Anyone But You

by Jerica MacMillan

  I walked over to the cluster of men conferring in a doorway and asked, “Chad?”

  A lanky, sandy-haired man in dark jeans and a black T-shirt looked me up and down. “You’re the new assistant?”

  At my nod, he took my suitcase to a room full of equipment, assuring me it would be waiting for me after the show. “You’re late. They need water and snacks,” he said, and pointed me to Marcus’s dressing room.

  Thus began my miserable failure of a first night. I found water and snacks in the greenroom, so I grabbed one of each for each dressing room and put them inside, only to find out after a strange man tried to devour me that I hadn’t provided enough hydration or nourishment.

  Maybe that’s why he looked like he wanted to eat me instead.

  I force back the deranged cackle that wants to escape at the thought. At least I have today to talk to Blaire and figure out what I need to do. With no tablet to help me keep on schedule, I was flying blind, relying on Chad—who I found out last night is the tour manager—and Marcus to keep me from ruining everything.

  Mostly, though, it seems like my job is to be their babysitter.

  Who knew four grown men would need a babysitter?

  Although … my boss at my last job needed a babysitter too. Officially I was an administrative assistant, but I had to update his calendar and keep him on schedule. Pick up his dry cleaning. Water his plants. Tidy his office.

  Okay, more maid than babysitter.

  Am I going to be responsible for these guys’ dry cleaning too?

  I hadn’t thought to ask that.

  All they’d said during the interview was that I’m responsible for keeping track of their schedule and their meal plan while we’re traveling.

  I was assured I’d have a tablet with all the information I needed at my fingertips.

  But there was some kind of glitch—no assistant to order the tablet for the new assistant, actually—so I didn’t have any of that information yet.

  Marcus had supplied me with printed copies of everything to last me until my tablet arrives tonight. The tablet that I had to order for myself, because apparently my job includes ordering devices for everyone as well.

  Good to know.

  Chapter Five

  Mason

  I arrive at the arena outside of Boston earlier than normal considering this is our second day here and we did our sound check yesterday. The first day in a new city is always the busiest, but day two has the lightest schedule when we’re in a city for several days. Our first show was last night to the first of five sold-out crowds.

  We don’t have a sound check today, and as far as I can tell, I’m the only one who’s been summoned five hours before our usual call time.

  I’m dragging ass, though, because I didn’t go to sleep till around five AM, and I woke up to banging on my door at eleven, followed by the cold fury of our new assistant letting herself in and ordering me to get up, get dressed, and get to the arena.

  Marcus greets me, his jaw clenched, arms crossed, the greenroom in disarray around him, though it looks like someone’s started cleaning up the worst of the leftover trash from last night.

  Scrubbing a hand over my face and shoving my hair off my forehead, I greet him with a lift of my chin. “Hey, man. What’s up?”

  His jaw flexes again, and he throws his hands wide. “What the fuck, Mason?”

  I blink at him dully, still feeling the effects of last night’s partying. “You’re going to have to be more specific, Marcus.”

  “You had a party in the greenroom last night.” He says it like this is news to me.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Bending, he scoops a newspaper off the coffee table, then crosses to me and slams it into my chest. I react on instinct, catching it against me with one hand before I pull it away so I can see what it says, already knowing it’s not going to be good if this is Marcus’s reaction. It’s not a newspaper. It’s a garden-variety tabloid, complete with grainy pictures of me on the cover. Looking closer, I see they’ve blurred out the face of the woman on her knees in front of me—how kind of them—but my flexing torso and O-face are there in all their digitally enhanced glory.

  Is that really what I look like when I’m coming?

  Huh.

  “Look, Mase, I know you’re not happy that Blaire’s gone.” My jaw clenches at the conciliatory tone he’s forcing into his voice, but he continues before I can say anything. “I know you’re not happy we replaced her with someone new. But she left, man. She’s in love with someone else. We need an assistant, and it’s time for you to move on.”

  I shake the paper at him. “Pretty sure I’m moving on just fine.”

  Crossing his arms again, he shakes his head like he’s a disappointed big brother. Which is extra ridiculous, since I’m six months older than he is, but whatever. “Look, you getting drunk all the time and fucking everyone was fine when we were on break. At least you gave our PR team something to do.” He gives a weak chuckle at his lame attempt at a joke. “But we’re back on tour now. You can’t show up to venues hungover and smelling like booze. And you can’t throw raging parties in the greenroom and leave all this shit for everyone else to clean up.”

  “Oh? I thought we were rock stars. Isn’t that part of the deal? Wild parties, throwing things out of hotel room windows, women, booze, the works? I mean, I get that you’re with Kendra and everyone else is married or shacked up and that’s great and all, but why do I gotta be a monk just ‘cause the rest of you wanna act like choir boys?”

  “This isn’t how we do things.” Marcus is back to clenching his jaw. His attempt at pretending to be calm and understanding is failing, and he’s getting pissed again.

  I should probably care—Marcus and I have been friends for years. We lived next door to each other in the dorms freshman year at Berklee, and when I walked in on him and Danny jamming in his room one night and started tapping out a beat on the various objects on his desk with a pen and pencil, Cataclysm was born. We added a pianist a week later, and the rest is history. For whatever reason Gavin decided not to come with us when a label started showing interest and we replaced him with Aaron, but …

  We’ve been together since we were eighteen and nineteen years old. Seven years. We’ve been through lots of shit—terrible venues, dangerous stage setups, building a following, finding decent representation that didn’t want to screw us over, the shock and adjustment of life on tour, the high of platinum records and sell-out arena shows. He deserves more from me than this bullshit douchebag routine I’m giving him.

  But I deserve more than the condescending older brother schtick he’s giving me.

  I’m not some childish, irresponsible fuckup.

  I spread my arms. “What do you want me to say? The party ran later than expected and the janitorial staff had already gone home by the time we were done. I figured it’d be better here than in my suite, for lots and lots of reasons.” I don’t bring girls to my suite. It’s too risky. The other band members and their families are on the same floor, and if I’m too drunk to notice someone’s a budding stalker, giving them access to where we’re located would be bad for everyone. Not to mention the noise issue, and when half our band has kids, me limiting my recreational activities to the greenroom and my dressing room is my way of trying to be respectful. And now I’m getting my ass chewed for it.

  Marcus just shakes his head, like he’s frustrated, and I’m the problem here. “No more parties in the greenroom, got it?”

  “Yes, sir.” I give him a sharp salute with my free hand.

  He gives me a disgusted look in return.

  “Am I dismissed? I’d like to get in a nap before call time. I assume you’ll have Veronica come and wake me up again? I noticed you gave her a key to my room. Am I the only one, or does she get to barge in on all of you?”

  Marcus’s mouth pinches into a hard line, a look I echo unintentionally, anger and frustration simmering in my guts. He’s pissed? Well, so am I.

 
“Cut the crap, Mason. Her name’s Viola, and you’ve heard it enough times that you should know it by now.” He’s right, but I won’t admit it. I’ve been deliberately calling her the wrong name since we left LA. It’s the only thing that provokes any kind of reaction from her. The rest of the time, I’m reduced to bland looks and cool politeness. She’s friendly and warm with everyone else. But she looks at me like I’m less than nothing.

  I hate it.

  It pisses me off.

  She wants to make me feel like I’m not worth knowing? Two can play at that game.

  And like the childish asshole I’ve become lately, I do whatever I can to put a crack in that calm facade. So far, all I’ve got is calling her the wrong name. I’ve even resorted to Googling names that start with V so I can use a new one every time.

  “Whatever, Marcus.” I turn to leave, tired of this conversation. Just tired in general. I need to get back to my suite, take some ibuprofen, drink a bunch of water, and sleep until it’s time to come back. “I’ll take your suggestion under advisement.”

  “It’s not a suggestion,” he snaps.

  I glance back over my shoulder. “Oh? You’re ordering me around now? When did you become the dictator?”

  He huffs out a sigh. “Since you became a manwhore, and I’ve spent the last few months telling the PR team how to clean up the media nightmares you keep creating. Even with them killing as many stories as possible, you still show up in gossip sites and tabloids, pictures of you with your pants down literally everywhere. Is that really what you want? That’s the image you want to create?”

  My jaw clenches as I fight down my anger, reminding myself that Marcus doesn’t know how often I got that kind of lecture from my dad. My dad who cut me off just before my nineteenth birthday for not living up to his impossible standards. Not being exactly who and what he wanted me to be. Except dear old Dad’s lectures always invoked his god. “This is really what you want from your life?” he’d ask. “You think this is what God wants?” On more than one occasion I had to stop myself from telling him that it was fascinating how often what god wanted and what Dad wanted were the same thing.

  But I pull myself out of the emotional flashback and focus on the present, defense and deflection my only tools right now. “Danny has two accidental kids, and I’m the manwhore?”

  “Danny has a wife and a family and doesn’t party in the greenroom till after four in the morning,” Marcus responds in a tired voice. “Danny doesn’t make the janitorial staff so disgusted that they call Chad, who calls Viola, who passes the phone to me, because I was on the way to do an early morning radio show. You’re welcome, by the way, for handling all of those duties and not dragging you along since you’re the only other one without kids.”

  Crossing my arms, I turn back to face him, snorting at the idea of him dragging me to a radio show interview. “You wouldn’t even try. The PR team would never let you.” I gesture at the tabloid I dropped on the floor. “And that’s why. No one wants me facing questions about that. Seems like I’m doing a pretty good job of getting what I want, don’t you think?”

  With that parting shot, I spin on my heel and stalk off, prepared to ignore Marcus if he calls after me. But he doesn’t bother.

  Because we both know I’m not worth the effort.

  Chapter Six

  Viola

  With a deep breath, I brace myself to knock on Mason’s door again. I had to roust him out of bed at lunchtime to get him to go see Marcus.

  I have to fight down the blush at the various memories flitting through my head like a movie montage—shirtless Mason on stage at the first concert in LA and again at the concert last night. The picture of Mason with his shirt pulled up, eyes hooded, lips parted as he stares down at the woman kneeling in front of him in the picture in the tabloid. That picture is everywhere. And since I followed Blaire’s advice about setting up Google alerts for the band, each of the guys’ names, and the names of their significant others and children, I’ve seen that picture more times than I care to count. I lost track somewhere north of twenty.

  But the worst, most vivid, most disturbing memory to my mental health was when I barged into his room and pulled the sheets off him, revealing his naked ass. It’s firm and tight, flexing in the most mesmerizing fashion when he lifted up to see who’d dared disturb his slumber.

  I quickly averted my eyes when he climbed out of bed, shamelessly nude and grumbling about being woken up too damn early.

  I had to bite my lip and stifle a snort at that assertion. I hadn’t had the luxury of sleeping in till noon in years. And in fact, I’d been up since about the time Mason had apparently crawled back to the hotel and climbed into bed.

  Whatever. His sleeping habits aren’t really my problem. Marcus told me to get him up and in a car to the venue, so that was what I did.

  And now I’m here to repeat that process, only this time it’s four forty-five, and I’m hoping he’ll just answer the door when I knock and that I won’t have to barge in and see him naked again.

  I mean … I wouldn’t object to seeing him naked again in general. But like … if he weren’t a jerk to me. And wanted me there. And he clearly doesn’t like me or want me around at all.

  He constantly calls me by the wrong name—on purpose. I overheard him and Marcus talking in the greenroom this afternoon. It would’ve been hard not to, unless I’d been on the other side of the building instead of just down the hall. They were practically shouting, and the door was open, and I was waiting in Marcus’s dressing room like he told me to, going over my checklist of things to get ready for the show tonight, double- and triple-checking everything, because while last night went better than the concert in LA, I still feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water.

  While this isn’t exactly my dream job—I had no idea how exhausting it was until I started—it’s miles above being the administrative assistant at an insurance office.

  Except for this part. No one at my old job leered at my ass, groped me on my first day while kissing me like we were long lost lovers, or continually called me by the wrong name.

  In fact, I’ve never had anyone be so dismissive of my name before. Ever. Usually I get comments about how unusual it is, people mistaking it for the instrument that’s spelled the same but pronounced differently, and questions about how I ended up with a name like Viola. My parents are Shakespeare scholars, though, and while they named my older brother very obviously after The Bard, the story is that they argued long and hard about which female character to name me after. Viola won out, for not dying and being the heroine of my mom’s favorite play, Twelfth Night.

  And it’s not like I want to be around Mason. He’s rude and surly and … and rude. Even if he is absurdly attractive. I can admire his physical beauty and still not want to hear him speak. Thinking about saying, “You’re so pretty, shhhh,” the next time he says something rude to me makes me giggle.

  I’m stalling, though, and I need to get on with it. Time’s a-wastin’, and everyone will be waiting for us, especially if Mason is naked and has to get dressed.

  Straightening my spine, I knock firmly on his door, gratified to hear a gruff, “What?” through the door.

  I take that as an invitation to enter, though I’m still crossing my fingers that he’s dressed. And showered. This morning on the way to the arena, he’d filled the cab of the SUV with the smell of leftover alcohol and second hand smoke of more than one variety. I know pot is legal now in a lot of places, including California and Massachusetts, but my inner rule-follower squirms when confronted with people using it. My parents would probably still freak out if I ever used any kind of recreational drugs and they found out about it. They have the occasional glass of wine, but only on special occasions, and as far as I know, they’ve never experimented with drugs.

  It was drummed into Will and me from a young age that drug use would not be tolerated in our house, and alcohol was unacceptable until we were twenty-one.

  Will
didn’t adhere to that last rule so much, though he waited till he was a senior in high school to have his first drink—at least as far as I know. But I was too terrified of the consequences to even think about trying it.

  That’s basically been my motto my whole life—too terrified of the consequences to think about breaking the rules.

  And where did that get me? Stuck in a boring job and hating life.

  Taking this job for Cataclysm is the closest thing to rebelling I’ve ever done. Which is really kind of sad, I’ll admit.

  Though I suppose my rule-follower ways might serve me well in this role of making sure people get where they’re going on time.

  Fishing the key card out of my bag—because when I ordered myself the tablet, I also got a messenger bag to carry everything. Marcus told me Blaire always had one and that I could charge it on the same card as the tablet, no problem. So I did. And it has these convenient little slots for cards that I use to store the keys to the guys’ rooms. I feel awkward even having them, but when Chad handed them over, he assured me it was normal, that the guys would expect it, and that I need them to do my job.

  How else will I be able to get something they forgot at the hotel if I don’t have access to their rooms?

  And how else can I drag a naked Mason out of bed in the middle of the day?

  The light blinks green when I wave the card in front of the reader, but the door only opens an inch. “Mason,” I call into the opening. “It’s time to go to the arena. Everyone’s waiting.”

  His smirk appears in the crack, and then the door shuts in my face.

  I step back, frowning, my arms crossing of their own accord. Of course he shut the door in my face. He’s a jerk. At least to me.

  A second later, the door opens, and his gaze drags down and up my body, the smirk never leaving his face.

  Gritting my teeth, I do my best to keep my voice and expression pleasant. “Are you ready? It’s time to go.”