The show went off as successfully as we could have imagined, and the fans loved it, especially when I flew around the arena. It was definitely not my favorite part of the night, since I hated heights, but I put up with it since everyone thought it was cool. It also meant that people who had seats farther from the stage could see me, and I could see then. A lot of my fans made signs, and I always tried to wave at those who’d taken the effort. It meant a lot to me.
By the time the last note was sung, I was exhausted and ready for a big, fat cheeseburger and my hotel room. I was always hungry post-show since I didn’t eat before. Room service and then bed. That was pretty much my life on tour.
And that’s how it went for the next few weeks. Everything became familiar and was like clockwork until we got to Orlando. I started to panic then since I was pretty sure a moment of blind insanity had swept over me when I’d thought ahead to this particular stop the week before.
I’d actually asked Chris to send two tickets to Ryder, having promised him long ago that I’d do just that. I regretted it the next day, but Chris told me he couldn’t get the tickets back. I was stuck, and I was nervous as hell wondering if Ryder would actually come to the show and what I would do when I saw him.
And then I was even more nervous wondering if he wouldn’t show up at all. That was probably the scariest thought.
“You look ready to be sick,” Paul said, coming up to me a few hours before the show where I was lounging on a couch backstage.
I’d eaten two Twizzlers and couldn’t stomach any more. Then my dressing room had started to feel suffocating, so I went out to the room where everyone else was hanging out when they weren’t working. I’d been mindlessly strumming my guitar, kind of, but not really, working on a new song.
“I think I might be,” I told him, looking up to see him take a seat on the arm of the couch. He was wearing a fedora and looking fairly delectable.
“Why’s that, love?”
I shrugged. “Chris sent Ryder tickets to the show, and I don’t know if he’s going to come.”
Paul knew all about Ryder. We’d had long talks about him.
“He didn’t call you?”
I shook my head. “Nope. He did not.”
I strummed my guitar a few times for emphasis. I’d assumed Ryder would call when he got the tickets, but I hadn’t heard from him. It sealed the deal for me that he probably wouldn’t show. And that made me sad.
“That’s unfortunate. Did you call him?”
I shook my head again. “No, I figured the tickets would be an olive branch in and of themselves.”
“Well, I hope he shows up.”
“Me too,” I said, strumming out something that might actually work if I tweaked it just a bit. I worked on it until I had to get ready for the meet-and-greet, still feeling doubtful.
Chapter Six
Ryder
I was surrounded by thousands of screaming girls and Jake. I was sure there were a few other guys scattered throughout the arena, but I couldn’t see any of them. I felt very tall and very masculine and not a good way, knowing we both stood out like sore thumbs.
I was truthfully surprised that I was actually there. When the tickets for Sydney’s show had arrived a few days earlier, I’d stared at them in disbelief for close to an hour as I tried to process what they meant. She’d reached out. She’d sent me tickets. Or someone on her team had.
Shit, what if she’d told them months ago that they should send me tickets to the show in Orlando, and then she’d forgotten to tell them to take me off the list. Maybe I’d gotten them by accident.
Then I thought maybe I shouldn’t go. Initially I’d decided I was going. There was no way I was going to miss seeing her, especially if she wanted me there. But what if it was all a mistake? Was she going to look down into the front row and get annoyed when she saw me?
No, I didn’t think she’d be annoyed, but it would probably be awkward for both of us. I could only imagine the look of pity she’d give me as she stood on stage looking all hot and sexy. All I’d want to do was grab her and kiss her, and she’d be looking at me like ‘Who is this obnoxious stalker guy who won’t leave me alone? I used to be friends with him before he made out with me one night, and it was the worst kiss ever’.
Okay, so maybe I was being a touch melodramatic. I knew I wasn’t a bad kisser. I was just way out of Sydney’s league. I decided then that I wouldn’t go to the show.
“Hey man,” Jake had said when he’d gotten home from the gym.
I was sitting in the exact same spot still staring at the front row tickets. “Want to go to a concert?” I asked him, my brain having a mind of its own. I’d already decided I wasn’t going, but suddenly I was changing my mind.
“Sure,” he said, as he pulled his sweat-soaked t-shirt off over his head. “Which one?”
“Sydney Chase.”
“Fuck no, man. Are you joking? I thought you won tickets to Linkin Park or something.”
I shook my head. “Nope, sorry.” Then I held up the tickets.
“You actually bought tickets to her show,” he groaned. “That’s even worse! Damn, man, just give it up already.”
“She sent me the tickets,” I said, raising my eyebrows in emphasis.
Jake’s eyebrows rose to meet mine. “She did? Was there like a note or anything with them?”
Shit, I hadn’t even checked for a note. I rifled through the papers that were in the FedEx envelope, but there was only basic information about the concert.
I looked up at Jake. “No, no note.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, man. This doesn’t sound like a good idea. Are you prepared for her to brush you off like she’s been doing for the past five months, because she might do that. I don’t want you to be all like ‘Yay, Sydney likes me. We’re going to make out and get married and have babies, and it’ll all be sooo perfect’, and then she’ll be like ‘No, I just want to be friends’. And you’ll be all like ‘I don’t know why Sydney doesn’t like me, Jake? Why aren’t I good enough for her?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Fuck her. Let’s go have a beer and get laid.’ But you’ll be all ‘I can’t. I’m too sad to drink. I’ll never be able to look at another girl again without thinking of her. Poor me’.”
I glared at him and his mocking dialogue, complete with hand gestures.
“Are you about done with your little play? Or did you want to give me the second act?” I asked sarcastically.
He laughed. “Do you want to hear the second act?” he asked, sounding all too eager to share it with me.
“Not particularly. I can only imagine what your twisted mind would come up with.”
He hoisted himself up onto the platform and let his legs dangle over the edge as he kicked off his running shoes. “This is true. I’ll spare you the finer details, but you jump off the roof of the frat house at the end, in case you were wondering.”
“Do I die?”
He shook his head. “No, you just get all mangled and paralyzed and shit, and Sydney comes to see you, and she’s all guilty and sad, so she throws herself into Lake Alice and gets eaten by an alligator.”
I looked at him for a few seconds, seriously wondering if he was half-cocked. “You’re a sick motherfucker.”
He shrugged. “Yeah. I know. It’s part of my charm.”
“No, it’s really not.”
He pulled one of his dirty socks off and threw it at me. I batted it away before it smacked me in the face. It was damp.
“Asshole.”
“Pussy,” he countered.
“Fuck you. Are you coming with me or not?”
“You seriously want to go, like really?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head, sort of hating myself in that moment. “Yeah, I don’t think I have another choice. I have yet to get over her.”
“And going to her concert where she’ll be dancing around in tiny, sexy outfits is going to do that?” he scoffed, but he had a point.
“Hell if
I know. Maybe I just need to see that she’s not interested in me anymore, that she didn’t actually send me these tickets on purpose, that she doesn’t want me there. Then I’ll stop wanting her.”
Jake gave me a look like he doubted that, and he was right. This was an almost decade long crush we were talking about, and he’d lived it for two years with me. It wasn’t going away overnight.
“You know why you can’t get over her, don’t you?”
“Why?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know the answer.
“Because you won’t get under anyone else,” Jake, the king of the one night stands, said, laughing as he did.
Yeah, I’d completely walked into that one.
“I have standards,” I defended. “Unlike some people I share a wall with.”
“Hey, you weren’t complaining when that KD Melissa was moaning and making all of those sexy noises two nights ago.”
I looked at him like he was crazy or maybe just deaf. “So the not so subtle banging on the wall between our beds wasn’t enough for you?”
He shrugged. “I thought you were cheering us on.”
“You’re so full of shit. Dude, I’ve heard you with more women this year alone. You owe me this.”
He groaned. “Isn’t it going to just be a bunch of fourteen year-old girls? We’re going to look like gay douchebags.”
I shot him a look, basically letting him know that he didn’t have another option. I was very close to issuing a moratorium on no sex in our room if he didn’t agree to come with me.
“There will be plenty of girls over the age of eighteen there,” I promised.
I’d been to Syd’s shows before. Jake wouldn’t be starving for female attention. He might have to keep things PG if there were kids seated near us, but I’d deal with that when the time came.
He finally sighed. “Fine. When’s the concert?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“I’m in, but I’d better get some pussy out of it.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said, waving him off. “We’ll find you some college-age pussy. I promise.”
“Somehow I don’t believe you,” he said, shaking his head before he left the room to jump in the shower.
* * *
The next night, Jake was eating his words as he flirted with the brunette next to him. She was a freshman at UCF, and her friend kept trying to talk to me. I was polite until the lights dimmed and the opening act came out. Then I paid attention to the band, who sounded a little bit like The Fray, and I wanted to like them, but I’d heard rumors that Sydney was dating the lead singer.
He was your typical bad boy rocker with tattoos up and down both arms and a carefree attitude. I’d seen pictures of them together in Celebrity Weekly a few weeks earlier. He was good looking in a Chris Martin from Coldplay kind of way. I automatically didn’t like him, but then again, I didn’t like most of the guys she dated.
I was relieved that I didn’t have to look at his face any longer when they stopped playing. But then my heart kicked into high gear and pounded against the walls of my chest. Soon. In minutes I’d get to see Sydney. I was such a glutton for punishment.
I saw movement on the stage and elbowed Jake to quit flirting with the girl next to him as there was suddenly a sound like a cannon going off, and Sydney flew out of the stage and landed twenty feet away.
I practically had to pick my jaw up off the floor. She looked so breathtakingly beautiful and hot and sexy, and God, I just wanted to grab her and wrap her in a blanket, because that outfit was out of control. It was shiny black satin and only covered just beneath her ass to right above her boobs. If she wasn’t careful – or if I was lucky – one might pop out.
Oops. Nip slip. Ryder gets an eyeful.
“Dude, you kissed her?” Jake hissed in my ear as my eyes stayed glued on Sydney who was dancing around with an umbrella singing her song Bulletproof. It had been number one for a few weeks when the album first came out and was a fan favorite.
I knew what Jake was thinking, and it wasn’t because I was biased. Sydney looked great on TV or in magazines, but she was ten times better in person. She lit up when she was on stage, smiling and teasing and tantalizing the audience as she shook her ass and marched around like she owned the place. God, she was so amazing. I’d forgotten how she looked on stage, and being just five feet away, I saw every bit of her.
“Yeah, I kissed her,” I told Jake, never taking my eyes off of Sydney. All I could think about was kissing her again.
There were a few times when she came dangerously close to the edge of the stage, but our eyes never met. It was almost like she was purposefully looking away from where I was sitting, and that made me wonder again if she wasn’t happy that I was there. Maybe I shouldn’t have come.
Just six months ago we were in such a different place. I never would have second-guessed anything about our friendship. But then everything changed in an instant, and I was so afraid we’d never get it back. And just looking at her, I wanted nothing more than to have her back in my life, to hug her and talk to her and tell her how proud I was of her. She was practically taking over the world.
At the end of her song and dance, she approached the front row, but she still didn’t look at me. She handed the umbrella she’d been dancing with to the girl Jake had been flirting with, smiled widely at her as the girl jumped around excitedly, and Syd then took a few steps back to talk to the audience.
It was painful that she never once looked my way throughout the entire concert, and it couldn’t have been a coincidence. And when she sat at the piano on stage later in the show and sang Only With You, I felt like walking out. But I couldn’t. My feet wouldn’t move.
By the end of the show, I felt about two inches tall and slunk out of the arena behind Jake who was talking to the brunette and asking if she and her friend wanted to get drinks. I gave him pleading look that he ignored. I wanted to go home. I wasn’t in the mood to watch him try to get a blow job in the bathroom of the bar, which was what I knew he was aiming for.
But I’d driven, and I had the keys, so he was out of luck. I told him to say goodbye to the girls or I was leaving his ass in Orlando. I wasn’t in the mood for his shit that night.
I was silent the whole drive back to school while Jake alternated between blasting rock music and talking on his cell phone, trying to find a different girl for the night since I’d cock-blocked him, apparently. We parked on Frat Row at close to one in the morning, and I was ready to crash, but there was a party in full swing at the house, so I knew I wasn’t going to get to sleep for at least a few hours.
“Hey, hey!” Jake yelled to anyone who happened to be listening when we walked in the front door.
There were people everywhere, and the music pumping throughout the house was deafening. Jake motioned for me to follow him upstairs to the deck. Thankfully it was quieter the higher up we went.
“So Kyla’s here,” he said, walking backwards up the stairs.
“Great,” I said with false cheer.
He thumped me on the shoulder with the flat part of his palm. “Dude, it is great! She’s so hot!”
“Isn’t she dating that Sigma Chi guy she went out with after you told her you wouldn’t be exclusive with her?”
Kyla had been Jake’s hook-up pretty consistently back in the fall, but after three months, she gave him an ultimatum, and he dumped her. I’d heard she’d hooked up with some other guy at the start of the semester.
He grinned. “They broke up!” he announced, as he did a little dance up the last few steps. “And Kyla wants some Jake-lovin’.”
“Awesome for me,” I said sarcastically. Kyla was a screamer. It was annoying.
“It is awesome for you! She brought Kirsten with her!”
“No,” I said, stopping in my tracks. “No way. Get her out of here.”
“No way. She’s hot.”
I rolled my eyes. Kirsten Branson was the most annoying girl on the planet – mostly because she seemed to be able to se
e right through me and had no problem telling me exactly what my problem was. We’d dated for two months in September and October after I decided that I needed a girlfriend to take my mind off of Sydney. It hadn’t worked.
Of course Kirsten knew I was in love with someone else. She just didn’t know who, but she had no problem calling me out on it every time I had Syd on the brain. It was usually after I’d talked to her and was reminded of how much I wanted her. Kirsten would come over to hang out, and she’d yell at me, we’d fight, and then we’d have sex. It was pretty much the extent of our pathetic relationship. If you could even call it that. I didn’t.
“Dude, she annoys the fuck out of me.”
“She’s a good lay, though,” Jake pointed out, and he was right. It was why I’d stayed with her as long as I had. The sex was phenomenal.
I leaned back against the wall in the hallway and let my head fall backward. “I’m not sleeping with Kirsten tonight,” I told him.
Jake’s head fell forward as if he was too exhausted to hold it up. “Ryder, man, you’re my boy, and I love you, but come on. You need to get over this shit with Sydney. She’s not interested. She didn’t even look at you once tonight. It’s done, seriously.”
He’d noticed too. It had been that obvious.
“I know,” I said, closing my eyes, knowing it just wasn’t that simple.
“Dude, I’ll be on the porch if you need me,” Jake muttered, obviously knowing I wasn’t going to snap back as quickly as he’d hoped. Then he left me standing alone in the hallway with my pathetic thoughts.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Ryder Thompson.”
Ugh, I knew that voice.
“Hey Kirsten,” I said through gritted teeth, my eyes still closed, my head pressed back against the wall. Maybe she’d just walk by me.
Nope, I knew I wouldn’t get that lucky, I thought as she pressed her entire body against mine. She was so close I could smell her beer-soaked breath when it hit my face.
Only With You Page 5
