I actually glance around for Curt, that's how desperate I am for someone to fix this. I can hear fingers tapping on phone screens and I don't want to see anything they're saying.
“It never occurs to you or anyone else that my costumes are just the same as the backup dancers, the lights, the exact mix of the sound. A way to create an experience outside of normal life.” Ava’s voice strains, and I can’t quite tell if I’m hearing the beginnings of tears, or just her anger.
I drop my hand from Danny's shoulder. I have to, because I can’t stand the scream of energy punching through him. I don’t understand how this has gotten so out of hand. I need to think of something to say to calm them down, but my head is all light and spinny, like this is a dream I'm having right before waking up to the king of all hangovers.
“That sounds like a lot of bullshit,” Danny says, “But I can't deny you know how to sell a shit ton of records. I'll leave you to it.” He tips his chin up and takes one step back. “All I want to do is make music, and I don't need a costume for that.”
He turns, and the entire room empties along with him. Ava turns her back, but not before I catch a glimpse of the tears brimming in her eyes.
“I am...so sorry,” Jera says to Ava. “I can't believe he just said that, or that he would ever mean those things. I mean, he doesn't really know you and whatever he said, he owns all your albums except the oldest ones and—”
“Stop,” Kate snaps. “He meant every word. Danny always does. That doesn't mean he can't be wrong.” She touches Ava's back, still turned away from us. “Are you going to be all right? I need to go—Danny alone when he’s like this is not a great idea. We gotta do the band check-ins separately from the crew from now on, okay?”
Ava nods. Kate goes, throwing me a tense glance that looks like an order, though I have no idea what she wants.
I swap a glance with my remaining bandmate. Jera’s face is bloodless pale, both of us realizing exactly how much pull Ava has with our record label. How easy it would be for her to kick us off this tour, and maybe even off our entire label. I jerk my head toward the door, and Jacob steers his wife toward the exit. I’ll think of something to fix this. I’m the face of this band and when it comes to our career, I always come through.
Ava's shoulders begin to shake, though her head is tilted so I can't see it in the mirror. Okay, so maybe this is not the time for a professional discussion. She probably expects me to go. Her bodyguard is almost certainly going to liquefy my jawbone if another member of The Red Letters approaches her tonight, but I just can't leave her like this.
I really wish I could stop caring what he thinks of me—it’s pretty obvious the guy permanently hates me. Even for a bodyguard, Dean’s a little overprotective. I take a step forward, already tensing a little for the hit. When Dean doesn't taze me on the spot, I close the distance between Ava and me, wrapping my arms around her shoulders in the softest of hugs, the bullets in her bandolier scratching my forearms.
“You're not wrong,” I murmur. “Danny will never understand how hard we work for this, because he will never want it as badly as we do.” He's not in the gym at 5 a.m. when I get there, and he's certainly not there at four, when Ava starts. He's never had to grease the inside of his lips so they don't get raw from smiling, because I do the interviews for him. He's never had to argue commercialism vs. content on a refrain, because Jera writes for us, argues for us. He also believes so strongly in the equality of women that it would never occur to him you would have to do anything to get them there—in his head, they've already arrived.
I am not, however, dumb enough to say this to Ava right now.
She pulls away from me, sucking in an uneven breath. “I'm not crying.”
“I know.” I keep the words as soft as a breath. “You're just pissed. You have every right to be.”
A door slams, and I flinch. When I turn to look, Dean's vanished, the door closed behind him.
Her eyes are dry when I look back, but her lower eye makeup is mostly gone, wiped off onto the heel of the hand she clenches at her side.
“I may not be wrong, but he's right. I've sold every part of me for this career. My face, my voice, my thoughts.” She exhales shakily. “My family.”
I don't argue. In the single week we did pre-tour together, I watched her suck in her already-flat stomach every time we went through a door or left a car, because she never knew who would be on the other side. I never saw her read a book or watch a movie. She was working when I went to bed at night and by the time I woke up every morning.
“I've heard your music,” I say. “It was worth it.”
She isn't breathing, staring over my shoulder like she is too deep in her thoughts to hear my voice. This is the part of the music business Danny doesn’t get. He thinks we should all be able to make music from behind a curtain and have people love it just the same, but that’s just not the reality. You have to give them a whole package to fall in love with, or nobody will be there listening when you step up to play your music. Ava is damn good at playing that game, and it’s unfair as hell that Danny is using her as the whipping boy for his frustrations with the industry.
“You didn't sell out your personality,” I offer. “Your brand really is you, and how many celebrities can say the same?”
“I did, though.” She flicks her hand so the golden hearts of her holstered whip snap against her skin. “I'm not...ballsy like this. Not all the time, Jax.” She laughs. “Sometimes I Google myself and read the articles, sad as that is. Just so I can see who I wish I was.”
I can only stare, because I never imagined anyone else felt like that. Jera thinks my public persona is an act, but she’s wrong. It’s like an instinct that kicks in when I need it, but resists all my invitations to stay. If that confidence were mine, I wouldn’t need drugs, because when it exists, it’s as real as any high that swims through your veins, changing and brightening everything until you can’t even remember what it’s like to be just “okay.”
Until you don’t even know to miss it anymore.
And when that confidence goes, it sucks your life and your charm and your charisma all back down into the infinite vacuum where it lives the rest of the time, until you’d sell your dick and your soul and your mother just to be able to crawl back up to “okay.”
I clear my throat. “It’d be nice, right? Actually being the person the fans think we are.”
Ava’s eyes flick back toward the mirror of her dressing table, and she doesn’t respond.
I reach out and touch her bare arm, just for a second. “That was a hell of a speech you gave Danny, you know. I've never in my life thought about it like that.” I find a smile for her, pulling hard for harmless and charming. “Except now I feel like a total shit heel for every time I've looked at you and thought you were hot. Which, by the way, was a lot of times.”
Her lips twitch and she looks away. “Don't even try to make me laugh right now, Jax.”
“Do you want to kick me in the balls?” I offer. “I'd rather get a laugh, but if you really need to kick someone in the balls...” I pause. “Well, then I'll go pay a roadie twenty hard earned bucks and hold him for you.”
This time the smile is pulling at both sides of her mouth, and she tips her shoe forward for my inspection. The six-inch platform heel is a flame-shaped swoop of chrome, the toes bristling with metal studs. “Think you'll have to pay more than twenty if you want somebody to take one of these to the family jewels.”
I wince. “Yeah, better hit an ATM.”
She giggles, then looks away like she wishes she wouldn't have. “How am I supposed to work with him, Jax?” she whispers, her breath catching. “All the dates are booked. We can't back out, but most of our crew just watched him call me a whore to my face.”
“First, he didn't call you a whore. You two had a very complex argument about feminist philosophy and the psychology of performance-based art. It probably went over 80% of the heads in the place. Second, you won't have to work to
gether, because Jera is going to murder him for blowing this opportunity for us.” Ava peeks up at me, and I keep going, egged on by her reaction. “Or he'll die of sexual frustration because there's no way Kate's going to fuck him after he was that mean to you.”
The light is starting to return to her eyes, but then she seems to notice the clock on the wall over my shoulder. “Shit, we’re so late, aren’t we?”
I shrug. “Ever heard of a grand entrance? They were made for people like us.” I smirk. “You know, the ones pretty enough to distract everybody from the fact that we forgot we were supposed to be someplace.”
She chuckles, just barely. “You make it kind of hard to feel bad, you know that? I bet your band loves you for it, especially after a few hard months on tour.”
“Everybody loves me.” I wink. “But it’s not for my personality.” I take a step back toward the door. “I better get out of here and let you change. If you try to wear those whips to the meet and greet, I’ll have drool on my chin in all the pictures. I don’t even want to know what the tabloid headline would be after that.”
She’s almost grinning now, and I reach for the doorknob before I lose us the ground I’ve just gained. If flirting is all it will take to keep her from killing my bassist and getting us all fired, I am absolutely the man for the job.
“Hey, Jax?”
I turn back.
“Wanna keep me company tonight?”
What in the holy...I thought I might be nailing it on witty just now, but I didn’t think I was doing that well.
“On the plane, I mean?” One of her platform heels scuffs the floor in the tiniest of fidgets. She tries a half-hearted smile. “I mean, otherwise I’ll be alone with my Nazi of a personal trainer and Curt, and—”
“And the last time Curt raised someone’s spirits was probably when he paid a witch doctor to torment his dead grandma,” I finish for her. Shit, was that too weird? That was probably way too weird. I put on my cockiest grin and move on before she can think too hard about it. “Yeah, I guess I could ride along tonight.”
“Cool,” she says. Her face is relaxed, smile is easy, the corners of her eyes crinkled just enough to look sincere but not enough to be squinty. I’ve used the expression a thousand times, filed under Confident comma Easy-going. Usually to cover that I’m anything but.
Something in me aches, and my voice comes out gentle, quiet in the room between us. “I’ll be there,” I say simply.
Chapter 6: Fun is Good
The perfectly ergonomic seat of Ava’s LearJet cradles my shoulders as I shift my weight again and check my phone, feeling like a traitor.
The thing is, when the lead singer goes to rehab, a lot of bands break up. My band went to rehab with me.
But since they didn't have any drug addictions, they just haunted the borders. Jera lived in the Holiday Inn two blocks away and Danny set up a tent outside the property boundary of the rehab clinic.
A tent. In Tucson. It was hot as demon’s breath every day, and cold as shit all night.
Any time I looked out the window he was there: sketching or listening to his headphones in the shade. When Jera was with him, they’d be bickering, or messing around on a guitar, or playing checkers with soda cans and a board they scratched into the sand.
Thanks to some miracle of God and Kate, the paparazzi never found us.
No matter how bad it got, they never left. Every week, Kate flew in and they’d all come for family therapy, even though my own mother refused to be seen in a rehab center. When the therapists weren’t there, though, it was always the same—Danny wouldn’t say much and Jera never stopped talking. About how it wasn't my fault, what happened in New York. About how nobody would ever have to know, and it didn't have to define me. How I was better than all of this.
I know she’s wrong, and I never believed her. But because of her and Danny, I eventually started to believe I could be worth the space I was taking up on this already overcrowded planet. And for that, I love my band the way I have never loved a woman or a child. And because of them, I will never give up music as long as they want to play. If every note is torture and the lyrics are stale dust in my mouth, I'll still sing. For Danny. And for Jera.
In the Bible, the letters printed in red are the words of Jesus. We didn't know that when we named the band. We just thought it sounded cool: red letters in a whole world of black type. But now I think...it's kind of perfect. Because my band, to me, is forgiveness. It is salvation. It is religion.
I throw a glance across the airplane aisle at Ava, then look quickly away. Danny’s stood by me through every dumb thing I’ve ever done. Even if he was a jerk to Ava tonight, I should probably be on the band’s bus right now.
I’m here instead because I can’t get the vision of her sagging shoulders out of my head. I made her laugh, twice.
Thing is, though, she would never have invited me to keep her cheered up if she really knew me. I can ride the rush of the show through all the fan obligations and interviews, but as soon as the people are gone, I need more. A drink or a line, or a beautiful girl with a lot of energy. If I don’t have it, my vision shrinks down to grayscale, my muscles go soft and weak, and it’s all I can do to make it through a minute, much less twenty-four hours until the next performance. It’s a version of me I’d rather Ava didn’t ever meet.
“Would you like anything to eat tonight, sir?”
I rub my scratchy eyes and then blink up at the flight attendant. “I’m having a great time and I’d just like to thank all my amazing fans, because I’d never have gotten this far without them.”
Ava snorts into laughter across the narrow airplane aisle. “That’s about the only answer I’ve got left after all those interviews, too.”
The flight attendant, clearly used to this kind of behavior, smiles. “No food then?”
“Coffee,” I tell her, but when she heads for the kitchen of the private plane to make some, I call after her, “No, sleep! I always get those two mixed up. I meant sleep.”
Sirena, Ava’s makeup artist, turns back when she hears her boss giggling. She smiles at me before she goes back to her thick, leather-bound book. A bubble of energy struggles up through the heaviness of my mood as I start to perk up for my audience.
I don’t realize the flight attendant is back until she hands me a blanket, fuzzy neck pillow and a royal blue satin eye mask.
“You’re a saint,” I tell her, my back straightening a little more. I hold up the satin eye mask and narrow my eyes at Ava. “So on a scale of one to immediate-Instagram-post, how much fun are you going to make of me if I put this girly little thing on?”
Sirena swivels in her seat and tips her head, well-conditioned hair brushing her copy of The Golden Treasury of Knowledge, or whatever that godforsaken tome is. “Oh, that’s super manly. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Dean gives me a look from his seat behind Ava’s, his shoulders making the generous piece of furniture look Barbie-sized. “Super manly.”
I toss the eye mask into my open carry on. “Okay. Well, that answers that.”
Ava’s gaze snags on my bag. She unbuckles her seat belt and reaches across the aisle, moving the eye mask out of the way. “Is that...?” She picks up the book underneath it. She brushes off the cover—which is not dirty—as if it will help her to see the kissing couple on it. “My sister used to read books like this. But I didn’t think...is it yours?”
“My stock answer to that is, ‘No, Officer,’ but I’ve never found it forestalled the inevitable by much.”
Ava snorts. “So, is it any good?”
“You can laugh now,” I tell her twitching lips. “Quick, before you strain something.”
She pulls out her phone and holds the book up next to my face. I give her my movie star smile, or at least eighty watts of it, which is all I can manage at the moment.
She clicks a picture. “Perfect. This is a long tour. I’m going to need blackmail on you at some point, and this swinger book will give me
plenty of leverage with your bandmates.”
“Doubt it. First of all, it’s not called Swap Out because it’s a swinger book. Second of all, Kate gave me that one, Jera has a copy on her to-read shelf, and it takes more than a romance novel to freak Danny out.”
“Okay...” Her eyebrow quirks. “But seriously, Jax, your bookmark is halfway through.”
“Yeah, well, I’m apparently a pain in the ass on the bus. Nobody wants me messing with a guitar for sixteen hours straight, and when Maya’s not there to play with, I’m going to get bored. I’ve been trying to read more and with these romance books, you get to hear about sex from a chick’s perspective, which is weird and really cool.” I grin. “Figured I might learn something.”
She tucks her hair behind her ear. It was deep purple waves for the concert, but now she’s back to her cloud of tight spiral curls, a tiny braid here and there that makes me want to sink my fingers into it just to enjoy the texture.
“Tell me about your book, Jax,” she says, her voice a velvet murmur that doesn’t carry beyond our seats.
I tilt my head, but she seems serious. “So this one’s told by a guy, used to be in the Air Force but now he moves furniture for a living. He’s messing around with his boss, this super hot girl with spike heels. You know the type.”
Ava smiles and kicks one of her heels across the aisle toward me. “Hate girls like that.”
The corner of my mouth curls up despite my fatigue. “Anyway, he knocks her up, but she’s worried she’ll be a bad mom. She’s not going to keep the baby.”
Ava sucks in a jagged breath.
“Don’t start,” I tell her. “I know the politics are red-hot, and I’m all for choice and all that but in this book, it’s like...so fucking sad. And the guy really wants to keep his baby but he’s falling for the girl and...”
“He’s falling for her?” Ava stares at me, some big kind of look on her face I can’t quite name.
Insatiable (Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll Book 3) Page 6
