by Anne Calhoun
Recognition flickered in Cesar’s eyes. Good.
“You’ve got a handle on that line?” Conn said.
“Yessir,” Cesar said firmly. “I’ve got this.”
“Good.” He pulled out his phone and took Cesar’s number, then texted him. “That’s me. Text or call if you see any trouble.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I brought you fresh ice water, and refilled your Cady juice,” Eve said with a smile.
Eye Candy was a little island of Eve in the middle of the East Side, upscale, sassy, determined. She admired how thoroughly Eve had held on to her sense of self, how she could transform the space around her, own it. Cady knew how to do that on stage, the moments to approach the audience, when to hold back and linger behind the mic. Doing the same thing in her regular life wasn’t as easy. “Thanks,” she said, and sipped the Cady juice.
“How are things going with Conn?”
“He’s all cop, still. Just doing a job. Is he former military?”
“Yes. Army, I think, like Matt. He shot Hector’s accomplice.” At Cady’s astonished glance, Eve added, “He did the only thing he could do. From what Matt says, that’s pretty much Conn’s reputation. Whatever it takes, he’ll do it. He’s blue, through and through.”
Loyal. That’s what Eve meant. A man like that wouldn’t play by the shifting, shallow rules of celebrity “relationships.” “I need to make a phone call. Where can I get a little privacy?”
“My office, upstairs,” Eve said immediately. “Thick walls on three sides, and no one goes up there except me and Natalie.”
She followed Eve up the stairs, and tapped Chris’s name in her most-recent-calls list. He was always on the first screen, and always picked up on the first ring.
“I was just about to call you. What’s this I see on Instagram? Pictures of my favorite pop star getting ready to do a charity show we agreed she wouldn’t do?”
“Don’t talk about me in the third person, Chris. I told you I was doing this show as a favor to Eve, and I’m doing it. Period. Also, what the hell? I just got blindsided by Hannah Rafferty with rumors about Harry!”
“Who is Hannah Rafferty and how would she know anything about Harry?”
“She’s the features reporter for the Star Trib, which has been extremely supportive of me and my career.”
“Ah, yes, Lancaster’s Star Trib, the pinnacle of journalism.”
Cady was scrolling through search engine hits on her and Harry. “Oh my God, these rumors are all over the gossip sites.”
“Cady, stop reading the gossip sites. There is a good reason why I don’t round up every single trail of bullshit on the internet and send you a daily summary, and that’s because the rumors are like the demons in those pigs in the Bible. They’re legion and will only drive you over a cliff. There are also rumors you’re half alien, rumors that you’ve joined some wacko cult in Oregon, and my favorite, that you’re having John Travolta’s love child.”
“John Travolta is something out of the Enquirer. The rumors about me and Harry are on every celebrity gossip site!” She walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the club and parted the curtains. Conn was talking to Eve, who was pointing at her office. He looked up, saw her, and his expression went even more blank.
“I know. Forget about it. I’m on it. In the meantime, stay inside, and be lazy.” Chris sounded distracted. Cady could hear a keyboard in the background.
“I can’t just switch from one to the other. I’m not a machine you turn off,” she said as she watched Conn’s long strides cover the distance between the dance floor and the spiral staircase to the office. “It takes time.”
“What’s going on, Cady?” Chris asked, his voice gentle.
It was the gentleness that did her in, every single time. Most of the time he was cutthroat and mercenary and absolutely ruthless, shoving and chivvying her up the career ladder, but when she needed it, he was there for her. But the one thing that had become clear in the last day or two was that the album they’d started a year ago wasn’t the one she wanted to release now. She was different, changing from day to day.
Just the thought of the chaos she’d cause at the label if she stopped the process now made her light-headed.
“I need time to think,” she said, unexpectedly choking up. “I’m just not sure about this album.”
A double rap at the door.
“Come in,” she called, clearing her throat to cover the thickness in it.
Conn walked in, his gaze sharpening when he saw her face. He took up position against the cinderblock wall, shoulders and one foot braced, jacket open to reveal gun, badge, cuffs all on his worn brown leather belt. Neanderthal thug does insouciant combativeness. For a split second she wondered if he’d agree to a quickie before she went on stage.
“Cady.”
Chris’s voice in her ear made her jump.
“You’re saying you don’t want to drop it?”
“I’m saying I’m not sure.”
A long silence. “Honey, you’re just tired. A couple of months off, a nice Christmas turkey dinner, a happy New Year’s, and you’ll be so bored you’ll be begging me to drop the album.”
She tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder and fiddled with the clasp on Nana’s bracelet. “I don’t know, Chris. I really don’t know. It’s not me. It’s not my sound. It’s not the music I want to make.”
“What are you talking about? You were there for all the songwriting sessions. You recorded multiple versions of all of these songs, fine-tuning the right sound.”
“I know,” she said. “I know I was, but it’s…” She searched for the right words. “They’re fine songs. They’re fine. I worked on them, and I can sing them. But I think I want more than fine.”
She could practically hear the wheels spinning in Chris’s head, all of the logistics around dropping the album, the appearances already planned, the timing. The money involved in recording the album, the musicians paid. If they junked the album, they lost all of that. She wasn’t a big enough star to pull that kind of stunt and hope to have any kind of career afterward.
“You wanted this,” Chris said. His voice was wary as he backpedaled in search of his footing. Cady knew how he felt. “Two years ago when you asked me to represent you, we sat down and planned out what we wanted. I got you exactly what you wanted.”
And when did this become about him? “I know,” she said. “But … I don’t know anymore. That was a long time ago.”
“Cady, sweetie, talk to me after Christmas, okay? Just take the next few weeks and rest up. If you still feel the same way after the holidays, we’ll talk.”
“Okay,” she said, knowing it was a concession she didn’t want to make. “But it’s not going to get any easier to pull the album.”
“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Spend some time with your sister. Get some rest,” he said again.
“Rest might not fix this,” she warned.
“And it might fix this,” he shot back. “Look, you hired me to give you advice. I’m giving you advice. You think you’re the first singer to get cold feet about a sophomore album? Please. It happens all the time.”
Maybe it did. Maybe she was wrong, maybe all she needed was to mainline gingerbread lattes and shortbread, do some Christmas decorating, watch a Netflix marathon. “Okay,” she said again. “I’ll give you until Christmas.”
“That’s my girl,” he said, expansive and obviously relieved. “Enjoy the show. Don’t sing too long. It’s inside, right?”
“Goodbye, Chris,” she said, and disconnected the call.
“The building’s already at capacity and the line to get in is around the block,” Conn said. “I called for backup.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“There’s a crowd forming on the Mobile Media property, which is trespassing, and also dangerous given that there’s a big open pit over there. Big companies don’t like bad publicity any more than you do
.”
“Got it. Do you want me to talk to them?”
“No. I want you to stay inside. I warned the bouncers about your drunken admirer from the last concert. He won’t get in. When you’re ready to go onstage, I get you there. Clear?”
“Clear.” Chris was pissed enough at her. If she got injured at a benefit concert to which she’d donated her services, he’d probably fly back to Lancaster just to kill her himself. She shook out her arms and legs, rolled her head on her neck, blew a few lip trills. Business never, ever entered her performing headspace. The day she couldn’t give a great show to a live audience, she’d hang up her guitar. “I’m ready.”
He didn’t move. “You don’t look ready.”
“This is my ready face,” she said, and smiled at him, the smile that was all teeth and no eyes, the one she’d practiced. His expression didn’t change. “Seriously,” she said. “This is it. I’m ready.”
He pushed away from the wall, shifting planes of muscle and God, the shoulders on him. She expected him to open the door for her. Instead, he walked right up to her, cupped her jaw in both hands, and kissed her.
It wasn’t soft and sweet, or reassuring in the slightest. His hands were rough with weight-lifting calluses and the male attitude that skin-care regimes were pointless wastes of time. What sent heat zinging through her was the rough texture of his lips, chapped from days in the cold and wind. For a split second she imagined Conn behind the wheel of a dragster, winter air pouring into the car’s interior as he warmed up the tires. Rough, intense.
Then his tongue touched hers, his breath heating her mouth as he tilted his head and parted her lips with his own. Her hands gripped first his jacket, then slid inside and around to his shoulder blades, where his body heat seared through his T-shirt. She went up on tiptoes and kissed him back, answered his demand with a call of her own. More.
Then he stepped back, breathing hard, hands on his hips.
“What the hell was that?” she said.
“Don’t know,” he replied. He swiped the back of his hand across his mouth, then stared at the color smeared there. “But now you look ready.”
She felt it, the jumpy dance of her stomach, electric ripples along her nerves. She was excited, not nervous, anticipating something good, the chance to connect with the audience, connect them with each other, connect everyone in the building with the basic rhythms of life. Breath and voice and song all coming together to make meaning. To show people what it meant to be alive.
The gray-blue glint of his eyes flashed in Eve’s brightly lit office. She laughed, feeling witchy, bewitched, slipping into her stage persona. He didn’t back away as she took one step forward, closing the distance between them.
“Again,” she breathed.
Then she kissed him. Her breath hiccupped in her throat as she fisted her hand in the front of his jacket and pulled. She had as much chance of moving him as she did of moving one of the trees in her backyard; all she did was yank herself full length against his body but it was worth it to feel his size and strength, how immovable he was. She didn’t even rock him on his feet when their bodies made contact from thighs to chest. It wasn’t the most sophisticated kiss she’d ever given, mashing their lips together just long enough for blood to bloom in her mouth. Conn stood rigid just long enough for her to get a hint of his erection against her belly. She looped her free arm around his neck, knowing this was spiraling out of control, unable to help herself.
His hair bristled against her palm when she cupped his nape. Conn let out a rough growl, hoisted her right off her feet, and walked her backward, into the wall. Head, shoulders, and hips hit at the same time, knocking the wind from her. His kiss left her no chance to get it back, deep and thorough and definitely, definitely caring about something. Wanting something.
“What is it with you and walls?” she gasped when he came up for air.
“Gotta make sure you’re not going anywhere,” he replied. He tugged down the collar on her V-neck sweater, and sucked at the thin skin over her collarbone.
She wriggled and tried to climb his body to notch his cock where she wanted it, needed it. “Trust me, I’m not going anywhere.”
His hand was on his belt when a sharp knock came at the door. “Cady? Eve says we’re pretty well ready to go down here.”
Natalie, Eve’s manager and friend. This wasn’t her house, her wall. She had a show to give.
Conn looked at her, his eyes sharp and glinting with the unwanted return to reality. “You’re going somewhere, Queen Maud. You’re definitely going somewhere.”
He leaned away from the wall, easing up the pressure so she could lower her feet to the floor. “Thanks,” she called. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Conn clasped his hand to the back of his head, and turned his back to her. Cady inhaled deeply, then ran a couple of scales, just in case Natalie was still listening. Conn was staring at her, expression dialed back to blank.
She picked up her guitar case. “Let’s do this.”
* * *
A cheer went up when she stepped through the office door. Cady smiled, waved both hands, took a quick picture for her social media accounts, then set off down the spiral staircase leading from Eve’s office. Conn stayed one step in front of her, surprisingly deft on his feet for a man built like a solid wall of muscle. Eve was waiting at the base of the stairs, guiding Cady through to the patio. Conn’s thick, outstretched arm gave her a few inches of breathing room. She needed it. When she’d fisted her hand in his shirt she’d revealed the ink hiding under the soft cotton. Just a hint of the sharp geometric design gave her flashbacks to the night before.
Before she quite knew what was happening, she was seating herself on the stool on the little stage, adjusting the microphone and her guitar. She looked up but the fairy lights strung from the tent’s center pole didn’t do much to dispel the winter darkness.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Maud.”
Then she launched into the acoustic version of “Street (of) Dreams,” a song she wrote years before, after visiting a showcase of homes with her mom and Emily. It was about looking into the windows of enormous homes her mom would never own, in neighborhoods where she didn’t belong, after her divorce became final. Even at the age of twelve she could see her mother wondering if her decision to divorce was the wrong one.
She didn’t sing the song often; it wasn’t popular enough to make it into a concert set list, so only her truest fans who’d listened to every song on every album multiple times knew the words. But these were her truest fans, clapping along, and it felt right now, a way for her to work through the questions troubling her.
“I don’t know what just happened there, but that was good.” She strummed a few chords, smiled at someone’s shouted Yeah!
But she did know what happened. Conn happened. Conn and his rough mouth and muscled shoulders, his tight fists and iron control. That thought turned at the back of her mind as she spoke. “Songs always surprise me. I think I know them. I mean, I wrote that song, I should know it, right? But sometimes they surprise me. Maybe it’s not the song. Maybe I’m different.”
Where did we get the idea that dreams would pay us? The question lingered at the back of her mind as she scanned the crowd.
“I remember you,” she said to one man in the third row. He froze, then gestured to himself. “Me?”
“You used to work in SoMa, at Il Cortile, right? You’d come outside and listen during your breaks, or before the dinner rush started.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“‘Painted Walls,’” he said immediately.
“Wow. That’s an oldie. I love that you guys want to hear songs I wrote,” she said. She’d written the song while dating an artist moonlighting as a tagger, one of the graffiti artists Conn probably arrested. The waiter she’d pegged as one of those shy types, because he’d never worked up the courage to approach her. “On slow days, I’d sing for
you. It helps sometimes, makes you less nervous to imagine you’re singing to just one person. Even after I started playing bigger shows in indoor venues, like clubs. That was a big step up for me, singing indoors. Thanks, my friend,” she said when the laughter died down. The former waiter had flushed with delight. Then she sang it for him.
After that she changed up to her more recent songs, the ones written by committee, slowing a tempo, trying a different key, trying to make them her own. In between songs she mentioned success stories for the East Side Community Center Eve’s father ran, reminding people that the cover charge and anything else they cared to contribute went entirely to the ESCC.
“Any chance of something new?” Eve called as the set drew to a close.
“Ah,” she said. “That I cannot do. I’m working on some new material, but it’s not ready yet.”
She finished with a Lancaster favorite, one that described a girl’s reaction to her first night cruising the strip, the streetlights, the fast cars, the boys racing each other off the red lights. The end of the show devolved into the usual blur, applause, thank-yous, calls for an encore, which she provided, though not a second one, then a crush of people at the edge of the low stage, clamoring for pictures or autographs or to tell her a story. Conn stepped forward and stuck two fingers between his teeth. The sharp whistle, and his gun, badge, and shoulders, cut off all conversation.
Firmly in control of the situation, he held up a hand and leaned close. “How long do you want to stay?” he murmured in her ear.
A shiver of delight raced across her nape. “Until they’re done,” she said simply.
“Form a line against the wall,” he said, and gestured for Eve. She trotted over, then nodded her head and gestured for Natalie to open the gate to the sidewalk, ensuring that Cady would sign for the people who came to see her, not the crowd now forming for Eye Candy’s usual Friday night. It took over an hour, but she chatted with everyone who wanted face time. She put her guitar away, wrapped her scarf around her throat.
