I gave Rick some air time, then zoomed back out so I could record Noah strutting around like he was the star of the show. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought so. His ass looked mighty fine in those jeans. He made sure I had ample opportunity to immortalize his posterior for posterity. But he’d been so ugly to me, I’d rather kick him than kiss him.
They played three more new songs and finally took a break. Micah sat on the sofa beside me, dripping sweat everywhere. Shane paced in a semi-circle a few feet away, like he was waiting his turn. Noah took off for parts unknown, and Rick just sat on an amplifier with another cigarette.
“Can I see how they came out?”
I handed Micah my camera. “I got some earlier songs, too,” I confessed. “And the covers.”
While he played back a few seconds of video, Shane moved closer, and I lifted my eyes to his. He crossed his arms, tapping his fingers against his biceps, still drumming, and my gaze lingered on muscles that glistened from his exertion. I bet my hands would slip right along his body right now.
Micah interrupted my dirty thoughts. “These are great.”
Relief. “So, I can share?”
“Yeah. I don’t care what you share, but Lars will only want one of the new songs. The rest is miscellaneous stuff for the diehard fans.”
He was right about that. I didn’t feel right posting their banter, though. Not without Micah’s permission. “I caught some of your arguments. Should I delete that?”
“If the fans don’t know Noah can be a turd, they’re not paying attention.”
He handed me the camera back. “So, which new song did you like the best?”
“Wow. They were all so good. Um—”
He chuckled and looked up at Shane. “She’s diplomatic.” He touched my arm. Micah Sinclair touched my arm. “Seriously, though. We don’t need to be coddled. Did you have a favorite? Or were they all shit?”
“No! They were all fantastic.”
His eyebrows rose a half an inch, and his clear blue eyes pierced me. Damn, Jo must melt every time he looked at her. It would have been unnerving enough even if I hadn’t seen those eyes on the glossy cover of a magazine. But he was waiting, so I gave him my honest opinion. “I loved them all, but I liked the second one best, I think. Does it have a name?”
“The one that went—” and he sang a little of the chorus “—Hit me like an aftershock?”
He was singing a foot from me. The corners of my mouth felt like helium.
“That’s the one.”
Micah nodded. “Cool. Then that’s the one we’ll play at our next show. It’s called ‘Aftershock.’ ”
I felt dumb. “Of course.”
He stood and thanked me. “Feel free to post those other vids over on Facebook or on our message board if you want. Shane can point you to it.”
I became aware for the first time that I’d been gaping at Micah right in front of Shane. As soon as Micah was out of earshot, I said, “Sorry for the fawning, but super fan and all.” I hoped that would cover for enjoying the eye candy far too much.
He twisted his lips into an inscrutable expression. Reluctant acceptance? Judgment? Displeasure? He sighed. “It’s fine. I’ve seen worse.”
“Yeah?”
He sat beside me. “Oh, God, yes. There’s a girl who used to come to all our shows, and at the end, she’d somehow manage to get Micah into a bear hug. I don’t know how it started, but Micah’s too nice and afraid of turning away any single fan.”
“Wow. He just let her hug him?”
“I’d stand behind her making signs at Micah asking if he needed a rescue, but he’d shake his head.” He shrugged. “Eventually, Micah just stopped coming out after shows because of shit like that.”
“So, I passed the test?”
“He probably didn’t even notice. It’s the way things are in Micah world.”
Shane had noticed, and I felt like a jerk. “Well, right now, I’m fawning over a certain drummer. By the way, you are incredible.”
His face lit up. “Good?”
“Very.” I dragged my teeth across my lower lip. “And fucking hot.”
He quickly glanced at the empty studio, then leaned in to steal a kiss, just a peck. He started to pull away, but like gravity, he drew me toward him, and my lips caught his. I could feel him smile, and so did I, essentially wrecking what might have turned into a passionate makeout.
“Maybe we could sneak out. Go back to my place?”
Whether he was teasing or not, his would-be plan was foiled when Micah came back in, trailing Noah, and said, “Hey, can we finish this up so we can break for lunch?”
Shane stood, adjusting his pants. “I need to walk around for a minute before we start back up.”
I turned airplane mode off, and my phone notifications started coming in one after another. I had a missed call from my mom and voice messages from Ash. I groaned. “Ugh. I’m gonna have to check on this.”
“Do you want to go back to the waiting room? You won’t miss much. We’ll just be going over shit Micah wasn’t happy with.”
I weighed my options. I really wanted to sit through the rest of the rehearsal, but if Ash was calling me, things had gone south according to her DEFCON meter.
With a wistful look at the guys setting up for another set, I took my phone and headed to the breakroom.
I played back the messages from Ash. She rambled on incoherently about trolls, and I couldn’t piece together what she was freaked out about. Trolls were easy to deal with. It wouldn’t take but a minute to call and tell her how to handle it.
I hit call, and her voice poured through. “There are a bunch of people suddenly commenting all over your reviews, all disagreeing with you and calling the fans idiots. I didn’t notice right away because—”
“It doesn’t matter, Ash. Give me a minute to log in.”
I had to go back out to the rehearsal room to grab my laptop bag. Shane had settled back behind his drum and was tapping out a beat while Noah noodled around. I waved at Shane. He responded with the most famous drum beat from “In the Air Tonight.”
I laughed with my fist over my mouth. He settled into another rhythm, and it took me until I got back to the kitchen and Micah kicked in with the rhythm guitar for me to recognize their song “Close Enough.”
I remembered his words the night before.
“I can’t get close enough to you.”
My thighs turned to liquid at the memory. I wanted to think he’d played that on purpose, just for me, and I preened a little. Over the speaker, Ash asked, “What the hell is that? Where are you?”
The closed door provided no respite from Shane’s relentless drumming.
“Um.” I’d forgotten about Ash. I would have loved to confess it all, but besides her inability to keep a secret, she’d want to know everything, and that could take a while. It was too much to explain, and she’d be mad I’d kept the secret. I’d deal with it later.
“I’m at a bar.” My nose scrunched up as I processed that terrible excuse.
“At noon?”
“Co-workers took me out for lunch.”
“Why are you calling me then?”
“Uh.” Fuck. I couldn’t think of anything.
“Is that band covering Theater of the Absurd?”
“I hadn’t noticed.” I opened the hotspot on my phone. “Hold on. I’m almost online.”
Ash kept talking. “The usernames are all one word, like Unforgiven and Puppets.”
“Aren’t those from Metallica songs?”
Had we done something to piss off Metallica fans? With everyone so bored, waiting for anything to do, a fan war would be like throwing a spark into dry kindling. I didn’t have time for it. A few trolls, we could handle. An assault? I already dreaded the expended energy putting out the fires.
&nb
sp; But I couldn’t understand why they’d want to attack us. “Do you know if Metallica fans are prone to start feuds?”
“No idea. They hit about ten of your blog posts, but most of the comments are on your review of the new album.”
“Did they go to the forum?”
“Not yet.”
Not yet, but if this was the start of a board war, they would.
“I’ve got the blog up now.” I scrolled through hundreds of comments, kind of laughing at how lame they were.
There’s no way you listened to this album. Did the band pay you to write this?
This is a shit album. You’re a shit reviewer.
I scanned the rest without reading. “When did this start?”
“The earliest one I found was from around seven-thirty. The last one came about an hour later. They’re all roughly a minute apart. What’s weird is they’re grouped. Like they hit one blog post, then moved on to the next.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I was missing the band’s rehearsal for this stupidity. The comments weren’t going to hurt anything. Most of them were on old blog posts which had been buried by time. If anyone was reading my archived reviews, they must be bored. Or vengeful.
“I think we should just leave them and pretend we never saw them. That will piss off whoever it is.” I disconnected my hotspot.
She snorted. “Won’t they just come back and do more?”
My turn to laugh. “What’s the worst they can do? Drive traffic to the blog? Make me an extra twenty-five cents this month?”
“You’re always so levelheaded, Layla. I should have known you wouldn’t panic.”
The music in the other room came to an abrupt halt, and I felt a stab of disappointment and regret for choosing to take care of business rather than enjoy the last few minutes of my fly-on-the-wall experience.
“Thanks for helping out, Ash.”
“No problem. Traffic’s down anyway. People are getting restless though. It will be good when the guys are on the road and we can get back to discussions about setlists and sharing vids.”
“For sure.”
The door cracked open, and I closed the lid on my laptop before anyone could catch a glimpse of my dirty little secret.
Shane said, “Rehearsal’s over,” a little too loud, like he’d suffered temporary hearing loss.
“Rehearsal?” came out of the speaker, and I shook my head at Shane.
His eyes widened. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t know you were on the phone. I’ll be outside.” He shut the door behind him, leaving me to clean up another toxic spill.
I tried dodging yet again. “Sounds like we’ve got a plan then. Let me know if our friend comes back.”
“Layla, where—”
“I’ve got to go. Talk to you later.”
“Okay. Thanks again.”
It was becoming painfully obvious I was going to have to confess to Ash and then pass the torch to her entirely. She could run the forum easily without me. She just needed more confidence. Surely someone would agree to take over the blog for me. I couldn’t keep it up if for no other reason than I’d just wasted twenty minutes investigating a trivial issue instead of watching a rock band rehearse.
The blog troll would have to stew a little longer. Shane waited for me.
Shane.
That one thought pushed all others out of my head, and I packed up, curious if lunch would be with all of the band or only him, finding myself not caring either way as long as I could enjoy the swoops in my belly whenever he looked my way or touched me. My hands trembled as my imagination took those small gestures to their logical conclusion and I pictured him on his back under me again.
Rock n’ Roll. Literally.
Chapter Sixteen
Shane leaned against the wall with one leg bent, looking so hot in the setting sun, it was a wonder he hadn’t scorched the earth. The orange light made his hair look like he’d caught fire. Did these guys really just wander around here at all hours of the day and nobody accosted them?
Right now, there were probably a couple of fans online arguing about their favorite Theater of the Absurd song lyric, and I’d just lived the dream. It was giving me a serious sense of cognitive dissonance to compare the reality of these guys against years of my own imagination.
When Shane saw me, he pushed off the wall. “Freedom at last.”
I couldn’t help but chastise him a little. “You know the rest of the world has lunch breaks that last about as long as you work.”
He grabbed my hand, twining our fingers, like it was no big deal, like we’d been a couple for longer than, oh God, less than twenty-four hours. Barely more than twelve. My head spun with how quickly things were changing.
“Speaking of food, the guys went on ahead. I told them we’d catch up.”
“Pity,” I joked and squeezed his hand.
“We don’t have to.” He slowed. “I don’t need to spend another minute with Noah.”
“He obviously thinks I’m in the way, anyway.” I stopped altogether and faced him. “He’s so—”
“It isn’t you.” He hooked his arms around my back and pulled me into him so my face was inches from his. “I swear. He’s got something going on. He’s also a total prick. But not usually quite so deserving of a swift kick to the nuts.”
“You sure?”
He pressed his lips against my forehead. “Positive, Star Shine.”
I pushed him away so I could see his face when I asked, “Are you ever going to tell me why you keep calling me that?”
“Maybe.” His coy expression left no doubts he planned to milk the mystery a while longer.
“Fine.” I turned my back on him and started down the sidewalk.
Shane caught up, laughing. “I promise I will, but do you want to go eat with the guys or not?”
I’d barely eaten anything since the croissant at breakfast, and my stomach churned. “Yeah, let’s.”
He ushered me into a local fast food burger joint that gave off a dodgy vibe, but seeing a crew of rock musicians casually hanging out in such a dive made my entire year. I never thought about where they might eat, but if I’d been forced to imagine it, I might have pictured somewhere that had silverware. Or catering.
A couple of teenagers at a booth had their phones out and were taking their own selfies with an impressive photobomb in the background. Micah signed an autograph for a mom wearing a baby in a front-facing sling while Noah sat with one foot up on the Formica bench and his arms draped across the back, a half dozen leather wristbands hanging loose.
They were kings of the greasy burger bar.
I made eye contact with the gawkers, feeling both self-conscious and exceedingly cool when I slid in next to Shane. A waiter brought out a mess of bacon burgers, and the guys continued to squabble over some decision they hadn’t ironed out regarding which cover song they wanted to focus on. Micah wasn’t happy with their rendition of the Black Keys song, and since I’d recorded both covers, he asked if they could be leaked out to fans to find out which was working enough to take on the road.
They all looked at me like I had some kind of say in their plan. Micah said, “Do you think you could?”
Shane reached over and blatantly stole a fry from Noah, which didn’t go over well. Noah smacked Shane’s hand and then hunched over his food like a caveman.
“Damn, Noah. Can you try to remember who your friends are?”
“Fuck off, Shane. Am I supposed to just put on a happy face and act like everything’s okay?”
I watched the two of them, afraid to say a word. I couldn’t help but speculate on what could be eating at Noah. My brain ricocheted from testicular cancer to creative differences to a pregnant groupie to a bad review to a hike in his tax rate. I had to sit quietly. It was none of my business.
That imm
ediately changed when Noah gave me one nasty look and blurted out, “How about when you catch your girlfriend fucking some other guy, I’ll come and tell you to cheer up.”
There was too much to unpack in that statement. First, Noah’s anger suddenly made more sense. If his girlfriend had cheated on him, no wonder he’d been such a grump. I felt pity for a split second until I understood the implied insult hurled at me—as if Noah believed I would one day do the same to Shane. My instinctive response was to defend my honor, but even as my mouth opened, I heard the echo of the word girlfriend and clammed up with a quick look to Shane for some idea how to react.
I could see my input going over like a lead zeppelin, but I didn’t know any way around this particular Yoko Ono moment.
“Don’t drag Layla into your shit.” Shane placed his white-knuckled fists on the table. “Apologize. Right now.”
Noah’s lips, which I used to find so beautiful, curled into a sneer of disgust, and he spit out, “I apologize, Layla. You’re obviously not using Shane as an entry-level rock star to work your way through the band.”
The sarcasm dripping off his words could have burned a hole through the floor.
My jaw dropped open, and I finally found my tongue. “How dare you?”
Whatever thrill the band vibe had given me, Noah had just completely torn the scales from my eyes. “You know, you’re right about one thing. I did consider myself a fan of your music, and even of you, Noah. But you’re not who I thought you were. And I’m not who you think I am.” I grabbed my bags. “And I’m leaving.”
I stood and headed toward the door, unsure where I was going, but I wanted to get there before the tears stinging my eyes started to fall.
Shane said, “God dammit, Noah,” and ran after me. He put an arm across my shoulder, and that, more than anything else he might have said or done, made me feel like I wasn’t alone. He was on my side. “Fuck lunch. Let’s go on back to my place.”
Out on the street, once we’d cleared the view from inside the hole in the wall, I grabbed his forearm and twisted him to face me. “What was that?”
Kind of Famous (Flirting with Fame Book 3) Page 15
