Beauty and the Bassist (The Extra Series Book 9)

by Megan Walker

  “I might be. Is that okay?”

  Nothing sounds better. “Definitely. But I can’t promise I won’t grope you a little.”

  Allison laughs. “Go right ahead. I give you pre-consent to grope me. I will probably not wake up, and I can fall asleep in minutes, so . . . sorry about that.”

  I rub my face against her cheek. “It’s okay. I’m just happy to be here. I’m probably going to wake you up with my nightmares, so I’m the one who should be sorry.”

  “Maybe having someone to cuddle with will help.”

  I truly hope she’s right.

  Fourteen

  Shane

  It’s bright where I am, so much so that my eyes can’t adjust to the light. I squint against it, trying and trying to see, but the more I look, the more stars scatter across my vision. I’m cramped in a tight space, and my legs are aching, and my head feels thick, like I’m starting to get high.

  Someone is screaming, outside in the light, and her shadow passes between me and its source so that the light blinks and then intensifies. My hands are slick with something hot and sticky, and I know what it is and where it came from. I can smell blood and burned rubber, and if I crane my head right, I can almost see Kevin pinned by the metal of the roof. He’s not moving. No one is moving. Time seems to have stopped, except for the screaming.

  “Shane!” the woman’s voice screams. “Shane!”

  I blink against the light. There’s a thick, pink fluid splattered over the upside-down dash, but I don’t turn. I can’t turn. I know if I do, he’ll be there, his head bashed in by the roof of the car when it rolled.

  “It’s over,” I hear JT saying. “It’s over, it’s over, it’s all over.”

  The woman’s voice is wailing now. It’s Allison, and she’s crying, and I’m sure that she’s stuck somewhere, too, she’s pinned and scared and bleeding. I find the door handle with my sticky fingers and yank on it, but the light is bright, and I can’t see, and the door won’t open.

  “Shane!”

  I jolt up in bed, my whole body drenched in sweat. I’m shaking, and for a moment I don’t know where I am.

  “Shane.” It’s Allison’s voice again, but she’s not screaming now. She’s next to me, and her arms encircle my waist. She holds on to me as I struggle to breathe. “Shane. It’s okay.”

  It’s not okay. It’s not even close to okay. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I woke you. I told you that you didn’t want me to sleep over.”

  “Um, no,” she says. “I’m glad you’re here. You’ve been doing this alone every night?”

  “Pretty much.” I shake my head, and a tremor runs through me. My body feels cold.

  “Is my being here better or worse?”

  I want to say neither, but my heart is slowing now, and I’m catching my breath. I run a hand through my hair, pushing back beads of sweat. “Better. I mean, the dream was bad, but right now, this is better.”

  Allison pulls me down next to her and wraps her whole body around me. She’s still wearing my shirt, and I bury my face in her shoulder, holding her tight.

  “I’m sorry this is happening,” she says. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  My chest tightens. “No.”

  “Did you get even a little sleep?”

  I look over at the clock. “Yeah. A couple hours, I think.”

  “Did you get some groping in?”

  I laugh. “Yes, I did. You didn’t notice?”

  “Mmmm,” Allison says. “I had really good dreams.”

  “I bet.”

  “I’d share mine with you if I could. Dream Shane is really good in bed.”

  Ha. “Better than real Shane?”

  “Nah,” Allison says. “No one has anything on real Shane.”

  As I come down from the nightmare, I’m becoming more aware of her, of the way she’s wrapped around me. My body is responding to her touch, and I bring my face up to hers and kiss her desperately.

  She moans against my lips, and moments later she’s reaching for another condom. Her touch awakens every sensitive nerve in my body, and then we’re moving together and I’m lost inside her, burrowing into the shelter of her arms. Holding her after, I feel safe and calm for the first time in as long as I can remember. I love her and this and us so deeply and desperately that I don’t know what to do with myself.

  Allison stretches and wraps her arm around my shoulders, resting her head on my chest. “Yeah,” she says. “Really glad you spent the night.”

  “Me, too. Thanks for putting up with me.”

  “Ha. Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  I kiss her gently on the mouth. “Okay, maybe you seem like you’re enjoying yourself a little.”

  “A little.” She pokes me in the side. “Seriously, though, are the dreams about the accident?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Being trapped in the car. We were in there for almost an hour.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “They had to pry the car apart to get us out.”

  “And you thought both your friends were dead the whole time?”

  “Yeah.” I hesitate. I’ve never told anyone this part. “I thought I might be dead, too. I thought maybe that’s what happens when you die. You feel like you’re locked inside your body, and you’re trying to move, and you can’t.”

  “You couldn’t move at all?”

  “Not much. I thought for sure I was dead or paralyzed, but it was just the shock. I heard later that I kept kicking the dash, like I was trying to get out, but at the time it felt like everything was still. Weirdly quiet. Except when people outside started yelling. And the one guy who was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s Shane Beckstrom.’”

  Allison grimaces. “And Kevin was unconscious?”

  “Yeah. He started groaning when they moved him, and that’s how I knew he was alive.”

  “But JT died on impact?”

  I nod. “I saw what happened to his body. Trust me. No one could survive that.”

  Allison holds me tighter, and she doesn’t ask for details, which I appreciate. What she says next surprises me.

  “Where do you think JT is now?”

  I almost tell her I’m pretty sure he’s kicking it on her couch complaining about how he can’t hold a controller and I’m too busy getting laid to play video games to entertain him.

  But I catch myself in time. That’s not what she means.

  “You mean, like, do I believe in God?”

  “Sure,” she says. “Life after death in general.”

  “I used to believe in God,” I say. “Not in any particular religion, but in God and an afterlife.”

  “But not anymore?”

  “No. Not since Kevin killed him.”

  Allison looks incredulous. “Kevin killed God?”

  “Yeah. I wrote this song once about my relationship with him. God, I mean, not Kevin. About feeling like I could never measure up, never please this disapproving absent father figure. When I played it for the band, Kevin was all, ‘That’s not about God. It’s about your dad.’”

  “You think he was right?”

  “Hell yes, he was. So I tore up the lyrics and decided that nothing about my belief in God had anything to do with actual spirituality. It was just me projecting deity onto my father’s shit, and that wasn’t helping anybody. So that’s when Kevin killed God.”

  “I believe in God,” Allison says. “I may not be the best Catholic around, and I don’t go to church as often as my parents would like, but I find God there.”

  “At church?” I wouldn’t have expected that about her; she seems too practical to bother with religion. But then, she’s also clearly got layers.

  “Yeah. Have you ever been?”

  “Not to a Catholic church. Kevin’s mom dragged me to her Baptist church a coup
le times. The only part I liked was the band.”

  “The music is different at mass, but I like it. My family is pretty hardcore about it, actually. One of my brothers is thinking about becoming a priest.”

  “Wow,” I say. “That’s intense.”

  “Yeah. I’m less intense about it, but I like the ritual of the service. I prefer it in Latin, actually, because then it’s just the ritual. It’s one of the places I feel like I find God.”

  I shake my head. “I’d like to believe again. It would be nice to think that JT won’t just disappear. That his spirit will be up there hitting on angels and trying to look up the Virgin Mary’s skirt.”

  Allison laughs. “Yes. I’m sure that’s exactly where he is.”

  I’m not, but it doesn’t bother me like it probably should. It doesn’t make a difference if I believe or not. Either an afterlife exists, or it doesn’t. Wishing won’t make it so, and refusing to hope in it won’t make it disappear.

  I can’t bring myself to believe that I have that kind of power.

  Fifteen

  Allison

  I should be exhausted, sitting here in the auditorium, watching the choreographer work with the girls on one of the dance numbers. Not just because of waking up to Shane’s nightmare—which I can tell he’s still self-conscious about, even though I was happy I was able to be there for him. But also with how late we stayed up before that, talking and laughing and holding each other. How early we were both up this morning, like we instinctively wanted as few hours away from each other, even just in sleep, as possible.

  And don’t even get me started on the sheer breathtaking physicality of making love with him, over and over and over. Sex that is more all-consuming, more emotionally fulfilling, than it’s ever been before. Not to mention earth-shattering—no wonder I could barely keep my hands off him.

  After all that, I should be exhausted, but I’m not. I’m wide awake, smiling, riding this giddy high.

  The doors to the auditorium open, and Shane walks in wearing his sunglasses and holding two to-go cups of coffee. He grins over at me, and now I want to be riding something else this morning.

  Again.

  “Hey,” he says, taking a seat next to me.

  I make a big show of looking at the time on my phone. “Did this thing break? Because I swear it’s telling me that you’re only fifteen minutes late.”

  He hands me one of the coffees. “Might have actually been on time if I didn’t stop for these.”

  I breathe it in; I might not need the caffeine as much as I’d have thought this morning, but it smells heavenly. “Totally worth it.”

  We catch each other’s eyes—or as much as I can see through his sunglasses—and I think he might be having as much trouble holding back a dopey smile today as I am.

  “And it’s all good,” I continue, “because their dance practice is running a little long.”

  “That’s not keeping Carlyle from looking like he wants to kill me.” Shane tips his head toward where Carlyle is, in fact, glaring over here.

  “Well, if he was the one you were bringing post-sex coffee to, he might not be so mad,” I say, nudging him.

  “I’ll keep that in mind for tomorrow.”

  I stifle a laugh, and Carlyle glares harder at us, even though I’m sure he can’t hear us over the girl-power pop song and the barked orders of the choreographer.

  We drink our coffees and hold hands, and it feels so simple and right just sitting like this with him, so purely happy. It feels like . . .

  I stop myself before I can put any more words to it. There’s no need to examine this too thoroughly, not so soon. I told him I’m not going anywhere, and I mean it. But there’s a twinge of fear, quiet this morning but still there, that this is too good, too right.

  And Shane and I both know how quickly things can change, how life is never entirely in our control.

  I grip Shane’s hand tighter, and as if he can read my mind, he grips mine back.

  We sit and watch the girls move in tandem—or try to do so, anyway—around the stage. They’re in yoga pants and sports bras rather than their dresses right now, but they are in the heels they’ll be wearing the night of the pageant. They’re also wearing these big flower headdresses with large wire-enforced orange poppy petals, which on pageant night they will pair with glittering green high-slitted gowns, like they’re part of an adult-themed Anne Geddes calendar.

  I’ve worked with the Miss California Poppy pageant for years now, and participated in it for just as many, but this is easily the most literal the theme has ever been taken.

  “So,” Shane says after a moment. “Sexy flowers? Is that what this is supposed to be?”

  “Apparently.” I take a drink of my coffee.

  “What would the internet call those? FILFs?”

  I nearly choke on my coffee with a sudden laugh, and Shane grins at me, clearly very pleased with himself.

  “Well, the joke’s on you,” I say. “Because the script requires you to call them a ‘Bouquet of Beauty.’”

  “Good god,” Shane says with a groan. “That’s what that line was referring to?”

  Now I’m the one grinning, even knowing there’s a more than decent chance this line will never actually be spoken. Perhaps because of that.

  The girls seem to be doing pretty well at picking up the admittedly-uncomplicated moves, but then Becky cuts Gwen off mid-sashay, which causes Gwen to stop and Yvonne—who is beaming out at the audience—to plow right into her, nearly toppling them both over.

  I cringe.

  Gwen rounds on Becky. “You did that on purpose, you—”

  “Time to move on!” Carlyle wisely announces. Perhaps he’s also decided that if Shane is actually here, he’s going to get some real practice out of him. “Contestant intros in five!”

  There’s a scramble from the stage as girls flock to the dressing room, and a lesser scramble from the audience seats as the coaches join them—there tend to be more of those that show up the closer we get to the pageant. Carlyle doesn’t technically require the contestants to be in their outfits at this point, but we’ve only got a few more days of practice, and coaches like to make sure their girls can get in and out of their dresses quickly and with as minimal destruction to hair and makeup as possible.

  I watch Becky’s smug look as she all but skips off the stage, and Gwen’s death-glare after her. I should definitely keep an eye on that situation, lest some camellias end up trampled by a marimba.

  I reach in my bag and pull out a few pages of script. “Here you go,” I say to Shane. “The intros. In case you somehow lost your copy in the green room garbage.”

  Shane gives me a mock-insulted look. “If I was going to ‘lose’ the script, it would be in someplace much more deserving. Like one of those industrial shredders.” But he takes the pages from me, anyway. My guess is the script is actually still sitting on the green room table, but I’m not taking the chance.

  We get up, but we’re barely out of our seats when Collette jogs over to us—as much as she can jog in three-inch heels. She’s got her flower headdress clutched in her hand, and a nervous expression. I notice Thomas hovering back by the stage, frowning at us. I’m kind of hoping whatever this is gives me an excuse to bar him from future practices.

  “Hey, Collette,” I say when she reaches us. “What’s going on?”

  She looks around furtively, as if making sure no one is in hearing distance. Other than Shane, of course, but she doesn’t seem to mind him being here, and I can already tell he’s too curious to leave unless he’s directly told to. Now I’m worried that Thomas actually hurt her, and I might have to kill him rather than just kicking him out of the building.

  “I had a vision,” Collette says, her blue eyes wide. “Of some bad things that will happen very soon.”

  Well, I wasn’t expect
ing that. Though with Collette, maybe I should have.

  “A vision,” I say, trying not to let my skepticism be quite so obvious.

  “And I thought you needed to know.” She lets out a shaky breath, closing her eyes like she’s steadying herself. “One of those bitches is going to get sick before the pageant. And someone else is going to break their nose. Like, in front of everyone. On TV!” She sounds more horrified by that last part than the actual nose-breaking.

  I suck my lips inward. “Okay, first of all, calling your fellow contestants ‘bitches’ isn’t something—”

  “It wasn’t me who said that!” Collette says. “It was Cher!”

  I blink. “Cher? Like the singer?”

  Collette nods. “She’s the one who always appears in my visions.”

  Next to me, I hear Shane make a little snorting sound like he’s trying to stifle a snicker. I very deliberately don’t look at him, lest I have to do the same thing.

  Collette doesn’t seem to notice, her expression so earnestly serious. “I think it’s because I was her in a past life.”

  There’s another pause.

  “Cher’s not dead,” Shane points out.

  Collette gives him a long-suffering look. “I mean young Cher.”

  “Right,” I say, figuring that battle isn’t one worth fighting at this moment. “Well, I appreciate you telling me, but I’ve done a ton of pageants over the years, and I’ve never seen anyone break their nose—or any of their body parts.” A girl did get her hair caught in the trap door of her magic-show wardrobe a couple years ago, and I had to give her a very impromptu onstage haircut, but I decide not to mention that. “But I’ll make sure to keep an extra close eye on everything, okay?”

  Collette’s brow furrows. It’s clear that’s not what she wants to hear, but she nods again. “Okay. Thanks.”

  Then something far more worrisome than visions from not-dead singers occurs to me. “You haven’t told any of the other girls about this, have you?” Pre-pageant superstition is already a thing, and if they get wind of this—

  Collette’s lips twist and she nervously tucks a strand of her pale blond hair behind her ear.