Accidental Groupie: A Sweet Lesbian Romance

by Mia Archer

  Gareth blinked and then he gave me a one fingered salute of his own, though he was grinning as he did it.

  “That doesn’t sound like a grateful woman who just had her ass saved by her lead guitarist,” Gareth said.

  “Hey, he’s not the only one who helped out with this rescue,” a familiar voice said.

  I turned and grinned at Jake. Of course he was the crazy bastard willing to nearly drive a limo into a crowd of crazed fans. He knew better than anyone else just how bad things could get in the middle of one of those crowds, which made me appreciate him jumping in like that all the more.

  “So what happened anyways?” Gareth asked.

  So I explained everything. How the night had been going so well. How I was really starting to feel something for this girl which got a raised eyebrow from Gareth who was always a heart breaker that even eclipsed my record of broken hearts, but he took it in stride. I told him about the text message coming at the single worst moment possible and how Jessica found it and it set her off in the worst way. I ended with how that all turned into me being humiliated in the middle of a hotel lobby with people taking pictures of me nearly naked since I had no way of letting the hotel know I was locked out of my room short of going down to the front desk.

  “Damn Ivy. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “How you were feeling about that girl?”

  I had a moment to think about that as the limo pulled around to the other side of the staging area and they let us in. I noticed a couple of the security guys out there were looking nervously at the other side of the parking lot where the rescue had taken place.

  I had no doubt that some of the girls who’d gone for me were making a run around to the other side in the hopes that they could get in before the gates were closed, but those dudes moved so fast that the girls didn’t have a prayer.

  It was always interesting to see the fear a crowd like that could inspire. It was like a zombie horde, and I was so used to it that I didn’t blink an eye unless I was out there completely exposed like I’d been a minute ago. I still had a bad case of the shakes.

  We got out of the limo and stepped into my bus where I immediately pulled out my guitar. That always helped me think. The strains of the song I’d been working on earlier in the day picked up and I noticed Gareth nodding right along with. I always appreciated it when he liked something I was putting out on guitar. I was good, but he was an acknowledged deity of the instrument after all.

  “I guess I was afraid,” I said.

  “Afraid? What are you talking about?”

  “Well there was the whole Incident to think about. The last time I got serious with a girl she ended up pulling a Yoko and splitting the band up for a decade. I was afraid of something like that happening again.”

  Sure that was part of the reason, but it wasn’t the main reason. And Gareth wasn’t making it any easier.

  “That’s crazy. Anyone could see this girl is different from she-who-shall-not-be-named,” Gareth said. “Besides, if you feel like you’ve got a good thing going with a girl you don’t have to keep it from me. You’re like a sister. No, we’ve been together long enough that you are a sister to me. We’re the last people who should be keeping shit from each other.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I guess I worried you’d think you were being abandoned or something. We were the two single ones in the band on this tour. I know I’ve felt left out watching the other girls with their perfect relationships and here I am with nothing because I thought it would be more fun to fuck around the last time around than find something real.”

  Gareth snorted. “If you think it’s all sunshine and rainbows with them then you’re crazy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Gareth shrugged. “Relationships are about ups and downs. Good with the bad. It’s not like they’re all lovey-dovey all the time just because they have their wives with them. You have to learn to roll with the punches if you’re going to be in something long term. Which, I might add, is a big part of the reason why you won’t see me in anything long term any time soon thank you very much. I get the highlights and then it’s how d’you do and see you the next time I’m in town, but we both know that’s a pleasant fiction.”

  I blinked in surprise. Aside from the last bit about showing women the door when he was done with them that had been a surprisingly profound bit of wisdom. There was going to be good and bad. Well there’d certainly been plenty of both tonight with Jessica.

  The only problem was I didn’t know how I was going to track her down and prove to her that the good could outweigh the bad. That I wasn’t the girl she thought I was. At least not anymore.

  I was still picking at my guitar, lost in thought, when Gareth interrupted.

  “So what’s that you’re working on? Doesn’t sound like any of the old standards.”

  “It’s not,” I said. “I think I’ve finally got something worth writing about here.”

  “Fair enough,” Gareth said. “I’ll go get my guitar and we can work on it. What are we calling this one?”

  I looked up at him and grinned. Things might’ve gone to shit with Jessica, but at the very least she’d given me this gift. I was finally in a head space where I could start writing again.

  “I’m calling it Jessica’s Song.”

  28: Pre-concert PR Blitz

  I heard the closing strains of a damn catchy song as I stepped into the elevator and breathed a sigh of relief. Another day over at the office. Another day of seeing Rachel give me disappointed looks out of the corner of her eye because she thought I should be out there with Ivy and not here in a cubicle wasting my life away.

  Never mind that actually focusing on my career was probably far better than going off on tour chasing some asshole rock star who was just using me as a semi-permanent booty call anyways. Not that I’d ever been able to quite convey that to my boss.

  I wasn’t going to embarrass myself by going into the details of why things never worked out with me and Ivy. Details that I knew she desperately wanted to hear but was always too polite to ask.

  I found myself wondering who that was but then I caught the announcer and suddenly I wasn’t curious anymore. Suddenly I couldn’t get away from the elevator fast enough.

  “And that was the surprise new smash single from Sleepwalker who will be swinging back around to our city for a second…”

  I didn’t hear the rest. I tuned it out. I did not need to know anything about Sleepwalker or what they were doing on the second leg of their tour. I had a pretty good idea of exactly what Ivy was doing: any pretty girl who stood still long enough for her to work her bullshit seduction routine. The poor things, but that wasn’t my problem. The only thing I could do was make sure I wasn’t that girl again.

  I’d finally stopped getting text messages a month ago. I still wasn’t sure if I was more disappointed or relieved that she’d stopped. Every time she messaged me it came up as an anonymous number since Alice had deleted her from my phone book but hadn’t actually blocked her no matter what the poor tech-unsavvy dear had told me at the time. I was always tempted to respond.

  I was proud of myself that I never did. I could kick myself that I never did.

  As I walked through the apartment doors I wanted to scream out in frustration. My ears were assaulted with the same strangely compelling sound I’d heard in the elevator.

  “Alice, we have a rule!” I shouted as I made my way back to my room where I could close the door and be free from that song. Mostly. The walls weren’t exactly all that thick in our cheap apartment.

  She’d been surprisingly understanding of my “no Sleepwalker” rule since the incident, but maybe she thought I wouldn’t know that new song was theirs or something. Either way I needed to get away from it. I needed to get away from anything that would remind me of Ivy and what she’d done to me. I needed to not think about her because that led down a path where I remembered all the wonderful things she’
d done to me right along with all the terrible things.

  Remembering those wonderful things made me want to dig out that number and send a message. It always sent me into a spiral of weakness where I had to put my phone in a drawer until I’d cooled down. I hated that she could still do that to me a couple of months after she’d broken my heart by revealing herself to be exactly what I’d thought she was all along.

  This was one instance where I hated every day how right I’d been.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Alice said just before I reached my room. I turned and raised an eyebrow. What the heck was she going on about?

  “What? I know that’s a Sleepwalker song and I’d rather not have any reminders of Ivy,” I said.

  “You need to come in here and see this,” Alice said.

  “See what?”

  “Ivy was just in playing an acoustic version of her song for the local news and she’s about to do an interview.”

  “An interview? Isn’t local news a little small scale even for a fading star like her?”

  “Fading? Have you been under a rock Jessica?” Alice asked.

  “When it comes to anything to do with Sleepwalker yeah, pretty much,” I replied.

  “Well you need to come see this interview or I’m never letting you borrow any of my clothes ever again and that’s final,” Alice said.

  I let out a frustrated growl, but I also let her pull me back into the living room where I plopped down in front of a TV that was playing commercials at the moment.

  “Great, they’re having a sale at Downtown Pizza. Why don’t we go there instead of sitting here listening to this stupid interview?” I said.

  “No way. You need to see this.”

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” I replied. “I thought I made it clear I don’t want to see anything to do with…”

  I stopped and stared at the screen. I couldn’t help myself. She sat there with some local news anchor who I vaguely recognized from billboards around town but I couldn’t remember her name if my life depended on it. The anchor was staring at Ivy with a look that I’d come to recognize during my brief time with her. A mixture of being star struck and maybe a little turned on at the same time.

  Well okay then. Who knew the news anchor swung that way? She was pretty enough and that was definitely going in the old fantasy file. Or maybe she was just curious. Maybe it was just Ivy.l

  It was the sort of effect Ivy had on women regardless of their professed sexuality. It was certainly the effect she had on me. Damn did she look so fucking good sitting there with that easy grin on her face and an acoustic guitar slung over her shoulder.

  “So we’re back with the lead singer of Sleepwalker, Ivy Thompson!” the girl said. “You just heard her doing an acoustic performance of the chart busting number one single, “Jessica’s Song,” which they’ve released while on tour. A tour that has had a second leg added thanks to that song’s popularity. They’re in town tonight only for a limited engagement downtown!”

  I blinked. “What did she say the name of the song was?”

  I decided that I was going to ignore the fact that she was in town right now. She was downtown, which meant she was probably somewhere that was a decently short walk from our apartment. I tried not to think about how I could be at her bus’s front door in under twenty minutes if I really wanted to.

  “Jessica’s Song,” Alice said.

  “So is that her mom’s name or something too? Because that’s going to make things really creepy on top of heartbreaking.”

  Alice grinned and shook her head. I sighed. I didn’t figure there would be any important woman in her life named Jessica. No other woman but me, that is. I suddenly found myself wishing I had heard that song even as I was kicking myself for making that wish.

  Still, I felt something towards Ivy Thompson that was very different from the usual anger I’d been feeling. Hope. If she was writing songs about me then maybe there was still hope, though I was also thinking I was a silly little girl who’d grown up drinking the pop culture happily-ever-after Kool-aid just a bit too much if I actually thought a happily ever after was in the offing for me right now.

  “So can you tell us a little more about where you got the idea for Jessica’s Song? There have been a lot of rumors, you even had an ex-girlfriend try to sue you saying it was about her, but that got thrown out and the mystery endures.”

  Ivy laughed and shook her head. I definitely did not notice the way her hair flew this way and that as she shook her head. I wasn’t paying attention to the way her teeth seemed to shine a pearly white. I definitely wasn’t looking at the way her smile seemed to create laugh lines that gave her a little bit of distinction that was missing from some of those early Sleepwalker posters that I totally hadn’t been obsessing over in the couple of months since our brief and totally doomed romance.

  No, I wasn’t paying attention to any of that because I was still totally pissed off at Ivy Thompson. I still wanted to reach through the television screen and punch that pretty face, didn’t I?

  I guess not really. Punching the screen would just result in a broken television and maybe a broken wrist. It’s not like either Alice or I could really afford to replace the thing right now on what we made. It’s not like I could afford a trip to the emergency room considering how crappy my insurance was.

  I steeled my resolve. I was not going to moon over this girl just because she happened to look gorgeous sitting across from that simpering bitch who was doing just about everything but ripping her clothes off and jumping on Ivy to try and catch her interest. Honestly, this is what passed for professionalism with journalists these days? It was disgusting. I had half a mind to write a letter of complaint to the news room, but of course what would I say? That I was pissed off the traffic reporter who was hired for her looks was mooning all over a woman I had a brief fling with a couple of months back and could you please fire the airheaded bitch because she wasn’t even that good at reporting traffic in the first place?

  Yeah, I’m sure that would be good for a few laughs in the news room.

  “Oh the lawsuit? Yeah, that was interesting. She made the mistake of filing that in the same court where she tried to go after half my stuff back when we broke up,” she said. “The judge threw out this one in record time. I didn’t even know the legal system could work that fast, but apparently Her Honor had a long memory for frivolous suits.”

  “This would be the same woman who threatened to kill herself if you broke up with her and then was arrested multiple times for stalking you after the breakup?” floozy reporter asked.

  Ivy winced. “I see someone has been going through my official autobiography. I forgot my ghost writer put that story in there.”

  I leaned forward with sudden interest. This was a new wrinkle to the Ivy Thompson story that I wasn’t previously aware of. She’d been in a serious relationship with a girl? A girl who threatened to kill herself if Ivy called things off? A girl who sued her for half of her stuff when they broke up and stalked her to the point she got arrested?

  Now that was a chewy bit of gossip that I hadn’t latched onto because the only Sleepwalker related information I’d allowed myself in the past two months was mooning over those aforementioned posters and daydreaming about the magical twenty-four hours we’d shared and what might have happened to keep it from blowing up in my face.

  “What’s she talking about, Alice?”

  Only Alice didn’t have a chance to answer. Ivy shook her head but a grin was back on her face. I was amazed that she could think about an experience that must’ve been extremely painful for her and laugh like that. I tried to imagine what it would feel like if I was trapped in a relationship with that level of crazy. It seemed like one hell of a nightmare scenario.

  I wondered how the hell a girl could do that to her. My eyes narrowed and my fingers flexed without me even realizing it. Like I was preparing to claw the eyes out of some girl I didn’t even know.

  Weird. I forced m
yself to unclench my hands from the old-fashioned catwoman claws, but it took some doing.

  “Yeah, it was none other than. I guess she’s still so self-absorbed that she thinks everything I do is about her. Truth be told I’ve spent the past ten years or so trying to forget about her. She really screwed me up. Really screwed the band up,” Ivy said.

  “So can you tell us any more about who this mysterious Jessica is? Word on the street is you haven’t dated much since that incident. Has that changed? Is the great Ivy Thompson, the most eligible rock goddess bachelorette in the world, finally spoken for?”

  Traffic Floozy was leaning forward and she even licked her lips as she said that! Talk about unprofessional! I couldn’t believe they even let this girl on camera when her only qualifications were looking good in a low cut top and a short dress. It was obvious she was drooling all over Ivy. Why didn’t the station manager or whoever the hell was controlling things step in and put a stop to this ridiculous behavior?

  “Well I wish I could say I was spoken for,” Ivy said. “But I’m afraid that this song’s namesake doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.”

  Traffic Floozy’s eyes went wide. “Wait, so you’re actually finally going to say something about the girl you wrote the song about? You’ve been mysteriously quiet about it this whole time.”

  Ivy leaned back and took a deep breath. Let it out. I tried not to think about how good she looked in her own low-cut top, particularly when she took a deep breath that showed off the goods like that. I tried not to remember what she’d looked like when she was on top of me, her lips pressing down and…

  “Jessica! Pay attention!”

  I snapped out of my reverie and smiled at Alice. A good thing she could tell when I wasn’t paying attention, because I suddenly didn’t want to miss a moment of this interview. I also had to shift on the couch just a little because I was starting to get flustered.

  “Well I didn’t need to come clean about who the song was about because I figured it would be painfully obvious to everyone who was in the know exactly what the song was about.”