by Bec Linder
She heard a knock at the door, and O’Connor speaking to someone, and she waited in the bathroom until she heard the door close again; and then she went out to see what sort of spread he had ordered.
“I got you a cheese plate,” he said. He had wrapped himself in one of the hotel’s fluffy white bathrobes, which should have looked ridiculous, but somehow he was pulling it off. “And a bottle of champagne.”
“And a steak,” Leah said, watching as he removed the covers from the plates. “O’Connor! Really?”
He grinned. “I’m a rock star, baby. I can order steak from room service whenever I want.”
They ate on the bed, reclining in a nest of pillows, and when they were finished they curled up together and O’Connor turned on the television. He flipped through the channels until he came to an old espionage film that Leah liked, and she said, “Here! No, go back. That. Let’s watch this.”
They watched in silence for a few minutes. Leah idly ran her fingers along O’Connor’s ridged abs. “When on earth do you have time to work out?”
He laughed. “I don’t. I don’t work out much on tour. I just hit the gym extra hard when I’m at home.”
“Well, I approve of your vanity,” she said. “You look good.”
He flexed his free arm, and she laughed.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said, after a few more quiet minutes. “I’m glad we broke our promises to Rushani and James. I’m glad we didn’t keep things professional.”
She tilted her head up to look at him. He was gazing down at her, a soft light in his eyes that thrilled and terrified her. “Me too,” she said.
“I worry about Andrew every minute of every day. Being with you reminds me that there’s more to life than worrying.”
He bent to kiss her forehead, and Leah clung to him, unable to believe her good fortune, and feeling incredibly lucky to be there, in that moment, curled close against his warm body, safe and cared for. She had never been happier.
His hand on her shoulder moved lower and skimmed over her breast. She thought the touch was accidental until he thumbed her nipple and then pinched it gently between two fingers. “Again?” she asked, laughing.
“You know what they say,” he said, and rolled her onto her back. “Third time’s the charm.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When he woke up the next morning, Leah was gone; but she had left a note for him on the side table: Snuck out early so no one would catch me. I can’t wait for our next hotel night! xoxo
He flopped back on the mattress, grinning. Christ, Leah. Hellion, succubus. What a night they’d had together. He didn’t know how he was going to survive until the next hotel night, which was—shit—in three days. An eternity. He had sort of hoped that sleeping with her would—well. Not cure him. But certainly get it out of his system. But now that he’d actually been with her, he knew there was no way in hell that once would be enough.
Well. Three times.
Technicalities.
He dealt with the backlog of dick pics his youngest brother had texted him overnight, and showered and went downstairs to breakfast. Leah was there in the dining room with James, very innocently eating a bowl of cereal. Was she sucking off her spoon? Was she winking at O’Connor while he waited in line to toast his bagel? Maybe he was imagining things; but she was a sly thing, so you never knew.
He joined them at the table, and James raised his coffee mug in a wordless salute. O’Connor sat down and opened a little plastic tub of cream cheese, and valiantly tried to ignore his body’s automatic response to Leah’s presence. “How’s the intrepid explorer?”
James groaned. “I’m so sore I can barely walk. This sedentary bus life is slowly killing me.”
O’Connor grinned. They had spent the bus ride to Vegas yesterday evening looking at the pictures James took on his hike, and O’Connor wasn’t at all surprised that James was in bad shape. The trail had something like 1500 feet of elevation gain. It looked brutal.
“You should have taken it easy, like us,” Leah said. There was the faintest shadow of a bruise on her neck. “A woman in a manual wheelchair passed us on our way back to the bus.”
“To be fair, she looked incredibly strong and was going pretty fast,” O’Connor said.
Leah bumped her foot against O’Connor’s beneath the table. James, oblivious, started telling a story about something he had seen on the hike yesterday—a hawk or something, O’Connor wasn’t really listening. He felt like the most blatantly lovesick fool in the world, but nobody on the tour seemed to have noticed. Or maybe they all knew and were just pretending otherwise, to spare him the embarrassment; but he was sure that he would have at least gotten an earful from Rushani if that were the case.
The way that Leah was looking at him was going to give him hard-on right there at the breakfast table, and with his luck he would end up traumatizing a grandmother, or someone’s child.
“—so next year, maybe Yellowstone,” James said.
“Yellowstone is great,” Leah said. “I definitely recommend it. We drove through there on tour one time, and it was packed with tourists, but it’s such a weird and awesome place that I didn’t mind at all. Seeing Old Faithful erupt was really cool.”
“Yeah, and there’s that prismatic hot spring,” James said. “I read something about how the most common technique in gene sequencing is based on extremophile microbes that came out of that hot spring.”
“Nerd alert,” O’Connor said. James was really sort of a dweeb at heart, tattoos and extreme sports notwithstanding.
“I think it’s interesting,” Leah said, blatantly sucking up, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and trying to play footsie with O’Connor underneath the table again.
He was really in all sorts of trouble.
After breakfast, Leah went off with Rinna to do mysterious girl things, and O’Connor took a walk along the Strip. It was the middle of the week, and the middle of the morning, but there was still plenty of action: packs of tourists with their cameras, tour buses with loudspeakers rolling along the road, people dressed up like they were ready to party, or like they were still partying from the night before. O’Connor liked Vegas—the lights, the excitement—but in small doses. It could get overwhelming after a while. He didn’t gamble, because who knew how deep that rabbit hole went.
He walked along and looked at the casino lights and thought about what he was going to do after the tour was over. They only had a couple more weeks on the road, and then he was free until they headed to Europe in mid-October. He would probably go to Iowa for a week and visit his parents, and then maybe fly to New York to see his youngest brother, but other than that, he wasn’t sure what he would do. He still owned a condo in Chicago, but he was on the road so much that it didn’t feel much like home anymore. He had no plans, no obligations, nothing tying him down, and he had enough money to life modestly for the rest of his life, or outrageously for a handful of years. So he could go anywhere in the world. He could ride elephants. He could learn to scuba dive.
Maybe he could go to L.A. and spend some time with Leah.
So there it was: he was making plans to see her again. It wasn’t just a tour thing. Maybe they would get sick of each other after a month, but maybe they wouldn’t; and either way, he wanted to find out. He didn’t want her to get on a plane at the end of the tour and disappear from his life.
It was strange to have something to look forward to again. He’d spent so many months bracing for some Andrew-related calamity that he’d forgotten the simple joy of anticipating a good event.
And Leah was good. The best.
Their show went well that night. They were all a little tense after the disaster in Salt Lake City, but the crowd in Vegas was on fire, screaming the entire time like they couldn’t get enough. The energy was through the roof, and partway through the second song O’Connor decided there was nothing to worry about. It would be a good night.
The atmosphere in the dressing room
afterward was celebratory. O’Connor went to take a shower as soon as he left the stage, and by the time he made it back to the dressing room, everyone was drinking and eating pizza and yelling excitedly about how awesome the show had been.
“The man of the hour!” Andrew hollered when O’Connor came into the room.
He froze beside the buffet table, caught in the act of lifting the lid of a pizza box. “What did I do?”
“He’s been saying that to everyone,” James said. “I would ignore it.”
“Right,” O’Connor said. Andrew’s ritual post-show exuberance. He lifted a slice from the box and drifted over toward where Leah was standing and talking with Rinna, both of them with beer bottles in their hands.
He was halfway across the room when Rushani came in from the hallway, grinning and holding a piece of paper. She waved her arms above her head, the paper flapping, and shouted, “I have good news!”
Everyone quieted down and looked at her. James said, “Don’t keep us in suspense.”
She cleared her throat and said, “I just got off the phone with Hakeem. The album has just been certified triple platinum.”
Nobody reacted for a long, silent second. Then James let out an ear-piercing girly shriek, caught Rushani up in his arms, and spun her around while she squealed and kicked her feet. “Vegas, baby!” James yelled. “We’re going to Vegas!”
“We’re already in Vegas, dumbass,” Andrew said, grinning, and he raised his beer bottle in a toast. “To the Saving Graces!”
It was a good night.
* * *
Albuquerque was dry and brown, and the mountains on the horizon made a scalloped brown border with the sky. Leah had been in Albuquerque once before, and she remembered it being greener. James looked at the weather report and said it hadn’t rained much lately. But the desert had a sparse beauty that was comforting in its familiarity: it looked like L.A., or at least more like L.A. than most other places they had been since leaving California.
She hadn’t slept well the night before—bad dreams that she couldn’t quite remember—so she went back to the bus after soundcheck to take a nap. Her alarm went off a couple of hours later, and she rolled out of her bunk, groggy, and dressed in the clothes she was going to wear for that night’s show, and went into the bathroom to splash some water on her face. Her left cheek was creased from her pillow. She patted her face a few times, waking herself up. Then she left the bus and went into the arena.
The dressing room was in turmoil. Rushani approached her, face pinched with worry, and said, “Have you seen Andrew?”
Leah shook her head. “Not since soundcheck. Why?”
“We can’t find him,” Rushani said. “The food’s here for dinner, and he isn’t answering my texts.”
“Sorry,” Leah said. And then she remembered standing in the bathroom on the bus and seeing the door to the rear lounge open just a crack, with yellow light shining through. She had a good feeling where he was.
She didn’t say anything about it to Rushani, because she didn’t want to get hopes up in case she was wrong. She left the dressing room and went back to the bus, and walked down the corridor to the back lounge. The light was still on. The door was still cracked open. She stopped at the threshold and peeked inside.
And there he was, lying on his back on the couch, smoking a cigarette and staring blankly at the ceiling.
She eased the door open. It creaked on its hinges, and he looked over sharply, a frown creasing his face.
“Everyone’s looking for you,” Leah said.
He looked back at the ceiling and blew out a cloud of smoke. “I don’t give a fuck.”
He was so angry—and why? What did he have to be angry about? His life seemed pretty great. But Corey had taught her that that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what someone’s life looked like from the outside. You could be the richest person in the world, the luckiest, the most beautiful, and still be miserable. So she said, “Dinner’s here. Rushani wants to know if you’re going to come eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said, “and Rushani’s a nosy bitch.”
Leah frowned at him. Misery she understood, but there was no reason for him to say that about Rushani, who was clearly devoted to him. “Rushani is the only person on this tour who still gives a damn about you.”
She watched as his face crumpled, and for a moment she was afraid he would start crying. But he drew in a breath and said, “I’ve gotten good at burning all my bridges.”
“So stop,” Leah said. “They all want to forgive you. They miss you. They want to help you—”
A misstep; she saw that immediately. Andrew scowled at the ceiling and took another drag from his cigarette. “I don’t need any fucking help.”
Okay. She would have to tread carefully. Corey had been the same way: incredibly touchy, incredibly quick to take offense. “Why don’t you come eat? Rushani ordered pizza.”
“She always orders pizza.”
Leah forged ahead. “And we’ll have another good show tonight. We had a good show last night, so—”
“I’m not doing it,” Andrew said.
It, okay. “You mean the pizza? I’m sure we can find something else for you to eat if—”
“No, not the fucking pizza,” he said, impatient. “The show. I’m not doing it. Tell Rushani to cancel the show.”
Leah was stunned, although maybe she shouldn’t have been. She hadn’t expected Andrew to outright sabotage the tour. But she was ready for this: she knew just what to do. She’d spent a year in training with Corey. She went into the room and closed the door behind her, and took a seat on the couch near Andrew’s head. He made a face and scooted down the couch away from her. Good. She wanted him to be a little uncomfortable.
They sat in silence. Andrew smoked his cigarette. Leah waited. Finally he snarled, “Aren’t you going to try to talk me out of it?”
She shrugged. “It’s your decision. You’re an adult. I’m not going to tell you what to do.”
He sat up and stabbed an accusing finger in her direction. “You’re playing mind games. You’re trying to trick me.”
Well, of course she was. “Why would I do that?”
“To get me to change my mind,” he said. “To get me to go on stage. That’s all anyone cares about. It’s like I’m a trained animal. Be a good boy, keep quiet and do your part, keep making money for the label, and nobody fucking cares how I—that I’m—”
“That’s not true,” Leah said. “They care a lot. They worry about you all the time. I just don’t think they know what to do.”
His shoulders slumped. He bent down and stubbed out his cigarette on the side of his shoe, a move that would have looked cool if it weren’t so thoughtless and automatic. He smoked too much. He was too thin, Leah noticed, examining him closely. She already knew he didn’t sleep enough. He was well on the way to a full-fledged breakdown. But what could she do? He was right, to an extent: as long as he kept going on stage every evening, nobody would take drastic measures to get him to shape up. And she wasn’t even in the band. She was just a bystander.
But she was the only one who was here with him now, and maybe she could do a little bit of good.
She said, “What do you want them to do?”
He looked down at his hands on his lap, the fingers curled loosely upward. “I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything to do.”
“You seem really unhappy,” Leah said, as gently as she could.
He nodded tightly, his chin dipping down.
“The tour is only two more weeks,” Leah said. “And then you’re done.”
He laughed, a harsh and bitter sound. “I won’t ever be done. Everyone always wants more. The next album, the next show.”
He had chosen this life, and it was making him rich, but Leah wasn’t going to say that. “It’s because you’re so talented. You have a gift. The fans love you. The band is so successful, and a lot of that’s because of you. And you must love it, right? Nobody
starts a band if they don’t love music.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I used to love it. Now…” He spread his hands.
He was too depressed to feel anything. God. He needed help, actual help, not Leah’s attempts at pep-talking. But there was no one else. “We’ll go eat some pizza, and then we’ll put on a kickass show, and then we’ll see how you’re feeling tomorrow.”
“You’re good at this,” he said. “You’ve had practice, huh?”
She nodded. “My old band—you were right, of course. About the lead singer. He was really—we had a bad year, before the end. I spent a lot of time convincing him to keep going.” The memories didn’t sting the way they used to. Telling O’Connor about it had released some internal pressure in her, cleansed those old wounds. It was a sad thing, a heartache, but she wasn’t afraid to talk about it anymore.
“So now you’re working your magic on me,” he said. “Okay.” He straightened up and raked his hair out of his eyes, knotted it up into a bun with the swiftness of long practice. He looked at her, his gaze clear and direct, probing. “Why do you care what I do?”
“Because I love making music,” Leah said, deciding to be honest. “I love being on stage. I care about it more than I care about anything else in life. And I also hate to see anyone suffer as much as you are.”
He nodded. “Good. Straightforward selfishness mixed with human empathy. I can live with that.” He stood up. “Let’s go eat some of Rushani’s pizza.”
Was it that easy? Leah scrambled to follow him. They went to the dressing room, and Andrew told Rushani that he had fallen asleep and Leah had kindly woken him up. He was all smiles, really putting on the dog, and Leah watched him and knew that this was only the beginning.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They drove overnight to Denver, and played another good show there the next evening. That night they were in a hotel. They didn’t check in until late, after the show was over and Rushani was confident there weren’t going to be any unexpected crises with load-out. Leah kept giving him sly looks while they waited in the dressing room, drinking beer and shooting the shit. James was planning a trip to Antarctica in early September, and O’Connor thought it was pretty cool and genuinely wanted to listen to him talk about his travel arrangements, but he kept getting distracted by the way Leah was mouthing at the rim of her bottle. Succubus. Devil-woman.
