by Mia Archer
“Hey, one of the deals when we started this tour was I wasn’t doing any of that stuff anymore,” he said. “Besides, all my contacts are at least a decade out of date. I’ve been clean for as long as the rest of you.”
I laughed and shook my head. Of course he would think I was after that, though I wasn’t sure that scoring a little bit of pot for after the show really counted as being heavy into illegal shit. Especially considering the stuff was legal now in a few of the states where we toured.
Still, I wasn’t interested in any of that. I was more interested in some of his contacts in the security business.
“I’m not talking about scoring some weed for an after party or anything like that,” I said. “Besides, the record company has way better contacts for that sort of thing than you do if I decided I wanted to get back into that.”
“Oh? Then what do you need?”
“You work security. Do you know guys who can track things down? Like if I were to give you a phone number do you know anyone who could run with that?”
Jake grinned and spread his hands wide. “My lady. I have a cousin who does PI work. I could get him a phone number and he could see what he can find. Usually takes a few days though.”
“What if I told you I needed it this morning? I’m on a little bit of a time crunch here.”
I really was under a time crunch. We were scheduled to start off for a new city tonight. It was a miracle that this stop happened to coincide with one of our rest and relaxation days where we took some time to decompress between concerts before jumping into big weekend dates.
That meant I had today. Technically we were supposed to be on the road later this afternoon, but I could push it and leave as late as tomorrow morning and still be on schedule. Maybe. It would be a stretch, but it’s not like they were going to start a concert without me or anything. Worst case scenario the opening act got a chance to shine for one night.
“I suppose he might be able to do that, but it’s going to cost you to pull him off of whatever he’s working on,” Jake said.
“Fine, done. Make it happen Jake.”
“Is this one of those girls I saw last night? I’m assuming it’s the hottie that came off the bus?”
“Yup, that’s her,” I said.
“Weird. Never figured you to be one to try and track a girl down after she left the bus. Seems like you already got what you needed from her.”
“I don’t have what I needed from her at all Jake,” I said.
And it was true. There was so much more that I wanted, so much more that I needed, from the beautiful Jessica. She was all I could think about, and I needed to find out why she decided to leave in the middle of the night. I needed to know if it was me or if it was the star she was running from.
Though more than anything I just needed to see her again. See her smile. Spend more time with her. I wanted to be with her in the worst way, and not physically. I just wanted to spend time with her.
I really hoped Jake’s cousin would be able to track her down. I handed over Jessica’s phone number and headed back to the bus. I needed to be ready to go the instant I had more information, and that meant a solo shower.
Thinking of Jessica the entire time. Damn that girl was stuck in my head!
16: Bragging Rights
This morning was killer. I’d taken a shower and made sure I was done up. I put on a nice tight fitting T-shirt. The ladies always seemed to like the tight shirts. Then I’d quickly changed out of the tight shirt into something more respectable because Jessica didn’t seem like the kind of girl who’d be impressed by what impressed your average groupie.
After that I turned on the TV and tried to watch a movie, but it was really hard to stay distracted with passive entertainment like that. Watching a love story was the last thing I needed since I was terrified I might be headed for an unhappy ending that’d be a stark contrast to what I saw on the screen, and an action movie with lots of explosions was too mindless.
Too much opportunity for thoughts of Jessica to slip into my head. I hated that I couldn’t get her out of my mind even as I loved it.
I pulled out my guitar and started picking randomly at it. That always got my mind off of my problems. The guitar had certainly helped me after the Incident, though a lot of the songs I’d written during that dark time weren’t exactly the kind of thing I could ever perform on stage unless we wanted to completely change the band’s genre and risk getting our asses sued by my ex for defamation or libel or whatever the fuck it was lawyers used to go after people who said mean things about other people.
The last thing I wanted after that fucked up breakup was to put out a song that might make a single cent the bitch could sue me for, so they went into the vault to stay there until maybe some day in the far future when I was dead and wouldn’t give a fuck what happened.
Though even as I was plucking away I found myself humming a tune that turned into the beginnings of a song about how I felt, and I was feeling pretty damn good.
It started with some suitably indistinct references to troubles in the past. Vague enough that a bloodsucking lawyer couldn’t come after me and say I was talking about any one girl in particular even though it was obviously about the Incident in my head. Then a little bit about what I’d been missing out on and how I might’ve found it.
I was stuck on some of the lyrics when the knock came at the door and any thoughts of the song disappeared from my head. I really fucking hoped that was Jake, because I didn’t know if I could take much more waiting. It was getting close to noon, and I worried that if this kept up for much longer I wasn’t going to be able to find Jessica before we had to head off to the next city.
We weren’t scheduled to actually have our next concert until tomorrow, but the band could be sticklers about getting to the next city with plenty of time. At least most of them were. Gareth was usually willing to make an exception if he had a pretty little thing that he wanted to enjoy for a day or so. We’d even left him behind on at least one occasion.
I opened the door and was disappointed to see Gareth standing there with a huge grin. Inwardly I was groaning and rolling my eyes, but on the outside I took the hand he was holding over his head and clasped it.
“Ivy!” Gareth said. “So how did things go with you and your lady friend last night?”
I hated myself for doing it, for acting like that girl, even as I held his hand in a tight grip and pulled him up into my bus. I forced myself to slap on a goofy grin to match his. This was one-on-one time with Gareth, and that meant it was time to act like the player. The girl who’d traveled to hundreds of cities and left a line of broken hearts along the way. The girl that I hated and really didn’t want to be anymore, but there was another part of me that felt like I had to keep up the charade because that’s how things always were with me and Gareth.
Gareth was like a brother to me, and I worried that if I didn’t act like this it would hurt him. So I kept up an act that wasn’t really me anymore.
“You know I had a good time! How about you?”
Damn I felt like a slime even as I said it. I felt like I needed to tell Gareth that it had been a decade and we were fooling ourselves if we thought we could still treat girls the way we did back then. Not that he would probably understand if I did say something.
And of course I already knew how his night went. Jake told me all about that. He gave Jessica’s friend the full groupie treatment and probably showed her the door shortly after. Him turning that Alice girl loose was probably a big part of the reason why Jessica wasn’t here right now. If her friend wasn’t around to carry her away then maybe she would’ve stuck around.
Then again maybe my reputation would’ve been enough to send her running whether or not her friend was around to be jilted by Gareth. Maybe I was getting what I deserved. My karmic retribution for all the crap I’d pulled before the band broke up the first time. A breakup that was caused largely because of the fallout from my fucked up love life.
/> It all came full circle.
“You know I gave it to her then showed her the door,” Gareth said. “Some things never change. Am I right?”
He held his hand out to slap mine again. I grinned and laughed as we slapped skin even as I wondered how that Alice girl felt about being loved and left the night before. She’d seemed a hell of a lot more into the band than Jessica was. She should know what to expect.
That a long time fan should “know what to expect” and not be surprised about getting shown the door after a night with Gareth was enough to send a fresh wave of guilt running through me. The same held true for anyone who spent a night with me, after all.
“Yeah, some things never change.”
“So what’s the plan for today? Want to go out and see what there is to see before we head off to the next city?” Gareth asked.
I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. I hoped he would take it for me leaning back and trying to chase away some of the bright light that was threatening to break through my eyelids and set off the mild hangover that was threatening. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d had to sit back and pause the conversation because my substance abuse from the night before was catching up with me.
Only this wasn’t the substance abuse that was catching up with me today. This was a lifetime of bad choices threatening to catch up to me. This was something special I’d felt with a girl, something more real than anything I’d ever imagined, being thrown down the pisser because of my reputation. Because I had a reputation that was almost as bad as Gareth’s. Though I wasn’t sure Jessica would even know about that reputation if she wasn’t a huge fan of the band.
Then again if she’d left with her friend who’d been jilted by Gareth then she probably knew about the reputation now. I wanted to reach across the room and punch Gareth. I wanted to reach into the past and punch myself. More than anything I wanted Jessica here. I wanted Jake to pop in and say he’d figured out where to find her.
As though on cue there was another knock at the door. I popped up and walked over, getting a curious look from Gareth in the process. Whatever. He could be curious. When I opened the door Jake stood there with a huge grin on his face.
“Tell me you have good news,” I said.
“Boy do I have good news,” he said. “Turns out your girl was a contest winner, or her friend was at least. From there it was simple enough to get their information from the radio station and figure out where she works and everything!”
I shook my head and reached out to slap Jake on the back. That was better than I ever could’ve hoped for, and it was fucking fast. When I first asked him to try and track that info down I figured it was crazy. I figured there wasn’t a chance he was actually going to find anything. I’d never been happier to be proved wrong before in my life.
“You’re amazing, Jake. Tell your cousin to throw on another couple thousand to his invoice and then add a couple for you too.”
I could afford it, after all. One of the perks of being a millionaire many times over from traveling the world making music and then turning around and putting that money in a responsible investment portfolio was the ability to throw that money around from time to time. I figured if I was going to make it rain then the least I could do was make sure it was pouring on people who were doing me a solid.
“What’s he talking about Ivy?” Gareth asked from behind me.
He’d turned his chair around and he was regarding Jake and me with half curiosity and half surprise. Not that I should be surprised that he was surprised. In his world the fun was over when the girl was shown the door. He probably couldn’t conceive trying to chase down a girl. Not that I could judge him much for that. That’d been my world for so very long, after all.
“I had Jake track down the girl from the night before,” I said. “She left with her friend in the middle of the night.”
Gareth shook his head. “I’m sorry man. If I’d known you wanted to hang onto that one for a little morning fun I would’ve kept her friend occupied. God knows she was worth it!”
“Yeah, you know it,” I said. “She was so good that I just have to have round two!”
I don’t know why I said that. It was more out of habit than anything else. This is how I’d talked with Gareth, how we’d acted around each other, for so damn long that I had a hard time thinking of acting any other way. It was like I was watching myself in an out of body experience, disgusted at what I was saying even as I was powerless to stop it because it was such a deeply ingrained habit.
Jake handed me a slip of paper and I glanced down at it. It was an address.
“What’s this?”
“Address of the place where she works. At least I’m pretty sure it’s the place where she works,” Jake said. “It’s actually a pretty short walk from here, but it’ll be up to you to use your rock star charm to actually get a foot in the door.”
“So are you going to go track that down? Get another crack at it?” Gareth asked.
“Something like that,” I said.
If everything went as planned then I hoped to do a hell of a lot more than “get another crack” at Jessica, as Gareth had so crudely put it. There was just something about that girl that captivated my imagination. Something about her that left me wanting more whenever I was around her. There was something about the way she was never impressed by the fact that I was who I was that piqued my curiosity and made me want to know more about her.
No, how I felt about Jessica went so far beyond the love’em and leave’em approach Gareth was so fond of and that I’d used so often once upon a time. It went so far beyond a single night’s pleasure. When I thought of Jessica I found myself thinking of silly things like buying a house together. I started wondering about the names of our kids, and that was something that had never occurred to me with any girl. Ever.
“So should I tell the guys they can expect to be delayed?” Gareth asked. “I can totally cover for you if you want.”
I smiled despite myself. I might get annoyed by Gareth sometimes, but he could also be a good friend. And it wasn’t entirely fair to get annoyed with him anyways considering he was just keeping on the same as we had back in the day. I’d never actually told him how much this stuff annoyed me when he pulled it, and I wasn’t going to bring it up now either. There wasn’t enough time to go into it anyways.
I needed to get out there, find Jessica, and figure out exactly why she’d left in the middle of the night. More than anything I prayed that I’d be able to convince her to give me another chance.
“I have to get going. Lock up after me?” I asked.
“Sure thing. Good luck with your piece of tail!”
I winced as I walked out of the bus. Jessica was so much more than just another piece of tail, but that’s the way Gareth looked at the world. If you’re a hammer then everything you see is a nail. If you’re Gareth then every girl you see at a concert is a potential groupie to be wined, dined, banged, and tossed back.
Assuming she wasn’t one of the many girls in our crowds who was into the ladies. That used to be my territory, but not anymore.
Things were going to be different this time. I just prayed that my reputation wasn’t finally going to catch up with me and ruin my first true chance at something real.
17: Back to Reality
I sat in my cubicle staring at my monitor. I was moving numbers around in a spreadsheet, but I was having one hell of a hard time focusing on said spreadsheet.
I looked over to my second monitor which was just showing the desktop. The desktop that was sporting a wallpaper featuring Sleepwalker. It was from their new tour. I’d downloaded it first thing this morning.
I'm not sure what compelled me to do that. Maybe I just had to see Ivy. Only it was turning into pure torture every time I looked over at her. Pure torture and pure bliss. I kept thinking about last night, about how out of character everything I'd done was. I kept thinking about how incredible she’d felt with her body pressed against mine
. And more than anything I kept kicking myself and thinking how stupid I was to sneak out when I did.
Even as another part of me knew that it had to be done. It was just a one night stand. It couldn't be any more than that because of who she was and what she did. I didn't want to get too emotionally invested. I definitely didn't want her to get too emotionally invested. she was on tour, and it wouldn't work out.
Still, last night had been so damn fun!
"Enjoying the picture of your new girlfriend?"
"I told you he's not my girlfriend you bit…"
I realized too late that it was my boss Rachel standing behind me. Her arms were crossed and she stared down at me from over her glasses. She had her hair done up behind her in a bun and overall it gave her a very severe stern librarian vibe.
"Sorry Rachel," I said. "I thought you were someone else."
"And I thought you were someone else last night," she said. "I almost didn't recognize the studious buttoned up workaholic on those big screens!"
She leaned into my cubicle with a decidedly non-stern-librarian looking grin on her face all of a sudden. She glanced around as though she was making sure there was nobody listening in on us. Meanwhile, I reeled. She mentioned monitors. She couldn't possibly be…
Only there was only one thing I could think of that would have her grinning like that. Sure boss lady was pretty easy-going when it came to running her ship despite the stern librarian thing, but she also wasn't one to break out in spontaneous smiles like that. I wondered if she went to the concert with a daughter or something.
"Why don't you come back to my office?"
"Sure," I said, not quite sure where this was leading.
I took a nervous seat in her office. I wondered how much she'd seen last night. Obviously a lot if she was alluding to seeing me on the monitors which meant she probably saw me up on stage.
"Go ahead and close the door Jessica," she said.