Page 20 of Ravaged For You

“Asshole,” he snaps back as he knees my stomach.

It’s play fighting, something we members of Ravaged like to do. It’s what happens when you get four testosterone-fueled young men in the same band together. We gotta let off our aggression somehow.

Caspian quickly breaks us up, as he usually does. I feel his firm hand pull me away from Bishop. There’s no real damage done.

“Everyone’s watching,” Caspian growls to us, keeping his voice down. That’s a lot of words coming from him, basically a full disciplinary lecture. I raise my hands in mock surrender and sit back in my cheap-ass office chair.

Everyone is watching. Well, except for Lucas who has his head in his hands in despair. Drake tuts at Bishop and me. We smirk back.

I spot the tea-spilling girl across the room. She’s staring at me and awkwardly drops eye contact when I match hers. I shoot her a cheeky grin, just to make her heart beat even more. She’s absolutely petrified, the poor girl.

She’s kinda cute in a way, though clearly some kind of nerd. I can read her like a book. She’s just a strait-laced geek who’s never seen such a sexy guy like me before.

Oh, I love playing games with girls like these.

The head honcho of the marketing agency coughs loudly to start the meeting. I think he said his name was Winston.

Like I said, I don’t really care.

“The purpose of getting you all here today is to show you what our agency has to offer…”

He doesn’t get very far into his little spiel before Drake interrupts him.

“We – and I’m going to be frank, Winston – don’t care about any of that corporate bullshit. We’re artists. Emotional beings who don’t have time for money or numbers. All we care about is one thing at the moment. One single target. That’s to beat Tainted Lives.”

“Tainted Lives? What’s that?” Winston asks, clueless.

I roll my eyes and stifle a yawn. The man wants us as his clients but hasn’t read up about our closest rival? That’s already a point deducted from our analysis of him. There are plenty of other marketing firms we can go and meet. Anyone in this sorry-ass town would be over the moon to represent us.

“They are another rockband,” the tea girl squeaks up to her boss. “Ravaged are in direct competition with them.”

Winston stares at her for a fleeting moment, then turns back to us. He’s clearly annoyed she knows more about us than him.

“For a year, we’ve worked on our latest album, Staying At Her Place,” Drake continues. “We announce it’s going to release on a certain day, and then Tainted Lives announce their own album is releasing on the same day. Just to spite us. Basically, they’re assholes, Winston, and we’ll very much like to beat them at their own game. You’re the marketing company; what can we do to make sure our album crushes theirs on release day?”

Winston strokes his chin, thinking. “We’ll look into it,” he says. “Actually, I’m going to suggest Maddie to take a closer analysis, seeing as she seems to know everything about Ravaged…”

The tea girl perks up. She blinks, an even more shocked expression on her face now.

“Sorry?”

She likes to apologize, doesn’t she? The pretty thing.

“You can make a report, to be delivered to Ravaged, about what we can do to help them beat Tainted Lives.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“What do you think?” Winston asks us.

Lucas nods. “We’ll like to see what you can do and your plan. We’ll be speaking to other firms and seeing their proposals too. How about we put a time limit on this, seeing as we want to move fast?”

What am I even doing here? This is such a fucking waste of time. Lucas can handle all this paperwork and admin. I should be out there with my bass…

Although playing with tea girl has been a hell of a lot of fun…

“What are you proposing?”

“Tomorrow?” Lucas suggests.