14
COLORADO HEAT, RIOT SAINTS CHAOS
RUBY
Three days after the party, the world feels slightly less on fire.
Security keeps assuring us the Santa Fe stalker is “contained.” (Contained could mean anything from “we scared him off” to “we buried his body and his phone under an FBI building.” I’m trying not to ask.)
We’re on the move again, this time to Colorado, which is apparently stop number whatever of this fever-dream tour-slash-music-video-slash-life-detonation.
The days blur now in a strange rhythm of filming, driving, sleeping, tour-bus-fucking, humming, and being stared at by a man who sings to arenas like he was born with hell in his lungs but watchesmelike he’s afraid I’ll disappear.
Music Video Snapshot #47 (or something)
We’re shooting a warehouse sequence today with fog machines and flashbulbs and me in a dress that definitely has fewer square inches of fabric than it should on a human body.
The director keeps muttering “mesmerizing” under his breath whenever Zane touches me on camera.
Zane keeps muttering “mine” and “watch it, fucker” under his breath whenever the director asks me to stand too close to anyone else.
The rest of the band doesn’t even pause tuning their equipment anymore.
Clearly, chaos is the new normal.
Night fallsand it’s time for another show with a real crowd and real lights.
Real ten thousand fans vibrating with enough energy to power a city.
The side-stage has basically become my home.
Zane refuses to perform unless he knows exactly where I am, which apparently means right here, where I can feel the heat coming off him as he stalks the stage and destroys every last brain cell in this auditorium.
He splits his time between singing for the crowd and turning his body toward me, making eye contact with all the devotion and intensity of a man engraving a promise into bone.
And then, halfway through the three-hour show, and because the universe hates me, a camera catches me.
Actuallycatches me. Full frame for ten hellish seconds.
Ten entire seconds of my face on the jumbotrons.
Me. Too many curves. Shiny from stage lights. Wearing one of Zane’s shirts because I couldn’t find mine.
Ten seconds where ten thousand fans see me standing there, blinking into giant screens.
I’m too shocked to freeze. Or run. Or have the meltdown I crave more than Haagen Dazs ice cream. I just… breathe. Then Icalmly step back behind a speaker until the camera swings away, and I exhale.
Then I catalog my feelings. Panic left the building a long time ago. And rage is futile.
So…acceptance?
This is my life now.
And I’m not crumbling beneath it.
After the show,the buzz is still thick in the air.
Crew zips by. The band shakes out their arms and flashes grins, adrenaline and the high of another excellent gig still pumping through them.
