He laughed, ripping the envelope open. “Yes, you will.”
He took my hand, and I straddled him, kissing him, sliding down on him. We gasped at the same time.
“Eden. Oh, my God.”
“Adam. Ah.”
We rocked together, releasing an immediate need. He came quickly, and we separated reluctantly. I wanted to follow him home and stay up all night touching him, kissing him. Instead I dropped him off at his place, and we kissed good-night for a lot longer than we should have. Then I headed home.
Alone in my bedroom, I opened my laptop and searched for videos on Walking Disaster’s YouTube channel. Our video had uploaded, and it had three-hundred-some-odd views already.
The video blew my mind. Hervé had managed to splice in cuts of both Adam and me singing. The audio was mixed and overlaid our videos. It sounded amazing. I read every single comment below the video. They weren’t all complimentary, but most of the negative comments were directed at the speculation that Adam Copeland was gay and that his music was gay. I laughed at those. Plenty of people asked who I was, but by the time I went to bed, the overwhelming commentary was that the song sounded cool like that, and that I had a lovely voice.
I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
Chapter 12
Nobody at work had any clue I was an Internet sensation. Probably because I really wasn’t one, although I did wake up to two thousand views of our video. I couldn’t possibly read all the comments and get ready for work in time. People had devolved into political arguments somehow, anyway.
Still, I couldn’t refrain from checking the fan site one time to see if anyone there had noticed the video. Someone had created a thread to discuss it, and it already had seven pages of comments. It was surreal.
And those fans knew how to stalk. The video was titled “Adam Copeland w/ Eden Sinclair—Expulsion (acoustic).” With my name to work with, they’d linked me to my brother, who they already knew would be opening for Walking Disaster in Europe. I clicked to the next page and was rewarded with some video footage of Micah onstage in Charlotte. They’d also found video of Micah and his band performing. And one savvy fan had located a recording of me singing backup for Micah.
The speculators had arrived at the apparently obvious conclusion that I was a musician, too, and that maybe Adam was planning on working more with me. The discussion stayed on this track for a couple more pages. The burning question was whether Adam was putting together an acoustic CD. Lots of tiny dancing emoticons lined these posts: a little yellow smiley holding up an electric fan to cool off, a little yellow smiley melting into a puddle, a little yellow smiley falling flat on his face in a dead faint.
A couple of people complained they didn’t like this direction for Adam’s music at all. It had already veered too pop for their tastes, and they’d have to find someone else to follow if he was going to turn into a folk act.
Then someone posted a link to my Facebook page. Is this her? It doesn’t appear she’s a musician at all. She lives in New Jersey and works at some place called Anubis Labs.
I was relieved I hadn’t posted anything about Adam on there. But they also found my Twitter, and someone pulled up Adam’s tweet from the week before about discovering the beautiful parts of New Jersey, and speculation took off like a thoroughbred in heat.
Their relentless hunger to find out everything they could about me weirded me out. I wanted to post, Knock it off! I’m just an average girl. I’m just like all of you. Nothing to see here.
But Pumpkin dropped a reminder not to dig into Adam’s personal life, and that was the end of that. I had half a mind to send her a private message to thank her. She had an uncanny ability to let the posters run free without allowing them to venture into truly invasive territory. And her posters for their part seemed rather well trained. I wondered if Adam had any idea who she was. If so, he should be sending her backstage passes and fruit baskets.
The last comment in the thread, from AnimeFan, asked, Didn’t Adam say in an interview last year he was trying to find a female vocalist to work with? Looks like he found one.
The apparently innocuous comment rattled me more than it should have. Maybe because Adam’s attention to me had gotten so much friendlier after I’d joined Micah onstage that first night. Maybe because he’d handed me a guitar the very next day and hinted at duetting without any more to go on than that. Maybe because he had me in the studio after three dates.
Dates. They weren’t even dates. We’d gone to dark, out-of-the-way restaurants, or to his place, or to mine. His explanations for hiding from prying eyes rang true, but he had a knack for saying the truth without being honest.
Maybe he’d seduced me with his sexy sexiness to trick me into performing with him. That thought was so ludicrous it made me laugh out loud. He could’ve always just asked me to perform with him first without all the hocus-pocus.
Still, it troubled me that he’d put me onstage professionally while keeping me hidden privately. But I swallowed back the doubts.
I brought up my Facebook page and discovered that Stacy had posted the video on her wall. Listen to my friend Eden Sinclair singing with Adam Copeland. How cool is this?
The buzz from the positive responses charged me all the way into the office, a place of unending normalcy. I was bursting with this secret that wasn’t a secret at all, except for the fact that you don’t just blurt out, “People are watching me perform on YouTube!” without sounding a bit full of yourself.
But when Kelly entered the lab, even she was nice about it. “Stacy sent me your video with Adam. Wow.”
At lunch, when I took a break, I had a dozen text messages on my phone, my Twitter following had increased by sixty people, I had several strange friend requests on Facebook, the view count on YouTube had increased to six thousand, and my mom had left me a voice-mail message.
Holy shit.
I found Adam’s number and called him. He picked up on the second ring, “Hey, superstar,” he yawned. It didn’t register until later that he must’ve been asleep.
“Have you seen it?”
He laughed quietly. “I told you.”
“I can’t believe it. Everyone is trying to reach me today. My phone keeps buzzing.”
“It’ll die down. Enjoy it while it lasts. But Eden, don’t go hunting down comments and read everything.”
“Too late.”
“I doubt you’ve read everything. Seriously though, it’s tempting, and when you read nothing but good things, you’ll get high on the ego-feeding reactions. It can be addicting.”
I recalled how buzzed I was driving into work and could see what he meant. “But what’s wrong with that?”
“It never lasts. Tomorrow or next week or next month, that video will be old news. The best possible outcome would be that you go from reading thousands of nice things about yourself and then suddenly nothing. And you’ll want another hit. Next thing you know, you’ll be wanting to make more videos, and that will lead to the slippery slope of trying to make a career out of music. And you wouldn’t want that.”
I laughed. “So what’s the worst possible outcome?”
“This would never happen, I’m sure. But people can turn nasty on a dime. If you read too much about yourself, you’re going to eventually find some pretty terrible opinions. And that can be miserable.”
“You mean like how gay your music is?”
He didn’t laugh. “Like how someone wants to beat my skull in with a blunt instrument so they don’t have to hear my shitty music anymore.”
“Ouch.”
“It gets ugly. So just . . . try not to read too much, okay?”
“Okay.”
“But what are you doing tonight? Can I take you out on the town to celebrate?”
Surely, he only meant another trip to Bound Brook. But a butterfly flew loose in my belly. “You just said yesterday—”
“I know what I said. If I’d taken you out in public last night, you’d have been my date
with all the gossip that goes with it. When I take you out tonight, you’ll be Eden Sinclair, up-and-coming musical sensation, and my colleague. It’s a different class.”
“I thought the paparazzi wouldn’t see that YouTube.”
“They haven’t. They will as soon as they see you on my arm. It’s what they do, Eden.”
I was useless the rest of the day. My nerves came and went. I’d forget about how nervous I was, and then my body would remind me. And when my body forgot, my mind picked up the slack. It was a tag-team effort to keep me completely distracted.
In the afternoon, I had to get up and move before I made myself crazy. I took a walk over to Thanh’s lab and found him occupied with a pair of mice. He acknowledged me with a wink. I came up behind him and gathered that these were in fact the same mice he’d shown me the week before.
I watched as Thanh pinched Rob Roy’s neck and inserted a syringe to draw blood. Then he placed Rob Roy on a treadmill near Cosmo and started a stopwatch. After several minutes, he drew blood again. He handed the vials to me without a word. While I ran the blood samples through the centrifuge to test for the presence of elevated corticosterone, Thanh got Rob Roy ready for the ejaculation testing. I stepped out of the room to get another cup of coffee. They were just mice, but when he explained what came next, so to speak, I felt like we were dealing in pornography.
When I returned, he was studying the blood work. “Fascinating.”
“What?”
“I haven’t injected the serum into Rob Roy for a week. His interest levels are dropping off.” He scribbled some notes on his clipboard.
“What does it mean?”
He set down the clipboard. “Your question before about cell regeneration was spot-on. Seems like the receptor gene is finally closed for business. If only we could get such promising results with the airborne topical agent . . .”
“Wait, but you said a day or two. Oh, God.” It had been over a week since I’d put on the perfume. But Adam was wearing it just the day before. “Thanh, how does it work that I’m not attracting every guy I pass when I wear the perfume? Why am I not attracted to every guy after I’ve worn it?”
“Don’t you remember before with Glenn, how he didn’t react to you until you talked to him? My theory at the time was that you need to have some connection, maybe a latent attraction, though I’m not sure to what extent. Honestly, we’ve gotten mixed results in our human trials. I’m trying to control for things like natural chemistry, but you know, humans are more art than science.”
I left his lab more confused than when I’d arrived.
Adam was waiting outside my apartment when I got off work. He actually wore non-jeans, a light suit jacket thing and, wonder of wonders, a tie. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere nice. Dress nice.”
I called Stacy immediately. “Help!”
She raced over and glanced at Adam with an “Oh, hi” so casual as to seem rehearsed. I tried not to laugh. We pulled out everything that might pass as “nice” and settled on a soft black sweater with three-quarter sleeves, a tweed miniskirt, and chunky black heels. I let her do my makeup, without trying to hide from Adam that I had no idea what I was doing.
“This is what you signed up for, okay? Do not laugh.”
He laughed. “It’s cool. I don’t know how to put on makeup either.”
“Oh, I know how. But she can make me look good.”
“You always look good.”
Stacy stopped for a minute. “Aw. Points for that.”
Traffic going into the city wasn’t a nightmare, and we made it to the restaurant with time to spare. He parked and walked me out to the street. As we strolled together, I wrapped my hand around his bicep and bumped him with my shoulder. “We clean up pretty good.”
He put his hand on mine and stopped me. “Are you ready for this?”
“For what?”
“Fasten your seat belt. And take a deep breath.”
He dropped my hand as we turned the corner. Right out front, a small crowd waited to go in. A man leaned against the wall nearby, noticeable in that he clearly wasn’t dressed to dine at the restaurant, he was alone, and he held a very expensive-looking camera. Adam and I cleared the corner, and the man straightened up and started shooting pictures. He crossed the sidewalk and walked along beside us. “Who’s your date, Adam?”
We kept walking. Adam ignored the man. Undeterred, Mr. Paparazzo spun around and walked backward down the sidewalk right in front of us, his camera click-click-clicking the whole time. I couldn’t help notice Adam didn’t put his arm around me or in any way demonstrate we were together. It hurt a little, but I figured he knew what he was doing. When we got inside the door of the restaurant, he lightly touched my back, just between my shoulder blades, and spoke to the maître d’ who ushered us in. For a change, we didn’t go to a corner table in a dark room. We were right out in the open.
I scoped out the restaurant and saw some people who looked familiar. I sucked in my breath. “Isn’t that—?”
Adam’s eyes never left mine, but he smiled. “Probably.”
Picking up my cloth napkin, I flapped it against his hand. “You don’t know who I was going to say.”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It probably is whoever you think it is.”
From the corner of my eye, I noticed a couple staring in our direction. When I glanced over, they looked away quickly. But the girl’s eyes crept over again, and she whispered feverishly to the guy with her. Her date might be saying, “Probably. It probably is Adam Copeland.”
That thought put me in my place, and I stopped gawking at other customers and focused on the menu. There were no prices. Oh.
I cast my eyes up at him to find him watching me with a devilish grin. “What?”
“Nothing. Just enjoying watching you. You’re completely fascinating.”
Okay. Other than him, nobody had ever said anything like that my entire life. “Me? How about you?”
“Why? Because people know who I am?” He put his forearms on the table and leaned in. “I’ve made music my entire life. Like your brother, I started playing at battle of the bands and wherever we could get someone to give us the time of day. I played small clubs. My band toured in a broken-down van and played in front of five people. That song on the radio now? I wrote that years ago, but nobody gave a shit.”
I scooted forward so we could talk closer, more quietly, more privately. “Yeah. Music’s a fickle business. I’ve watched my brother scratch and claw to make a living from it. He’s so talented, but so are a million other people competing for the same dollar. And he doesn’t even care about the money, but he has to.”
He listened, nodding. “Exactly. People say we sold out. I don’t know. We studied the business and adjusted our performances to build a grassroots fan base. And we hired producers who could make our music more radio-friendly. We worked on our stage presence. It was work. None of it came easy, but when it paid off, it left me a little disillusioned. A little bitter.”
“Because you had to bend to the industry to succeed?”
“Yeah. I’m grateful to be able to make a living this way. But when we set our sights on success, we were thinking about playing more gigs at slightly better venues. None of us expected this.”
“Careful what you wish for?”
He laughed. “Exactly. You know, most people would pull out the world’s smallest violin about now. I have nothing to complain about, right? It’s what everyone wants.”
“But not you?”
The waiter interrupted us to take our order. I’d barely scanned the menu. “Um.” I looked up at Adam for help. “What should I get?”
“Do you like steak?”
“Of course.”
He asked the waiter to have the chef prepare his best cut of meat and whatever he thought best to pair with that. Then he asked the waiter to choose the wine. The waiter smiled appreciatively and walked off with a mission.
Adam watched him
go. “I didn’t know what to order either. I’m not sure why, but it always seems to make waiters happy when I let them pick the wine. Maybe they just grab the most expensive. I can’t really tell the difference.”
I put my hand out on the table toward him. He hesitated, but took mine and asked, “Living on the edge so soon?”
He ran his finger across the side of my hand, lightly, barely noticeable to the naked eye, but it set fireworks off inside my body. My eyes rolled back in my head, and I had to drag my hand back across the table and set it in my lap for fear of making far too obvious what we were still trying to keep hidden.
I coughed and squared my shoulders. “Back to what you were saying. What do you want out of all this, Adam?”
“I want to take you out to dinner without some creepy little troll trying to find out if I’m cheating on the fake fiancée invented to foil a different creepy troll. And I want to make a career out of making music. Why are those two things incompatible?”
“They aren’t, though. Not as much as you think.”
His eyes narrowed. “What d’ya mean?”
“How many people could pick Hervé out of a crowd? Doesn’t he play the same gigs as you?”
“Oh, so you’re saying I cultivated this because I’m the front man?” He sat back in his chair and considered that. “Yeah. That’s true. Part of our marketing put the target on me. And then that stunt with Adrianna didn’t help.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come here and be all sour grapes. This was supposed to be about your YouTube success today.”
I found a roll in the basket and tore it in half. “How did you know that would come out so well?”
“You really don’t know how talented you are, do you? Hervé heard it right away. Micah must know, he asks you to come up at the last minute and throws a mic in your hand. You have an amazing voice and an instinct for songwriting.”
I ducked my head behind the roll in my hands, unsure how to take the compliment. “I’ve always loved music.”
“You could’ve made a career of it. You still could.”
The waiter came and poured us our wine. He let me taste it, and I pretended I had a clue what I was doing. “It’s fine.”
Some Kind of Magic Page 14