Mostly exciting. Australians had the sexiest accents I’d ever heard. Whoo.
“Who is it?” I called out a little hesitantly, wishing I had a knife or a bat or at least a rock I could chuck nearby. Then again, every room around mine had one of the guys on the tour in it. If I yelled loud enough someone would come, right?
Eh. I could use a lamp if push came to shove.
Someone—or something?—scratched at the door lightly.
Jesus Christ. “Seriously, who is it?”
There was more scratching.
Damn it! “Eli, I swear to God—”
A loud laugh pierced through the door. “It’s me.”
Me.
Sassy.
I groaned and grumbled climbing off the bed. “Damn it, Sacha. Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”
“Yes.”
Yeah, I rolled my eyes, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t greedily sucking up the attention, especially after what he’d said during The Cloud Collision’s set. His favorite day was my birthday? That wasn’t him calling me cute or saying something else along those lines. So what the hell did it mean?What the hell did it mean, damn it?
It wasn’t like I could talk to any of the monsters, or even Carter, about it. It also wasn’t as if I could hop onto Skype and get Laila’s input because of the time difference. This wasn’t an e-mail-worthy conversation; it required a face-to-face conversation.
I had no one.
So…
I wasn’t going to bring it up and possibly make our friendship awkward until I could figure out how I was supposed to handle what he’d said and might have meant.
“One sec, Sassy pants,” I said in the middle of turning the deadbolt. I’d barely cracked the door when his smiling face greeted me. “Hi.”
“Princess,” he said with a long blink of his cool-colored eyes as he pushed the door open and slid inside.
He toed off his shoes the instant after he’d kicked the door closed. Before I'd even locked it, he was climbing onto my bed and reclining against the headboard. My mind said, “Danger!” But my ovaries screamed, “Naked! Now!”
Instead I did what any friend would have done: I jumped onto the bed as if him showing up to my room in the middle of the night was no big deal, and sat cross-legged next to where he took a seat.
Fresh-faced and damp-haired, he pushed his black locks straight back before rubbing at one of the shaved sides of his head. “I thought you’d be asleep by now.”
“I was still trying to wind down.” Plus, he’d banged on the door so loud that it would have woken me up even if I’d been passed out, but I kept that to myself. “What are you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep, and I’m not in the mood to get any writing done tonight.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Writing your next album?”
He nodded. “This tour is for the last record we have with our label and our contract runs out in exactly a year; we want to release another album the day after it’s over. I wanted to go ahead and get started on the songs now.”
“You’re self-releasing it?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty certain we’re going to have to sue our label for back royalties they owe us afterward.” He winced.
I made a face that he mirrored.
“It’ll be fine,” he assured me.
