Indigo Rain

by Elise Noble

  “Keep reading, okay?”

  Why? Was I going to get to the end and find it was all just a terrible joke?

  No.

  No, I wasn’t.

  RushModer: Are you single, bikini girl?

  Raven: Totally single.

  I. Was. Going. To. Kill. Her.

  Raven: What do you think of my idea?

  RushModer: What idea?

  Raven: Writing your biography? Interviews and stuff?

  I imagined the idiot pausing to take a slug of his whisky before he replied.

  RushModer: Right. A biology. Where do you live?

  Raven: London.

  RushModer: We’ll be in London soon. Come and meet me, bikini girl.

  Raven: For an interview?

  RushModer: Sure. But Dex will want to check out anything you write. He’s a control feet.

  *freak.

  “Who’s Dex?” I asked Tessa.

  “Indigo Rain’s bass guitarist. He’s kind of serious compared to the other guys. Hardly ever smiles. So, you’re gonna meet Rush? I mean, this is a dream. I’d totally go myself if I wasn’t pretending to be you.”

  Totally. There was that word again. “Tessa, are you still drunk?”

  “Maybe just a little tipsy. Well?”

  “No! Of course I’m not going. He was probably as drunk as you when he wrote this garbage.”

  “Who cares? He said yes, and this is the chance of a lifetime.”

  “He’ll come to his senses.”

  “Have you read the last part?”

  No, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I also made the mistake of taking a mouthful of coffee before I lowered my gaze to the screen again.

  Raven: Where should I come?

  RushModer: On my dick. Or on my fingers. Or in my mouth. All three? Your choice.

  I spat the coffee across the table.

  “I see you’ve got to the good bit,” Tessa said. “He just sent that, like, two minutes ago.”

  “What about his girlfriend?”

  “She dumped him after the whole naked-pictures thing.”

  “Rush Moder’s a pig. You asked a reasonable question, and he twisted it into…into this.” I stabbed at the screen and hurt my finger. “Ow.”

  “At least you admit my suggestion was reasonable.”

  “No! No, now you’re twisting things too. On the scale of one to utter depravity, your idea was merely stupid.”

  “Well, Rush liked it.”

  My phone pinged again.

  RushModer: We’re staying at the Hamilton House Hotel. Meet me there at eleven a.m. a week from Monday.

  Moder was the cockiest asshole I’d ever met. Well, not met, exactly, but you know what I mean.

  “There’s only one thing for it.”

  Tessa grinned. “You’ll meet him a week from Monday?”

  “No, I’ll have to block him on Instagram, and we’re never mentioning this again.”

  And I also needed to change my PIN number to something trickier. Four-three-two-one, perhaps.

  “But—”

  “Zip it. Unless you want me to put one of your bikini pics up on Plenty of Fish with a note that says you like threesomes.”

  “I’ve never tried one, but it could be fun.”

  Good grief.

  “I mean it. We’re never discussing this again, and while I think about it, you’re banned from wine too.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  Somewhere in Surrey, in a mock-Tudor mansion inhabited by my ex-stepfather. Mother divorced him three years ago, but for the whole of their marriage, she’d brushed his abuse under the carpet in return for a platinum credit card and vacations in San Tropez. I still refused to speak to her unless it was absolutely necessary. Tessa knew about my past, but I didn’t want to bring it up now and send her on a guilt trip. Not when I tried so hard to act normal.

  “I’m not going to the Hamilton House Hotel to catch an STD next Monday morning, Tessa. I’ll start applying for proper jobs instead.”

  I’d been putting it off for far too long. My tone said I was serious, and her sheepish look said she’d finally got the message.

  “Sorry. I was only trying to help.”

  “I know. And I appreciate it, really I do. But I’m not into rock stars, and they’re not getting into me.”

  Absolutely no way. I may have shared almost everything with Tessa, but the one thing I liked to gloss over was my complete lack of experience with men who weren’t paedophiles. I dated occasionally, drooled over sexy men on the internet, and read every issue of Cosmopolitan, but the one time I’d ended up naked in bed with a man as an adult, I’d flipped out, made an excuse, and left. Then, when Tessa questioned me the next day, I panicked and told her it was amazing.

  And I’d felt guilty about my lie ever since.

  “No Rush Moder? You’re seriously turning him down?”

  “No Rush Moder.” I forced a smile. “I’ll write some application letters after we’ve got the apartment straightened out. Will you help?”

  “With both things? Sure.” She looked around and grimaced. “Did you see someone broke a leg off the coffee table? We’ll have to go furniture shopping.”

  This promised to be a really long day.

  CHAPTER 2 - ALANA

  “NEW COFFEE TABLE?” Zander asked the moment he walked through the door.

  Damn my brother for being so observant. Although I suppose that trait did help him in his day job as a private investigator.

  “Uh, yes. I thought we could do with a change.”

  Dove sniffed the air. “Did you get an air freshener too?”

  “I burned dinner last night. It smelled really bad.” I managed a smile, although that took quite an effort since I’d spent twenty-two of the last twenty-three hours cleaning. “But I made lunch—quiche and salad.” Okay, the deli down the road had made it, but I picked it up and that was practically the same thing. “Welcome home!”

  Dove abandoned her two suitcases and flopped onto the sofa. “Boy, am I glad to be back. Who knew travelling could be quite so exhausting?”

  “But you had a good time, right?”

  I’d seen the pictures on Facebook, and I hated to say I was jealous, but… I was insanely jealous. First, they’d rented a convertible to drive parts of the old Route 66, and after they reached California, they’d flown to Mexico and spent a week on the beach. Then they travelled to Peru and walked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. The trip of a lifetime.

  Apart from my four-day jaunt to Las Vegas to be their bridesmaid, I hadn’t made it out of Europe since I was a baby, despite the fact that I had dual English and American nationality. Mother was from Colorado, and I’d been born there by virtue of being a month premature, but I’d spent my whole life living in England and France. When Mother went on holiday with her various husbands, she’d always left me at home with the nanny so I didn’t get in the way.

  “An amazing time. I’ll show you the pictures of the cloud forest later.” Dove pinched herself. “I still can’t believe all the places we went.”

  I giggled. “And I still can’t believe Zander got married.”

  A year ago, if I’d had to nominate one person who’d stay a bachelor for the rest of his life, it would’ve been my brother. But now he’d fallen head over heels in love, and my new candidate was Rush Moder. Surely no woman would ever put up with him? Even thinking of the late-night conversation he’d had with Tessa made me want to vomit.

  “Are you okay?” Dove asked. “You look like you’ve swallowed a wasp.”

  “I’m—” A knock at the door saved my life. “Totally fine.”

  Gah! Now I’d started with the “totallys.” Tessa was a bad, bad influence.

  I practically ran to the door and yanked it open.

  “Hi.”

  Mrs. Galbreski from next door looked up at me. And I mean looked up. At five feet nothing, she stood seven inches shorter than me.

  “Hello, dear.” She held out
a foil-covered plate. “I thought you might be hungry after all the cleaning yesterday, so I made you a cake. I saw you out scrubbing the balcony during the ten o’clock news.”

  Oh, bless her.

  “Why were you scrubbing the balcony?” Zander asked from behind me.

  Dammit. Because someone had spilled a bottle of beer over the wood and it stank, but I couldn’t tell my brother that.

  I conjured up a smile. “I just wanted everything spick and span for when you and Dove came home.”

  Mrs. Galbreski patted Zander on the arm. “Don’t worry, dear. Everyone likes a good party. Well, almost everyone. There’s always one stick-in-the-mud who calls the police. I bet it was that young couple who moved in downstairs last month. They wrote me a nasty note complaining about my Zumba dancing the other day.”

  Zander raised an eyebrow, and I sagged back against the doorjamb.

  “Lanie?”

  “It was only a few friends.”

  “Back in my day, we’d have been fishing people out of the river,” Mrs. Galbreski told him. “Enjoy the cake.”

  Busted. I closed the door and turned to face my brother. “Honestly, it wasn’t that bad.”

  Zander sucked in a breath, pinched the bridge of his nose, and let the breath out again in a long exhale.

  “I just worry about you, that’s all. If I’d known, I could have arranged for someone to keep an eye on things.”

  Exactly, and what kind of fun would that have been?

  “Honestly, it wasn’t a big deal.”

  Behind him, Dove shifted on the sofa, then her brow furrowed as she fished a pair of knickers out from behind the cushions.

  “Are these yours?”

  No way. And I had no clue who they belonged to. I couldn’t even blame one of Zander’s pre-Dove girlfriends because he’d never brought them back to the apartment.

  “Uh, possibly some people might have been messing around?”

  “Lanie, next time you want a party, just let me know, okay?” Zander said. “I’ll get a couple of the guys from work to stand at the door and make sure nobody does anything stupid.”

  My brother wasn’t completely unreasonable, far from it. No, he just worried too much. Nobody at a Zander-monitored party would dare to let their hair down, and he’d probably insist on background-checking everyone first. Not even kidding. He’d already informed me that Greg from my journalism course had gotten arrested last year for being drunk and disorderly, so guess who would have been banned from the party if Zander was involved?

  As it was, I’d invited Greg, and he’d brought a whole shopping trolley full of beer then had us in stitches with his dad-dancing. Tessa had wheeled the sodding trolley back to Sainsbury’s yesterday evening.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you next time.”

  Zander had saved me from my previous life, so I could hardly act ungrateful. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wanted a little bit of freedom.

  He wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Did you say you’d got lunch?”

  I swallowed down my sigh. “Give me ten minutes to heat up the quiche.”

  With Zander and Dove both back at work on Monday morning, I started my job-hunting in earnest. If nothing else, Tessa’s stupid stunt on Friday night had spurred me into action.

  The lady in the university careers office tutted and gave me a lecture on leaving things till the last minute. Apparently, all the good placements had already gone, but she did grudgingly send me a list of possibilities. Did I want to do social media, copywriting, editorial work, or digital marketing? None of the positions paid more than minimum wage, and some didn’t pay anything at all. Luckily, I didn’t need the money—Zander had inherited our father’s fortune, which covered our living expenses—but I didn’t want to be taken advantage of either. Call it a point of principle. One of the job descriptions was basically for a PA by another title, and the PAs where Zander worked sure as hell earned a lot more money than these cowboys were offering.

  Still, I did my research, filled in application forms, and sent off emails to anywhere that looked reasonable. And by reasonable, I mean I skipped the place where the boss got Twitter-shamed for timing his employees’ bathroom breaks.

  By Thursday, I’d scored one interview and a whole bunch of rejection letters. Overqualified, underqualified, sorry, we’ve already hired somebody else. To make matters worse, Tessa had been messaging me all week, raving about how much she was enjoying her internship. And I was thrilled for her, really I was, but every time my phone buzzed, my heart sank a little lower.

  “How’s the job-hunting going?” she asked when we met up for dinner on Thursday evening. She’d picked the restaurant, a hip new place where none of the food came on plates.

  “I have an interview tomorrow.”

  “Ooh, where?”

  “Fly Boy Media.”

  She crinkled her little ski-jump nose. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  Neither had I until I sent in my CV. “They provide news and content aimed at the under-thirties.”

  The company had been around for over twenty years, according to their website, so they had to be doing something right. It was run by a father-and-son team, and they offered the opportunity to gain a rounded experience by working in all departments.

  “Sounds good. At NewsFlash, we still have a few dinosaurs who insist on using shorthand. Where are they based?”

  “Shoreditch.”

  “It’s nice around there now.” She held up her glass of wine. “Here’s to your new job.”

  “I haven’t landed it yet.”

  “But you will. They’ll love you. Although I won’t lie—I’m super disappointed you turned down Rush Moder. You could have introduced us.”

  “I’m pretty sure Rush Moder’s offer had nothing to do with my professional capabilities.”

  He’d kept calling me “bikini girl,” for crying out loud.

  “Who cares? Most girls would crawl to that hotel on their hands and knees just to lick his feet.”

  Eeeeuw. “Good thing I’m not most girls. And I’ve never understood the whole foot-fetish thing.”

  “Me neither. I tried sucking a guy’s toes once, but he’d been wearing trainers the whole day and it was gross.”

  “Yuck. Were you sober?”

  “Of course not. And speaking of not being sober…” She waved at the nearest waiter, all cute and smiley, and he came over right away. “Can we get two more glasses of white, please?”

  “Chardonnay or Sauvignon blanc?”

  “Hmm, I can’t decide. Just bring two of each.”

  Thanks, Tessa. Her insistence that we drink everything on the menu meant I didn’t check my phone until we got home, which meant I missed seeing the message from Roy Flynt, my potential new boss at Fly Boy Media, until almost midnight.

  Alana, forgot to mention it earlier, but could you write a brief article on a hot topic among twenty-somethings and bring it with you to the interview? See you at two!

  Oh, shit.

  At that point, I could barely even focus, let alone start researching an article. I racked my brains for anything I’d written recently that I might be able to repurpose, but there was nothing. Was this a test? A challenge to see how I coped with impossible deadlines? I groaned out loud, but with no other opportunities on the horizon, I couldn’t afford to screw up this interview. Finding a placement was even harder than I thought, and I’d gone from being picky at the start of the week to being desperate by Friday as the harsh realities of the London jobs market revealed themselves.

  I had to nail this.

  The alarm rang at six, and I rolled out of bed to make coffee. Zander sauntered past on his way to the gym.

  “You’re up early,” he said.

  “I have to prepare for my interview.”

  “I won’t bother wishing you luck. They’d be crazy not to hire you.”

  I appreciated his confidence, but it would be misplaced if I couldn’t get a bloody article written in time. And w
hat should I write it on? At that time of day, tired and a bit hungover, my mind was blank.

  Panicking slightly, I thumbed through my phone for inspiration. What topics mattered to people my age? Unfortunately, I made the mistake of clicking on Instagram, and Rush Moder’s grinning face made me groan. His drunken rant had got hundreds of thousands of likes and comments in the past week. Why was he so popular? What made girls go crazy over the assholes in Indigo Rain when they acted like idiots all the time? Hmm… That could actually make an interesting article.

  I turned to my old friend Google. None of the four band members were men you’d want to take home to meet your mother. Especially my mother—she’d probably end up dating one of them since they appeared to have more money than sense.

  If I had to rank them from bad to, well, less bad, the tattooed lead singer and occasional guitarist, Travis Thorne, would take the top spot. My heart might have skipped a beat when I saw his picture because there was no denying he was as handsome as sin, but no amount of messy brown hair or scruffy beard or dimples or hooded hazel eyes could make up for his character flaws.

  Following a late-night party, he’d gained his first DUI conviction six weeks ago and been banned from driving for half a year. Since he most likely had a chauffeur, I imagined that wasn’t as much of a hardship as the course at DUI school, the counselling sessions, and the thousand-dollar fine he’d also been landed with. Despite breaking his arm in the incident at the beginning of May, he’d allegedly managed to push his girlfriend down two weeks later—she had a black eye to prove it—although he wasn’t charged by the police over that. Unsurprisingly, she’d dumped him, and since then, he’d been pictured falling drunk out of a club with a different bimbo every night. How he ever managed to do any actual singing was beyond me.