by Jamie Shaw
Dedication
For every reader who falls in love with Mike.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By Jamie Shaw
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
There’s an elbow on my head.
My boobs are smashed against a barricade, a Converse sneaker almost just kicked me in the face, and there’s an elbow . . . on top of . . . my head.
“ADAM!” my cousin screams over the music that’s blasting out of gargantuan speakers piled high at the sides of the stage. I pull my neck down just in time to avoid the arm she throws over the railing, and the elbow on my head follows me deep into my turtle shell.
“Adam!” she yells again as she jumps on an invisible trampoline in the front row. “Down here! Adam!”
The lead singer of The Last Ones to Know is crouched down at the edge of the stage, his fingers reaching out toward the mash of girls gathered at his feet. They’re climbing over each other to try to yank him into the crowd, and I’m just here, trying not to die.
“I fucking love you!” Danica shrieks as Adam serenades the fans front and center. His knees poke out of the bare threads of his jeans as he stretches his black-nailed fingers toward the crowd, and the way his lips caress his mic . . . well, it’s no wonder half of these girls have gone rabid.
All week, I’ve had to listen to Danica talk about her rock star ex-boyfriend. About how madly in love with her he was. About how he worshipped her all throughout high school. About how his band is finally making it big.
The only problem is, her ex-boyfriend isn’t the lead singer.
At the back of the stage, in a black T-shirt that’s damp with four songs’ worth of hard-earned sweat, Mike Madden beats on the drums with arms that have been sculpted to do nothing else. He wields his drumsticks like they’re extensions of his own body, radiating power as he sets the beat for the war song in the club. He’s not lanky or dressed in distressed clothes like the rest of the band, but there’s no mistaking it—he’s a rock star.
“I thought you were here for the drummer?” I shout, but my voice is as tiny as the rest of me, lost under the swell of the music and the frenzied screams of the crowd. I try to hold my own as I get jostled left and right, but I’m at the mercy of the waves upon waves of people that slam into me from all sides.
“I WANT TO SUCK YOUR COCK!” some chick further behind me screams at Adam as she tries to jump past the gigantic sweaty guy molded to my back, and Adam smiles wide under the glowing blue lights without missing a single lyric. The crowd is absolutely insane, but the band has obviously seen it a thousand times before. Even Danica’s frantic shrieking can’t get their attention.
“Shawn!” she desperately pleads when she notices the lead guitarist glancing down from his spot at Adam’s right. In a vintage tee, with messy black hair and a thick layer of stubble, he shreds his guitar and shouts backup lyrics into his mic. He and Adam weave a song, line over line over line, and I almost start to enjoy it—right up until my hand gets snatched from the railing.
“Help me get his attention!” Danica orders as she yanks my arm high over my head.
I’m fighting for control of my limbs, in serious danger of getting sucked backward into the music-fueled chaos, when Shawn finally locks his sights on Danica.
A crease forms in the center of his brow, reminding me of this stray cat that used to live on my family’s farm . . . It was only friendly when it went into heat, and then suddenly its favorite thing to do became weaving figure-eights around my dad’s denim-clad legs. My dad hated cats, particularly this one, and he used to make this face—a face almost exactly like the one Shawn makes at Danica.
“OH MY GOD!” Danica squeals, clamping a freakishly strong hand onto my shoulder. She spins me to face her, and I latch on to her arms to avoid getting knocked sideways into a thrashing whirlpool of elbows and armpits and hair. “Did you see that?! He looked right at me!”
A violent wave crashes into me when Adam hits the chorus of the song, and I struggle to keep my head above water. Blue and purple lights cut across my skin as I get slammed back against the metal bars in front of me and Danica shouts her undying love to every single guy on the stage.
Adam! Shawn! Joel! Mike!
She doesn’t waste her breath on the female guitarist, introduced earlier as Kit, but I don’t bother commenting—because I’m too busy ducking to avoid getting kicked in the head by another crowd surfer. A security guard drags the screaming fan over the barricade and ushers her away, and at the weary expression on my face, he gives me a sympathetic look that promises, It’ll be over soon.
Only, it’s not over soon. It doesn’t end until an eternity and two kicks-in-the-head later, when the music ends and the lights finally cut. I inhale a deep, much-needed breath—and get pushed hard to the side. “Let’s go,” Danica orders as she shoves me directly into someone’s back.
“Where do you expect me to go?” I bark as she continues pushing me into the crowd.
“Just GO.”
She uses me as her battering ram the entire way out of the pit, and I almost regret not getting trampled to death while I had the chance.
“You can stop now,” I snap at her as soon as I have enough room to spin around.
“Shut up for a minute.”
I’m biting my tongue—literally, because it’s all I can do to keep from growling at her—when Danica rises onto her tiptoes and begins scanning the venue. We’re in a club called Mayhem, in the city we both just moved to. I moved here to get my bachelor’s and eventually doctoral degrees in veterinary science, and Danica moved here for . . . well, who knows why Danica does anything.
She’s always been the star of the ballet. The captain of the cheerleading squad. The Juliet in school plays. The queen of the homecoming dance.
She’s never had to want for anything, and she does whatever she wants.
“How do we get backstage?”
“Um,” I say as I peel my shirt away from the sweat on my back, “I’m pretty sure we don’t.”
“Don’t be stupid, Hailey,” she scoffs. “Didn’t you see the way Shawn looked at me?”
Like my dad looked at that horny ba
rn cat? Yeah, I definitely saw that . . .
“There!” she interjects, and when she begins walking away, I gaze longingly at a big red sign that promises exit. I wonder how much I’ll regret it later if I make my escape while I have the chance. It’s not like Danica would have trouble finding a ride home. She has the kind of beauty only money can buy—salon-tended copper-brown hair, trainer-sculpted curves, cosmetically whitened teeth. And aside from all of that are pretty almond eyes and naturally flawless skin. Since moving in with her almost two months ago, I’ve stopped counting the number of guys that have stopped by our apartment to pick her up or bring her home.
All of them have been cute. But none of them have been rock stars.
“Are you coming or what?” Danica shouts from a few steps ahead of me, and at the impatient look on her face, I sigh and follow her.
It wasn’t always this way. When we were kids, she sometimes let me be the leader in follow the leader. In Simon says, she sometimes let me be Simon. In house, we took turns being the mom and being the dad. And when her family moved away when Danica and I were in elementary school, I was actually pretty sad.
But that was before she started at her new school, where she became a mean girl made for movies. Our families continued to get together for holidays—Christmases, Thanksgivings, Easters—but each year, Danica turned more and more into someone I didn’t know. She grew into someone beautiful and someone ugly, while I stayed more or less the same. I never imagined we’d end up roommates, but at our family dinner this past Easter, when I mentioned wanting to transfer to Mayfield University someday since they have one of the best pre-veterinary programs in the country, she jumped right in and volunteered her father to pay my tuition. She said she wanted to go back to school too. She said we should both go to Mayfield and be roommates. She said it would be so much fun.
At a door near the back corner of the room, my fun-loving cousin marches right up to the first security guard she sees, who also happens to be approximately five zillion times her size, with muscles made of stone and a face to match. “Who do I need to talk to to get backstage?”
At her bossy tone, Muscle Man lifts an eyebrow. “The Easter Bunny?”
“Excuse me?”
“No one’s allowed backstage.” The arms he crosses over his chest warn that he isn’t messing around.
“I’m with Mike,” Danica lies, and after studying her for a moment, Muscle Man laughs.
“Sure you are.”
“I am!”
When Muscle Man just smiles at her like she’s a petulant child, Danica resorts to acting like one. She demands to see his boss and threatens to get him fired. When that doesn’t work, she resorts to curse words. And when those have no effect, all hell breaks loose.
She’s torpedoing her finger into his chest and shouting something about his inbred gene pool when I try to pull her away from him. But Danica is on a rampage, and all my efforts get me is a hard shove that nearly knocks me on my ass. At five feet tall, one hundred and three pounds, I’m not exactly in a position to throw my weight around, and I don’t make a second attempt to try. I’m rubbing my tender collarbone when the security guy picks my assailant up off her feet, and I helplessly follow as he carries her outside.
After serving as an armrest for a sweaty gigantor inside the club, after obliterating my eardrums in front of the world’s biggest speakers, after getting knocked around like a bratty child’s toy all night, all I want is to take a hot shower and crawl into my own bed to sleep for a week straight. Instead, I stand on the sidewalk outside Mayhem, frowning at the furious look on Danica’s face as she glares at the big metal door the security guard just shut behind him.
She came here for one thing, and I know she’s not leaving until she gets it.
“You didn’t have to push me,” I mutter, and her eyes flare.
“You should’ve had my back!”
“And done what? Bite his ankles?”
In her four-inch wedge boots, Danica towers above me. I stare way up at her, trying to remember the girl who played dolls with me up in my parents’ hayloft. But she’s lost somewhere behind fake lashes and fifteen years of getting everything she’s wanted.
“You’ve been nothing but a bitch this whole time,” she snaps, and I sigh and pull my shirt away from my skin again, letting the cool night air dry the sweat beaded on my lower back. There’s no point in trying to defend myself. In Danica’s mind, she’s always simultaneously the victim and the hero, and as her non-rent-paying roommate, I’ve learned to just accept that.
I appreciate everything she’s done for me. I do. If she hadn’t been the little voice in her father’s ear, persuading him to fund my schooling and begging him to make some calls to get us enrolled, I’d be home mucking stalls, not following my dreams. Her dad pays all of my bills—my tuition, my insurance, my living expenses, all of them. And while I suspect that Danica’s sudden interest in my life wasn’t entirely genuine—she’d flunked out of college before, and I think her dad was only open to the idea of her going back if she was living off-campus with a responsible roommate, aka her boring farm-girl cousin—I owe her. I owe her the roof over my head and the massive student loan debt I don’t have.
When her phone rings, she wastes no time dismissing me to answer it. “Katie?” she says. “Guess who just got kicked out of the fucking club. Yes! Because this asshole bouncer wouldn’t let me backstage.” She gives me a dirty look. “Just stood there doing nothing. I know! No, she didn’t even try. Getting a place with her was stupid.”
An icy chill slithers up the back of my neck, and I chew the inside of my lip. Because of my uncle’s insistence that I focus all of my energy on school right now instead of also finding a part-time job, I have no income. My only “job” is not pissing off his daughter. And it’s a job that I’m learning I am very, very bad at.
With my mouth shut, I slink away before my mere presence can enrage Danica further, and when she asks where I’m going, I make up the lamest excuse ever. “To read this flyer over here.”
I walk to a telephone pole to give us both time to cool down, choosing to poison myself with the secondhand smoke coming from the chain-smoking girls standing nearby rather than spend another second listening to Danica’s passive-aggressive trash talk.
“He is so fucking hot,” a girl in cheetah-print leggings gossips as she blows a string of smoke from her bloodred lips. The streetlight hanging above her pours a harsh glow over her bruised-purple hair, making it look even darker against her pale white skin. “And you know what they say about drummers.”
“No, what?” her friend asks, scratching the back of her fishnet stockings with the scuffed toe of her black leather boot.
“Drummers really know how to bang.”
A quiet chuckle escapes me as their drunken cackles echo down the city streets.
“You are so bad!” the girl in the fishnets says. “But I hear he never hooks up with fans.”
“Ever?”
“Ever. You’d have better luck with the bass player.”
“But I hear his girlfriend is batshit crazy . . .”
“Crazier than you?” Fishnets asks, and Cheetah Print pushes her while they giggle and continue fantasizing about my cousin’s ex.
It makes me gaze down the sidewalk at Danica, wondering if in some alternate universe, we could still be friends. Maybe I’d actually have fun at rock shows. Maybe she’d stop being so mean. Maybe we’d like living together.
Maybe we’d even gossip about boys.
Presented with two options—banging my head repeatedly against the telephone pole until this night finally ends, or extending Danica an olive branch—I take a deep breath and walk back toward the club.
“I have an idea,” I offer as she hangs up her phone.
“First time for everything.”
Ignoring her jab, I ask, “Don’t bands like this have tour buses?”
While she stands there staring blankly at me, I wait for her to tell me what an i
diot I am, or how stupid my idea is. But instead, the corners of her mouth start pulling up, and she smiles. Really smiles.
“See,” she says, beaming down at me, and she’s so sincerely happy, I can’t help smiling back.
“See what?”
“I knew you weren’t completely useless.”
Chapter 2
“Didn’t I tell you he was hot?” Danica asks as I sit on the pavement in front of the band’s double-decker tour bus, picking a rock out of the sole of my sneaker. I scratch at it with my nub of a fingernail, mentally tallying how many times she’s said that word over the past week.
Mike’s band has gotten so hot.
They performed with Cutting the Line. Cutting the Line is so hot.
Mike wasn’t this hot in high school. Look at this picture. Do you think he’s hot? Hailey, are you even looking?
“Hailey, are you even listening?” Danica scolds, nudging my knee with the toe of her boot as I chip a short fingernail on the rock still wedged in my shoe.
I stare way up at her, wondering if she kicks everyone when they don’t give her their undivided attention, or just me. Was she this bossy with Mike when they were together? What did he even see in her?
“Yeah,” I finally answer. “He was okay.”
“Okay?” she scoffs. “Are you blind?”
I’m not blind. I just don’t feel like answering stupid questions at one o’clock in the morning. Of course I saw how hot he was. Everyone did. The girl in the cheetah print did, the girl in the fishnets did, and I’m guessing a hundred other girls did too, and each one of them will be jealous of Danica, and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly why she’s making me sit out here in the cold next to a locked behemoth of a tour bus. What does she want me to do? Congratulate her on how hot her soon-to-be boyfriend is?
“Adam was hotter,” I lie.
“Huh?” Danica scrunches her nose, and my expression changes to match her confusion.
“What?”
“Who do you even think I’m talking about? The lead singer. Adam. Do you ever listen to anything I say?”
I free the rock from my shoe and stand up, dusting off the back of my jeans. We’ve been waiting out here for so long, my ass is numb and the rest of the fans have left. “If you’re so in love with Adam, why didn’t you date him instead of Mike?”
