by Megan Walker
And yeah, maybe he’s an asshole, like I’ve heard he is, like even he said he is. And yeah, maybe I’m a little pissed that he’s acting like he’s not attracted to me, like he’s too good for me or something, even though he was clearly checking me out. And maybe I’m more than a little annoyed at myself for caring at all, especially after that awful, shallow comment about the fake breasts.
Bad boy rock stars aren’t my type—I’ve designed for enough of them. I should know.
But against my better judgment, I find myself wanting to talk to him. Wanting to see if he’ll be open with me again like that bare moment when he told me about his concussion, and why he wears his sunglasses.
Wanting to see if maybe his claim that he’s nothing but an asshole is just another faked diva-fit to cover up the panic underneath.
Five
Shane
JT is waiting for me in the green room. I slam the door behind me and brush past him, sitting against the wall next to the couch with my knees pulled up to my chest.” Hey,” JT says. “Come on. The accident wasn’t that bad.”
“You don’t remember. You were dead.” The lights are so bright they feel like they’re boring into my skull, and I get up and turn them off.
“Yeah, okay,” JT says. “Good plan. Have whip girl find you in here all pathetic and shivering. Girls love that wounded soul shit.”
“Shut up,” I tell him. “And leave her alone.”
“Whaaaaaat,” JT says. “That’s just cold, dude. It’s not like I’m competition anymore. You don’t need to call dibs when I’m dead.”
I should have told Parker I wouldn’t do this gig. I should have stayed in my cave of an apartment with all the lights off and a mounting pile of pizza boxes and Chinese takeout cartons and never emerged.
“But damn, have you checked out Allison’s ass?” JT says. “I copped a feel when she was backstage checking this girl’s hem to see if it was even, and damn—”
“Shut up!” I say.
The door swings open, and Allison stands there, back lit by the hallway lights. “I didn’t say anything,” she says.
Shit.
“Oh,” I say. “Sorry.” I’m not going to try to explain who I was talking to, and there’s nothing I can say that will adequately address why I’m sitting on the floor next to the couch in a corner with the lights off. I briefly consider unzipping my pants and making her think I’ve been jacking off in here.
That would be less embarrassing than the truth.
“Are you okay?” Allison asks.
I shrug. Let her think what she wants about me. I don’t think she’s the type to go to the press with it. “What do you want? Here to make fun of me some more?”
She steps in and closes the door behind her. In the crack of light under the door I can see her pacing to the couch and sitting down on it. She’s just a silhouette in the dark, so I can’t read her face. “I was going to yell at you for being such a diva.”
“Go ahead.”
She hesitates, and I want to repeat my rant from yesterday about how I don’t need her pity. Whatever JT says, I’ve never found being a wounded soul to be a particularly great way to get women. Sure, it works, but then you’ve got girls following you around, thinking they’ve seen deep into your soul or some such shit. It’s easier if everyone knows the score from the very beginning.
“It was the noise, wasn’t it?” Allison asks.
My face gets hot. “Yeah, so?”
“Is it because of the accident?”
I shrug again, even though I’m not sure she can see it. “What’s it to you?”
She hesitates. “I’ve had my share of days spent sitting in the dark.”
I’m not sure where JT has gone. Probably feeling her up again while I can’t see and chew him out for it later. He’s right. I didn’t generally care who he copped a feel with when he was alive; I should care even less now that he’s dead.
She’s quiet, and I can’t help but wonder what could have happened to her to make her hide in a dark room like this.
“Why?” I ask.
“I had cancer.”
My stomach drops. I never would have guessed that, though it’s not like cancer doesn’t happen to people of all ages. She doesn’t elaborate, and I don’t ask her what kind it was. I knew a girl in a band we used to tour with who had cervical cancer, and she was always saying what happened with her lady parts was nobody’s damn business.
“That sucks,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“Physically, yeah. For now, anyway.”
I can see her profile in the dark, her hair falling down over her shoulders. I’m suddenly scared that she’s dying or something, and I’ve been an ass to her because I didn’t even know it.
“Was it treatable?”
“Yeah,” she says. “And it was a couple years ago. But it could always come back.”
I lean my head against the wall. That must be hard, always knowing there’s that chance. Though I guess it could happen to any of us at any time.
Before the accident, I never gave much thought to my own mortality. Now it’s fucking terrifying.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Allison says.
“Me, too.”
I expect her to say one of the idiotic platitudes people tend to launch at me. He’s in a better place. It was meant to be. He didn’t feel any pain.
I saw the twisted angle of his neck, the lacerations that slit him open on his arms and throat. I marinated in his blood for over an hour before the paramedics finally got us all out of the van.
Even if it kills you, that shit’s gotta hurt.
“You said you had a concussion,” she says. “Do you remember the accident?”
“Yeah. I was conscious the whole time.”
Allison’s voice is quiet. “Did you know he was dead?”
“I knew. I thought Kevin was dead, too. He was unconscious, and he didn’t make any noise until the paramedics were dragging him out. Took a long time. The van rolled off the road when the truck hit us, and it was pretty thrashed. We were all wearing our seat belts. Not great for our image, and now I’ve got road safety people trying to get me to do public service commercials.”
I shiver, and Allison must notice, because she moves to the floor next to the couch. Having her so close, in the dark . . . it makes me even more aware of her than I usually am. I haven’t been alone in a dark room with a woman since the accident. Logically, I know I should get out of here.
But I don’t want to.
“You’re opposed to being a spokesperson?” she asks.
“What am I going to say? Wear your seat belts, kids, and you have a one-in-three chance of walking away. Your best friend will be dead and your band will be done and your other buddy won’t ever be able to play again, but you’ll get to live through it all. Maybe. If you’re lucky.”
I say that last bit with more irritation than I ought to, and Allison shifts closer to me. “It sounds like no one in that situation was lucky.”
I shake my head. “I know it’s unfair of me to whine.” JT reminds me of that often enough. “But I’ve always been a whiny son of a bitch, so I don’t see why that should change now.”
“What about your image? You’re the bad boy with the charming smile. The devilish rogue. Isn’t that your thing?”
“Not anymore,” I say. Damn it. If I were trying to pull this wounded soul crap, I would be doing a good job. “Don’t imagine that there’s anything underneath, though. I used to be a charming asshole, and now I’m just an asshole. I’m not an onion. I don’t have layers.”
“Hmmm. Are you sure? You do act like quite the ogre.”
“Right. And that’s all you need to know about me.”
“I get being different after, though. The cancer . . . it changed me. It’s supposed to make you reali
ze what’s important in life, you know? Closer to family and all that. But it just made me more focused. More driven. Made me realize how little time I might have left to accomplish the things that I want to.”
“What do you want to accomplish? The costuming thing?”
“No,” she says. “I mean, I enjoy costuming, but I’m a serious designer. I’d like to have my own fashion line.”
I can see it. Allison clearly works hard and cares about what she does. “Not trying to make a career of the pageant thing?”
“God, no. It’s how I got my start, so I come back every year to help out the girls. I had some mentors in my pageant days who really helped me, made me think about what I wanted beyond winning, you know? You get so focused, you forget that there’s life afterward. I want to help the girls figure out what they want out of this, besides the sash and tiara. The pageant can be a springboard into lots of fields, if you know what you want.”
“And you know exactly what you want.” It comes out sounding more suggestive than I meant it, but I don’t mind. Allison’s hand shifts next to mine, just inches away, and I gather that she doesn’t either.
“They must be looking for us.” I say. Not that I want to go back out there into the chaos, but I am wondering if we’re going to get walked in on.
“Angelica pushed a cart full of sound equipment into Gwendolyn’s marimba. When I left them, both Gwen and the sound people were threatening to sue. Carlyle got fed up and sent them all home. He’s probably wondering where I am, though. I’ll catch it from him tomorrow.”
“He’s not wondering where you are,” I say. “Word is going to get around that you’re in here with me, and they’ll all think we had sex in the green room.”
“Sorry about that. Wouldn’t want anyone to think you were into me.”
She says this at once like she half believes I’m not, which is crazy, and like she’s testing me to see if I am, which is hot.
But I don’t bite. Not yet. “Wouldn’t want them to think you’re into the guy who’s off-limits, right?”
“For them,” Allison says. “Not me. Not that it matters, since you’d never date someone like me.”
“I don’t think I said that.”
“Oh, it was pretty clear.”
Yeah, she’s definitely baiting me. “Yeah, well, you told me quite clearly that you’re not into . . . what was it? My type? Entitled rock stars? It’s the hair isn’t it? I’ve been told it makes me look like I’m trying to be Kurt Cobain.”
“Really? I thought you were just trying to get girls to run their fingers through it.”
I shrug. “Hey. You can run your fingers through my hair anytime.”
Allison shakes her head at me. “I’m sorry I said that.”
“That you want to run your fingers through my hair?”
“About your type.”
“Why? It’s not like it’s not true.”
“Really?” Allison says. “Is everything they say about you true?”
“Probably. What do they say about me?”
“That you get around, for one.”
“Ha.” She’s scoping out the territory, trying to figure out if I’m as big a player as I seem. “Yeah, that’s definitely true. Or it was, anyway.”
“Not big on commitment.”
“I don’t have a problem with commitment. With the right person.”
“Did you have a girlfriend at the time of the accident?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “I haven’t had a girlfriend since high school.”
“So Anna-Marie is the only girl you’ve ever committed to.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And that went so well I was super eager to get into another relationship, let me tell you.”
“You guys weren’t good together?”
I pause and look at her over my glasses. My eyes have adjusted sufficiently that without the shades I can see her face. She’s watching me earnestly, with no trace of annoyance. My heart picks up pace.
“We were kind of a train wreck. And that was before I wrote those albums about her.”
“About lies you made up about her?”
She’s asking like she wants to know if it’s true what Anna-Marie says. “Yeah. Exactly.”
Allison’s quiet, and I hope she’s cataloging the million reasons for not getting involved with me. “I’m hardly one to talk about having very many relationships. The last boyfriend I had was the one I was dating when I got diagnosed with cancer.”
“Ouch,” I say. “That probably wasn’t good for the relationship.”
“No kidding. We were in this awkward place where we weren’t serious enough to go through it together, but he still didn’t want to leave the girl with cancer.”
“So what happened?”
“I broke up with him. I didn’t want to be this burden, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
“Ha. You’re Shane Beckstrom. You’ve probably got girls lining up to console you in your hour of need.”
That’s true, or it was. It’s one of the things I was hiding from, the expectation that I was going to drown my sorrows in liquor and parties and girls.
Maybe if JT were still around, I would have. That was always our scene.
“Not really. I haven’t been with anyone since the accident.”
Allison looks surprised. “I thought your reputation was true. The internet would have me believe you had a different girl every night of the week.”
“The internet was right, more or less.” My throat constricts, but I keep going. “But what it won’t tell you is that Shane Beckstrom died in that accident. I don’t know who I am, but I’m not him.”
The weight of that hangs in the air, and Allison puts her hand over mine. I want to pull away and tell her again that I don’t need her pity, but it feels so damn good to be touched by her that I can’t move. I don’t dare.
“Whoever you are,” she says, “you’re not as bad as you think.”
“Please. You were right about me. I am a rich, womanizing, entitled rock star who can’t be trusted to show up on time or show anybody any respect. I’m all the things you hate and more.”
“I thought that guy died,” Allison says. “Isn’t that what you just said? Besides, I’m a workaholic, uptight bitch who doesn’t know how to have fun. So I guess we’re even.”
I look up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you a bitch. That was out of line.”
“But the rest of it you agree with.”
There’s a note of humor in her voice, and I turn my hand over, taking hers in mine. Her skin is soft and warm, and holding her hand feels a whole lot more intimate than most of the sex I’ve had. “I’m willing to bet that you do know how to have fun.”
“Really?” Allison says. “This is what you’ve learned about me in our two days working together?”
“Yes. Because no one who mocks me as mercilessly as you do is totally without a sense of humor.”
“Maybe I like to mess with you.”
“Maybe you do. Maybe I like it.”
Her hand squeezes mine, and our eyes meet. Hers are barely a gleam in the dark, but they’re locked on mine and my heart is in my throat and suddenly my mouth is dry and her lips are just inches from mine.
“Yeah?” Allison says, her lips parting just slightly. “Like this?”
Just as my chin dips toward hers she reaches up with her free hand and musses it through my hair, sending it in all directions.
I laugh and duck away, and somewhere in the process she lets go of my hand. “Yes,” I tell her. “Exactly like that.”
We’re both laughing, and her hand is still in my hair. She runs it through, smoothing it down to my shoulders. The hairs rise on the back of my neck.
“It’s so soft,” she says. “What do yo
u use on it?”
“Um, shampoo. We’re comparing hair products now? That’s what we’re doing?”
“You condition.” Her hands are still in my hair, and I have a powerful urge to move up against her and take her in my arms and press my mouth against hers.
Except, what would be the point? I’m losing my mind, and the minute she gets wind of my particular brand of crazy, she’s going to go running. Even if she didn’t, it’s not like I can have someone in my life right now. I’m shit at relationships at the best of times, and now I’m goddamned certifiable.
“Careful,” I say finally. “If I walk out of here with sex hair, don’t think I’m going to go out of my way to disabuse people of the notion that you banged me.”
Allison snickers, but she does drop her hand. “Have you heard that song, ‘Sex Hair’? From Parks and Recreation?”
“Have I heard it? I’ve covered that song.”
“Are you serious?” she asks. “You’ve covered Mouserat?”
“Oh my god, I was Andy Dwyer in high school. I mean, smarter. And meaner. But when it comes to musical ability, that was pretty much me.”
Allison laughs like she can picture this, and I find myself smiling. I take off my shades to see her better.
God, she’s so beautiful. And not just because I’ve been out of the game for a while, either. It blows me away that she hasn’t had a relationship in years. There must be guys lining up, begging to take her out.
“Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” I ask.
“Ha,” Allison says. “That’s what I’d like to know.”
“Don’t give me that. No way you don’t have offers.”
She arches an eyebrow at me. “Are you suggesting that you find me attractive?”
I roll my eyes at her. “You know you’re gorgeous. So how come the only man in your life is . . . god, I can’t remember your cat’s name.”
Allison smiles at me. She’s not going to bail me out.
“Sir . . . it’s not Snugglesworth. Snelgrove?”
Allison giggles. “You come up with the best cat names. It’s Lord Shelldon. Which is no ‘Orville Redenbarker’ but . . .” She trails off with a shrug.
