Accidental Groupie: A Sweet Lesbian Romance

by Mia Archer

  Damn it. Damn her!

  “Right. Well Gareth texted Ivy earlier tonight. Asked her if she’d gotten “the groupie” out of her system yet so they could move on to the next city,” I said.

  Alice moved closer and wrapped her arms around me. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing, because otherwise I was going to lose control again. I was going to start crying again.

  I’d been so sure that I had something special with Ivy. She was so beautiful. Talking with her came so easily. She seemed so good natured and fun to hang out with, and there were those few brief flashes when I’d seen the rock goddess triumphant on stage and realized in those flashes exactly what it was that all those other women at the concert saw in her.

  And because of that I’d let myself be taken advantage of. Like an idiot. I wanted to scream in frustration. I wanted to smack something, preferably Ivy, but she was still back at the hotel probably having a grand old time.

  Something buzzed. I instinctively looked around in dread, thinking back to the buzzing noise that had heralded the end of my brief romantic liaison with the lead singer of Sleepwalker. Only of course there was no phone lying on the floor and I wanted to smack myself.

  I really hoped I wasn’t going to get a fear of buzzing phones because of what happened back in that hotel, because talk about the most stupid case of PTSD in the world.

  No, it was Alice’s phone. She picked it up and I saw her eyes flashing back and forth, then a smile spread. A smile that quickly turned to her cackling and kicking her feet.

  “Care to share what’s so funny with the rest of the class?”

  Alice didn’t say anything. She just held her phone out for me to have a look at whatever it was she was looking at that was so damn funny. It looked like some sort of news website. No, more like an entertainment blog of some sort, because I was pretty sure CNN didn’t use bright pink in their color scheme. Then I looked at the headline.

  “Ivy’s towel trouble!”

  Now what the hell was this all about? I moved down expecting to see an article or something. Had she given an interview in the half hour it took for me to get back to the apartment? Was this some fresh hell where she told the world all about me and what we’d just done?

  Nothing could’ve prepared me for what I actually saw. A blurry picture, obviously from a phone, of Ivy standing wearing only a thin hotel towel in the hotel lobby doing her best to keep covered and not doing a very good job of it.

  There were a few people at the reception desk, but they all looked more interested in her nearly-naked state than they were interested in actually trying to help her out. One older lady was staring at her computer with an obvious blush on her face.

  “Looks like Ivy got herself into a little bit of trouble after you left,” Alice said.

  What the hell happened? What could lead her from that expensive suite to walking around the hotel lobby in just a towel? Then it hit me.

  “She was in the shower when I told her I knew what was going on. I actually smashed her phone. She came running after me and she must’ve just grabbed that towel instead of getting dressed.”

  “And she followed you into the hall like that?” Alice asked, incredulous.

  “I guess? I made it down to the elevators before she could catch up to me. I guess she ran out the door without thinking and must’ve gotten locked out without her key, and her cell was in pieces in that expensive shower…”

  A smile spread across my face and then I was giggling and kicking my feet against the couch as well. I knew it wasn’t strictly nice to be thinking mean things about another person like that, to wish for bad things to happen to them, but on balance I figured a little bit of public embarrassment was the least Ivy deserved considering all the humiliation I’d had to endure thanks to her.

  Alice pulled her phone back and then she was swiping through various sites dedicated to Sleepwalker. There were more and more articles popping up. It seemed that Ivy Thompson was setting the Internet on fire with those embarrassing not-quite-risque pictures.

  Before long it was being picked up on mainstream news services as well, and Alice and I sat on the couch with our phones in hand basking in the glory that was Ivy getting a little bit of comeuppance. It didn’t come close to atoning for a lifetime of loving and leaving girls like me, but it was satisfying that the first time her name was splashed all over the Internet like this in a decade was for something like this.

  “Here’s something interesting,” Alice said. “Witnesses report a girl storming out of the elevator lobby just before Ivy appeared running through the same lobby screaming for some girl named Jessica.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Great. Just great. Rachel’s going to read that and figure it all out and then everyone’s going to know what happened tonight.”

  The pictures kept coming until they showed her getting a new card and disappearing into the elevator while hotel security finally seemed to pull their heads out of their asses. The last few pictures to filter online were of an annoyed security guard holding a hand up in front of phone cameras to prevent any new shots from being taken.

  Something told me that even for supposedly being the most high class joint in town they weren’t really used to dealing with stars as big as Ivy. This scandal was the biggest thing to happen to this town in forever. She was the certainly the biggest thing to happen to my love life in forever. I sighed.

  “Y’know I really thought there might’ve been something special there with Ivy,” I said.

  Alice put her phone down. It didn’t seem there were going to be any new revelations now that Ivy had made her way back up to the suite.

  “I’m sorry Jessica, but you have to realize she is what she is. Expecting a rock star like that not to go after groupies is like expecting a fish not to swim in water.”

  “But she seemed different! It isn’t fair! I really believed her!”

  “Yeah, everything I read said she wasn’t like that on this tour, but I guess the blogs can be wrong about that sort of thing,” Alice said.

  I thought I was done with staring at my phone, but at that moment my phone buzzed. I jumped. Damn it. I forced myself to look down at the screen. After all, it’s not like every time I got a message it was going to be from…

  Ivy.

  “We need to talk.”

  Four words. So simple, and yet they seemed to have a pull on me that was stronger than anything I’d ever felt before. Alice noticed me freezing and she glanced over my shoulder.

  She hissed as she pulled the phone away from me, which was probably a good thing because I was about to tap out a reply. That was how much of a spell I was under when it came to Ivy Thompson, even after everything that had happened.

  I was starting to really sympathize with girls who’d been fans of the band their entire life. If I had it this bad after a couple of nights then I couldn’t imagine what it must feel like after a lifetime of worshiping the group.

  “What if she really wants to talk?” I asked.

  I felt like an idiot even as I said it. If she did want to talk it was probably just to get pissed off at me because I was the reason she ended up in that hotel lobby in nothing but a towel. Besides, I’d made it absolutely clear that I didn’t want anything she was peddling.

  Yeah, it was a good thing Alice snatched that phone out of my hand before I could give in to my moment of weakness. I saw her tap a couple of times and then she grinned.

  “There. Ivy’s number is blocked and deleted from your phone. The only way you’ll be able to get in touch with her is if you memorized it,” she said.

  I blinked. That had a lot of finality to it. Isn’t that what I wanted, though? Didn’t I want to never talk to that jerk again? And yet there was still a part of me that wanted to talk to her. That was still under her spell.

  I needed to be strong though. She’d taken advantage of me, and I didn’t want anything to do with her.

  “Fine,” I said. “No more Ivy Thompson. No more Sleepwalker in m
y life. I was right about hating them back then, and now I have a real reason.”

  “Well I can’t say I’m going to stop liking them myself,” Alice said. She grinned. “I will stop bothering you about them, though. I figure you deserve a pass now that you have a real reason to hate them.”

  I sighed and rolled my eyes. So all it took to get Alice to finally stop bothering me about liking Sleepwalker was getting into an ill-advised disastrous affair with their lead singer? I guess I’d take it if it meant she’d finally shut the fuck up about that band. I was done with Ivy Thompson, and I was done with Sleepwalker.

  Forever.

  27: Jessica's Song

  Through the lobby. Out into the streets beyond. Cameras flashed all around me. Everybody knew I was staying at the hotel and it appeared everyone decided to camp out and take part in the shit show that was Ivy Thompson showing off half naked for the world.

  Twelve years. Twelve years on the road and I’d managed to avoid letting any asshole with a camera get an embarrassing picture of me like that, and then I’d gone and done it to myself by running out of the hotel room without thinking.

  I was going to send a sternly worded letter to the hotel chain as well. I saw how those people at reception had been looking at me. None of them had the audacity to pull out their phones like those girls at the store in the mall earlier, but they weren’t exactly moving to expedite helping me out or anything either.

  And I didn’t care about any of that as I stepped onto the sidewalk and found myself confronted by more people with cameras. No, all I cared about was looking at the phone I’d had couriered over to the hotel while I was getting dressed.

  I guess it was a good thing I was still in the habit of keeping spares ready to go, a holdover from the days when I routinely partied to the point that my phones didn’t have a very long service career, and I was really glad I opted for the cloud backup. Otherwise Jessica’s number would’ve been lost with the phone she destroyed in the shower.

  “We need to talk.”

  I thought about that before I sent it. Was it sending the wrong message? I really just wanted to figure things out. I wanted to apologize for everything. To know there was still a chance.

  More than anything, though, I just wanted to talk with her. I was feeling a strange new sensation in my chest. In the pit of my stomach. An ache that I was having trouble explaining. Heartache. I was actually feeling broken hearted at the idea that she might never want to see me again, even if I did sort of deserve it for the way I’d treated her, if not directly then I’d certainly been an asshole to her indirectly because I was still having trouble getting rid of some of the habits of my past.

  Habits that led to the Incident. Habits that led me to lose Jessica, the first girl I’d truly been interested in since the Incident. The first girl I wanted to have a real relationship with, and this time it wasn’t partially because she threatened to hurt herself if things ended.

  Yeah, so maybe this wasn’t as big a cluster fuck as what led to the Incident, but this was still a pretty big cluster fuck in its own right and it was all my fault.

  The message went through and I stared at my phone waiting for a response. Held my breath hoping, praying for a response. A response that never came, though at least looking down at my phone had the side benefit of hiding my face from all the idiots trying to take my picture.

  Including a couple of outlets that hadn’t been interested in me or the band in the better part of a decade. I guess it took a good embarrassing incident to get them to crawl out of the woodwork. The fucking vultures.

  They kept following me and I kept right on ignoring them until I found myself standing in front of the back entrance to the arena. And immediately I found myself in a different sort of trouble as some of the fans who’d been waiting the night before were still camped out by the buses. No doubt waiting for a chance to see someone in the band.

  Not that it was likely. Those buses were fortresses that were designed to cater to our every need for a couple of days without resupply if need be. I was sure the married ladies in the group were busy getting busy with their wives. If the bus was a rockin’ and all that.

  And Gareth. Well, Gareth was probably sitting back wondering where the hell I was. He probably had no idea that I wanted to punch him right in his smarmy face. Sure it wasn’t exactly a fair thought, I might as well want to punch a shark for eating fish or punch a wolf for killing cute woodland critters.

  Gareth wasn’t being malicious when he sent me that text asking when I’d be done. Gareth was just being Gareth, and he was operating under a false idea of who I was. An idea I’d done nothing to stop on this new tour.

  Yeah, that was as much my fault as it was his, but that didn’t stop the urge to punch from rising every time I thought about walking onto his bus and seeing him smiling at me.

  I was going to have to get control of that before I reached the buses, but first I needed to make sure I could reach my bus in one piece in the first place. Because the crowd gathered around the outside of the chain link fence were starting to notice the walking commotion that was me walking with a crowd of paparazzi looking for a good story.

  I’d learned over the years that there were gradations to how dedicated and crazy a fang could be. There were the ones who liked our music and thought the girls, and guy, were hot. Maybe they bought the posters and tore them down when they moved onto the next big thing. Maybe they gave our new music a download which I appreciated, but they weren’t die hard fans.

  Then there were the moderately crazy fans who joined the fan club for early access to concerts. They downloaded all of our albums and maybe they still had that poster from when they were younger rolled up somewhere that their spouse couldn’t see it because they couldn’t quite bring themselves to throw it away.

  They were our bread and butter. They came to the concerts and bought the merch and God bless them, every one. Especially since the crazy was never very strong with them.

  Finally there were the true crazies. The ones who wrote fanfiction about the group on our fan club forum. At least that was my understanding from the horror stories we heard from our social media guy who had the unenviable task of trying to moderate that shit.

  These were the ones who would get into fights if we flicked a pick or a drum stick into the audience. They were the ones who charged the stage. They were the ones who posted pictures of the hair doll they created from putting together locks of leftover hair collected by venue workers who cased the green room when we were done and sold their findings on eBay.

  I really wish I was joking about that last one. It took a cease and desist order to get that crazy to stop selling her wares on various craft sites.

  And that was the level of crazy I was facing down now as these fans turned and saw me approaching. I saw the hunger in their eyes. They were regarding me the same way a shark might regard a nice wounded fish that was limping along leaving a trail of blood, only in my case it was a trail of “news” organizations and photographers.

  I had no doubt these girls, and a few guys to be fair, were the craziest of the crazy if they were still waiting outside so long after the concert was over and their chances of seeing anyone from the band were so vanishingly small. We weren’t even supposed to still be here, so anyone standing in that crowd either didn’t have anywhere to be or they were crazy enough to call off work for something as silly as watching a tour bus.

  Well those chances of seeing someone in the band were going way up.

  I winced as more of them turned towards me. As they started dashing towards me in a mad stampede. This was it. This was how I was going to die. A broken heart from the one girl I’d ever had true feelings for running away from me. Humiliated on the Internet in the worst way possible. And finally trampled to death by a group of rowdy fangirls who had lust in their eyes that made it terrifyingly obvious they planned on enjoying themselves thoroughly before I went down.

  At least that would provide some interestin
g pictures and copy for the vultures behind me who were looking for something juicy.

  I turned back to see if there was any way to escape, but of course the crowd of vultures had closed in around me. They scented blood, though of a different variety than what the fangirls were after. No, they were looking forward to the impending blood bath and they weren’t going to let me get away.

  Damn it. Paparazzi on one side and crazy fans closing in on the other. I squeezed my eyes shut. This is not how I imagined this day going when I started. This is not how I imagined it would end, though I’d always strongly suspected.

  Squealing tires brought me back to reality. I opened my eyes and was surprised to see a black limo with tinted windows screeching to a halt in front of me. Right between me and the crazy fans. If the crazy son-of-a-bitch driving the thing had cut it any closer he would’ve risked running into some of the equally crazy fans dashing towards me.

  As it was they crashed against the other side of the limo with a muted thud and screamed out in frustration as they realized their chance to get me and rip me to pieces, hopefully metaphorically but you never knew when there might be a love knife hidden away in a crowd of crazy like that, had disappeared.

  Briefly. Some of them were already trying to climb the car or go around it. I had seconds.

  The door on the side facing me flew open and Gareth was there gesturing frantically for me to get inside. No words were spoken. They didn’t need to be. Both of us knew what it was like to get caught in a crowd like that, and neither one of us wanted to repeat it.

  I dove into the limo and stuck my hand out to give the news types a final one-fingered salute before slamming the door shut. I was pushed back against the leather seats inside as the driver hit the accelerator.

  “Damn that was close,” I said.

  “I’d say. Seems like you’ve had quite an evening,” Gareth said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, and it’s all thanks to you, you asshole.”