by Julia Kent
Amy pulled me aside, down a small hallway in the room, away from everyone else, clearly looking to have a private conversation. Eager to escape, I followed. She gave me one good reason to get out from under the spotlight while Trev and Joe defended me.
“Hah! You finally did something worse than me!” Amy crowed.
“I’ve done way worse. Pulling a four-foot chunk of my aunt’s wallpaper off the bathroom wall with my butthole wasn’t comparable?” I insisted.
Liam gaped from the hallway behind Amy. She had no idea the entire band was queued up behind her in the suite. They were all staring.
Aw, yeah. This was gonna get good.
“You know what I mean. You lost eight thousand dollars! I only lost my cellphone.”
“In your vagina.” I giggled. That fact would never, ever not be funny.
“It was a minor tech glitch.”
“That’s what you call using a phone vibrator app and shoving it in so hard, it hooks behind your pubic bone? A glitch?”
“User error. Have you ever googled it? Happens to more women than you would think.”
“That’s your excuse? ‘It happens to other people, so it’s okay that I did it’?”
She thought that one over for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Sure.”
“Then I am going to appropriate that excuse. Other people lose money gambling, so what I did is fine.”
“You lost eight thousand dollars in money that wasn’t yours, Darla!”
“And you lost an entire telecommunications device in a pink tunnel. What the hell did you use for lube – quicksand?”
Liam couldn’t breathe, he was laughing so hard, folded in half, red faced. Amy whipped around and while I couldn’t see her face, the way her shoulders tightened and the skin around her neck flushed told me she wasn’t exactly happy he’d overheard us.
“Does Sam know?” I asked.
“Yes.” She turned red.
“And?”
“And what, Darla? Why would there be an and to that question?”
Good point.
“Let’s get back to your fuck up. Not mine,” Amy insisted as Liam turned toward Sam.
“Sam!” Liam shouted. “Your woman shoved her cellphone in her snatch? What’s up with that?”
So much for making this about me.
All our phones buzzed at once.
“Time to get to the venue for prep!” I shouted, grateful for the interruption. “Showtime’s in a few hours.”
Confession: I almost forgot we had a concert – the mess from my gambling and Mama and Calvin all swirled together in a way that made my regular life fade into the background. You’d think that being in charge of a band that was about to make a major career leap forward would have been more in the forefront of my mind, but between being accidentally drugged by our booking dude, gambling away the band’s money, walking human chickens for pay, and most of all – hiding all this as I tried to escape the truth – took up more mental real estate than it should have.
Our purpose here in Vegas was this: the concerts. We were gonna rock.
Time to rock hard.
“I’m sorry,” I said to all of them, making sure to make eye contact with Sam and Liam, then Charlotte and Amy. “I truly am. What I did was wrong. So wrong. And I understand if you can’t trust me. If this changes things and you don’t want me managing the band, I get it. Take your time, talk about it — ”
“No,” Sam said. Liam echoed him.
“No, what?” I asked, confused.
“No, we don’t want you leaving. But we’re about to go warm up and here’s what I care about,” Liam said. “Is it fixed? You paid back the money?”
“Yes.”
“Are you ever going to do this again?” Sam asked.
“Hell, no.”
Sam gave Liam a frowning look. “Then I’m cool.”
“Cool,” Liam echoed.
“Well, I want details,” Charlotte announced, Amy nodding furiously.
“After the performance tonight,” I pleaded. “Let’s get through that. That and understanding the new viral video of me with Mavis and Rooster.”
“Mavis is never going away, is she?” Sam asked as he grabbed his sticks and a small duffle bag, Amy holding his hand, carrying a bag of her own.
“Nope,” Trevor said. “And that video – how’d it really end up on our account?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“It’s on the Random Acts of Crazy YouTube account. Going viral. Darla, you’ll make more money off that video than you lost gambling,” he said, pointing to the number of views it had already accrued as we watched now on his phone.
Joe grinned.
“Who took that video?” I asked him as we walked to the elevator, my brain a rush of ribbons all flowing in a massive windstorm, each tied to a detail I had to manage.
“Your mom,” Joe whispered.
“Mama? My mama?”
“Yes. Turns out she was watching you all along and started videotaping the second one of the chickens handed you a leash. When I explained how YouTube and viral videos worked, she handed it over to me. It’s ours for copyright purposes. She only asked to plug her business at the end.”
“Plug?” I snorted.
He groaned.
“That’s not where you got the money, though, is it? No way could we get a bunch of revenue already from that.”
One corner of his mouth curled up in a mysterious smile. “I got it playing poker, remember?”
I eyed him the way Mama looked at me when I told a whopper. “You gonna tell me the truth?”
“No.”
“Eventually?”
“Yes.”
I frowned. “You know we’ve been together for three years. Big secrets aren’t our thing.”
His eyelids closed slowly, shoulders dropping with a resigned sense that he knew that I was right, and his conscience was giving him a big old wrestling match inside him.
“I know. I do. And I’ll tell you and Trevor. Just…let’s get through the performances. I can’t be creative and throw myself fully into the music when I have too much emotional chaos in my life.”
“And what I just did made for one hell of a mess, huh?” I said, feeling bad.
“You could say that.” Joe’s face looked so mature. “The truth is, I — ”
My palm flattened against his chest as I caught his eyes. “Good enough. I understand. Tell me when the performances are over and when you’re ready. I trust you.”
His face folded in, like I pained him with my willingness to defer. Joe opened his mouth to say something, and then —
“Hey guys! Time to go downstairs,” Liam announced, all of us grabbing our stuff, moving in one crowd, like starlings in a bush, headed on out into the sun.
Showtime.
EPILOGUE
DARLA
“Done.” Amy dropped the thick stack of marked-up manuscript pages on the couch next to me. The slightly battered pages were neatly blocked into a chunk of dead tree that reminded me I was truly finished. I’d written an entire book, had it professionally edited, and now a devout romance novel reader had gone through it with a critical eye.
And?
“And?” I asked, nervous as fuck.
“And it’s fabulous.”
“Quit shining me on.”
“No. I mean it. It’s got all the elements of hot shifter romance in there, and you damn well better keep this series going. How’s book two?”
Sweat covered every part of me, tickling my armpits, welling up between my breasts, making the underboob bands of my bra feel like I was wearing socks in the shower.
“Book two? I’m almost done with it.”
“You’ve been saying that forever!”
“Well, it’s true. It’s been almost done for ages. I’ve been busy.”
“Busy walking chickens on leashes. Oh! And I love Mavis. She’s hilarious. I can’t believe you really wrote a chicken shifter into your book.” She
gave me a look that I let her indulge in without challenge. I could tell some deeper question was stirring inside her, trying to find its way out with the best, most cogent set of words.
Finally, she asked, “How does it feel?”
“Feel?”
“To do what you said you were going to do. To do it your way?”
“All I did was write a book about a bear and an owl who are humans and turn out to be shapeshifters who have a lot of sex, Amy. It ain’t a Pulitzer Prize winner.”
“But you did it. On your terms. Your way.”
“Yeah. I did. I do lots of things like that.”
“But this one turned out to be really good.”
“Are you saying the rest aren’t?”
“You lost all the band’s money, Darla.”
Point taken.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “You’re gushing about a stupid book I wrote –”
“STOP! Not stupid. Don’t do that.” Her long brown hair curled lightly around her shoulders, her eyes big behind her reading glasses. Amy’s kind eyes were a jarring contrast to the closed-off, slightly defensive look she typically gave me.
“Do what?”
“Cut yourself down. You don’t normally do it and it’s really freaking me out.”
She was right. I didn’t normally do it, so why now?
“And I love the title.”
“It’s a play on rock songs.”
“I could tell.”
“Wait until you see the cover.”
“Where is it?”
I bit my lips, suddenly shy.
She grinned at me, throwing her arms around me in a hug as I pulled out my phone to show her.
