Through no fault of my own, my life disintegrated. My best friends were no longer speaking and my livelihood demolished over a stupid poker game. I did my best to put together the shards of my life, but damn it, when both of your best friends betray you, that digs deep.
It’s only because Franklin Alexander pulled my shit together that I’m standing here ready to go on stage and lie my fucking mouth off about what happened atAngelo’s. I owe him in more than one way for my life, so I’ll do what Jacine says and put on a happy face, and talk up this concert her miracle team pulled out of their nether regions at The Hollywood Bowl? Eighteen thousand seats of screaming fans? Yeah. With a gross of around four million for one night. But the money wasn’t in the ticket sales. It was in the television rights, and the CD recorded from the performance. Millions more rode on those deals.
Not that I needed the money. No, this was a way to show promoters that despite our butt head action, we would make filthy lucre for them.
Hell, even my former business manager called me, leaving several pleading messages that his quitting was a big misunderstanding.
So far, I hadn’t answered. The jerk should have had more faith in me. Let him sweat.
Jacine stood in the wings with Jersey and Cole next to her giving each other the evil eye. Tobias Marshall shadowed them all, which surprised me, but I suppose he was here to hand out a few forthright legal words of advice like “don’t fuck this up.”
I won’t. My bread is buttered firmly on the side of "let's not fuck this up."
Cole and Jersey, on the other hand, stare at each other as if the other was an interloper in their private territory. I notice that Jacine is between them as if she’s trying to keep them from tearing each other apart. And the lawyer? His eyes are narrowed and his lips drawn into a tight slash. He keeps glancing at Jacine and my ex-confederates as if he wanted to separate all of them, which might be a good idea.
But the music cues with our signature hitEver,and Jersey doesn’t even have time to shoot Cole a nasty look, because Cole will get the royalties for that even before the PAs usher us to the entrance. We all plaster huge smiles on our faces and walk out waving to the studio audience, totally lying about our feelings of being on stage together.
The studio crowd, either naturally enthusiastic or groomed, I don’t know which, stood on their feet and gave us a standing ovation. We sat down on the long sofa that held guests and Nyberg smiled at us like we were old friends.
Cole sat closest to Nyberg, and Jersey at the other end, which left me in the middle.
As usual.
I hated being in the fucking middle.
“Welcome, guys,” said Nyberg with a cheesy smile. “So that was quite the scene at Angelo’s the other night. Are you telling me that was all for show?”
Cole gave his brightest shit-eating smile, but then he was a real showman and laughed aloud when he cried inside. No one, but no one saw what fueled that man’s emotions, except Jersey Dys who couldn’t seem to do anything but.
“People have been talking soooo long about the competition between our groups. It’s ridiculous.”
It sure was, I thought.
“What do you say, Jersey? I mean you and Cole were best friends in high school, weren’t you?”
“You could say that,” said Jersey with a twist of his lips.
I turned my head to the left and saw Jacine in the wings making the hand sign for “wide smiles.” Jersey pointedly did not glance at her, though from his vantage point he must have seen her out of the corner of his eye.
“Banshee,” Nyberg persisted, “broke up under the cloud of a lawsuit you filed against Cole, isn’t that right, Jersey?”
Man, Nyberg went for blood, and I glanced again to Jacine, whose face paled and drew into tight lines. Her eyes flashed and I could tell Nyberg would never get an Alexander and Wells client again on his show. She’d make sure of it.
“That’s right,” said Jersey. By now he was Nyberg’s target.
“But that’s not the way you treat a friend, is it? From all accounts, you signed away your rights to the songs in a poker game?”
“Yep,” said Jersey with a pop of his lips. Tension flowed off him. There was no way not to feel it.
From the sidelines, Jacine mouthed “what the fuck?”
“We were kids,” I said in a bid to rescue this mess. “We’ve grown since then. We’ve established our own bands, wrote our own songs. Hell, Jersey here is making more money than Cole anyway.”
Oh fuck. I did not say that.
“You are?” said Cole amicably. Or as amicably as a rattlesnake could hiss. “But my albumTotal BlissoutsoldCaress, didn’t it?”
“In the US, yes,” said Jersey. “But I have a big following in Japan.”
