by Daisy Allen
STRUM ME
A ROCK CHAMBER BOYS NOVEL
~*~
Written by
Daisy Allen
Copyright © 2018 Daisy Allen
Strum Me: A Rock Chamber Boys Novel
By Daisy Allen
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. All characters and storylines are the properties of the author and your support and respect is appreciated.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Epilogue
The Music
About the Author
Other Books by Daisy Allen
Chapter One
Brad
“Definitely lobster.”
They’re the first words I hear when I open my eyes.
“I dunno...more like a cherry tomato?” another voice suggests from somewhere to the right of me.
“Nah, that doesn’t really describe the dry, crusty, beef jerky value of it. I’m going with…hmmm, a rare prime rib roast left out in the desert for three days,” a third person pipes up in a French accent.
“Oooh yeah, that’s a good one! I changed my mind, I’m going with that!” says the lobster commenter’s voice.
“What the fuck are you idiots talking about?” I finally break in, my shoulders cracking as I raise them over my head in a long stretch, pulling them out of my deep sleep.
“We’re talking about the right side of your face, tit-wad,” Sebastian, the owner of the French accent helpfully informs me.
My hand immediately goes to my right cheek.
“Oww!” My fingers snap back as my cheek tightens in a sharp pain. “What the?” I scan my brain for the reason for the pain.
“Roast beef jerky talking! That’ll teach you to fall asleep next to an open window for a twelve-hour flight! We’ve been chasing the sun the whole time…and it looks like your ugly mug caught it!” Sebastian manages to get out before falling off his chair in laughter.
I push myself up out of my leather recliner and run to the little bathroom on our private plane.
They’re right; my face is a blazing, blistering red—that is, until it comes to the bridge of my nose. Down the other side of the slope it’s still a pasty white. I look like hell’s version of the phantom from Phantom of the Opera.
“Ugh, fuck, you couldn’t pull the blind down for me?” I grumble as I return to my seat, deliberately knocking my elbow against Marius’s head as I pass him doing one of his yoga poses in the spacious lounge area next to the recliners. Plopping my ass down into my seat, I dab a cold-water towel against my sore cheek.
“Ow. Ball-breath!” Marius shouts, losing his balance and toppling over into a pile of arms and legs.
“Hey, it’s not our fault that after two weeks under the glaring Australia sun you still had the complexion of a prebaked loaf of bread,” Jez says as he comes over, pushing his face close up to get a better look at my enraged skin, poking at it gently with his finger.
“Well, I guess I didn’t get as much sun as you guys did,” I explain as I swat Jez away.
“True. There wasn’t much sun in that pool house with…what was her name again?” Sebastian goads me.
“Hollie,” Marius shouts.
“Jenny,” Jez follows.
“Karli!” Sebastian gleefully finishes off.
“All of those and more.” I poke my tongue out at my bandmates. This wasn’t going to be a discussion I was going to get out of looking good. Time to deflect. “Hey, I’m not the only one leaving the sunny gold coast of Australia without a tan. What about Sebastian? Did you and Cadey come up for food or oxygen even once?” I’m referring to Cadence, his newly acquired fiancée and our sometime-bandmate.
“Hey. Our love is our air,” Sebastian waxes poetic, then grins as I make a puking noise, sticking a finger down my throat. “You say that now, but one of these days you’re going to meet your own Cadence and knowing you, we’re all going to be projectile vomiting before you know it.”
“Fat chance, dude. My whole body will be as shriveled up as that beef jerky you so sweetly described my face as, before I’m going to get caught by a woman. I already learned that lesson a long time ago.”
“Famous last words, buddy,” he replies and I shiver a little at the thought that he might be right.
“What the fuck is that?!” a loud voice booms from the back of the plane and we spin our chairs around to see our long-suffering manager, Dennis, coming toward us. He comes to a stop next to me and jabs a finger in the direction of my face. Dennis is not a nuanced man, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell from the look on his face when he’s not happy with us. Probably because we’ve had so much practice at seeing it. Kind of like…right now.
“Um...what’s he talking about?” I whisper through the side of my mouth to the other guys.
“Oh, I think he’s referring to your face’s impression of a red and white yin and yang figure,” Marius answers unhelpfully.
“WHAT IN GOD’S UNHOLY EARTH HAPPENED TO YOUR FUCKING FACE?” Dennis finally booms by way of an answer.
“What? Oh this? It’s just a little bit of sunburn. No biggie.” I try not to cringe as my fingers graze over the tender skin of my cheek.
“You look so fucking ridiculous! We have a press conference as soon as we land! You know the only reason you pickle-dicks are famous at all is because you all look like you belong on the cover of magazines, right? And I DON’T mean Dermatology Today! FUCK ME!” He glares at me and I shrink a little into my seat.
“Hey! That hurts our feelings. We’re famous because we’re talented, right guys?” I implore the guys to take a little of the heat off me.
“Uhmmnowesuckwe’rejustpretty.ThanksforeverythingDennisweloveyouuuuu,” the three of them mumble and pretend to be suddenly engrossed in their newspapers and fingernails. Wuss-asses.
“And um, why did you book our flight so close to our press conference time anyway?” As soon as the words leave my mouth I wish I can take them back. “Um, never mind.”
Dennis’s face quickly burns a bright red, not too different to the right side of my own face. He takes a deep breath and I can feel it coming. “Why? Why?? WHY DID I BOOK YOUR FLIGHT SO LATE?”
“Er, no, it’s okay. I’ll forgive you this
time.” I try to spin my chair away from the wrath that is coming, but I feel it stop in its tracks and the chair spin back around to face my manager.
“Oh, maybe you didn’t realize, I DIDN’T book your flights to London so close to your press conference time. In fact, the plane is a WHOLE DAY late because…someone… SOMEONE arrived six hours late to the airport and we missed our window for takeoff and had to wait a WHOLE DAY later to leave. Someone…SOMEONE…Who could that have been, I wonder?” At this point his face is way redder than mine and his two bunched-up fists tell me, he’s not finding this as funny as the three smirking faces behind him.
I decide the best way to handle it is to just sit completely still, play...not quite dead, just spontaneously comatose, and then maybe the beast will just give me a few sniffs and wander off.
So, for just a moment, I don’t move and avoid eye contact. I can hear his hissing breath easing and as I predicted, one of the other thousands of problems we cause him distracts him and he swings around and glares at Sebastian.
“And YOU!” Dennis points to my ill-fated bandmate.
“AH!! What did I do?” Seb jumps out of his skin and narrows his eyes at me.
“Where is Cadence?”
“Um, she’s in Sydney. Did it take twelve hours for you to notice she’s not here?”
“Where is she? I thought she was coming with us. They’re expecting her as well.”
“She’s coming in a few days; she just had to finish up some work and then she can enjoy the rest of her summer with us instead of worrying about her students.” Sebastian explains. Cadence is a music teacher at a local school, and until very recently when a sexy French cellist stole her heart, the school and her students were her life.
“But they’re going to be expecting her to get off the plane with us. The stories are going to run rampant about you guys breaking up if you arrive alone.”
The sound of the four of us guffawing stuns Dennis out of his grump.
“Denny, after what they’ve been through, I think ‘breaking up’ is hardly the news headline that’s going to bother Cadence at this point,” Marius finally speaks up, referring to the recent sex video scandal headlines in the international media that almost broke them up.
Dennis sighs and sinks into an empty recliner, the guilt of not being able to stop the scandal still weighing heavily on him, and Sebastian gets up to pat him on the shoulder.
“Take it easy old man, or you’re going to give yourself a heart attack.”
Jez follows and hands Dennis a drink, who takes a sip and hisses, the amber liquid probably burning his throat.
“And don’t worry about Brad’s face. It actually is an improvement. You know he’s always been the ugliest one out of all of us.”
This gets a chuckle out of Dennis and he gives me a limp smile. “Yeah, I guess. Just…try to sit with your less ugly side to the cameras, will you? With this one,” his head gestures to Sebastian, “out of play, we need the rest of you to be pulling your dreamboat status weight.”
I sigh and stand up and wrap my arms around Dennis’ shoulder in a man hug that he only mildly struggles to get out of.
“Keeping the ladies happy? I can do that, Dennis, just for you.”
I’m too busy patting myself on the shoulder to see the fist coming toward my face.
Chapter Two
Brad
The pounding in my head is somewhere about eight on the migraine Richter scale.
The twelve hours of sleep I got on the plane barely made up for the sleep I’d missed out on partying in Australia for two weeks. Now the jetlag and the two cans of Red Bull are doing a tango on the nerve behind my left eye. That’s on top of the way the right side of my face screams every time I inadvertently make some sort of facial expression.
And it’d all be okay if I were headed for a nice, dark room and into a soft, warm bed. Instead, there are about a hundred of London’s most zealous music journalists and paparazzi on the other side of the door, ready with their microphones and flashbulbs and wanting blood.
“You guys ready?” Dennis asks us for the eighteenth time since he herded us into the hotel bathroom to give us his best pep talk on how important these press tours were to the success of the launch of our new album. I’d like to think he didn’t turn toward me when he’d said, “Well, just don’t, you know, FUCK UP,” but I know better.
“He means you,” Jez clarifies, without needing to.
I am notoriously bad at these things and usually walk the tightrope between saying completely ridiculous nonsense and clamming up all together. If there’s something I’ve learned about being in the public eye for the last eight years, it’s that there are some born for celebrity and schmoozing the press, like Sebastian and Jez, who can charm the horns off an angry bull. And then there are the ones like me, and to a lesser extent, Marius, who turn into gibberish-speaking spider monkeys at the mere sight of a microphone.
“He knows. Get off his case. He already looks white as a ghost… well, a ghost with sunburn.” Seb defends me, patting me gently on the arm.
I give him a thankful smile that quickly turns into a cringe as my forehead threatens to tear from my cheek.
Rubbing my temples, I drag breath into my lungs, trying to stop the thumping against my skull and will my headache away. It’s going to be a rough hour.
“You’re up, guys.” Dennis pats me on the back and it’s one of those rare times I wonder why I’m doing this. Then I feel myself pulled into a big group hug, my bandmates’ arms wrapped around my shoulder and our four faces in a huddle. These are the faces I’ve grown up with, gone through hell and back with, achieved the highest level of success with, faces I would die for, and then I remember. I’d be completely lost without them, doing what I love with the people I love most in the word.
Dennis gives us a wink and pushes the door open and there’s a loud cheer and applause.
Marius steps onto the stage first and takes a seat behind the long table, followed by Jez and then Sebastian. I hang back watching them from the doorway, wondering who would notice if I made a run for it.
“Go!” Dennis whispers and gives me a little shove and I reluctantly follow my bandmates into the ring of fire.
The applause dies down as we settle into our seats and adjust the microphones in front of our faces.
I see Dennis nod to us and then Hailey, our new PR rep and Dennis’s daughter, walks onto the stage with her own microphone.
“Welcome, everyone, and on behalf of the Rock Chamber Boys, I’d like to thank you all for being here today! We are so proud to announce the release of the new album, due next wêk, Chords and Chaos, and believe it’s the best one yet. We’ll be here for the next hour taking any questions…so let’s start!”
An ocean of hands rise up and I see Hailey point to someone in the crowd.
“Hey guys, welcome back to London,” a small lanky guy in a leather jacket stands up and addresses us. He looks familiar, but then again, they all do. We’ve done the rounds so many times, there aren’t many journalists we haven’t come across at one time or another. I just can’t remember the good ones from the bad ones. “Congrats on the new album, it’s great,” he continues. “But, just wondering, why did you guys change your name?”
There’s a twittering among the crowd and I guess a few people are wondering the same thing, even though we’d released a memo when we recently changed it.
We all turn to Sebastian, who is probably the best one to answer, and he just grins and leans into the microphone as if it’s not an instrument of evil.
“Hey Gil, nice to see you again, man,” he starts. Gil! That’s it! Ugh, how the hell does he remember these names? Not for the first time I can’t help but be in awe of my bandmate and his social adeptness. “Well, as you know, we’d been No Strings Attached for the last eight years, but a lot has changed in that time. From our style of music to band members coming and going. But we really feel like we’ve reached a certain stage in our music careers
where we needed to make a change, to mark where we are now. And Rock Chamber Boys seemed like the perfect name to describe what we are—a contemporary music outfit that also combines the incomparable classic string instrument chamber music of centuries before us. We like it, so we hope you guys do too. But frankly, Gil, we don’t give a damn.” He finishes with a grin and wink.
And they eat it all up.
The next half an hour flies by pretty quickly, and I don’t talk too much, only once in a while when we see Dennis gesture to me and I interject with a quick jib or two just to prove I’m not completely mute. But for most of the time I’m happy to sit back and let Jez and Seb spin their web while I sit there behind my shades, pretending to appear mysterious. It’s a role I’ve perfected and prefer, and find that the few times I do speak, they tend to pay attention more.
A loud laugh from the crowd jolts me out of my daydream of going back to the hotel room for a long hot soak in the tub.
Leaning over to Sebastian, I nudge him and whisper, “What happened?”
He grins and whispers back, “Jez just tried to hit on that blonde pap over there and she told him she only dates guys who wear less eyeliner than she does.”
I can’t help but guffaw as I look over and see Jez is still pouting. His pride in his hairstyles and “face styles” as he calls them, is well known to anyone who knows anything about the band. His pout quickly breaks out into a grin however, and he shrugs and holds his hands out in defeat.
“Okay, okay, enough picking on Jez,” Hailey jokes into the microphone, before glancing at Dennis who twirls his finger, in the universal “wrap it up” gesture. “I think we have time for one more question before we let these guys grab some sleep. They have just come off a plane from Sydney after all. So…yes, you, the young lady in the back, what question have you got for the band?”
There’s a squeaking of the chair legs scraping against the floor and everyone turns to the back of the room, toward the sound. The lights, as always, are shining directly into our eyes and I try to block them out with my hand, looking out into the crowd. I see a female silhouette stand up, with long dark hair, but I can’t make out anything else about her.