Just like that, Sacha and I were walking across the parking lot at his guidance while I pocketed my younger companion’s twenty dollars.
The black-haired man walking alongside me looked down from over his shoulder, his eyes such a pristine shade of ash they were nearly a clear blue. “Are you craving anything?”
I scrunched up my face. “As long as we aren’t eating pizza again, I’m game.”
Sacha laughed, his gaze still on me. “It’s the worst, isn’t it?”
There was a reason almost everyone on the tour crossed their fingers and toes that pizza wouldn’t be the meal of choice wherever we happened to be that day. Venues were responsible for providing the tour package with food every night. Each band had a rider, or a list of requests, of items they wanted. It wasn’t anything crazy like all red Skittles, Oreos without the filling or anything. Ghost Orchid’s rider consisted of a case of Dr. Pepper, some kind of vodka, a large bag of barbecue chips, a sandwich tray and Oreos. They were a vision of health.
Apart from their riders, the two bands were either supposed to have dinner provided or if that wasn’t available, each person on the tour was given a certain amount of money to supply their own food. The problem was that when the venues did have dinner available, more often than not, it consisted of pizza. Not the good kind of pizza either, at least so far, but the kind that had cheese that tasted like the off-brand individually packed crap, suspicious-looking pepperoni, and no sauce. It made me want to puke.
If you thought there was a food you could eat every day without getting tired of it, you were lying to yourself. Everything got old.
“I haven’t had pizza on tour in almost ten years,” Sacha continued. “There’s a Thai place about five blocks away…” He trailed off and I didn’t miss the hopeful look he shot me.
He gave me the type of innocent smile as he raked a hand through the hair at the top of his head that reached into your soul like a puppy’s lick could. “I swear it’s great—”
“Okay.” I shrugged up at him, meeting his gaze. “I’m game.”
Sacha paused for a second. His six-foot-one-ish height towered over my five-two. “You don’t mind?” He asked it so hopefully even if I hadn’t wanted to eat Thai, I would have still done it to keep the grin on his face.
The question earned him a snort. “Food is food.”
He hitched a shoulder up, the sleeve of his T-shirt sliding back to reveal more of the thick, black bands of his tattoo that went from wrist to shoulder. “That was easy.”
I didn’t even miss a beat before blurting out, “I’m easy.”
I slammed my mouth closed. And I blinked. Then I stopped blinking all together and just stared.
If it wouldn’t have been for Sacha stopping again and turning to look down at me, his mouth pulled tight at the corners, I wouldn’t have known he’d heard what I said. His dark eyebrows were halfway to his hairline. His eyes were huge as they flicked to the side.
I narrowed my eyes at him, heat crawling up my neck. “Don’t… say… anything.”
He coughed the fakest, most forced cough in the history of coughs. “Say anything about what?” he asked slowly, hesitantly. He even added a little questioning shrug at the end.
It was a lot harder than it seemed to not laugh. “Exactly.” I shrugged back at him, wanting to kick myself in the ass for having such a big mouth.
Sacha gave me a low-lidded glance before visibly pursing his lips together and coughing one more time. I didn’t miss the way his mouth pulled up into a tiny, short smile before he managed to wipe it off his features altogether. Sacha scratched at the bridge of his nose and glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes again before finally grinding out, “You’re sure you’re fine with eating that, then?”
At that point, it wasn’t like I could say no even if I wanted to. I nodded, which earned me another smile from him.
We walked a block in silence, each of us giving the other a few curious if not a bit awkward glances, like neither one of us could think of what to say until Sacha broke the silence. “Are you having fun on tour?” he asked as we came to the first crosswalk.
“Yeah, besides dealing with the heat.” It had been hot in every single venue we’d been in over the last two weeks, and me complaining about it said something; I’d lived in Texas my entire life.
He groaned. “It never gets easier to handle, trust me. I’ve been touring six months out of the year for the last ten and it hasn’t gotten any better than that first summer the band spent in a van with no AC.” Sacha shuddered at the memory, and I think I could have exploded at his cuteness.
“Ten years?” I asked him, looking up. He didn’t look twenty-one or even twenty-five but he didn’t look over thirty either. His face was still relatively unlined, except for these deep laugh lines on the sides of his mouth. How old was he?
“Ten years in August,” he reiterated. Sacha turned to look at me with those clear gray eyes. “Is this your first tour?”
I snorted as a dozen memories of the five years I spent on and off with Ghost Orchid blew through my brain in the span of a second. “No. I used to leave with Eli, but about two years ago, I decided to go to school full time and stopped. This whole bus thing is new to me. We used to get around in a van,” I summed it up, leaving out a few details that didn’t seem important.
Sacha grinned at me slyly. “I guessed that when you didn’t take shoes into the showers with you.” He looked down at my tennis shoes and waggled his eyebrows. “I heard you got fungus from it.”
I wasn’t even going to bother trying to guess which asshole spilled the beans on my foot problem. It could have been any of them. Pricks. I’m not sure where the action came from, but I bumped his arm with my own. He was so much taller than me, I was hitting closer to his elbow than his shoulder. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
And just like that, he was nudging me back with a big grin on his face. The corners of his deep-set eyes crinkled. “I bet your skin looks raw, huh?”
