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Not giving him a chance to respond, I end the call. I drag off the gray tee I’d thrown on earlier and crash face-down on my bed. I drag the pillow under my arms and rest my cheek on the fabric, my eyes toward the wall with Charlie on the other side.
Her words from earlier replay in my head. Asking me to act like she’s not here. I groan and turn my head the other way, but it does little to alter my track of thinking.
How in the ever loving fuck am I supposed to act like she’s not here. Not in my life again.
Screw it.
I push off the bed and swipe a hand over my face as I march my ass back into the hallway, not stopping when I reach her door. When I let myself in, her eyes dart up from her phone. I shove mine at her.
“Number?”
She eyes me for a second, her gaze slipping over the tattoos on my chest, torso, and biceps, and then to the device in my hand. She takes it from me. “You should really stop barging in here. What happens when I’m naked?”
She says it as a joke, but my dick wakes up at the thought. Bad, bad, dick.
“We’d have interesting family dinners from then on,” I reply, grabbing my phone back from her. I start the text as I’m walking out, hitting send on the message by the time I return to my bed.
* * *
Show tonight at 9. Your prissy ass coming?
* * *
I hear a laugh through the wall, and I can’t help but smile.
My eyes drop to my phone when she replies.
* * *
Depends, does the man bun have to come with us?
* * *
Biting at my lip rings, I toss my phone on the bed beside me and cross my arms behind my head, a smile still lingering when I close my eyes.
Brana kills it, unsurprisingly. He looks like he got a full eight hours after our chat this morning, no dark circles, and he’s not jittery. Just the smooth voice and boy-next-door smile chicks trample each other over.
After I clear him out of the bar, placing him in a car myself to make sure he doesn’t stumble upon any distractions along the way, I push through the curtained doorway, separating the backstage area from the rest of the space.
The bar used to be a jazz place back in the day, and I swear you can feel the music from then when all that’s left is the hum of voices after a performance wraps up. Someone from the back kicks on background music, and the air loses the ghosts by the time I reach the only chick in here who caught my attention when I’d sneak a look from backstage.
After grabbing a beer from the bar, I move through the crowd until I reach her. She’s playing with the straw in her mixed drink and misses me coming until I slide into the booth across from her. Her eyes pop up, and I’m eighteen. A poor puppy lost in a sea of amber.
“Hi,” she says. “He’s incredible.”
I nod. “And a complete douche.”
“Aren’t all musicians?” she snaps back.
After a sip of my beer, I lick my lips and nod again. “Every single one.”
She laughs and looks around the place, really taking it in. “A little nicer than the barn you and Michael used to play in.”
“You hear from Archer?” I ask, not so subtly changing the subject from the past.
Her attention returns to me after a second. “Yeah, he got in safe. Full day of free services provided.”
The conversation trickles off after that, a mention here or there about a song that plays. Even just sitting here feels better with her though, and I realize for the first time how much I missed this. Just being with her and not feeling the pressure to fill the empty spaces with something meaningless.
