Rhythm, Chord & Malykhin

by Mariana Zapata

  He nodded.

  “Are you really, really sure?”

  Carter’s smile tilted up a little more. “I’m positive.”

  I felt bad but… “Want me to bring you something?” I offered.

  His brown eyes lit up and he finally smiled, suddenly forgetting how irritated he’d been a minute before. “Please.” He began fishing through his back pocket for his wallet. Handing me a twenty-dollar bill, he paused and made a thoughtful face. “Who’s going with you?”

  Even though we’d only met two weeks ago, apparently he was going to worry about me. I liked it. “No one. My brother’s busy, and I can’t wait any longer if I want to get back here before doors open. I’ll just walk somewhere close by, no big deal.”

  “Gaby.” Carter’s long face was already telling me he thought my idea was terrible. He was only twenty-one, but he was such a mature guy, he seemed older.

  “Yes?”

  He shook his head. “This isn’t the best side of town. Find someone to go with you,” he insisted.

  “There’s no one.” There wasn’t. The guys were more than likely about to start soundchecking.

  Carter scratched at his chin, he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and though he wasn’t capable of growing in a beard—his words, not mine—he had some stubble going on. “TCC isn’t doing anything. They’re around here somewhere.”

  I almost crossed my eyes. “I don’t want to bother them. Honest. I can go by myself.”

  Just as he opened his mouth to argue, someone cut in.

  “Where do you want to go?” The voice I’d come to recognize as Sacha’s, from our handful of conversations and from listening to him talk to the audience every night over the last fourteen days, floated through the air.

  I turned to find him in his black basketball shorts, ASICS running shoes and a T-shirt. He didn’t even look like the same man who went onstage every night in a button-down shirt and dress pants with his hair gelled or moussed into perfect place. I thought he looked even better when he wasn’t in that persona, but that was probably just me.

  We’d only spoken a couple of times about how the most recent show went, and he still seemed like a really nice guy who brought up nearly every day how I’d kicked him in the ass. Twice already he’d walked by me with his hands splayed out behind him like he was protecting his butt cheeks from attack. I also tended to go to bed before he did, so it wasn’t like we got to gossip in our bunks or anything.

  “I want to go get something to eat,” I explained a little awkwardly, eyeing the piano keys I’d come to recognize were tattooed on his neck.

  He smiled easily, making those black and skin color keys tighten. “I’ll go with you.”

  What? “You will?” We’d spoken a few times but really, it hadn’t been more than ten or fifteen minutes total. There was also the fact that every time I spoke to him, I thought about how we’d met and it made my insides cringe. We were friendly but we weren’t friends exactly. At least, not like how Carter and I were. We were at the point where I knew he liked Dr. Pepper and sour candy, disliked the same music I did, and he had a girlfriend who hated him going on tour. You knew you were friends with someone when they grew comfortable enough around you to let you read psycho text messages from the person they were dating.

  “Yeah,” the tall man agreed with a dip of his chin.

  I didn’t miss the pleased look Carter had on his face.

  Just like that, Sacha and I were walking across the parking lot at his guidance while I pocketed my younger companion’s twenty dollars.

  The black-haired man walking alongside me looked down from over his shoulder, his eyes such a pristine shade of ash they were nearly a clear blue. “Are you craving anything?”

  I scrunched up my face. “As long as we aren’t eating pizza again, I’m game.”

  Sacha laughed, his gaze still on me. “It’s the worst, isn’t it?”

  There was a reason almost everyone on the tour crossed their fingers and toes that pizza wouldn’t be the meal of choice wherever we happened to be that day. Venues were responsible for providing the tour package with food every night. Each band had a rider, or a list of requests, of items they wanted. It wasn’t anything crazy like all red Skittles, Oreos without the filling or anything. Ghost Orchid’s rider consisted of a case of Dr. Pepper, some kind of vodka, a large bag of barbecue chips, a sandwich tray and Oreos. They were a vision of health.

  Apart from their riders, the two bands were either supposed to have dinner provided or if that wasn’t available, each person on the tour was given a certain amount of money to supply their own food. The problem was that when the venues did have dinner available, more often than not, it consisted of pizza. Not the good kind of pizza either, at least so far, but the kind that had cheese that tasted like the off-brand individually packed crap, suspicious-looking pepperoni, and no sauce. It made me want to puke.

  If you thought there was a food you could eat every day without getting tired of it, you were lying to yourself. Everything got old.

  “I haven’t had pizza on tour in almost ten years,” Sacha continued. “There’s a Thai place about five blocks away…” He trailed off and I didn’t miss the hopeful look he shot me.

  He gave me the type of innocent smile as he raked a hand through the hair at the top of his head that reached into your soul like a puppy’s lick could. “I swear it’s great—”

  “Okay.” I shrugged up at him, meeting his gaze. “I’m game.”

  Sacha paused for a second. His six-foot-one-ish height towered over my five-two. “You don’t mind?” He asked it so hopefully even if I hadn’t wanted to eat Thai, I would have still done it to keep the grin on his face.

  The question earned him a snort. “Food is food.”

  He hitched a shoulder up, the sleeve of his T-shirt sliding back to reveal more of the thick, black bands of his tattoo that went from wrist to shoulder. “That was easy.”

  I didn’t even miss a beat before blurting out, “I’m easy.”

  I slammed my mouth closed. And I blinked. Then I stopped blinking all together and just stared.

  If it wouldn’t have been for Sacha stopping again and turning to look down at me, his mouth pulled tight at the corners, I wouldn’t have known he’d heard what I said. His dark eyebrows were halfway to his hairline. His eyes were huge as they flicked to the side.

  I narrowed my eyes at him, heat crawling up my neck. “Don’t… say… anything.”

  He coughed the fakest, most forced cough in the history of coughs. “Say anything about what?” he asked slowly, hesitantly. He even added a little questioning shrug at the end.

  It was a lot harder than it seemed to not laugh. “Exactly.” I shrugged back at him, wanting to kick myself in the ass for having such a big mouth.

  Sacha gave me a low-lidded glance before visibly pursing his lips together and coughing one more time. I didn’t miss the way his mouth pulled up into a tiny, short smile before he managed to wipe it off his features altogether. Sacha scratched at the bridge of his nose and glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes again before finally grinding out, “You’re sure you’re fine with eating that, then?”

  At that point, it wasn’t like I could say no even if I wanted to. I nodded, which earned me another smile from him.

  We walked a block in silence, each of us giving the other a few curious if not a bit awkward glances, like neither one of us could think of what to say until Sacha broke the silence. “Are you having fun on tour?” he asked as we came to the first crosswalk.

  “Yeah, besides dealing with the heat.” It had been hot in every single venue we’d been in over the last two weeks, and me complaining about it said something; I’d lived in Texas my entire life.

  He groaned. “It never gets easier to handle, trust me. I’ve been touring six months out of the year for the last ten and it hasn’t gotten any better than that first summer the band spent in a van with no AC.” Sacha shuddered at the memory, and I think I coul
d have exploded at his cuteness.

  “Ten years?” I asked him, looking up. He didn’t look twenty-one or even twenty-five but he didn’t look over thirty either. His face was still relatively unlined, except for these deep laugh lines on the sides of his mouth. How old was he?

  “Ten years in August,” he reiterated. Sacha turned to look at me with those clear gray eyes. “Is this your first tour?”

  I snorted as a dozen memories of the five years I spent on and off with Ghost Orchid blew through my brain in the span of a second. “No. I used to leave with Eli, but about two years ago, I decided to go to school full time and stopped. This whole bus thing is new to me. We used to get around in a van,” I summed it up, leaving out a few details that didn’t seem important.

  Sacha grinned at me slyly. “I guessed that when you didn’t take shoes into the showers with you.” He looked down at my tennis shoes and waggled his eyebrows. “I heard you got fungus from it.”

  I wasn’t even going to bother trying to guess which asshole spilled the beans on my foot problem. It could have been any of them. Pricks. I’m not sure where the action came from, but I bumped his arm with my own. He was so much taller than me, I was hitting closer to his elbow than his shoulder. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  And just like that, he was nudging me back with a big grin on his face. The corners of his deep-set eyes crinkled. “I bet your skin looks raw, huh?”

  Just at his mention of raw-looking skin, that crease between the balls of my feet and toes started doing this weird itchy-burn sensation I’d become familiar with. I’d been smothering my feet in cream for two weeks and changing my socks twice a day per Mason’s instructions. What no one tells you in those athlete’s foot commercials is how long those creams take to work.

  “Sucking ass” just barely began to describe the experience.

  “It happens to everyone,” Sacha added when I didn’t respond immediately.

  I snickered, remembering the last time I’d heard those exact same words. “I’m pretty sure Mason has said the same thing about having The Clap.”

  The laugh that exploded out of him in response was so unexpected that I jumped a little at first.

  It was so infectious it made me snort.

  “That is… that’s absolutely not true,” Sacha snickered in between bouts of clear, loud sounds of enjoyment.

  “That’s Mase for you.”

  He slapped a long-fingered hand over his mouth as he laughed. “I thought I heard him say last week something like ‘it’s all fun and games until someone gets crabs.’ But I thought I imagined it.”

  Oh god. I burst out laughing just as loud as he’d been going at it a few moments ago. “Yeah, that sounds like something he would say.”

  His head tipped down enough so that our eyes met. Very intently, he asked, “Is he serious or does—”

  “Oh, he’s serious most of the time. I went with him to a free clinic when we were seniors because he’d gotten crabs from a girl on the drill team.” It had been our secret until he got drunk one night and told everyone willing to listen about his previously itchy privates. I’m pretty sure the staff had assumed I’d given them to him but who knows.

  Sacha’s mouth gaped in amusement for a second before he stopped abruptly in front of a storefront. “The restaurant is in here.” He gestured toward a glass door to our right, opening it and waving me inside.

  The small restaurant was homey with burgundy walls, round black vinyl-covered tables and a counter directly in front of the door with a menu mounted above it, written in chalk. There wasn’t anyone in line and I took my time looking at the various items listed for that day. Sacha stood next to me, deciding what to get as well. After a couple of minutes, an older lady in an apron and a hairnet made her way out of the kitchen and took our orders.

  With our drinks in hand—some tea drink for Sacha and water for me—we took a seat at one of the empty picnic tables.

  My unexpected eating buddy took a sip of the yellow drink in a clear red cup and raised his eyebrows. “You’ve known Mason for a long time then?”

  “I’ve known him and Gordo since I was five. We all grew up together,” I explained. “They’re like the brothers I never wanted.”

  He smiled. “But you and Eli really are brother and sister?”

  “Oh yeah. He likes to say he shoved me out of the way to come out first.”

  Sacha blinked. “No shit? You two really are twins?”

  I knew he hadn’t believed me! Then again, most people didn’t. My brother had more physical traits in common with Bigfoot than he did with me. “Yup.”

  He still made a face that said he wasn’t entirely convinced. “But he’s twice your size.”

  Twice my size. I could give him a hug for being such a terrific liar. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he tried to eat me in the womb.”

  Sacha burst out laughing again, making the lightly tanned skin on his face glow. His complexion was so clear it almost radiated; it made him even more attractive. “Jesus. They said you were funny, but I didn’t believe them.”

  Funny Gaby. I smiled and held back the sigh creeping around in my chest. How many times had I friend-zoned myself by joking around? A dozen? It wasn’t even that I tried to be funny; I just grew up around smart-asses. You either learned to adapt or you died. Well you wouldn’t really die, but you’d get verbally eaten alive by the folks that were supposed to love you; apparently they just loved making fun of you an equal amount. My siblings and the two idiots could find the smallest things to tease me over.

  I pushed all five of them out of my head and smiled at the man sitting across from me. That longer hair at the top of his head and the shorter buzz cut along the sides were really flattering even when he didn’t have it perfectly in place.

  “What about you and your band? Have you been together a long time?” I asked.

  “Isaiah—do you know Isaiah?” he asked, and I nodded. “Isaiah and I have known each other since middle school. We started playing together in high school, doing some cover band stuff, and then we met Julian. He’s the big guy,” Sacha explained, like I didn’t know the names of the people I’d been on tour with for the last two weeks, but I didn’t correct him. “The three of us started TCC when we were sixteen, and then slowly added members over the years.”

  Was asking his age considered flirting? I wasn’t positive, but I decided that I didn’t care. “So you’ve been together…?”

  “Eleven years.”

  He was twenty-seven. Huh. That sounded about right. I whistled. “That’s a long time.”

  “It is.” He shrugged. ”But I wouldn’t want to do anything else… most of the time.”

  I smiled at him, his words hitting home. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life now that I was done with school. The only thing I did know was what I didn’t want. That didn’t exactly help any, but I guess that’s what this tour was for. To give me some time to figure things out.

  What was the rush, right?

  The same woman who had worked the counter came over with our order. Sacha’s bowl was shades of green and brown while mine was a red curry dish. It must have been a sign of how hungry we both were that neither one of us said a word as we tore into our food. When I finished before him, I got up and ordered Carter the same thing I’d gotten.

  He smiled at me from behind the rim of his glass as he finished off the last of his tea when I sat back down. “Thanks for being a good sport and eating here. I usually have to pay one of the guys to come with me.”

  “Why? They don’t like Thai?” I asked. I wasn’t a picky eater. You could put a vegan dish in front of me, or fried chicken, and it was going to get devoured.

  “Not at all. None of them like spicy food,” he said, setting the glass on the table.

  “But not all of the food is spicy…”

  He blinked. “I know.”

  “Babies,” I muttered, a little unsure how he’d handle me calling his friends that.

 
He beamed at me. “Huge babies.”

  “They don’t know what good food is.”

  “Right? If it were up to them, we’d get fast food every day. All I’m asking for is a little Chipotle at least.”

  “Chipotle’s high class.” I smiled.

  He lifted a shoulder. “I’m a high-class kind of guy.”

  Yeah, I couldn’t hold the joke back despite how inappropriate it might be considering we didn’t know each other well. But screw it. Kicking him in the ass was like jumping ahead three months in a friendship. “You know who else is high class? Hookers. Hookers are high class.”

  Sacha didn’t even miss a beat. He blinked those clear gray eyes at me and asked very seriously, “Do you know from experience?”

  Was he seriously calling me a hooker on our first expedition out?

  By the smile on his face, I would say yes. Yes, he was.

  I think I’d found a friend.

  Chapter Five

  Where are you today?

  I had to refer to the list of dates we had on the wall. Every day felt like a near repeat of the one before, and after the first week of The Rhythm & Chord Tour, I’d lost track of what city was next. Since there usually wasn’t enough time to go sightseeing, one place looked just like the rest; maybe one venue was nicer than the other but since that was really all we got to see, it didn’t make a difference.

  I texted Laila back:

  New Orleans.

  A minute later, I got a response from her:

  Don’t flash anyone. It isn’t Mardi Gras no matter what anyone tells you.

  That’s all you, hooker.

  She knew exactly what I was referring to: her twenty-second birthday, Mardi Gras in Galveston, two in the morning. If I tried, I could still hear my screams at her flashing an unsuspecting crowd after one too many Long Island Iced Teas.

  OMG. STFU. If I don’t remember it, it didn’t happen.