He ran a hand through the loose hair at the top of his head and closed one single, gray eye. “I had to take a crap into a plastic bag once. The bathroom on the bus was clogged, and we were in the middle of nowhere during a thunderstorm.”
For the record, there’s no way in hell you can hold back a laugh when someone tells you that they took a crap in a plastic bag. Especially not when the story is told in a matter-of-fact voice. It wasn’t possible. On the other hand, it didn’t help that Sacha’s face took ‘striking’ and ‘handsome’ to a different level. I’ve always figured that people in the upper echelon of beauty—sans Mason—were incapable of doing the ridiculous things that semi-attractive people like myself do; like fart or burp in front of others, smell or have stinky shit. But apparently Sacha, whose last name I still didn’t know, was the anomaly.
He’d taken a crap in a plastic bag.
When I had to hunch over and press my forehead against the vinegar-and-lemon smelling table, Sacha poked me in the shoulder. “When you gotta go,you gotta go,” he said with another laugh that didn’t hold a lick of embarrassment in it.
I looked up to see that his grin was telling me a story about an incredibly handsome man that didn’t take himself too seriously.
It was like finding a four-leaf clover.
“Did I gross you out?” he asked when I didn’t immediately respond.
I scowled and shook my head. “Are you kidding me? Have you talked to Eli?” He nodded, but there was no way he’d interacted with him enough to not be fully aware of my brother’s mental impairment. I couldn’t see Eli talking to someone for longer than twenty minutes without making some rude and/or inappropriate comment.
“There’s four of us kids in our family, and Eli and I used to have to ride the bus to school together in the morning, so we had to wake up earlier than everyone else. He’d make sure to get up before me every single day for years so that he could purposely leave me ‘presents’ in the toilet,” I snickered. “You can bring on the brown pickles with me anytime.”
Sacha chuckled, his index and middle finger pressing against his temple. “What you’re trying to say is that Eli’s to blame for making you this way?”
“Hey!” I cried. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or not.
“I mean it in a good way. You’re beautiful—“ I’m not sure how I managed not to fall off my chair. “—And you don’t have a problem talking to me about The Clap, diarrhea and vomiting. You’re fun, Gaby.”
My ears went red. Too worried about saying something dumb, I held out my hands at my sides in a “what can I say” gesture.
Sacha smiled and opened his mouth right before the sound of loud beeping coming from his pocket tore his attention away from the table. Pulling his phone out, he asked me to hold on before answering the call. “Hey… I just finished going for a run… yeah… I’m about to eat.” He shot me a smile when he glanced up. “I’ll see you soon… I miss you too… okay… bye.”
The chances that the person he was talking to on the other end was a family member could be pretty high, but my gut feeling said otherwise. Someone that good-looking had to have a significant other in the picture.
“Girlfriend?” my mouth spewed without a second thought.
He simply shook his head, and I missed the way one of his eyelids lowered in denial. “Old friend.”
Friend?
Sure. I almost snickered. I’d grown up alongside three boys, two of them becoming manwhores right before my eyes. I understood how they worded their sentences. An “old friend” that you told you “missed” was more than likely an ex-girlfriend or an ex-buddy you used to do things with that you probably wanted to do more things with in the future. Sacha didn’t seem to be like my brother or Mase, but still. An “old friend” was an “old friend.”
It wasn’t my business, though, so I pushed Sacha’s friend and conversation out of my head and smiled over at him, close-mouthed.
He only smiled back at me. The silence settled around our shoulders in a weird fit.
“Are you ready to go?” I asked him.
Sacha nodded and we got up, making our way out. Neither one of us spoke up as we walked back to the venue. I didn’t know what to say, and I guess he didn’t either. We smiled at each other a couple of times when we’d stop at a corner and wait to cross the street.
I heard the guys before I saw them. We were rounding the nearest building to the venue when Eli’s booming laugh mixed with two other boisterous ones. Immediately, I felt this big ball of dread form in my stomach, my shoulders tightening.
I knew Eli inside and out. I could recognize his laugh when he thought something was kind of funny, really funny, not funny at all but he was attempting to be nice, and I was all too aware of the texture his laugh held when he’d either drank too much or smoked pot. And while he was a grown man and I had no right to tell him what to do, there was a reason why one of the conditions I made before coming on tour with him was that he kept the drinking, and by default the partying, to a minimum. Especially when I was going to have to put up with his crap afterward.
Eli laughed again, and I took a deep breath, already palming my chest for the tour laminate I had on a lanyard so I could go into the building through the front instead of the back door.
Sacha’s hand nudged my arm. “You all right?” he asked when I looked up at him.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I forced a smile onto my face when Mason’s voice pierced through the air.
He frowned. “You don’t look fine.”
We were getting closer and closer to the corner of the block where I would either go in through the front or walk a few more feet and make my way to the back where the bus and trailer were. “I just…” I blew out a shaky breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and shook my head as if I wanted to shake off this entire situation with the idiots. “I don’t like being around Eli when he’s on something.” I had a sudden flashback of the night that had finally been my breaking point, when I decided I didn’t want to keep going out with GO. I’d been so pissed that I didn’t speak to any of them for months after that tour ended.
