“Honestly, dude, why do you even care?” Dave asked. “Is this all some ploy to get in my sister’s pants?”
“DAVE!” Chelle shouted, hitting Dave in the arm and giving him a glare that made me want to disappear on the spot. At first he looked as if he wasn’t going to back down, but his face softened looking at her. Their bond was obviously stronger than most siblings I knew.
“Sorry, man. I was being an ass. I’ll think about it,” Dave said finally, slightly red in the face, either from anger, embarrassment, or both.
“No worries, dude. I know you’ve been through a lot, and the tour life isn’t easy. You won’t regret at least going to the audition,” I said, patting him on the back. I turned to leave when Chelle said,
“Wait, Thank you!” I turned back around and she was giving me the most sincere half smile I’d ever seen. Holy shit, she was beautiful. I smiled back and nodded, but I worried that I’d suddenly lost my ability to speak so I just walked away. I had no idea how or why she made me feel this way, but I shook off the thought. I didn’t need to head down that road right now. I needed to focus on the tour.
~ Chelle ~
I had no idea why Evan took it upon himself to schedule an audition for Dave. I secretly wondered for a moment if Dave was right; if he only did anything at all to get to me. I shook the thought almost immediately. Evan was an incredibly hot member of a rock band that undoubtedly had girls falling over themselves to be in his vicinity all the time. He didn’t need to try that hard when he had that many options. Still, it was kind of incredible that he went out of his way to do something like that for Dave. As soon as Evan was out of earshot, I chose to refocus all of my attention on my brother.
“You know you’re going, right?” I asked.
“Only because I know you won’t shut the fuck up if I don’t.” He replied, showing off his middle finger just a little too close to my face. I took his finger and tried to bend it backwards, but he grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back.
“Alright, I give!” I shouted through laughter. He let me go, so I muttered, “I knew you’d see it my way,” then I ran away before my brother could catch me. It didn’t stop me from wondering what Evan had to gain from helping out though. Every time I thought he’d all but forgotten about me he managed to show up again out of the blue. The other day when I was loading up the truck, he actually stood up for me, and wanted to protect me. He had come out there for me. Then he had disappeared and I hadn’t seen him again for a couple days. We had a strange relationship. Well, not a relationship in the realistic sense of the word, but we definitely had some oddball interactions or near misses that just left me feeling more confused, and more resolute all at once.
Evan was a bit flaky, or maybe he was just being true to his rock star nature. Either way, I’d seen enough of the life and the men who lived in it to know that I wasn’t going to go there with him. I wasn’t sure I could trust him. I knew that made me a bit of a hypocrite considering I’d just pressured my brother into trying out for a band he had very similar thoughts about, but going from a roadie to a band member was a different animal than getting involved with a rock star only to have them stomp all over your heart in public. Right? Still, I found myself thinking about the way his deep, green eyes made my heart flutter. Maybe it was a good thing he was flaky and I didn’t have to see him a whole lot.
Chapter 6
~ Evan ~
Glancing around, I didn’t see the one person who I had hoped would be out celebrating with us tonight. Damn.
“Looking for someone in particular?” One of the girls Micah had been hanging around asked as she scooted closer to me on the couch I was occupying.
I turned to her and shook my head. “Nope,” I stated, not about to tell this stranger that I was hoping to see the woman I was falling for, despite the fact that the feeling didn’t appear to be mutual.
She ran her blood red nail down my chest. “I can keep you company. Better the warm body in front of you than the memory that’s haunting you.”
That made me angry, and probably because it was sort of true at this point. “Nothing haunts me, and I’m not about to add lowering my standards to the mix.” The girl’s jaw dropped and the stunned luck in her eyes almost had me feeling bad until I remembered she thought I might be trying to get over someone, or be with someone who didn’t show and she still offered herself up to me. That was just the height of disrespect for herself and everyone else involved. I stood and moved over to David.
“I just wanted to say congrats again, Dave. You deserve this shot!”
“Thanks for working at convincing me. I wasn’t so sure because of Clay.”
“I know. I’m happy to see you were able to realize the rest of them aren’t like him, or your other band. I think you’ll go far with Fourth Down.”
We pounded out a bro-hug and I was out of there. The party scene just wasn’t doing anything for me. I sometimes resented that I was expected to at least show up. Besides, I had someone to go hunt down. I still remember what Bob, the gnarly truck driver, had said to me. If I wasn’t willing to work to find her then maybe I didn’t deserve her. Granted, he didn’t say it quite like that, but his meaning was absolutely clear.
~ Chelle ~
I woke to the sounds of a full-on party taking place on the bus. The men were in rare form, all excited, catcalls, yelling, and rambunctious laughter. Part of me wanted to join in and have some down time fun, but the other part of me just wanted to throat punch the bastards for waking me up. I had been having a really fantastic dream about a certain someone with his shirt off and he wasn’t offering to make me pancakes if you get my meaning.
I dragged my butt out of bed, threw on a hoodie and snagged my little lap blanket to take outside with me. I was right, as I passed by the guys on the bus they all called out there hellos to me, but they were in the middle of a bus party with the leftovers. That was the name I gave to the groupies who weren’t good enough to end up with one of the band members from either the headliners or the opening acts. They were the leftover girls that no one wanted, but they still wanted to stick around and party. Some of them had friends who had been picked up by a band member and they had to wait around for them. Others didn’t care that they’d been relegated to hang with the roadies. The story they would tell their friends when they got home was just going to be about how they got to hang out behind the scenes at the after party. Not a lie, even if it wasn’t the whole big picture either.
It was no matter because they weren’t my concern. I snagged a cold coke from the fridge before I took off through the bus doors and out into the parking lot where some of the older guys were playing cards around a fold out table while they had a campfire in a barrel going to chase away the unseasonably chilly night air. “Hey guys, room for a spectator?”
“Of course, young lady, get your behind over here,” Bob called out. “Those boys getting too rowdy on that bus?” His eyes narrowed on the behemoth behind me as if it had personally affronted him.
“No, Bob. They’re fine. I just wanted to get some fresh air and better company.”
“Fresh air, maybe. Stale ass company though,” Johnny Two-Thumbs sniggered out. Johnny drove the tractor-trailer that carried most of the equipment from show to show.
“Don’t listen to him, we’re just the right kind of company for a girl like you. Better than those guys in there, I’d wager.”
“That’s because we’re too old or too taken to get up to the shit they’re getting into,” one of the other men added.
“That’s why you’re the better group,” I informed him with a smile.
For a moment I just sat back in the camp chair and stared up at the night sky. It wasn’t full of stars or anything since the city lights pretty much killed any chance of getting a good view of any heavenly bodies, but it did offer up a moment’s peace before I allowed my eyes to sink shut in relaxation. I wasn’t sleeping. I was listening to the men around me as they laughed, joked, and teased o
ne another about what they used to get up to in the good old days before they got tied down and their bodies started aching as age set in. In an odd way it felt like home even though I didn’t really remember what having a home felt like. In some of my fantasies I guess I had always thought of something like this. Sitting around a campfire with my parents and grandparents, maybe normal aunts and uncles, while I ran around with a bunch of cousins trying to catch lightning bugs or something. I don’t know. I just pictured the furthest thing from the life I already had.
“Chelle?” A deep voice questioned and I peeked out my heavily lidded eyes to see the impossible. Kneeling in front of me was Evan. When I realized I hadn’t fallen asleep and wasn’t really dreaming I opened my eyes and did what any self-respecting woman would do. I began to question him.
“What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be out celebrating with Fourth Down and David? You set it all up, and seriously, why are you here?” Okay, so sometimes, I am prone to rambling when caught off guard.
“Nice to see you too, Chelle, but I thought I’d see you out celebrating with your brother instead of here,” he glanced around as if it was the first time he was noticing that I was sitting huddled up in a chair with a bunch of aging roadies and drivers.
I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s my brother’s night. The last thing he needs is his little sister tagging along when he’s out to celebrate. Nothing says cock-block like a sister watching your every move.” I giggled as some of the guys winced and nodded their head in agreement. It was true. I’d rained on enough of David’s parades over the years. When he should have been going to prom and being the star of the football team he was too busy trying to take care of me instead. He’d basically become my dad and my big brother all in one. There was no need to for him to miss out on being young and single any more because of me. I wanted him to be happy, even if it was just momentarily forgetting responsibilities and diving head first into life or the closest bimbo he could find.
“I get that,” Evan agreed. “Come on,” he held his hand out to me and without even thinking I accepted it and followed behind as he led me to the bus he shared with his bandmates.
I hesitated at the door before following him onto the bus. “I just want to talk, Chelle. I promise, that’s all.” I nodded my head at him and looked around. The place was nothing like the bus the road crew travelled in. The seating was made of buttery leather made for comfort. It was far more spacious and I was immediately envious and definitely less curious about how the bands were able to get enough rest on the road. They had every comfort of a real home here, just in a smaller space. Hell, this bus was like a mobile mini-mansion compared to the places David and I had been living in the past few years.
“This place is something else,” I finally stated when I got tired of taking in the entire splendor and moved my eyes back to Evan instead. Okay, not so much a change of scenery there since I felt like he blended with his environment just fine.
“Yeah, you should have seen our first bus. It was in worse shape the road crew bus your on, if you can believe that. We had no air condition and our first time touring was in the dead heat of summer.” He laughed lightly. “I thought we were all going to die of a heat stroke before we even got to our first venue.”
I scrunched up my nose then. “I guess you had to come up the hard way too at some point?”
“Yeah, though I’ll admit it didn’t last that long. My uncle is a member of Valhalla Rising and once he saw the conditions of our bus he did something about it. Said he couldn’t have us dying in the sweatbox and not being able to perform at the shows. Counter-productive if we die on tour instead of opening the show, you know?”
I chuckled. “So, you got upgraded and kept on upgrading then? I can’t imagine you went immediately from the sweatbox to this palace on wheels.”
He shook his head, his bright green eyes glittering my way as he did. “No, this is the latest edition of The Infinite Everything’s tour digs. We got this, because when we stay at hotels a lot we get swamped with fans. It’s no fun having to be under lock and key in a hotel all the time. You’ll see when we get to the stops where we have to check in. Some places aren’t so bad, like LA and New York, but there are towns in smaller places where they aren’t used to seeing celebrities all the time and it can get dangerous.”
“You guys get more security in those places though right?”
He grinned. “We stay at our home away from home in those towns, locked away behind fences with plenty of security.” Evan took my hand again and guided me over to the sofa. We each took a spot and he turned his body so that he was facing me. “I’m not sure what happened,” he started, and then stopped as if his statement was more of a question aimed at me.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought we got along okay when we met.” He plucked some imaginary lint from his jeans before his eyes met mine again. “I didn’t think I did anything to offend or hurt you. So I’ve been trying to figure out why you’ve been avoiding me since I took you to see Everly that first day.”
I sucked in a shocked breath at that. “Well, I wondered the same thing until I remembered you’re a busy rock star who probably didn’t even remember I was part of the crew on tour with him. I saw you a few times over the next couple days. I even went to go tell you the good news when Everly told me I could have the job for the rest of the tour. I meant to thank you for helping me get into the position to begin with, but…” I bit into my lower lip, not really wanting to recount the reasons why I ended up not going to him then, or any time after to offer up my thanks.
“Why didn’t you,” his wary tone gave me pause. I think he knew what I was about to say and he seemed hesitant to hear it.
“Every time I saw you it was with a fan, most of those times it was with a fan who was clothing-challenged.” He winced seeming to catch my drift.
“You know we can’t help that they take their shirts off and ask us to sign body parts, right?”
“I know that it’s a choice you make to allow that to happen. It’s most definitely a choice you make to put that marker up to a woman’s body parts and sign your name there. For a lot of those girls they make those signatures permanent, and then they have a piece of you forever on their body. I wonder what your future wife will think of that?”
Evan glanced up at me with a guilty look on his face. “I’ve never thought of it that way before. It was always something that seemed harmless and came with the job.” His voice was quiet and I felt bad for judging him. I knew what it was like. I’d seen my brother and his bandmates do those very same things. Hell, I’d given my brother the same lecture. To his credit, I think he refused to ever sign a person’s body after that lecture.
“I don’t mean to seem judgy, I just felt uncomfortable, so I obviously wasn’t going to interrupt that type of fan interaction to say ‘hi.’”
“I wish you would have,” he stated simply, never taking his eyes off of me. “What stopped you from coming to tell me the good news about the job?”
“Nothing,” I stated, and he glanced at me oddly, indicating that I should elaborate. “I was on my way to tell you but, in the parking lot, I slipped in some mud and fell down. You guys all came piling out of the building, and there I was, flat on my ass, watching you walk by groping a groupie in a hoard of groupies you guys were taking to your bus.”
“Aaron found me and picked me up, then walked me to the bus. It was fine. But, again, I wasn’t interrupting the party you guys were about to have.” I was trying not to consciously process just how jealous I sounded.
“Shit,” he hissed out. “We were all smashed that night. I didn’t want anything to do with that scene or the groupies, but Jay had found his girlfriend cheating on him backstage before the show, and he’s always been such a straight arrow, never one to indulge in the rock-n-roll lifestyle, that Micah said it would be therapy for him to get his rocks off with a groupie and be drunk out of his mind.”
I just cring
ed at Micah’s idea of therapy. “Nothing happened,” Evan quickly added to his statement. “Everly had been there, and she was not happy. She was there to commiserate with Jay since he’d helped her after she found Clay in a similar backstage situation before she joined the tour. She stopped some bad shit from going down for my brother, and I’m just pissed that I had let myself get so far out of control that I didn’t see what was happening right in front of my face. I’ve never been more embarrassed before, but knowing you saw some of that, I can now say that I actually have been more embarrassed.
“I’m not going to lie and say that I never get up to shit with the guys. I had my wild days and I had more intimate run-ins with groupies than I care to admit. I’ve never been a choir boy,” he started explaining.
“You don’t have to justify your actions to me, I’m no one.”
“That’s not true. You see, you are more than just someone. You’re the only damn woman I’ve never been able to get off my mind.”
I sucked in a sharp breath at his admission.
“It’s true, Chelle. I think about you all the time. I wondered what I had done, and then the other night when Micah came in the room with a bunch of women followed by Jer I thought I was going to lose my shit. I also started to understand that maybe you’d seen some things or heard some things that just weren’t what they seemed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jer told me that night that he talked to you right after Micah made a big deal about getting the girls to the room where I was waiting on them. I hadn’t been waiting on anyone. I was just coming down after the show. There’s so much adrenaline that courses through your system some nights that I just need a minute to breathe on my own. When I was younger and we were first starting out I took out that excess energy in other ways, often times with Micah in toe for the fun. He’s having a hard time accepting that I’m not about that life anymore.”
The Infinite Beat (T.I.E. Book 2) Page 7