Rock It

by Jennifer Chance

Lacey blew out the fringe of hair draped over her face, feeling comfortably exhausted. While the setup for tonight’s final show wasn’t quite finished, she knew they were ahead of schedule. The crew was probably just huddling somewhere, going over last-minute instructions with Harry, and final logistics with the security detail. After the events in Virginia Beach, IMO wasn’t sparing any expense on security. Dante had moved beyond key client and was now heading straight into golden-goose territory.

  No matter what, though, the final show tonight was going to be spectacular. The whole crew seemed to feel the edge, and the YouTube cameramen were positively giddy—not just with the culmination of the webisode series that was slated for midnight, but also—and perhaps predominantly—the fact that after this, they were done. Finito. They’d done it.

  Everyone could go home and sleep for a month.

  She and Dante had spent every second together that they could, as if they both knew it was coming to an end. It was like the best summer vacation ever. You meet a cute boy, you fall in love, and you have memories to last a lifetime. It’d been four days since they’d had sex on the bus, but though they made out like they were fourteen in random hotel rooms and dark corners, they hadn’t chanced hooking up in their own rooms. She’d told Dante about Brenda finding her scrapbooks in her desk, that she worried what else her boss might be planning. And no matter what, they weren’t safe anywhere for more than twenty minutes, which is about how long it took the YouTube guys to find them. Lacey had begun to wonder if they’d LoJacked her phone.

  Even worse, now she had her hands full with an entirely different problem to manage.

  The fans were demanding the return of RockerGrrl. It had started with an upswell of interest after she’d disappeared from the stage that first night, then a few outspoken e-fluencers had gotten involved. They refused to believe that she was a stunt. They were certain there was a connection between her and Dante. They were determined to see if she was real, fake, or somewhere in between.

  And Dante hadn’t helped. Somehow, the man had figured out how to use the Internet, and he’d responded to the fans, asking the RockerGrrl to return as well. After that, it was a nonstop war between those who thought she was a stunt, to those who thought she was real, to those who thought they should get married onstage.

  How was Lacey going to live up to all of that? She’d agreed to make another appearance—this time getting Jim’s approval first, while adroitly sidestepping the question of who had really been the original RockerGrrl. She hadn’t even needed Anna to come in to save the day this time, as the roadies gathered around her now were more than willing and able to lend a hand and a truckful of cosmetics to the process. But so much had changed in such a short time, and she worried that if she strutted out on that stage with Dante there, knowing it was his last night—their last night—well, she might well and truly lose it. And nobody wanted to see that on camera.

  “Yo, it’s about time I found you.” Lacey jumped back as Harry came striding through the mass of cords and stage props with an enormous oversized duffel bag. “I can’t believe I’ve been relegated to costume delivery.” He threw the half-unzipped bag down on the table, and shimmering cloth spilled forth. “Don’t even ask me what the hell that is, because I don’t want to know.”

  Lacey pulled out a sheath of material that looked like a glove. Several of the roadies hooted, and she blushed. “Who picked this out?” she demanded but was rewarded with just more laughter. “No, seriously, Harry. How am I going to fake my way through this tonight?”

  “Who says you’re going to fake it?” Half the crew chuckled at Lacey’s jolt of surprise, the others were grinning like lunatics. What had come over these people? “Look, Lacey,” Harry said. “We saw those books. We’ve seen the way you look at Dante. We’ve seen the way he looks at you. We’ve been through a hell of a lot of women over the past few years—and this is different. This is … this is kind of fun, actually.”

  The way he looks at me?

  “So, all the more reason to go out with a bang. You could play off this girl as being all fake, just part of the corporate schtick, if you want. Or you can play her as a crazy fangirl. But it’s going to make for a hell of a show, no matter what. And somebody’s got to go out there in that getup, and it sure as hell ain’t me.” He grinned at her. “I have standards.” One of the roadies had stepped up beside Lacey and was now finished setting out her instruments of makeup torture on the long, battered table. But Harry wasn’t finished. “You’ve got the stage, sweetheart,” he said. “The world will be watching and expecting a show. What are you going to give them?”

  Lacey stared at him, then around the room of expectant roadies and crew members. Even the cameramen were grinning at her, their good humor genuine beyond what would no doubt be another ratings coup. What did she want here? What was she hoping for? For Dante to see her for real on that stage, see her love for him and—what? What is it she thought she’d be accomplishing, besides breaking her heart into a million pieces on an international stage?

  Harry took her bemused silence for assent. “Man your stations. This is going to be a performance none of us are going to want to forget.”

  When the cheer went up, Dante whirled around. He’d been waiting for this moment all night, and he’d played as if a man possessed. The band had picked up on it; the crowd had picked up on it. It was probably one of the best performances of the Dream It tour, and it should have been—it was the final act. There were corporate sponsors in enormous tents on the grounds, fans hanging from every raised surface, and all of them were screaming, swaying, and howling out the words to every song he played.

  Dante grabbed the mike as Lacey took the stage, everything about her slow, strutting walk reminiscent of the first time she’d played RockerGrrl. Except this time, instead of sunglasses, she wore a fancy mask. And this time, he was planning to change things up as well. “Looks like we’ve got another visit from my number one fan,” he said, and there was no hiding the triumph in his voice. “What say we rock out a song just for her?”

  The crowd roared its approval as Dante slung his guitar back over his shoulder and launched into one of the sexier, grittier songs with Paradiso that they had watched pound its way to the top of the charts, the first real song that signified that Dante Falcone was no longer the tween-friendly crooner, but a sexy, sensual, full-on rock star in his own right. He caught Lacey in a loose embrace, and she played her part well, draping herself all over his body, stroking him through his leathers and making him heavy and hard, even as his voice dropped and grew even huskier and the Jumbotron flashed their faces and intertwined bodies over the stadium and, hell, throughout the world.

  The song was over too quickly, and Lacey swirled around him, angling for her getaway, just like she had before, even though she knew that the entire point of this show was not to let her get away unseen. Dante reached out for her, stopping her and gently turning her around.

  Lacey’s eyes were enormous, and filled with panic. “Dante!” she mouthed, though he couldn’t hear her, not with his ears clamped with headsets and the crowd roaring her name. But he didn’t have to see her speak to know what she wanted. She wanted an out—to escape, to evade the feelings he could see surging into her eyes, flushing her cheeks. Dante wanted to laugh out loud, and then, unbidden, he felt his throat close up with an unexpected rush of his own emotions. Had he really never looked at Lacey like this before? He’d seen her naked and swamped with need, he’d seen her angry and icy professional, he’d seen her with her friends, he’d seen her with the band. He’d seen her sexed up beneath the glassed stage, determined to get a rise out of him—and succeeding. But here, now, before him, he just saw her. Raw, open, and so incredibly beautiful it made his heart almost stop in his chest.

  “Sweetheart, you can’t get away from me this time,” he said into the mike, and the crowd responded with another surge of volume, cameras flashing and women screaming. “I don’t know about you guys,” he continued, turni
ng to take in the entire crowd. “But the first thing I think when I see a woman in a mask, is how good she’ll look when I pull it off of her.”

  He could see Lacey’s eyes flare beneath the feathers and sequins, but she plastered on a smile and shook her head playfully. No-no-no! she mouthed.

  “Oh, yeah.” Dante grinned when the crowd started chanting, “Take-it-off! Take-it-off!” “See, many of you were around to see the show a few nights back, when we learned how a certain one-time teenaged girl poured her heart out to me in scrapbook after scrapbook. You remember that?”

  The stadium leapt with the pounding response, but Dante just nodded. Two feet away from him, locked in mute confusion, Lacey stared at him with her teeth clamped together in a forced smile.

  “That girl was something else. She not only made up all those scrapbooks, but she wrote me letters. I’d forgotten all about that, until someone was kind enough to remind me a few days ago. A hundred letters all in a row, from a girl who thought she was in love. You all remember your first love when you were only sixteen?”

  Another roar. Another jerk from Lacey in his hands, with him refusing to give way.

  “Well, she somehow knew that I’d been getting a little burned out, a little lonely, a little unsure of myself. I don’t know where she got her information. God knows I was doing everything right, everything anyone could have asked of me. But she knew it anyway. She sent me letter after letter, week after week. None of them asked me to give anything back—at least not to her. They were just focused on me, on how I was doing, that I shouldn’t give up hope. That I had something to give the world, something no one else could.” Now he looked at Lacey. “Like I said, I forgot all about those letters. Until the girl who wrote them came back into my life.”

  Then he saw it, the tears sluicing down Lacey’s face. The crowd had gone silent—or silent enough. “But even teenage girls grow up, right?” Dante asked. “They have to go to school, get jobs, set their own dreams aside. Only, who says our very best dreams can’t still come true?”

  Dante let Lacey’s arm drop, but he didn’t have to hold it anymore. She was standing rooted to the spot, as if there weren’t tens of thousands of people watching. As if her career wasn’t balancing on the head of a pin, either on the verge of enormous success or humiliating failure. As if nothing mattered but him, and what he was going to do next.

  And Dante was a performer to his core. So what he was going to do next came easily to him.

  He reached out and pulled off Lacey’s mask. It came away easily, the snaps at the side that Harry had told him about performing exactly as he’d advised they would. Even Lacey looked startled to see the scrap of cloth and feathers in his hand for just a moment, but then Dante was throwing the mask on the floor, and the music from the band swelled up around them. He pulled his guitar around and smiled at Lacey’s confusion, leaning into the mike as the crowd screamed their support and triumph. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to Lacey Dawes. She was that long-ago teenager who wrote me all those letters, and she is the one who created my fantasy girl come true in RockerGrrl. She walked back into my life not three weeks ago, and I gotta tell you, she’s completely rocked my world.” His smile morphed into a full-on grin. “I know what you guys are thinking,” he said, wheeling around to address the band. “But I’m not going to be doing anything crazy like proposing marriage or anything tonight.”

  Laughter, cheers, and catcalls swelled up. He turned to take in the flush of Lacey’s cheeks, her self-deprecating smile, so quick to wave off any attention directed at her, to assume she wasn’t the girl, wasn’t the one. Dante reached out, and lifted her chin with his hand, Lacey looking impossibly radiant under the lights. “But I think it’s safe to say that I’m in love with you, Lacey Dawes. And that’s gotta count for something.” A crashing riff of music from the band swooped over them, and Dante drew the mike closer to his face to speak into the roar.

  “This song is something new we just put together for everyone,” he rumbled, never taking his gaze off of Lacey’s stricken, hope-filled eyes. “We think you might like it. It’s about a dream that almost got away.”

  Lacey heard Dante’s words, realized he was singing. Realized that she’d never heard the song before, a fusion of rock and soul and Dante’s clear, soaring voice, not buried in technology and repeated back over a dozen times, but pure and raw and so much more powerful than anyone had heard from him in a very long time. She couldn’t understand the words, exactly, couldn’t really see Dante. There was something—something in her eye. The makeup-wielding roadie had warned her that not even a nuclear explosion could cut through her makeup, but she no longer cared what she looked like, no longer cared who saw.

  Dante had said he was in love with her. On live TV. On the Internet. In front of tens of thousands of people roaring his name.

  She knew it was part of the act. She knew it couldn’t be real. But for one brief shining moment, she let herself believe in it, let her heart break just a little bit harder. The pain would be worth it, in the end. It was always worth it, for a moment like this.

  The music stretched out for a few more glorious measures, giving a soundtrack to the most precious experience of her life to date. And then the crowd roared, the band transitioned into one of Dante’s biggest hits, and finally—finally—Lacey remembered where she was and who she was. She wasn’t Lacey Dawes, the love of Dante’s life. She was Lacey Dawes, junior entertainment exec, who’d made a good chunk of the viewing public stop browser surfing long enough to check out the spectacle of the season—and in so doing had delivered eyes and ears to a pile of corporate sponsors who had to see her value in being the woman behind the scenes, making all the magic come together.

  She stepped away from Dante and the band, slipping backstage again, ready to disappear.

  Only, things didn’t quite work out like that.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Lacey Dawes, Lacey Dawes!”

  A horde of news magazine reporters, Entertainment Channel markers garishly decorating their mikes, were huddled in a swat-team formation at the press area set aside at the bottom of the stairs. A wide-open space heavily ringed by security for Dante to give his triumphant postperformance last speech. Lacey frowned at them, holding up her hands as if she was dressed in her usual sleek agent gear, and not a full-on leather bustier. “Just a few minutes more, everyone!” she shouted. “Dante will be right here.”

  That didn’t seem to calm anyone down. “What act will you go to next, Lacey? Word has it you have job offers at ELG and Celebrity—will you take them?”

  “How did you orchestrate the whole performance?” Another question came in. “Did you and Dante mastermind it together? Did the Teen Fantasy angle come from a real-life incident or was it completely made up?”

  “What?” Lacey blinked at the camera people, but her smile never faltered. She had been buried in makeup and onstage for the last several hours. She hadn’t checked the Internet. How had the story developed? And what did she need to do to control it? She managed a mile-wide smile. “One of you guys has to tell me where you get your intel. I swear you know what’s going on before I even do.”

  That merited her a round of laughter, and she parried back questions about the hugely entertaining show they’d just produced, leaving everyone guessing about the junior agent who’d thrown herself into the drama to create a ratings blockbuster—and how much of it was real, fake, or somewhere in between.

  Apparently, the story had spiraled out of control. Now, at least behind the scenes, the belief was that there had been a few scrapbooks from Lacey’s past, yes. The rest had been fabricated to feed the fantasy. Fabricated unapologetically, supposedly based on audience contributions about where they wanted the story to go. RockerGrrl had been a real fan, but they’d dolled her up to make her own fantasy come true as well. Lacey had stood in as the second RockerGrrl, to introduce Dante’s new song. The whole thing had been a “do you or don’t you believe” te
ase, carried off in real time—with over half the fans still swearing that it was all real, that Dante’s declaration of love had been 100 percent authentic. That Lacey had been a love-struck kid who grew up to fall in love for real with her dream rocker, and that Dante really did love her back. There was just enough doubt on both sides, that everyone was willing to concede that anything was possible.

  And Lacey had no problem keeping the mystery alive, either. Because she no longer knew herself what was real, and what was just her own fantasy.

  By the time a second wave of questions soared up, indicating the band had just made their appearance at the top of the stairs, Lacey felt like her smile was going to fall off. She tried to leave, but for every reporter surging toward Dante and Paradiso, another one stopped her, looking for the inside scoop. Where was she going to go next? Was it true IMO was going to promote her to assistant vice president? And, again, was any of it real—did the childhood crush she’d had on Dante really inspire the fantasy that swept over the Dream It tour?

  It must have been a full half hour before Lacey finally broke away, but instead of heading for the band and the transport that would take them back to their hotels, she headed for the tour buses. She knew for an ironclad fact that no one would look for her there. The tour was done. The buses were no longer needed. They’d roll on eventually, and so would she. But for now, they were a quiet oasis, and she needed the time, the space, the solitude. Needed it desperately, to give herself a chance to recover, to find closure—somehow.

  Because the fantasy was over.

  She tried the door of Dante’s bus, and mercifully her keypad combination still worked. She swung up into the darkened van, the last two weeks of her life washing over her. Her last two weeks of Dante and Paradiso. Her triumphs and failures and—whatever the hell had just happened. She needed time, time to think, to plan, to store everything up that she could spend the rest of her life remembering. She needed—