Last Contact (Galaxy's Edge Book 15) by Jason Anspach & Nick Cole

Author:Jason Anspach & Nick Cole
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Galaxy's Edge Press
Published: 2022-05-03T07:00:00+00:00

21

Earth

12 Months Prior to the First Lighthugger Departure Billy Bang—Crometheus—was already a little drunk. He had promised himself it wouldn’t be so this time. Then he ordered a whiskey sour when the cute waitress with the dimples cheerfully asked what he’d like.

It was… expected of him. To drink. A part of who he was. He wasn’t a lush or some sad, pathetic alcoholic who couldn’t help himself—although he was that too.

Billy Bang was a rock god. A one-man wrecking machine who in a night would decimate every member of the audience at the arena, every bottle behind the bar, every girl whose looks got her backstage, and every hotel room his manager booked for him.

And always in that order.

The rock god’s fall from Olympus was gradual, but the change didn’t escape Billy. Especially after the trial.

Things had changed. He was told to leave the bars before he had a chance to drain all the expensive bottles on the top shelf.

Gone was the grace offered by the club owners when Billy was moving from city to city, always adding more tour dates as more records sold and more girls needed his attention. When a drunken appearance at an awards show was watched breathlessly and the old rock gods who had lost their perch on the throne at the top of the charts laughed at his vile antics and clapped at his careless profanity. He threw up in a green room and the pages for the network apologized to him while they scrubbed his mess out of the carpet and his manager shrugged the whole thing off.

“That’s what they want, baby. It’s what they expect. And you’re delivering it. You’re a rock god, Billy.”

But at the bars, after the trial, when the sales had died down and the people forgot about the music and even the scandal… when all that happened, no one seemed to want a rock god except for the

well-perfumed girls who showed up backstage at the smaller shows, their dresses just as tight as before but now showing the softness of their middles and underneath their chins.

“You’ll know your star is fallin’ when the girls get bigger,” some hair-band lead singer had told him once when he was on top and not really listening. But now he knew that was true. At least most of the time. Sometimes nostalgia and the memories of fame made an exception.

Those were good times.

It was the gradual decline that had been the hardest. The album after the trial hadn’t hit the way it needed to. The comeback tour was downsized as it went on. The bouncers who once shook Billy’s hand and made a fuss and called for their friends to snap a Polaroid—see Billy curling his lip and baring his teeth while holding out a fist, the spiked leather collar strapped around his wrist, one photo after another until all the little people who made those bars run were satisfied by their brush with fame and the patrons waited outside the private areas hoping they could only get near him—those bouncers hadn’t changed.

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