapped a supportive arm around his friend and offered the strength of his shoulder for him to cry on.
**********************************************************
Simone was greeted at the door by a rather disheveled looking Adam; his usually neat silver hair was sticking up straight in a cowlick in the back, his t-shirt was stained with orange and purple blotches, and his trousers wrinkled as if they’d come straight from the bottom of the hamper. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the sight.
He must have recognized the sentiment in her eyes, because he smiled at her tiredly, trying to smooth his hair down with one of his giant hands. Simone was relieved to chuckle at him; it was the first time she’d laughed in days. She held up the package of diapers he’d called to ask her to bring.
“Looks like you could use some help,” She told him. “Where’s Trine?”
“Sleeping,” Adam replied. “She’s been out late every night lately. I think she came in about dawn today.” Simone smiled sympathetically at him, seeing a man who was usually in perfect control of everything in his life in a situation where all of that control was slipping through his fingers.
“I’m glad you called,” she told him, handing him not the diapers but Lorna, whom she’d been balancing on her hip. Lorna squealed with glee at being handed over to her uncle Adam, whom she adored. She planted a sloppy kiss on his chin and cooed at him, ‘An’m’ which was the closest she came to pronouncing his name.
“Where’s Lawry now?”
“In his play room,” Adam replied, turning to try and catch up to Simone as she hurried off down the hall. She stopped briefly to study the room, which looked as if a tornado had torn through the place, and then proceeded to check on Lawry, who was standing in his playpen screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Da-dee!”
“Hey, tiger!” Simone greeted him, and the boy drew in several deep, ragged breaths and blinked away his tears. His face was red and tear stained, his t-shirt bore the same orange and purple blotches as Adam’s, and he was naked from the waist down. Simone feigned an overdramatic gasp and covered her eyes, making the boy grin and peek over the top of the playpen at her. His sobs were quickly replaced by giggles as Simone peeked out from behind her hands and gasped again.
“You’re nakey!” she said playfully, making the boy stand up straight and proud, nodding and giggling. She clucked her tongue and averted her eyes melodramatically, picking him up and finding a clear spot on the floor to set him down.
“I nakey!” Lawry teased, his blue eyes shimmering gleefully as he made Simone cover her eyes again. Adam leaned against the doorway, Lorna laughing because Simone and Lawry were, and relief flooded him. He smiled at the scene, and Simone glanced over her shoulder at him to smile back. She had always had a soft spot for that smile of his, the one that should’ve seemed more like a frown because the corners of his mouth actually turned down.
“Being out of nappies didn’t bother him much,” Adam commented as his son made a mad dash across the room when Simone tried to put one of the new diapers on him.
“He is definitely your child,” she teased, making Adam chuckle in a way that almost seemed shy. She caught Lawry and tickled his belly until he was incapacitated with giggles, then took advantage of that moment to fasten the diaper on. She tugged the boys stained T-shirt off over her head and pretended to be shocked when he held his arms open wide and announce again that he was ‘nakey’.
“Thank you,” Adam told her as she wrestled a clean shirt and a pair of shorts onto the tiny streaker.
“No problem,” Simone assured him, taking Lorna from his arms and setting her down on the floor where she and Lawry proceeded to pound on a plastic snare drum Larry had given the boy last Christmas.
“Have you heard from him?” Adam asked, standing shoulder to shoulder with her now as they watched the children play. She didn’t have to ask who he meant; Larry had been gone for several days now with no word to any of them. She just shook her head in response to the question. She didn’t want to talk about it.
“And Pauley?” Adam inquired.
“He’s with Toby today,” She replied. Then, sensing he’d meant more than just where the boy might be at the moment. “He’s upset, he was mad at first and now he thinks Larry went away because he was mean to him,” she told him, tears warming her eyes at the thought. Her heart broke for Pauley at the thought of the hurt and confusion he was suffering. She blamed Toby for being selfish and Larry for being stubborn but mostly, she blamed herself; her own bad decisions.
“He’ll come back once he cools off,” Adam told her gently. “He just doesn’t like to lose his temper in front of you.”
“I know,” she told him weakly. To be honest, she didn’t know. She didn’t know if he would be able to get over this, or if he would come back to them. If she had been asked even two weeks ago, she would never have hesitated to say that he would never just walk out on them the way he had. Now, she just had no idea what to expect.
“Have you heard from Cat?” She asked, needing to change the subject.
“Yeah, she calls every night. She’s packing her things up, going through a few million memories. She’s talked to you about Gunnar and Charlene, I imagine?” he replied. Simone nodded. “She never really had time to mourn properly for them, everything went crazy about that time. It was like the world had been sent into fast-forward, and if anyone took the time to look around, they’d be lost in the whirlwind.”
“Will she be home soon?” Simone wondered.
“Probably another week or more,” Adam replied tiredly. Simone nodded in understanding, considering this for a moment.
“Why don’t you go get cleaned up, take a nap, whatever you need to do. I’ll watch both of the kids for awhile. Then we’ll get dinner,” she suggested, and Adam looked at her gratefully. He didn’t know how to thank her; there were no words that could match the relief her help brought to his heart. She smiled knowingly and shooed him out of the room. She was just as grateful not to be alone tonight.
********************************************************
Cat sat amidst the cardboard boxes and bubble wrap, her mind numb from the flood of memories she’d been lost in since her return to Tennessee. It was more than she’d been prepared for, and she often found herself standing there dumbly with no clue as to what she had been doing or intending to do.
Half a dozen boxes of Chinese take-out cluttered the counter in the kitchen, along with scattered bottles of soda and booze, all somewhere between half-full and bone dry. Johnny Cash and Fiona Apple sang softly from the stereo, ‘Bridge over troubled water’, and several candles flickered on the coffee table in an attempt to rid the house of the closed-up musty smell it had acquired in her absence.
Thunder rumbled outside and the rain lashed against the roof and windows violently, the wind howling mournfully. Despite the storm, it was hot; damn hot. She wore nothing now but a pair of cut-off jean shorts and a sports bra, and still her hair clung to the sweat-damp skin on her neck. She had missed this in Ireland, she realized with a smile. She had always been fond of the southern climate, even when other people complained that it made them miserable.
There was a romance in nights such as this, an ambience of danger and possibility hanging heavily in the air. She found a notebook and began scratching down her thoughts for a song, trying to capture the feeling before it was lost. She was deep in her musings when the knock sounded at the door, and for a moment she was sure that she had imagined it. Another rumble of thunder in the distance, and then she heard it again, sharper this time.
Cat left her notebook on the table and stepped over boxes and around pictures and books which were piled on the floor, her heart picking up its pace nervously. She was alone and suddenly felt very vulnerable. No one except the realtor and the buyers knew she was here; no old friends should be showing up to surprise her and no new prospects should be looking to buy the house.
With her hands shaking slightly and her pulse points throbbing nervously, she opened the door just in time to be blinded by a flash of lightning. As she squinted and tried to focus, the silhouette of a man took shape before her. She blinked in disbelief as his features became clear to her; his shaggy blonde hair, his slender build, the way he stood with his shoulders hunched against the wind, his hands buried in the pockets of his jeans.
Larry.
She stared in silence, her mind too stunned to find any words of greeting as he turned away from the storm and those eyes found hers. His eyes were the color of molten metal tonight, burning with an intensity she’d seen only once before.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he told her, one of his ring-clad hands slipping out of his pocket to run through the rain-soaked mop of hair on his head. “I just… God help me, Cat, I can't hate you!” He told her desperately.
Cat took a step forward, out into the night, the rain hitting her but doing nothing to cool her overheated skin. Her hands found the sides of his face, one of them sliding up into his hair as she had wanted to do for so long now. Without time for a second thought, she leaned in and met his mouth with her own, their lips parting eagerly to allow the other entrance.
It was not a hard kiss, not fierce and frightening as the other had been, so long ago. It was more like diving into the deep end of the pool, sinking in quickly and rising slowly, the world rushing past ignored as they lingered in that moment of submersion into a world completely different from the one in which they lived. A world where they knew they could not stay forever and so each moment in it was savored.
The lightning flashed and the thunder rolled, the rain soaking into their hair and clothes, but it was all just a part of the magic. It was all so surreal, like a dream. But whose dream was it?
Catalina Chronicles Book 4:
Someone else’s dream
Chapter Eight
Have you come here for forgiveness
Have you come to raise the dead
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head
Did I ask too much
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it's all I got
We're one
But we're not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again
from ‘One’ by U2
Trine knew it was wrong, on many different levels. The age difference wasn’t really bad, though there was a gap between them. It was his history, mostly, that made it dangerous for her to accept his invitation. He had broken the heart of one of her good friends, and had abandoned a boy whom she loved like a brother.
No one would approve, if they knew.
It was exciting, though. Trine liked having secrets. She liked to push her luck, see how far she could go before turning back. She liked the plunge into the darkness, not knowing where the bottom was or what was waiting there. It made her feel alive.
She had tried to resist, though. She was convinced that she deserved some credit for that, at least. She had waited until the temptation had just been too strong, and then she snuck out on Cat’s bike to meet him at one of her favorite clubs. Cat would never know, she’d taken off suddenly to go back to the states, and Adam had his hands full taking care of Lawry.
Meeting him in a public place was also a consolation. It wasn’t like she was knocking on his hotel room door or anything. Her whole body thrummed with energy as she entered the club; she felt like a blinking neon sign had replaced her veins. If she had still had a chance, it was gone as soon as she saw him standing at the bar, smiling at her from across the room.
She smiled back and waved before hurrying to join him there. The last thought in her head before that dark oblivion of adventure swallowed her whole was ‘damn, Simone does get the hottest men!’
***************************************************
“You look like shite,” Bono greeted Edge from the doorway of his home studio. Edge looked up at his friend numbly, the bags under his sea green eyes deep, dark and nearly as hollow as his eyes themselves. He held on to his 1962 Gibson Dove guitar as if it were his lifeline, and Bono could tell he’d not put that guitar down in hours. If he wasn’t already accustomed to playing for hours upon hours, his fingers would have been blistered and bleeding. As it was, Bono knew they must ache.
“What do you want, Bono?” Edge replied, sighing and returning to the heart-breaking melody he’d been composing.
“Tessa called Laney. She’s worried about you,” Bono said, moving into the room to settle on the couch beside his mate, despite the chilly reception. “Says something, doesn’t it? That she’s worried about you. More than she is about herself, I’d say.”
“She wants to go through this by herself,” Edge replied, his eyes still fixed on the fretboard of his guitar as he picked out the new tune. “She won’t let me go with her to the hospital for her chemo therapy or even to sit in the waiting room during surgery.”
Bono didn’t know what to say to his closest friend. The circumstances certainly were unusual, and he couldn’t claim to understand. Tessa had been diagnosed with breast cancer. He’d lost people he loved to cancer, so he did understand the fear that Edge was feeling. What neither of them could fully comprehend was that she wanted to undergo the treatment on her own.
“I don’t understand why she would not want me to be with her!” Edge repeated, this time tossing the guitar aside and rising to pace in frustration. He rubbed the back of his neck with both hands in a gesture of helpless anxiety. Bono sighed and ran a hand over his neatly cropped hair, the situation stirring up unpleasant memories of his own.
Edge glanced over at his friend and realized that Bono was probably the one person in the world who did understand what he was going through. He looked so small, suddenly, sitting there on the sofa feeling utterly helpless. Feeling like a bit of an ass, Edge sat down beside him again. Bono’s father had died of cancer, not long ago. The way he had pushed everyone away had been something Bono had grappled with ever since.
Writing and recording the song ‘Sometimes you can’t make it (on your own)’ had helped somewhat, to bring Bono the closure he needed. It gave him the opportunity to say the things his father had been unwilling to hear, and the chance to face his own powerlessness in the face of it all.
There was nothing Edge could say to him, in that moment, it was all too raw. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose to fend off the headache he knew was coming when the tears he’d been holding on to started to spring free. Before the first tear had been caught in the whiskers of his beard, Bono wrapped a supportive arm around his friend and offered the strength of his shoulder for him to cry on.
**********************************************************
Simone was greeted at the door by a rather disheveled looking Adam; his usually neat silver hair was sticking up straight in a cowlick in the back, his t-shirt was stained with orange and purple blotches, and his trousers wrinkled as if they’d come straight from the bottom of the hamper. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the sight.
He must have recognized the sentiment in her eyes, because he smiled at her tiredly, trying to smooth his hair down with one of his giant hands. Simone was relieved to chuckle at him; it was the first time she’d laughed in days. She held up the package of diapers he’d called to ask her to bring.
“Looks like you could use some help,” She told him. “Where’s Trine?”
“Sleeping,” Adam replied. “She’s been out late every night lately. I think she came in about dawn today.” Simone smiled sympathetically at him, seeing a man who was usually in perfect control of everything in his life in a situation where all of that control was slipping through his fingers.
“I’m glad you called,” she told him, handing him not the diapers but Lorna, whom she’d been balancing on her hip. Lorna squealed with glee at being handed over to her uncle Adam, whom she adored. She planted a sloppy kiss on his chin and cooed at him, ‘An’m’ which was the closest she came to pronouncing his name.
“Where’s Lawry now?”
“In his play room,” Adam replied, turning to try and catch up to Simone as she hurried off down the hall. She stopped briefly to study the room, which looked as if a tornado had torn through the place, and then proceeded to check on Lawry, who was standing in his playpen screaming at the top of his lungs.
“Da-dee!”
“Hey, tiger!” Simone greeted him, and the boy drew in several deep, ragged breaths and blinked away his tears. His face was red and tear stained, his t-shirt bore the same orange and purple blotches as Adam’s, and he was naked from the waist down. Simone feigned an overdramatic gasp and covered her eyes, making the boy grin and peek over the top of the playpen at her. His sobs were quickly replaced by giggles as Simone peeked out from behind her hands and gasped again.
“You’re nakey!” she said playfully, making the boy stand up straight and proud, nodding and giggling. She clucked her tongue and averted her eyes melodramatically, picking him up and finding a clear spot on the floor to set him down.
“I nakey!” Lawry teased, his blue eyes shimmering gleefully as he made Simone cover her eyes again. Adam leaned against the doorway, Lorna laughing because Simone and Lawry were, and relief flooded him. He smiled at the scene, and Simone glanced over her shoulder at him to smile back. She had always had a soft spot for that smile of his, the one that should’ve seemed more like a frown because the corners of his mouth actually turned down.
“Being out of nappies didn’t bother him much,” Adam commented as his son made a mad dash across the room when Simone tried to put one of the new diapers on him.
“He is definitely your child,” she teased, making Adam chuckle in a way that almost seemed shy. She caught Lawry and tickled his belly until he was incapacitated with giggles, then took advantage of that moment to fasten the diaper on. She tugged the boys stained T-shirt off over her head and pretended to be shocked when he held his arms open wide and announce again that he was ‘nakey’.
“Thank you,” Adam told her as she wrestled a clean shirt and a pair of shorts onto the tiny streaker.
“No problem,” Simone assured him, taking Lorna from his arms and setting her down on the floor where she and Lawry proceeded to pound on a plastic snare drum Larry had given the boy last Christmas.
“Have you heard from him?” Adam asked, standing shoulder to shoulder with her now as they watched the children play. She didn’t have to ask who he meant; Larry had been gone for several days now with no word to any of them. She just shook her head in response to the question. She didn’t want to talk about it.
“And Pauley?” Adam inquired.
“He’s with Toby today,” She replied. Then, sensing he’d meant more than just where the boy might be at the moment. “He’s upset, he was mad at first and now he thinks Larry went away because he was mean to him,” she told him, tears warming her eyes at the thought. Her heart broke for Pauley at the thought of the hurt and confusion he was suffering. She blamed Toby for being selfish and Larry for being stubborn but mostly, she blamed herself; her own bad decisions.
“He’ll come back once he cools off,” Adam told her gently. “He just doesn’t like to lose his temper in front of you.”
“I know,” she told him weakly. To be honest, she didn’t know. She didn’t know if he would be able to get over this, or if he would come back to them. If she had been asked even two weeks ago, she would never have hesitated to say that he would never just walk out on them the way he had. Now, she just had no idea what to expect.
“Have you heard from Cat?” She asked, needing to change the subject.
“Yeah, she calls every night. She’s packing her things up, going through a few million memories. She’s talked to you about Gunnar and Charlene, I imagine?” he replied. Simone nodded. “She never really had time to mourn properly for them, everything went crazy about that time. It was like the world had been sent into fast-forward, and if anyone took the time to look around, they’d be lost in the whirlwind.”
“Will she be home soon?” Simone wondered.
“Probably another week or more,” Adam replied tiredly. Simone nodded in understanding, considering this for a moment.
“Why don’t you go get cleaned up, take a nap, whatever you need to do. I’ll watch both of the kids for awhile. Then we’ll get dinner,” she suggested, and Adam looked at her gratefully. He didn’t know how to thank her; there were no words that could match the relief her help brought to his heart. She smiled knowingly and shooed him out of the room. She was just as grateful not to be alone tonight.
********************************************************
Cat sat amidst the cardboard boxes and bubble wrap, her mind numb from the flood of memories she’d been lost in since her return to Tennessee. It was more than she’d been prepared for, and she often found herself standing there dumbly with no clue as to what she had been doing or intending to do.
Half a dozen boxes of Chinese take-out cluttered the counter in the kitchen, along with scattered bottles of soda and booze, all somewhere between half-full and bone dry. Johnny Cash and Fiona Apple sang softly from the stereo, ‘Bridge over troubled water’, and several candles flickered on the coffee table in an attempt to rid the house of the closed-up musty smell it had acquired in her absence.
Thunder rumbled outside and the rain lashed against the roof and windows violently, the wind howling mournfully. Despite the storm, it was hot; damn hot. She wore nothing now but a pair of cut-off jean shorts and a sports bra, and still her hair clung to the sweat-damp skin on her neck. She had missed this in Ireland, she realized with a smile. She had always been fond of the southern climate, even when other people complained that it made them miserable.
There was a romance in nights such as this, an ambience of danger and possibility hanging heavily in the air. She found a notebook and began scratching down her thoughts for a song, trying to capture the feeling before it was lost. She was deep in her musings when the knock sounded at the door, and for a moment she was sure that she had imagined it. Another rumble of thunder in the distance, and then she heard it again, sharper this time.
Cat left her notebook on the table and stepped over boxes and around pictures and books which were piled on the floor, her heart picking up its pace nervously. She was alone and suddenly felt very vulnerable. No one except the realtor and the buyers knew she was here; no old friends should be showing up to surprise her and no new prospects should be looking to buy the house.
With her hands shaking slightly and her pulse points throbbing nervously, she opened the door just in time to be blinded by a flash of lightning. As she squinted and tried to focus, the silhouette of a man took shape before her. She blinked in disbelief as his features became clear to her; his shaggy blonde hair, his slender build, the way he stood with his shoulders hunched against the wind, his hands buried in the pockets of his jeans.
Larry.
She stared in silence, her mind too stunned to find any words of greeting as he turned away from the storm and those eyes found hers. His eyes were the color of molten metal tonight, burning with an intensity she’d seen only once before.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he told her, one of his ring-clad hands slipping out of his pocket to run through the rain-soaked mop of hair on his head. “I just… God help me, Cat, I can't hate you!” He told her desperately.
Cat took a step forward, out into the night, the rain hitting her but doing nothing to cool her overheated skin. Her hands found the sides of his face, one of them sliding up into his hair as she had wanted to do for so long now. Without time for a second thought, she leaned in and met his mouth with her own, their lips parting eagerly to allow the other entrance.
It was not a hard kiss, not fierce and frightening as the other had been, so long ago. It was more like diving into the deep end of the pool, sinking in quickly and rising slowly, the world rushing past ignored as they lingered in that moment of submersion into a world completely different from the one in which they lived. A world where they knew they could not stay forever and so each moment in it was savored.
The lightning flashed and the thunder rolled, the rain soaking into their hair and clothes, but it was all just a part of the magic. It was all so surreal, like a dream. But whose dream was it?
oh no!!! 
so adorable! daddy Adam 
I am really enjoying Adam being a father... I would imagine it would be quite similar to this.
cat can't cheat on adam!!! i hope it's really a dream...
Adam spawned a ministreaker!
