by Bec Linder
What a friendly and delightful person. O’Connor cut to the chase. “Have you talked to Rushani yet?”
Andrew didn’t bother playing dumb. He hunched his shoulders, drawing them up toward his ears. “I said I would.”
“But you haven’t yet,” O’Connor said. “You’re almost out of time—”
“I know,” Andrew snapped. “Back off, okay? I’ll take care of it.”
“Okay,” O’Connor said. “Whatever you say.”
Rushani emerged from the other bus and waved one arm toward the truck stop in a sweeping 90-degree arc. Time to eat.
He located Leah in the crowd of musicians and roadies moving toward the restaurant. She wasn’t hard to spot: there were only five women on the tour, and Leah was a full head taller than any of them. He looked for the chestnut sweep of her hair and headed in that direction. He had already given up on the pretense of coincidence, the stupid little fancy-running-into-you-here games that were such a staple of the early stages of flirtation. Leah knew it wasn’t a coincidence, and there was no point pretending otherwise. It was sort of a relief to dispense with all that. Under any other circumstances, he would have had her in his bed forty-eight hours ago. They would spend a few more days dancing around each other, but at this point it was a foregone conclusion that they would end up screwing like bunnies before the tour was over.
Yeah, he had promised James that he would keep it in his pants. But James didn’t need to know.
He caught up with Leah just as she was walking through the truck stop’s sliding doors. He moved in beside her, set his hand on her lower back, and leaned down to murmur, “Good morning, gorgeous.”
She flinched away from him. “Jesus! You scared me.” She flipped her hair back over her shoulders and shot him a stern glance, the curl of her lips betraying her amusement. “You should know better than to sneak up on unsuspecting women.”
“But you’re so cute when you shriek like that,” he said. “No, you’re right. Sorry. Let me buy you breakfast to make up for it.”
“I thought all my meals were covered on tour,” she said.
“You don’t believe in making it easy for a guy, huh?” he asked. “That’s fine.” He let her draw ahead of him so that he could admire her ass in her little cut-off shorts. “I’ll let you buy your own pancakes.”
She looked back at him over her shoulder, her expression rich with teasing invitation and promise. “You only get to sit by me if you’re nice.”
Jesus. What a woman.
They didn’t sit alone; that would have been too conspicuous, and O’Connor didn’t see any reason to tempt fate. Instead they sat with some of the roadies, who were primarily interested in cramming their faces with as much food as possible. Still, he and Leah kept their conversation strictly business: song arrangements, upcoming meet-and-greets, potential changes to the setlist. Leah kept bumping her feet against his beneath the table, just infrequently enough that it could plausibly be accidental, but he knew from the wicked look in her eyes that she was doing it on purpose.
After a while, he realized that he hadn’t seen Rushani, Andrew, or James come into the restaurant.
It probably meant nothing. Maybe they were out in the parking lot having a nice chat about solipsism.
He gave it a few more minute, listening to Leah with half an ear while he watched the front door for any developments. Nobody came in but a few truckers.
“You aren’t listening to me,” Leah said mildly.
He snapped his eyes back to her face. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Is something going on?” she asked.
He shrugged and slid his chair back. “Maybe. I’ll be back soon. Probably.”
“Okay,” Leah said. “Good luck.”
O’Connor went out into the bright sunshine. He should have worn his sunglasses, but it was hard to make good decisions like that before his first cup of coffee. Even squinting and half-blind, he spotted them right away; Rushani’s bright pink dress was hard to miss. They were clustered around the bus’s open door, Rushani and James standing to either side and Andrew sitting on the steps between them, his shoulders slumped.
O’Connor’s first impulse was to turn around and go right back into the truck stop. Rushani and James obviously had it covered. There was no need for him to poke his nose in.
His second impulse was to curse himself for being so damn cowardly.
He crossed the pavement, and Andrew looked up as he approached. Andrew’s eyes were red.
A low buzzing started up at the base of O’Connor’s skull. He didn’t want to deal with this situation, but he was committed now. They had all seen him. It was too late for him to bail.
“I told her,” Andrew said. “So you can get off my back now.”
O’Connor drew in a deep breath and let it out again. He could be the bigger person. “Glad to hear it.”
Andrew didn’t reply. He folded his arms, cupping each elbow in the opposite hand, and drew in on himself.
Rushani and James were looking at each other over Andrew’s head, exchanging some wordless message with their secret, shared language of disapproving facial expressions. Then they turned to look at O’Connor, and even he could read the fear scrawled across their faces: What are we going to do?
He didn’t know. And he didn’t know what to tell them, or how to pretend that everything would be okay. He wasn’t sure it would be okay.
Rushani took his silence for the answer it was. Her sunglasses were perched on top of her head, and now she slid them down to cover her eyes.
O’Connor turned around and went back to the restaurant. He had a meal to finish.
CHAPTER NINE
They arrived in Portland later that afternoon, after spending a miserable hour sitting in traffic on the Interstate. Traffic stressed Leah out even when she wasn’t the one driving. There was something about sitting and not knowing what was going on or when you would start moving again that just drove her absolutely nuts. So by the time the bus parked on the road behind the hotel, she was more than ready to get off.
Rushani handed out the schedule for the next day. “Load-in starts at noon. Soundcheck is at 4:00, and you’re on stage at 9:30. Bus call is at 2:00. This is our last hotel stay until Saturday night, so make the most of it. Andrew, James, and O’Connor, the three of you have phone interviews and a conference call with Hakeem this afternoon, so you’ll come with me. The rest of you are free until tomorrow.”
“Phone interviews,” O’Connor groaned.
Rushani shot him a sharp look. “No whining.”
“I’m not whining,” O’Connor said. “I’m expressing my emotions. Open communication is the basis for every healthy relationship—”
Rinna, standing beside Leah, glanced over and rolled her eyes. “Men.”
Leah grinned. Seriously.
“Me and some of the crew are going to head downtown and take the tram,” Rinna said. “You should come with us.”
Leah didn’t know what the tram was, but it sounded way more fun than sitting around the hotel all afternoon. She was pleased to be invited, and she knew better than to reject an overture from one of the roadies. There wouldn’t be a second offer. “That sounds awesome,” she said. “Just let me grab my backpack.”
She spent a fun afternoon roaming around Portland with Rinna and some of the sound guys, a mixture of Timory’s crew and the Saving Graces’. She had been to Portland before, but only for a few hours to play a show. There hadn’t been any time to explore. The weather was incredible—sunny, clear—and they could see several snow-capped volcanoes from the top of the hill the tram delivered them to. Leah snapped a picture with her phone and sent it to Luka. When they arrived downtown again, Leonard led the way to what he swore was the best dive bar on that side of the river, and they ate cheese fries and drank cheap beer and filled Leah in on all of the tour gossip. Most of it wasn’t very exciting—rumors about hook-ups and who had the best weed—but it was nice to feel included.
She wondered who “us” was, and hoped it meant O’Connor. She would accept either way, of course. Just as she hadn’t wanted to offend the roadies earlier, she definitely didn’t want to offend James. Sounds great. I’m downtown, should I come back to hotel?
“I gotta go,” she announced. “Dinner with James.”
The roadies booed loudly. “You’re selling out!” Rinna said.
“I know!” Leah said. “Sorry. Thanks for inviting me today, though. I really had a lot of fun.”
“You’re cool, Leah,” Leonard said, and held up his hand for a high five. “Hang out with us again.”
“I will,” Leah said, warmed by their collective approval and welcome. “Thanks.”
She went outside and texted her location to James, and about fifteen minutes later O’Connor pulled up to the curb in a sweet little red sports car. He leaned out the window and grinned at her, his eyes hidden behind his ridiculous sunglasses, and Leah felt her heart skip a beat, just the way it always happened in stories.
“Where on earth did you get that car?” she asked.
“Come on, sweetheart. We’re rock stars,” O’Connor said. “We have people to take care of these things for us.”
“I rented it,” James said from the passenger seat.
“So how come you aren’t driving?” Leah asked.
“He lost the coin toss,” O’Connor said. “Get in. We’re going for a ride.”
“You are a cheesy piece of shit,” James said.
They drove across the river and into a residential area. Leah gawked out the window at the tidy little bungalows and the hipsters zipping by on their bicycles. It was like Silver Lake, except an entire city of it. O’Connor was in high spirits, yanking James’s chain by pretending not to understand his directions—“Turn right? Do you mean your right or my right?”—and wolf-whistling at a series of bearded male pedestrians, who gave him startled double-takes.
“I should have left you at the hotel,” James said.
“You need to lighten up,” O’Connor said. “You and Leah at dinner alone would be a disaster. You’re both too serious. You would talk business the entire time. Business is boring. We’re going to have fun.”
There was a strange edge to O’Connor’s words that Leah didn’t quite understand. He was too insistent, or something—there was something odd about it. But she shrugged it off. They had been cooped up on a bus for a large part of the day, and he’d been doing interviews all afternoon. He was probably just a little stir-crazy.
“There it is,” James said. “That little—yeah. Park here.”
O’Connor squealed to a stop at the curb, and they got out of the car and went into the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, painted black on the outside. The inside was dimly lit and cozy, and all of the tables were full. Leah hovered awkwardly in the doorway. The place was too small to have a hostess stand or even much room to move out of the way of foot traffic. James went to the bar and spoke to the man pouring beers, who shouted with delight and leaned across the bar to thump James on the back.
“Old friend, I think,” O’Connor said to Leah.
The guy came out from behind the bar and followed James to the front, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “You guys are with this sad bastard, huh?”
James rolled his eyes. “Ji-Hoon, this is Leah and O’Connor, with the band. Ji-Hoon and I grew up together.”
“And had many misadventures,” Ji-Hoon said. He shook both of their hands. He was a little shorter than James and covered with tattoos and piercings, and he had a friendly, open face. “Come on into the back. I’ve got a table set up for you.”
“The back” turned out to be a small, quiet room near the kitchen, with four square tables and a glowing lantern hanging from the ceiling. Nobody else was in there. Ji-Hoon seated them and disappeared, then came back a minute later with ceramic pitchers of water and soju. “Don’t bother ordering,” he said, “I’m just going to bring you some delicious shit. White people, how much spice can you handle? Medium spicy?”
“I grew up in Iowa,” O’Connor said, which was new information to Leah. She hadn’t seen that factoid in any of the interviews she read. “I probably can’t handle much more than mild.”
“Noted,” Ji-Hoon said. “Leah?”
“Well, I grew up in L.A., and we would go to Koreatown once a week and have dinner,” Leah said. “So I guess I can handle whatever level of spicy they give to white people in L.A.”
Ji-Hoon grinned. “Medium for you, then. Drink up. I’ll be back with your food.”
He left. James poured soju into their cups, and said, “Bottoms up.”
“Aren’t we supposed to toast?” O’Connor asked.
“Is this our anniversary? Do you want a romantic toast?” James asked. “Okay, O’Connor. To our everlasting love.”
“I’ll drink to that,” O’Connor said, and drained his cup.
James didn’t look amused. There really was something going on, some undertone that Leah didn’t understand. Maybe something had happened with their interviews that had them both out of sorts. She was afraid to broach the subject.
She didn’t have to; O’Connor did it for her. “Look, let’s clear the air,” he said. “Leah, the reason that James is being such a grumpy asshole is that Andrew is a coked-out disaster of a human being who is probably going to nuke our band.”
She blinked. Well, that was a lot to take in. “He hasn’t seemed too coked-out to me.” Speaking from painful experience.
“O’Connor found cocaine in Andrew’s hotel room when we were in L.A.,” James said, looking and sounding incredibly grim.
Leah started laughing.
“It isn’t funny,” James said.
“You guys suck at being rock stars,” Leah said, after she’d gotten herself under control. “Really? You found some coke in his room? Oh my God! Musicians totally don’t have a reputation for doing tons of drugs. Nobody in the history of rock and roll has ever gotten wasted and trashed a hotel room. Come on. What is this, a children’s choir?”
O’Connor’s mouth was twitching. “She has a point.”
“He seems like he’s depressed,” Leah said. “Not necessarily like he’s about to go on a drugged-up rampage.”
“You didn’t know him before,” James said.
She shrugged. He was right, but that didn’t mean she was wrong. She thought that the most likely worst-case scenario was that Andrew had a total mental breakdown. Drugs came in a distant second.
“Anyway,” O’Connor said. “This is getting depressing. Let’s talk about how my mouth is about to turn into a flaming wasteland of spicy death.”
James’s smile looked a little reluctant, like he didn’t want to be amused by O’Connor but was anyway. “Leah, it’s good that you like Korean food. We’ll visit my parents’ restaurant when we’re in Chicago in a couple of weeks.”
“Your parents own a restaurant?”
He nodded. “I basically joined the band so that I would never have to chop cabbage again, but somehow I still end up working in the kitchen whenever I’m home for more than a few days.”
“Moms,” O’Connor said. “They give you that look, and you feel so fucking guilty that you do whatever they want just to get them to knock it off.”
“Women,” James said, and Leah threw a napkin at him while O’Connor laughed.
* * *
The show in Portland went off without a hitch, aside from how incredibly fucking sweaty O’Connor got within five minutes of stepping on stage. The arena was indoors, and for some reason a spotlight pointed directly at him the entire time—he would have to talk to Luis about that—and his hair and clothes and even his feet were completely drenched by the end of the show. As soon as the encore was over, he high-fived everyone, discreetly patted Leah’s butt, and hauled ass for the shower.
Summer was the worst. He didn’t understand why they couldn’t tour in the winter.
He cranked the shower’s taps to somewhere between “lukewarm” and “tepid,” and the sensation of the water pouring down his back was the best thing he’d ever felt. And if he was thinking about Leah when he wrapped his hand around his dick, well—nobody would ever know.
He was pretty relaxed by the time he went back into the large room they were using as a lounge. The others were already there, performing their usual post-show rituals: checking Twitter (James), exulting (Andrew), talking too much (Timory), and drinking beer (everyone). Leah was typing on her phone and smiling. O’Connor sat down beside her and opened a beer. “Who are you texting?”
He was being incredibly nosy, but Leah looked up at him and smiled, apparently not offended. “My brother. He always wants a full trip report of the show.”
“You guys were in Rung together, right?” O’Connor asked.
She nodded. “He played the drums. We made a badass rhythm section.”
O’Connor smiled. “I bet.What’s his name?”
“Luka,” she said absently, typing something else on her phone.
Luka. And Leah. “Wait a second.”
She looked at him and sighed. “Yes, we’re twins.”
“Holy shit,” O’Connor said.
“Our parents were big Star Wars fans,” she said, and shrugged. “Believe me, whatever jokes you’re thinking of making, I’ve heard them all before.”
“I’m, uh. Wow,” O’Connor said, really trying pretty hard to act like this information was no big deal. “Star Wars fans who like Korean food? Your parents sound like interesting people.”
“That’s one word for it,” she said, grinning. “They’re weird, but kind of awesome. They grow pot in the back yard.”
“I really want to meet your parents now,” he said, and she laughed and lightly smacked his upper arm with the back of her hand.
The door opened, and Rushani came in, carrying a stack of pizza boxes. Behind her came a pimply, adolescent delivery guy with his own stack of boxes. O’Connor watched the kid’s eyes widen as he realized exactly who he was delivering pizzas to.