Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7)

by Julia Kent

  Five minutes later, Darla came in, her face white as a sheet. Someone die?

  I needed to get out of there. Too much. Too many feelings, too many words, and—

  “Guys?” Darla looked at me, then Liam, then Trevor, then Sam. She closed her eyes tight, then looked at Joe.

  “What?” Trevor asked, coming over to her. He looked worried.

  “That was the national tour booking agent.” She shot Joe a very pained look. “They want to move the first concert up by two months. To September. Have us open for More Than Nothing, then start out on our own.”

  “The More Than Nothing?” I asked. More Than Nothing was one of the top three touring rock bands in the world.

  Everyone’s head swiveled and looked at me as Darla just said, “Yep.”

  “Why would—what?” Liam asked as Charlotte wrapped her arm around his waist like she owned him. She did. Lucky bastard.

  My brain filled with purple and orange hair. Piercings and smart blue eyes. A heart-shaped ass that made me want to—

  “That means I’m fucked,” Joe moaned from the bed.

  “Joey! Language!” his mom crowed.

  “I can say ‘fuck’ when I’m high on morphine and I just lost my best shot at greatness as a musician, Mom.”

  “You’re more concerned about this music thing than you are about law school!” You could eat her outrage with a spoon.

  “Yes,” he said simply. That stunned her into silence.

  “This is a joke, right?” I asked. I looked at Joe. Then Darla. She shook her head.

  “No joke. We need to be ready a lot sooner than expected. Three months. Not five.”

  “I’ll be ready,” Joe murmured, arms in casts. Darla’s eyes caught mine and she shook her head slightly. I took that to mean to keep my mouth shut. Joe wasn’t playing bass any time soon.

  And by soon, I meant not even in three months.

  I froze. Don’t assume anything. Don’t make waves. Don’t let hope creep in. Were they gonna ask me to—

  Darla stepped away from Joe, leaving him to the mercy of his mom. She reached for my right arm just as Maggie stormed into the room and yanked my left arm. When the fuck did I become a piece of man taffy?

  “You need to come out here and talk to me—”

  “Look, Tyler, let’s be quiet here about it, but—”

  Their words didn’t sound like words. Maggie and Darla sounded like someone took a page of a book, cut each word out, and blended them in a bowl, then poured it out on the wind.

  Darla let go of me, one eyebrow cocked. Her eyes were on Maggie. “You have some unfinished business with Tyler?”

  Maggie gave her a look that could peel paint. “You have some home waxing kits to play with?”

  Darla’s eyes got wide and she let go. Whoa. Didn’t think Maggie had that kind of fight in her. A long lock of her rainbow hair fell down over her eyes and nose. I wanted to brush it aside. My fingers twitched but I kept my free hand by my side as she pulled me.

  “We’ll talk later,” Darla said. Not sure who she was talking to.

  I’ve never been good at too many people talking to me at the same time. Especially not when one of them smells like cloves and lavender and lust and want. Whatever Maggie was doing, she was doing now. Her grip on me was like a bounty hunter catching a skip trace criminal.

  “You know what?” she hissed in my face, snapping around so fast I smashed into her. My chest bounced her back a half foot and she stumbled on the corner of a small chair in the waiting room. I reached for her, snaking my arm around her waist. Reflexes kicked in and I pulled her hard against my torso.

  We were both breathing hard.

  It wasn’t from her stumble.

  Maggie

  “What?” he asked, his breath hot against my temple. He smelled like coffee and tobacco, breath mints and fresh lawns.

  “You smoke?” I barked, amazed by the scent. No one I knew smoked, aside from a handful of experimental freshman girls in the residence hall where I worked.

  “You want to talk about my tobacco habits when your hand is on my ass?” His eyelashes fluttered against my cheek. “And no, I don’t smoke. Guys I work with do.”

  I froze. This was not going as planned. Then again, I didn’t plan any of this. My hand was, in fact, splayed across the fine, hard contours of his butt. I removed it fast and stood, forcing myself out of his arms.

  Tears pricked at the backs of my eyelids. Pooling in my throat, the salty fluid was a precursor, choking me. I wasn’t going to cry. No. Not this guy. Not this moment.

  And yet the loss of the heat of his touch made me hold back a gasp. Losing that connection was like being tossed in ice water against my will.

  “Who do you think you are?” I sputtered, leaning on a cliched phrase.

  “Tyler.”

  I gave him a flat stare, my face slick with new sweat. I poked him in the chest, my finger barely making a dent in his taut flesh. “Let me be perfectly clear. Fuck you for turning me down two months ago, and fuck you for taunting me back there. You don’t have to like me.”

  He snorted.

  “You don’t have to want to sleep with me,” I continued.

  He didn’t react.

  “But you need to give me a modicum of basic respect.”

  “Why?”

  The single word ran around and around in my head like a NASCAR driver at the beginning of a race. Why. Why. Why. Why. Forty-eight laps later and it was still going strong and steady.

  “Why?” I repeated, incredulous. My eyes searched his face and I wondered, for a split second of clarity, why I was doing this. Torturing myself over this guy’s rejection. He was hot. Quiet. Taciturn, really. He had never made an overture toward me (unless you count a few sensual looks). We’d exchanged more words about not fucking than we had on any other topic. He was not my type. He was not the kind of guy I dated...before.

  Seven years and two months ago.

  So why was I bothering? What was it about him that made me—

  Lips. Warm, soft, but in control and commanding. Hands around my waist, tugging on my belt loops, pulling my pelvis against his. The rub of his jeans rivets against the pad of my thumb. He was kissing me. Tyler was kissing me.

  I pulled my hands up and pressed them flat against his chest, ready to push hard.

  Instead, I pushed hard with my lips. My hands slipped up around his neck and pulled.

  Tight.

  He tasted so foreign, so forbidden, like something you know you shouldn’t sample but you can’t help yourself. Recriminations and warnings inside my head faded into a nothingness replaced by pure sensation, by the split certainty that I was violating every single norm about how I understood myself while enjoying every second of it.

  “You,” he said in a low, deep voice, his breath coming out in little pants, his cheek scraping against my jaw, “are a pain in the ass.”

  And with that he released me and walked away, leaving me wet, aroused, and ready to kill him.

  But not stupid enough to follow. What the hell was I doing? At least this time, he kissed me. What did that mean?

  “You okay?” Liam’s voice at my side made me jump. I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth, as if I could hide Tyler’s kiss.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “You don’t look okay,” he said, glaring down the hallway where Tyler had just departed. “Did Frown do something to you?”

  Oh, yes he did.

  “Um, no,” I said, sighing and running my hand through my hair. “It’s cool. I just needed to clear up a few things with him.”

  Liam has these eyes that make you think you’re on the beach in Nantucket when you look at him. Incisive and perceptive, those eyes took me in.

  He opened his mouth to say something, then looked at Charlotte. An unreadable look passed between them, and he took off down the hallway, following Tyler.

  I stayed put.

  I had to.

  My legs wouldn’t move.
/>   Chapter Two

  Tyler

  For the record, I was not the one found hanging out of a window, naked, with a chicken and a gerbil clinging to my ass. But I was the person they called to fix that mess. Two days later I went home to help see my dad off to prison.

  “Too late,” Johnny taunted as I walked in the apartment, my brain scrambled from being on seven different semi trucks over two and a half days. Being broke meant I couldn’t afford to fly. Hitching a ride was cheap but not easy.

  Nothing’s easy when you’re broke.

  “Too late for what?” I asked. My stomach growled. I felt like a giant grease ball. Shower first. Food second. Bed third.

  I dumped my backpack, my bass and my acoustic guitar on the floor near the door and stretched. My palms could rest flat on the yellowed ceiling when I did that. My calves screamed and my triceps burned from the relief of blood flow.

  I’d see Dad in the morning. I guessed he was at Shorty’s, the bar around the corner where he hung out sometimes. Two months ago he’d called and I’d bailed him out. The damn idiot did it again last week, only this time I couldn’t bail him out. No money. He got someone to get him out, but he’d violated the terms of some court agreement and now he was going back in. The plan was to take him in tomorrow.

  “He turned himself in.” Johnny walked past me, his body twitching, as he went into the kitchen and flung open the fridge door. A stench worse than the alley behind most of my bar gigs hit me like a wall of puke. Half-opened takeout containers filled the fridge shelves.

  He picked one and tossed the styrofoam thing into a microwave, pressed some buttons and picked at a scab on his arm.

  “What?” I snapped. He turned and stared me down with eyes like sandpaper.

  Johnny looked like our mom. Tall and lean, all knees and elbows. Pale skin with veins hiding under tissue paper. His eyes were a pale beige, like the shallow part of the ocean. I only know that color from living in Boston for a couple of years. You go to Castle Island a few times for free shore time and you can see it.

  The water. Growing up in St. Louis meant Johnny’d never seen the ocean. I wanted to bring him back with me. He was eighteen now and could do whatever he wanted. Two years ago, when I moved to the east coast, he begged. Pleaded. Bargained and all that shit for a chance to come with me.

  I couldn’t.

  He hated me for that. Still does. But now he’s eighteen and can do whatever the fuck he wants.

  That appeared to be drugs. And lots of them. I knew a tweaker when I saw one. So did Johnny.

  All we needed to do was look at our dad.

  “Too late to give Dad a hug and a kiss,” Johnny said. “What the hell do you think, Tyler? He’s gone. Turned himself in.”

  Back in prison.

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuck? That’s it?” He snorted, then shoved his palm up, fast, against his nose. A thin trickle of blood smeared his thumb joint.

  Scabs. Twitching. Bleeding nose. What drug was Johnny not taking?

  “How long?” I asked. My lips began tingling. My scalp felt like bees crawled under it. My fingers wanted to do anything but stay empty. I bent down to grab the handle of my bass case.

  “How long what?”

  “How long’s he in for?”

  “Ten months.”

  I made a low whistle and looked around the place. No ceiling lights and half the lamps were out. I knew that meant the light bulbs had burnt and no one had the money to replace them. Overflowing ashtrays dotted the broken coffee table. Burns made the top look like it was a piece of sick art, the surface eroded on purpose by the heat of the cigarette cherries. But there was no purpose.

  Just Dad’s way.

  No one had vacuumed in months. I was probably the last person who bothered to clean. The apartment had a funk. More than the smell of two men sharing the place. It smelled like decay. Like hopelessness. Like agony.

  Like giving up.

  Johnny’s eyes were so hateful it hurt to look at him. He looked so much like our mom. When he glared at me it was like Mom came back from the grave and shamed me. I tore my eyes from him and took a deep breath. Cut it off right away ’cause the odor burned.

  “Shit, man, what are we gonna do?” I asked him, my fingers going half numb from too many hormones, too little sleep, and the sense that something was deeply wrong in this place. More wrong than usual, and that was saying a lot.

  “We?” He made a nasty sound in the back of his throat. “What the hell you think I’m gonna do, Tyler? Go to my fancy prep school and get a massage? I’ll be fine.” His eyes hardened, like two pieces of tree bark. “I’ve got jobs.”

  Jobs. That meant he was dealing.

  “Huh,” was all I could say. It said everything. It said nothing. Any words I could come up with would be about as useful.

  “What about you?” He smirked. “Made it big yet? Sign a contract for a record deal?” His tone of voice made him sound exactly like Dad.

  Dad wasn’t exactly an optimist.

  “Nah,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I get by.”

  “We all get by. It’s what we Gilvreys do. We get by.”

  My throat filled with angry, salty outrage. Being lumped in with Dad and Johnny made everything in me go tense. A cold flush covered my body. Words didn’t come. Just feelings. Emotions I was about as good at handling as words.

  I looked at his greasy hair, the scabs on his body, his crappy shoes and how his bones seemed like someone carved them out of his skin. I hadn’t been home in half a year. How had Johnny changed so much? I was five years older and a million miles away. His life was nothing but street running and drugs.

  “I’ll help.” Those were the only words I could think to say.

  Wrong ones.

  “Help? What the fuck kind of help do you think you can give me, Tyler? Dad’s gone. Gone. No way I can pay the rent here. Hell, I don’t even know how to pay it. Who the landlord is or how that works.”

  But you can find a meth dealer in sixty seconds flat, I thought. Saying that would have been like dropping a nuclear bomb. Good thing I know how not to say words.

  “And,” Johnny continued, “I got friends. I’m fine. I’ll live somewhere.” He gave me a hard, sarcastic grin. “You don’t have to worry about me. Oh. Yeah. You never did.” His hands balled into fists and the skin under one eye twitched.

  I knew it was an act. Or, at least, it would have been a year ago. Now, though, he’d added an inch of height and had arms corded with ropy muscle. The tingle of danger began in the skin at the base of my neck. One thing you learn from being raised by a dad like ours: when to sense a threat.

  When had my little brother become one?

  Bzzzz. We both grabbed our asses like they were on fire.

  “Yours,” Johnny said, blasé and scratching something under his shirt. He turned away like nothing had just happened.

  It was Darla. “Yeah?” I said, wondering why she’d call me now. Here. Like this. It felt weird, so out of context, to have my Boston life intrude on my St. Louis life.

  “Change of plans,” she said, all breathy and weird. She inhaled and exhaled like some Euro technobeat was controlling her lungs.

  “What?”

  “Change.Of.Plans,” she said slowly, like that would make more sense.

  “What plans?” Layers of shit piled on layers of shit in my head made talking harder than normal. Listening, too.

  “More Than Nothing needs an opening act at their L.A. concert. Half their opening act has chicken pox.”

  “Chicken pox? Is this a joke?”

  “No joke,” she said with a weird laugh.

  “How Angelina Jolie of them.”

  “You need to be on a plane tomorrow,” she declared.

  “What the fuck? Tomorrow? What the hell for?” I barked, the words angry. Johnny was busy with his phone but I could tell he was listening.

  “Are you high?” Darla asked. “I said, More Than Nothing had a last-minute ca
ncellation of their opening act. In three days Random Acts of Crazy is opening for motherfucking More Than Nothing,” she added, then recited the amount of money I’d make for one show.

  “Quit fucking with me,” I said. A small headache formed behind my eye. Johnny started laughing his ass off suddenly. The tinny sound of a video playing on his phone hit me. He started wheezing about a chicken and a gerbil.

  That video was everywhere.

  “Not fucking with you. I already called in a plane ticket. Tomorrow.” Today was Sunday. She named an airline. “You have a 10:11 a.m. flight. I’m headed to L.A. the same day and Liam and Sam are following on a later flight. We couldn’t get the same one.”

  “Darla. Darla? Slow down,” I said, my brain turning into a hay bale with the string cut and tossed out of a loft. “You’re saying this is for real? I need to be on a plane that fast?”

  “Make sure you have your I.D.,” she said over my words. “And save receipts, because it’s all on the expense account.”

  My heart sped up so fast. “You mean it.” I made a mental check of my money. I didn’t have credit cards, but there was four hundred bucks in my bank account I hid from Dad and Darla was fast with reimbursements. Holy shit. This could work.

  “I don’t say things I don’t mean, Frown.” She laughed. “Congrats. You’re in the big time.”

  “Joe must be pissed.”

  “Joe’s high as a kite on legal prescription drugs. He still gets to take over when he’s recovered,” she added in a low voice.

  “I know. Promise. No problem.” By then I’d have enough money and experience to go find more gigs. “That’s cool.”

  “Ten eleven a.m. Airport. I’ll email you the hotel reservation and the other details,” she said. “Gotta go. This,” she sighed, “is some heady shit.”

  No kidding.

  She ended the call right there, leaving me dazed and spinning. I grabbed my backpack and music cases. Johnny started playing some video game on his phone and the room began to hum. My ears fought to drown out the sound but it was strong. Too strong. I ignored my brother and marched into my old room.

  Which was stripped down to a stained mattress, an old sheet I think was on the bed six months ago when I left for Boston, a ton of cigarette butts, and enough aluminum beer cans to side a house.