Ranger Knox (Shifter Nation: Werebears Of Acadia Book 1)

by Meg Ripley

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  We got out of the radio interview unscathed, and I climbed onto the bus quickly the minute we were out of the station’s offices. Maybe if we were lucky, I’d have a little time to spend with Olivia before we had to do the next interview at the club we were playing at. I’d left her working on more content for the magazine, compiling pictures and writing an article that would go up on the Record Spin website in a few days.

  I walked through to the lounge; but Olivia wasn’t there. I frowned, hearing Jules giving Mark shit about something—some comment he’d made that I barely cared about. Alex was talking to Ron about scheduling something or other, and I didn’t care about that either. I walked to the back of the bus. “Hannah? You seen Olivia? Did she go somewhere or something?”

  “She was in the lounge last time I checked,” Hannah said with a shrug. “Working on another article for the magazine.” I sucked on my front teeth and tried to think. The only place on the bus I hadn’t looked through was the bunks.

  The guys were settling in the lounge when I walked back through. “Anyone see Olivia go anywhere? I don’t want to leave her stranded,” I said, trying not to sound as anxious as I was starting to feel.

  “Why would she get off the bus?” I shrugged, continuing onto the bunks. I went to my bunk first—just on impulse. She wasn’t there. The next option—and the most obvious one—was her own bunk.

  Sure enough, when I tugged aside the curtain, there she was, curled up on the bed, facing the wall. “Liv? What’s going on? What’s up?” I looked back at the lounge and decided that it was probably better to join her in the bed—if she would let me—than to stand outside of the bunk and try and talk to her. I climbed up and pulled myself onto the bed behind her.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Olivia said, her voice creaking and breaking. I tugged the curtain back into place behind me.

  “Obviously, it’s a big deal,” I pointed out. I shifted closer to her on the bed. “Come on, Liv. Tell me what’s going on.” I pitched my voice low, my lips only inches away from her ear.

  “We got found out,” Olivia said after a moment’s silence. Her voice was flat. “Someone sent pictures to my editor. He emailed me while we were checking into the hotel, but I didn’t see it until you got to the station.”

  “What’s so wrong about that?” I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her body against mine. “I mean, how terrible can it be? We’re in the open now.”

  “He’s thinking about pulling me from the assignment,” Olivia said. “Looks like the rest of the guys are going to get to argue over who gets the money or how to split it.”

  “Why does he want to pull you?”

  “Because it’s a scandal! Everyone’s going to be going on about me being a slut. I’m ruined.” She shuddered against me and sobbed, turning her face towards the pillow. “All anyone is going to ever associate me with is fucking the guitarist of Molly Riot.” I tightened my grip on her and Olivia struggled against me, pulling away. “I knew this was a mistake. I knew it was stupid and a bad idea and I did it anyway.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake!” I heard the guys in the lounge starting to go quiet—not quite stopping their chatter, but certainly going about it a lot less. I didn’t care. “Look, Liv—it happens all the time. Julian Casablancas got together with his band’s assistant manager. Dave Grohl married someone from MTV.” I pulled her tightly against me until she stopped struggling. “We’ll convince your editor that it’s actually better that you’re dating me.”

  “And if someone bitches that the only reason I wrote something is because I’m fucking you? What then, Nick? Women’s careers get ruined over this.”

  “Yours won’t.” I kissed the top of her head, holding her body against mine, feeling the tension in every muscle. “I swear, Olivia. I won’t let anyone ruin your career over this. It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing to you,” she said, her voice tight and so bitter I could almost taste it. “When you break up with me in two months or four or six because you want something new, you can forget all about me, and not give a single shit about what my career looks like.”

  “By the time I break up with you—if I ever do, which at the moment I’m not planning—no one is even going to remember this.”

  “They will if it goes to press,” Olivia said. “And I can just about guarantee that the kind of person who would find my fucking editor’s personal email to send him pictures of us together is exactly the kind of person who’d send the same pictures to a bunch of other people.”

  “So, you come clean with it,” I suggested. “Make it your next article on the site. Talk about the ridiculousness of having a relationship on the road.” I gripped her so tightly I knew it was probably more than a little uncomfortable for Olivia, but I couldn’t make myself let go of her. “If you don’t freak out over this and you handle it like it doesn’t matter, then it won’t matter.”

  “Just…just let me be for a little while, Nick,” she said. She sounded exhausted—so thoroughly exhausted that my grip loosened without me even thinking about it. “I need to cry over this and try and get…get myself together, and I can’t do that if you’re insisting that everything is going to be fine and dandy and fucking wonderful. I need to—I need to think. And I can’t think if you’re right here next to me.”

  “I’ll be quiet,” I said lowly. “I’ll just lie here, and you can cry all over me, and when we get to the venue I’ll change my shirt and no one will have to know.” I glanced towards the curtain. “Well, no one other than the guys and the crew on the bus.”

  “Just leave me alone for a little while,” Olivia said. “I—I’ll talk to you about all this later when I’ve figured out what I want to do.” I wanted to argue the point; I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t going to just leave her alone. I wasn’t going to let it end like this—and I could tell she wanted it to end. When she did talk to me later, she was going to argue for us to be over. But I couldn’t make myself do it. I kissed her forehead and let go of her, and then I slipped out of the bunk and climbed down along the wall, and went into the lounge.

  “What happened?” I threw myself onto a couch and shook my head.

  “Someone sent pictures of us to her editor,” I said as quietly as possible. “Her editor’s considering taking her off the assignment.”

  “So, we say that we won’t work with anyone else,” Alex suggested. “I mean what are they going to do? Risk making a bigger scandal out of this by having to explain the cancelation?”

  “She’s afraid it’s going to ruin her career.” I sighed. “Fuck, I need a beer.” I needed more than that. I stood up on unsteady feet and went back to the bunks. I found my vapor pen and the little tiny jar of hash wax; at one point in its life it had been a container of lip balm or something. I went back into the lounge and Dan handed me an open beer. I put a dab of brown, sticky hash on the atomizer of my vape and took a quick hit, holding the tingling vapor in my lungs for as long as I dared. I exhaled and took a sip of my beer.

  “Take it slow,” Jules suggested from the table where he and Dan were playing Battleship. “You don’t want to go into the show blasted out of your mind.” I shrugged.

  “She’s going to end it,” I said quietly. I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out of my lungs in favor of another hit of the hash. “The fuck does it matter if I play bad for one night over it?”

  “That’s some bullshit,” Alex said, scowling at me. “You’ve never, ever let any of the rest of us have the excuse of breaking up with somebody for playing bad. You don’t get it either.”

  “I’m not going to fuck the show over,” I said. “I just…” I shook my head. “I just want to get stoned enough to leave her alone. If I don’t then I’m going to keep trying to talk to her and just make things worse.” I took another hit and then set the vape aside, starting on my cigarette in earnest. I knew better than to get wasted before it was even two in the afternoon. “I just thought—for like, the first fucking t
ime in my life—that I’d found something I wanted to really keep. And then this shit happens.” I looked at each of the other guys in the band in turn. “If I ever find out who did this to her, I’m gonna fucking break his ass.” A little smile tugged at Jules’ lips. For a second, I couldn’t help but suspect my band mates; there were only so many people who could have gotten pictures of Olivia and me together, after all. But none of them would’ve done something like that.

  “You figure out who it is and we’ll help break their ass,” Mark told me. I took a deep breath and a sip of my beer.

  “I can see the headline now,” I said, grinning wryly. “Molly Riot Share Jail Cell After Felony Assault.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Olivia avoided me the rest of the day, and I tried to fill the void that I’d gotten used to spending watching her work, helping her get the best possible pictures or sound bites from the crew or the rest of the band. I stayed on the stage even after we’d finished up sound check, playing meandering little runs on my guitar. It sounded off-pitch, but every time I checked it against the built-in tuner, it was dead on. This is why you’ve never gotten close to anything like this, I thought, picking out a mournful little OK Go tune. It took me a minute to remember the name: “Let it Rain.” I played the melody fill over and over again and then switched to the rhythm, murmuring the words to myself under the noise of the amps and speakers. “Cruise control distressed her/ kinda cursed and kinda blessed her/ engine running on the fumes…vision blue and blurry/ fallen angels in a flurry/ spinning through the empty room…”

  The thing that shocked me was that I’d never even considered the possibility of it ending between Olivia and me. She’d say that I was going to eventually move on from her, get tired of her—but it had never occurred to me to think that she might end it. Not really. I’d just thought things would go the same way that they’d been going; that I’d just keep ending up in her bed or her in my bed, and then once the tour ended, we’d switch off going to each other’s apartments, fucking like animals, eating dinner together and getting wasted and having a good time. Even if I never thought of it being something serious—something like a committed relationship—I’d figured it would just keep being the way it was.

  I switched to another OK Go tune almost without thinking. The low-slung groove suggested itself in my brain, the lyrics flowing through my head as I played the soulful low melody. I want you, yeah I want you/ I want you, yeah I want you bad/ So bad I can’t think straight, so bad all my bones shake/ so bad I can’t breathe… And in the light of morning for twenty-one days straight, there you are beside me…

  “Nick! You’re going to play the calluses off your fingers,” I missed the note and hit the wrong chord, startled by the sound of Alex’s voice shouting over my playing. I sighed and stopped playing altogether, setting the guitar down on its stand.

  “I was practicing,” I told Alex as I walked past him. “What else have I got to do? Olivia doesn’t want to be in the same room as me.”

  “You have two choices,” Alex said, following me. “You fight for her, or you give her up and find someone to take your mind off of her.”

  “She won’t let me fight for her,” I pointed out. “She wants to be left alone to figure everything out, and that’s going to mean that she’s going to figure that she should end it and hope that appeases her fucking editor.”

  “I had Ron put in a call to Record Spin,” Alex told me. “He told them that we see no problem with Olivia continuing, and that we aren’t interested in working with anyone else. He’s going to have to eat the scandal or it’ll blow up in his face.”

  “But what about her?” I remembered what Olivia had said. “She’s going to have to try and live it down too. Especially if it gets out in the press in general, they’re going to treat her like some kind of groupie.” Alex shrugged.

  “Keep her by your side if you can’t live without her,” he suggested. “That way if someone talks shit you can take care of it. But are you that serious about her?”

  “I’m more serious about her than I’ve ever been about anything in my life other than this band,” I told Alex. I frowned; the words had just left me—I hadn’t thought about it even for a second. But they were true; I’d never been serious about very many things. My family, the band, and my own pleasure were the only things I’d prioritized for years—even above school. The only reason I’d graduated at all had been because my life was easier finishing and getting the damn diploma than it would have been dropping out and having to pay my parents rent.

  “Then fight for her, asshole!” Alex grinned at me. “Jesus, you may be like—easily fifty women ahead of the rest of us in terms of honing your skills in the sack but Christ if you have no idea how to deal with a relationship.”

  “Like you’re one to talk,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Until Mary you nuked every relationship you were ever in as soon as the girl started talking about being serious.”

  “Nope—only when they started asking about when I’d be stable enough to support children,” Alex countered. “Mary is happy with the way things are between us for now, and if she wants kids eventually…” he shrugged. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “How do I fight for someone who doesn’t want to be around me?” I crossed my arms over my chest. Alex chuckled.

  “You lure her to you,” he told me. “You make it impossible for her to stay away, and then you don’t give her the option of you not fighting for her.” I considered that. I smiled to myself slowly and started to form a plan in my head; I thought I knew Olivia well enough to know what to use to lure her back to me, at least long enough to get my point across to her.

  “Thanks, Lex,” I said. “I’m going to grab a shower. I’ll catch you in the green room later.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The crowd was one of the largest we’d ever played in front of; the club was packed, even the balcony area stuffed so full of people that it seemed like a potential fire hazard. I’d stopped even thinking about the sweat pouring down my body under my clothes twenty minutes into the set; thinking about it wasn’t going to make it stop. In between one song and another, as Alex was saying something to the audience, I bent over to grab one of the open beers from its perch on one of the monitors. I glanced over at the sidelines; Olivia was there, and I gave her a little smile.

  Instead of my original plan—which had been to white knuckle my way through the set, gritting my teeth and just going through the motions—I was determined to play as well as I ever had in my entire life. I knew what Olivia liked; I knew there was a very good reason why she hung out with musicians that had nothing to do with a love of a good party and fun companionship. As I set my beer down again, turning to watch Mark sketch out the beat for the next song on the list, I remembered something from a couple of weeks before, when Olivia’s scandal hadn’t even been something I considered possible.

  We’d been tangled up in each other, sprawled as much as my bunk would allow, drenched in sweat. We’d finished fucking for the night—at least, unless one of us suddenly had a burst of new energy—and were just laying together, enjoying the afterglow. Olivia had taken one of my hands in both of hers, and examined it in the overhead light, peering at it until I started to feel uncomfortable. “What?”

  “Your hands fascinate me,” she’d said. She brushed the pads of her fingers along the calluses at the tips of my left hand fingers, then slid them along the digits themselves. “Not just because you can get me off with them in like, three minutes,” she’d added, giving me a little self-conscious grin.

  “What about them?” She’d shrugged, but hadn’t stopped her examination, making me shiver at the sensation of her fingertip following the lines on my palm.

  “I can see the skill in them,” she had said. “I love watching you play. I could never do the things you do—it’s like an instinct for you—but every time I watch you play a song, I feel like I can almost understand what you’re doing, why it works
.” She’d blushed then, letting my hand drop to the blankets. “Then there’s also the fact that it’s really, really easy to understand how you can get me off in three minutes, watching you play guitar.” I’d laughed and somehow managed to get the energy to pull her closer to me, to get her off with the hands she liked so much, before we finally fell asleep.

  I came back to the present just in time to start into the next song, pretending like I didn’t feel Olivia’s avid gaze watching my every move. I turned just enough to let her see my hands in the lights flashing their way across the stage, sweeping one way and then the other. I threw myself into the melody, nodding my head and tapping my foot in time even as I swayed to the beat. I opened my eyes once or twice just to meet her gaze, just to let her know I knew—and then I closed them again, turning more towards the audience, or towards one of the other guys in the band.

  It wasn’t much of a strategy, but by the time we played the last song, I thought it might be working—at least a little bit. Olivia hadn’t been able to tear her attention away from me for more than a few seconds at a time; long enough to grab pictures of the rest of the guys every so often, or of the crowd, but not so long that she risked forgetting about me, or thinking about anything other than me.