“You want to check it? It feels off to me.”
He shrugs then goes to the kit, taking his seat. He pulls the drumsticks from the bucket on the side that holds them all. He always has a bucket full because he needs so many and goesthrough so many in a show. Aliko breaks them often—the crowd loves it because they get the pieces.
Aliko gets settled then does a quick beat on the drums to test them all out.
“Feels fine.”
“Are you sure? I think the tension on that second snare is a little tight.”
He hits it a few times, playing a quick beat—and snapping a drumstick. I pull one from my pocket and hand it over quickly. He takes it from my hand, our fingers brushing. I hold his gaze, but he quickly looks away and plays again.
“Nope. Feels fine.” He looks over at me, and our eyes meet again.
They’re exactly the same as when he’s in his human form, and something about the way he’s looking at me right this second reminds of how he had my dick in his mouth just a few hours ago. But it’s clear that we’re not talking about that.
“Cool.” I run my hand through my hair and look away. “So, uh… everything is good?” I ask.
“Sounds good to me. As usual.”
Okay, so we’re definitely pretending nothing happened last night. This feels fully professional, like maybe he forgot what happened.
How drunk was he last night? He couldn’t have still been drunk this morning. He remembers what we did. He has to. So then that just means he didn’t care. That it didn’t actually mean anything. Nothing more than a hookup anyway.
I can handle that. I can totally handle that. Done it before and I’ll probably do it again.
“All right, well, have a good show,” I say as I take a few backward steps, then turn and leave the stage.
I feel his gaze on me until I’m around the curtain, but I ignore it because that’s what I should do.
He’s right.
We should act like nothing happened. I said it myself this morning that I didn’t want anyone to think anything was weird between us, so why am I offended now that he’s doing the same thing?
“Fucking stupid,” I mutter to myself.
“Hey, you going to eat?”
I turn toward the voice, recognizing it immediately, and knowing he isn’t going to leave me alone. Not that it’s a problem. He’s my closest friend on the tour.
Cody hurries to catch up to me.
“I, uh…” Hadn’t thought of eating now, but sure. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Cool, me too,” he says, coming up to my side.
Cody and I got hired at the same time. He’s the guy in charge of running all the wires and making sure everything is plugged in the right way, attached to all the right things, so we don’t have fires or blow fuses. He double checks all of our work and does a bunch of his own checks too. Not only with the instruments and speakers, but with the screens and pyrotechnic stuff that goes off too.
“So, how’s the rock electrician doing today?” I ask as we make our way down the hallways and to the community room.
He huffs a laugh. “Never living that name down.”
“Not a chance.”
The community room smells amazing, the food spread out over two long tables buffet style. Steam rises up from the sides of the lids. One of the crew, Jackson, is filling his plate, while a couple others are sitting at tables, eating and chatting.
Cody and I grab a plate and start piling food on. We drop them at an empty table before heading over to the drink station. There are blenders to make smoothies, bottles of soda,water, electrolyte drinks, energy drinks, coffee drinks… basically everything you could think of.
I grab a water and a cotton candy flavored energy drink.
