Liam’s silence is his answer. He looks sideways at the ground.
I feel like I’m going to throw up. My mind fogs with jealousy.
“If I weren’t here, would you be sleeping with her all summer?” I ask.
He finally meets my eyes, sighs, and answers honestly, the only way he knows how. “Who knows. Maybe.”
I want to curl in on myself until I evaporate.
Liam told me he wasn’t dating. He didn’t say anything about being celibate.
“We can talk about it tonight, if you want to,” he says. “You know I’ll tell you the truth about anything you want to know.”
I nod, my heart still pinched. “Okay.”
Without ado, he grabs my case and heads backstage. “You finish the song?”
I try to shake the last thirty seconds off. “Yep.”
“How’s your breathing?”
“Thought maybe you could tell me,” I quip back, my voice weak, mind still a bit unnerved.
Liam shoots me a fond smirk—while I marvel over how easy it is, despite everything, to joke with him about lyrics so weighted—and stashes my guitar in a cubby. Then he puts a hand on my back and leads me toward the dressing rooms. We head inside the one labelled simplyBand.
Three men are finishing their lunches in here. One is tattooed along both muscled arms and has spiky brown hair. Another looks like Tarzan, oversized and bearded, his hair pulled into a low bun. The last is a slender guy with red hair and glasses.
“Guys,” Liam says, and they all glance up from their sandwiches.
“Liam!” Tarzan stands from the couch, dunking his sandwich into a widemouthed trash can. “Good tofuckingsee you, dude!”
“You’d have seen me earlier if you hadn’t been late.”
Tarzan ignores this, pulling Liam into a hug and clapping him twice on the back, hard. “There was a girl, there was some alcohol, there was a dead cellphone. What can I say?”
“We haven’t even started the tour yet, Marlowe.”
Tarzan equals Marlowe. Tarzlowe.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You missed half of sound check,” the tattooed guy says.
“So did Jake,” Tarzlowe says, gesturing at the skinny one.
“Only because I got locked in the bus bathroom,” Jake replies. “Liam, can you get that looked at? You got the TaskRabbit app?”
“Not my job. Talk to David.”
“I’m Josiah,” says the tattooed guy, nodding at me from the couch. “Siah for short. I remember you from backstage at CMA Fest, with Misha. Pleasure to meet you.”
“You too,” I say. “I’m Paige.”
“What’s your story, Paige?” Marlowe asks. “You friends with Misha?”
“We went to school together at Belmont,” I answer.
“Are you dating her?” Siah asks.
