You walked right into that one, Maia. Play it cool. Do not give him any indication you were half in love with him before he’d finished the first song.
But when I turned to look in his eyes, the open vulnerability in his gaze disarmed me completely. So I told him the truth.
“Your voice is something special, Zane. Enjoy the next little while because your rise to fame is going to come fast and hard and nothing will ever be the same again.”
His grin was like winning the lottery. He leaned down next to my ear and said, “Sounds a little bit like spending the night with you…”
My stomach did somersaults.
No, no, no. Absolutely not, Maia. You convinced yourself this was just fun and you’re already thinking about your next date.
Not that this is a date.
Fuck him and move on with your life and don’t under any circumstances get to know him any better.
“What about you?” I asked, betraying every screaming instinct in my head. “What do you do for fun besides stealing other people’s dates…”
He barked a laugh. “Hey now. I hadn’t even tried to steal you yet. You came to me.”
I acknowledged him with my beer bottle.
“Music has kind of consumed me for the last few years. I like surfing, hanging out with friends, learning new stuff. I love documentaries.”
I laughed, “I didn’t see that one coming. What kind of documentaries?”
“Literally anything. If it’s decently well done, I’m in. I love it when I wonder why someone would even make a documentary about something and then by the end of it I’m obsessed with whatever it is and go down a rabbit hole of learning more. Like I saw this one last week about forest mushrooms.” He gestured with his hands exploding out from his head. “Blew my mind. Had no idea mushrooms were so rad. Or pigeons! Did you know they were domesticated like dogs and cats until really recently and that there’s still a huge group of people who race them competitively?”
He had that devastatingly earnest expression again. Most of the people I’d met in LA said they liked documentaries because they thought it made them sound smart, like they knew things. Zane liked them because he wasn’t afraid to admit hedidn’tknow things.
“I think I used to be that eager to learn,” I mused aloud wistfully. “As a kid, maybe. Before life got so complicated.”
He took a swig of his beer and paused like he was trying to decide whether he should say something. “Would it be bad for me to ask how you ended up in this line of work?”
I knocked the neck of my beer bottle against his. “If we were playing the ‘shit people say to sex workers’ game, it would be time for you to drink, my friend…”
He laughed. “Okay, fair.”
I wasn’t offended, especially since I could see now that when he asked questions it was because he liked to learn things, not because he was being judgmental. “I’ve seen what debt does to people. It ruins lives. It ruins relationships. I wasn’t going deeper into debt to pay for school when there was a perfectly viable option right there.”
He looked pensive. “But you couldn’t have done some other job? Something less…degrading?”
I let the word roll right over me, well beyond being hurt by it. “Sex work is work. Is it occasionally degrading? Of course. You know what else is degrading? Waiting tables. Working retail. Customer service. Admin work. Paying for things with food stamps. Having your car repossessed. Being fucking poor.” I took a deep breath, not meaning to get preachy. “Sex work is something I discovered I was good at and it pays me more than any other job I could fit into my schedule right now.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I’d never really thought about it like that. Lots of jobs suck a lot of the time. We single that one because people are weird about sex.”
“And what about you?” I said. “How did all of this come about for you?”
He leaned back, looking up at a sky too bright for any stars to shine. “Someone at the record label saw some videos of me playing and reached out to see if I wanted to audition for a band they were putting together. They think we’re due for another wave of boy bands…or they’re engineering that readiness. It was sort of a whirlwind from there and now here I am.” He spread his hands out and looked around.
“So which one are you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Which what?”
“Which member of the boy band? There’s always the goofy one, the sensitive one, the bad boy…you can’t be him because the one guy was wearing leather and that automatically means he’s the bad boy. Oh wait! I know exactly which one you are. You’re the dreamboat who dates another pop star and drives all the girls wild.”
His cheeks actually turned bright pink before he could cover his face.
I climbed onto his lap, prying his hands away. “I’m right, aren’t I? Tell me I’m right!”
