Wild Open

by Bec Linder

  “I hope some of you are hungry,” Rushani said.

  “Rushani, you’re a god among men,” Andrew said.

  “I’m a woman,” Rushani said crisply, setting the boxes down on a table. “But thanks.”

  The kid approached Andrew, eyes wide as dinner plates. “C-could I get your autograph?”

  O’Connor looked at Leah and grinned. “Time to get out of here,” he whispered. “You grab a box of pizza, I’ll grab some beer.”

  “Where are we going?” she whispered back.

  He winked. “You’ll see.”

  “How do I spell your name?” Andrew asked.

  They slipped out of the room with their contraband, giggling like naughty children. Rushani had shot O’Connor a warning look, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. He and Leah were just hanging out. It was totally innocent.

  He hoped Rushani wouldn’t question him in person. He was a shitty liar.

  “How do you know where we’re going?” Leah asked, as he led the way through the maze of corridors beneath the arena. “Have you been here before?”

  He shook his head. “Once, but I don’t remember anything useful. I’m just following the signs.” He pointed to a nearby placard on the wall that had arrows pointing in opposite directions, each with a list of amenities. He was following the arrows for “Back Lot.”

  Leah laughed. “And here I thought you had some freakish sense of direction.”

  “Would that make me seem more manly and impressive?” he asked. “If so, yes, I’m navigating by instinct, like a migrating bird.”

  “I already think you’re pretty manly,” Leah said, which made O’Connor feel like he could slay lions.

  They went outside, into the lot behind the arena where the buses were parked. It was a cool, clear night, with no moon. O’Connor walked over to the rear of the closest bus and handed Leah the six-pack he was carrying. “I’m going up,” he said. “Pass me the stuff when I’m up there and then climb up after me.”

  “What, on top of the bus?” she asked, making a skeptical face.

  He grinned. “Exactly.”

  The roof of the bus was mostly flat, with a minor slope at either edge where it curved down to meet the sides. O’Connor scrambled up the ladder attached to the rear of the bus and onto the roof. It was dirty, but his clothes had been through worse, and he didn’t think Leah would mind. She didn’t strike him as being particularly squeamish. He crouched on the roof at the top of the ladder and reached down to take the beer and the six-pack. She scrambled up after him. He clasped her hand once she was in range and helped to draw her to the top. Her hand was small and warm in his.

  They sat cross-legged on top of the bus and opened the pizza box. It steamed lightly in the cool air. Leah asked, “Are we allowed to be up here?”

  O’Connor shrugged. “Probably not, but who’s going to stop us?”

  They ate half of the pizza, washing it down with beer. Nothing would ever come close to Chicago-style deep dish, but as far as O’Connor was concerned, all pizza was good pizza. Then, completely stuffed, they lay on their backs on the roof of the bus and gazed up at the sky. Leah lay close enough that he could feel the warmth of her arm against his, almost but not quite touching.

  The glow of the city lights hid most of the stars, but a few bright points shone through. He found the Big Dipper above them, its handle aimed upwards. He nudged Leah and pointed. “Look.”

  “Ursa Major,” she said. “And there’s the Little Bear.”

  “It doesn’t look much like a bear to me,” he said.

  “It’s hard to see in the city,” she said. “Too much light pollution. If you go out where it’s really dark, you can see the head and the legs and the rest of the body. We used to go camping at Joshua Tree, and our dad would keep us up half the night looking at the stars.”

  “Mm, sexy. I like a woman who knows things. Tell me more.”

  She laughed, a breathless little puff of air. She pointed to the handle of the Big Dipper and moved her finger to the left. “There’s Bootes, the Herdsman. That bright star is Arcturus.” Her finger tracked downward toward the horizon. “And there’s Spica, in Virgo.”

  O’Connor squinted. He’d never been good at spotting constellations. The Big Dipper was the only one he knew, other than Orion.

  “So, real talk,” Leah said, dropping her hand. “O’Connor is obviously not your first name. What’s the deal with that? Do you have a really embarrassing name and you don’t want anybody to know?”

  “Well,” he said. Where had this come from? “Basically, yeah.”

  “You have to tell me,” she said. “You know my embarrassing name situation. It’s only fair that you tell me yours.”

  “This is top secret shit,” he said. “How do I know you won’t spill the news to the press?”

  “You mean nobody’s dug up your birth certificate yet?” she asked. “Weak. Your fans must not be very invested.”

  “You minx,” he said, amused. “Incredible. I can’t believe you’re busting my chops while you’re trying to get me to open up.”

  “Is it working?” she asked.

  He folded his arms behind his head and grinned up at the night sky. “Fine. I’ll tell you.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “You have to promise not to tell anyone.”

  “I promise.”

  “Herbert,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Really,” he said. “After my grandfather.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, and burst out laughing.

  O’Connor sighed, and waited her out.

  “You poor thing,” she said, wiping away tears. “That must have been terrible as a kid.”

  “Yeah, my parents are assholes,” he said. “I have four siblings, and they all have totally normal names. I’m the only one who got screwed. It’s worked out okay, though. Going by my last name makes me seem sexy and mysterious.”

  “Is that what you think?” she asked, turning her head to look at him. “Mysterious? Sexy? Well, Herbert, I know the truth now, and—”

  There was only one way to get her to shut up

  He rolled onto his side and kissed her.

  She made a noise against his mouth, surprised or pleased, and then she raised her hands and slid them into his hair. He kissed her slowly and carefully, like she was a wild creature who would startle away at any sudden movement. He curled one hand around her hip and thought of sliding his hand beneath her shirt, how warm and smooth her skin would be. But that would probably end in one of them falling off the bus.

  She pushed him away after a few minutes, her chest heaving. “I thought we weren’t going to do this.”

  He shrugged. “We held out for three days. I think that’s worth at least a bronze medal in the Sexual Tension Olympics.”

  “That isn’t a real thing,” she said. “Herbert.”

  “I’m going to push you off the bus, Star Wars,” he said, and she laughed and rolled against him, resting her head on his chest. He curled his arm around her shoulders and held her close, feeling her breath making a warm patch on his shirt, feeling his heart beating like a kettledrum. Above them, the stars wheeled endlessly through the dark sky.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Leah began to settle into the routine of the tour. They slept on the bus for the next two days, for their shows in Seattle and Vancouver. She woke around 10, drank coffee with whoever was awake in the front lounge, texted Luka, and then bummed around with O’Connor until soundcheck. They were being completely unsubtle, and she had gotten some disapproving looks from Rushani and James, but she didn’t care. She was reliving her teenage years, giddy and foolish every time she saw him, a stupid grin stretching across her face until she ducked her head to hide it. She saw the same look on his face: stunned, elated. It would all come crashing down eventually, but she didn’t care about that now.

  She usually ate dinner with Rinna, who was quickly becoming her #1 tour buddy. And after di
nner, the show: the best part of her day, even more so than the time she spent with O’Connor. Music was better than any man. It would never leave her, and every time was just as good as the first. The thrill never wore off. Music never rolled over in bed and started snoring and left her hanging.

  Not that she was bitter.

  And not that she thought O’Connor would ever treat her like that. But you never knew.

  In Vancouver, she had her first meet-and-greet. “We don’t do these in every city,” Rushani explained. “It’s sort of a special thing, usually if a local radio station organizes it. And it’s not in your contract, so you can totally skip it if you want to, but the fans have been asking, and so I thought—”

  “I’d be happy to,” Leah said. “What do I do?”

  “Smile and hug people, basically,” Rushani said. “It can get a little weird, I think. If you’re not comfortable—”

  “It’s fine,” Leah said firmly. “It sounds fun.” It didn’t sound fun, but she didn’t want to be a party pooper. If the fans wanted to meet her, she would smile and kiss babies and whatever it took. She wanted everyone to like her; and she especially wanted O’Connor to approve of her, to think that she was a team player and pulling her weight.

  The meet-and-greet took place just after soundcheck. The fans were corralled in a sort of holding area, and then dispensed in small groups by the arena’s security guards. They screamed and squealed, and some of them cried. Most of them wanted to hug Andrew. Nobody tried to hug Leah; they wanted her autograph, and to tell her that they thought she was doing a great job. Leah smiled, and signed her name, and thanked them.

  “That was sort of weird,” she said to O’Connor, after it was over.

  He nodded. “It’s a trip, isn’t it? But I was the same way—there were bands I worshiped as a teenager. I had their albums memorized. Every one of their songs spoke to my deep, mysterious teenage soul. And I think if I had ever met any of them, I would have pissed myself and fainted. So it’s pretty weird that now I am one of those bands. These kids act like we’re—well. You know. It’s weird.”

  “Like you’re the second coming of Christ,” Leah said. “Yeah. I know. You’re a real-deal rock star.” It was weird for her, too, thinking about all of the magazines that O’Connor’s face had been plastered on, all of the people who eagerly gobbled up every scrap of gossip about his personal life. He was a public figure in a way that was hard to fully grasp.

  Even that wasn’t the strangest part of the meet-and-greet. That honor went to Andrew’s interactions with the fans. James and O’Connor had sworn up and down that Andrew was great with the fans, they adored him, et cetera, but Leah hadn’t really believed it until she’d seen it with her own two eyes. Andrew was charming. He laughed, he hugged people with no sign of hesitation, he gently teased a crying girl until she was all smiles. He even remembered a fan from a previous meet-and-greet a year ago and addressed her by name. It was, all in all, an impressive bit of work.

  And then, once it was over, Andrew was back to his sullen self, hunched in a corner of the dressing room with his notebook. He didn’t say a word to anyone until they went on stage for the night’s show.

  It was just weird. That was all. Andrew was a puzzle, and Leah was curious and nosy; she didn’t like mysteries. She wanted to know what Andrew’s deal was. But he was almost impossible to have a conversation with—surly and uncommunicative—and everyone else on the tour got a pinched look when she mentioned him. So there was no telling.

  They had a day off in Vancouver, the day after the show. Leah always thought she slept fine on the bus until she spent a night in a real bed, and then she remembered how much sleeping on the bus sucked. She drew the curtains and slept without dreaming or moving for a solid ten hours. She woke close to noon, feeling incredibly refreshed, and texted O’Connor.

  Getting coffee with James, he replied. Want me to bring you some?

  Omg yes please, she said, and got in the shower.

  By the time O’Connor knocked on her door, she had showered and gotten dressed, and was midway through blow-drying her hair. She opened the door and he grinned and handed her a paper cup of coffee, and said, “I like the hair.”

  “It’s a work in progress, smartass,” Leah said, and pushed up onto her toes, greatly daring, to kiss him on the cheek. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  He sat on her bed and looked at his phone while she finished drying her hair. The blow dryer was too loud for conversation. When she finished and switched it off, he said, “What are we doing today?”

  The we made her stomach flip over. How had this happened so quickly, that they both assumed they were spending the day together, with such certainty that it didn’t require any discussion or planning? But there it was; this was her life now. She wasn’t going to give him up.

  “I haven’t thought about it,” she said, swiftly winding the cord around the dryer. “We could just walk around and see what looks cool.”

  He clicked his tongue disapprovingly against the roof of his mouth. “’Just walk around’? Okay. We’re going downstairs to ask the nice lady at the front desk to point us toward the worst, tackiest tourist attraction in the city.”

  Leah laughed. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” he said. “And if you’re very, very good and don’t complain,” and his voice dropped down into a register that made Leah’s spine tingle, “I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.”

  “How could I resist,” she said dryly, trying to mask the fact that she couldn’t resist him at all.

  The nice lady at the front desk told them to go to a suspension bridge north of the city. “The bridge itself is very nice. There’s a whole network of paths through the trees. And you can also have your picture taken with someone wearing 1890s-style clothes.”

  “The best of both worlds,” O’Connor said, grinning, and asked her where they could rent a car.

  They drove north through the city and over a bridge across the harbor. O’Connor had rented a convertible and immediately put the top down, and Leah closed her eyes and felt the wind blowing through her hair and the sun warming her face. It was a beautiful day.

  The suspension bridge was exactly what they had been promised: tacky, but also breathtakingly gorgeous. The bridge swung over a gorge with a stream at the bottom, and Leah and O’Connor gawked along with all of the other tourists, and took endless pictures with their phones. In a way, Leah was glad that it was a Saturday and the bridge was so crowded; it was easier for O’Connor to blend in. He kept his sunglasses on the whole time, though, and they had a few close calls with people who did double-takes but then seemed to decide they were imagining things.

  At the other side of the gorge, a series of suspended walkways connected viewing platforms attached to enormous fir trees. It was quieter there as people dispersed into the trees, or decided they didn’t want to walk that much and went back to their cars. Leah walked slowly, gaping at the sheer size of the trees, and thinking of how old they must have been, of how many centuries they had grown in that soil, still and peaceful.

  They walked to the very edge, as far as they could go, way out in the woods with nobody else in sight. Then O’Connor caught her hand and said, “Hey.”

  “Uh, hey,” Leah said, hoping her palm wasn’t too clammy.

  “Leah,” he said, and her heart beat a little faster, because what was he going to say? “Hey. I’m really into you.”

  Oh, God. She was in so much trouble.

  They kissed, standing there beneath the ancient trees, until a child appeared at the end of the walkway and they broke apart, laughing.

  * * *

  In Vancouver, Andrew trashed a hotel room.

  O’Connor didn’t find out about it until much later, after he and Leah returned from the North Shore and he went up to his hotel room to pack his things before checkout. Rushani came to his door, her face very stiff, the way it was when she was angry or frightened, and said, “Did you know?”

  “Did I
know what?” O’Connor said, clutching a pair of boxer shorts in one hand.

  She pushed past him into the room, and let the door swing shut behind her. “Andrew,” she said.

  O’Connor closed his eyes briefly, centering himself. “What did he do?”

  “That little friend of his,” Rushani said, and now O’Connor could hear the taut anger in her voice. “Isaac. He moved to Vancouver a few months ago, did you know that?”

  “No,” O’Connor said. He sat on the bed and watched her pace back and forth, her eyes fixed on the carpet.

  “I didn’t know, either,” she said. “Until I got a phone call from the front desk this morning. Housekeeping went in and found the two of them. Passed out. They destroyed the room. Totally destroyed it.”

  “Fuck,” O’Connor said. He remembered Isaac all too well: a low-life, red-faced and loud, the sort of person Andrew never would have been friends with even two years ago. Isaac was the cousin of the lead singer of the band who opened for them on their last tour, a hanger-on, always around for some reason. Andrew and Isaac had hit it off, somehow, and the resultant partying had been the worst part of O’Connor’s life last autumn.

  “This is unacceptable behavior,” Rushani said. “If it leaks to the press—”

  “He’ll get some bad-boy accolades,” O’Connor said. “Big deal. I wouldn’t worry about that.” There were plenty of other things to worry about.

  She pursed her mouth. “Okay. Maybe you’re right.”

  “Have you told James?”

  “He’s in Andrew’s hotel room right now,” she said. “Yelling at him, I think.”

  O’Connor groaned and rubbed his hands over his face. “That never works.”

  “Nothing works,” Rushani said. “Nothing we do. He doesn’t care about anything but money, and soon I’m afraid he won’t care about money, either, and then I’m going to have to find a new job.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” O’Connor said, although of course that was exactly the fear that kept him awake at night.