Taming the Storm (The Storm, #3)

“I’d lost my dad. I’d seen him murder my uncle and then kill himself. I just wanted to bury the pain, bury that night…forget it ever happened. But I couldn’t get away from it. Reminders were everywhere. So, I started drinking, smoking weed…having sex to block it out.” He meets my eyes.

“I was fourteen when I lost my virginity with some junior at a party. I was drunk and high, and I just wanted to feel normal. I couldn’t even remember her name afterward, and I’m pretty sure she never got mine. But what I did remember was that while it was happening, while I was having sex with her, I didn’t feel like shit. I didn’t have to think about everything that was wrong with me. In that moment, I wasn’t Tommy Segal, the heir to the whiskey fortune, and son of the man who shot his brother before committing suicide. I was nothing. Nobody but a warm body for her to fuck. She didn’t care about me, and I didn’t care about her. I liked the way it felt, and I wanted to keep on feeling that way. I guess that was when sex became a coping mechanism for me. I could just switch off and lose myself in another person, forget everything. It worked for a long time until it just became the norm. Having disconnected sex was just what I did…until you.

“And as for the company…” He laughs harshly. “I barely managed to graduate high school. I was partying hard, screwing around. I wouldn’t come home most nights. My mother couldn’t control me, and after a while, she stopped trying. I turned eighteen, and it was supposed to be all mine, the company—Segal fucking whiskey.”

He looks at me. “Even with the scandal of what happened, it didn’t affect the business. I was the hoping the disgrace would burn the company to the ground, but it didn’t. It made it bigger, popular. Sales increased. That first year after their deaths, sales went up by fifty percent. Apparently, people like a shot of scandal with their whiskey. Fucked up, right?”

He rubs his face, looking frustrated. “I was eighteen years old, and they were trying to get me to run Segal’s under the guidance of the board. I could barely tie my own fucking shoelaces most days. I was a mess. I just wanted out.” He lets out a heavy breath. “I was just a kid. A screwed-up kid. So, I took some money from my trust, enough to see me through. I packed a bag, got in my car, and drove to New York.”

He lets out a miserable sounding sigh. “I ran away. When I arrived in New York, I dropped my surname and became Tom Carter. For the first year, I just bummed around, partied, got high…slept around. Then, one night, I met Denny at a mutual friend’s party. We got to talking about music. He was into it in a big way. I liked him. He was a cool guy. We just clicked, and it had been so long since I’d had a real friend. The friends I’d made in New York were just people to party and get high with. But Den, he was different. We started hanging out, and he made it his mission to get me on the straight.

“Den was in college, so I decided to go, too. I had no clue what I wanted to do, but I’d always loved music. Den was doing a BA in music, but the thick shit was having to repeat the year as he’d flunked out.” He smiles with fondness at the memory.

“I took the same major as Den, but we took a few different classes. I was interested in musical history, whereas Den was interested in composition. He met Jake and Jonny in that composition class. Introduced us, and the rest is history.” He takes a drink of his whiskey. Leaning forward, he puts the glass on the coffee table in front of us.

He comes back to me and takes my hand in his. “I never thought we’d get famous. We were good. I knew that. But how many bands get signed, right? I was having fun with them, and they felt like family. Steady. Something I hadn’t had for a long time. So, when we started to take off, I couldn’t leave. And I thought, correctly, that no one would give a shit about the bassist who likes to screw lots of chicks. No one would be interested in me or where I came from. And if anyone did ever ask about my family in interviews, I would just downplay it. They were interested in Jake and Jonny, and that worked well for me. I got to be with the guys, doing something that I’m good at, and that I love.” He looks at me with tenderness.

“I was happy, Ly. I hadn’t been happy for a long time. Then, things went to shit when Jonny died. I just couldn’t fucking believe it. I thought that was gonna push me over the edge. I couldn’t see straight. Jake and Den weren’t coping. I thought we were gonna fall apart.

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