She pulled her shoulders back, a muscle popping in her jaw as she gripped the pen tightly in her hand without making a move to use it. She wasn’t a particularly short woman, maybe five-seven, but compared to my six foot two, she seemed tiny.
“Sign it,” I repeated, stepping into her space.I’m in control.
The heat of her body crossed the short distance between us, and I firmly tamped down on the impulse to flinch away. I would win this first battle of wills. Then, and only then, would I back off and find the space I so badly wanted.
Her chin tipped up, lips set in an obstinate moue.
“How about we go and explain to James exactly how we know each other so well…or not, as the case may be. If you lied about me, what else have you lied about? I’d hate to think the integrity of the record comp—”
“Fine,” she gritted out, scribbling a signature on the back of the card and holding it up with a huff. “What makes you so sure I’ll play along, though?”
I allowed a dark smile to spread slowly across my face, my chest tightening with smug pleasure as her throat worked down a gulp.
“You will,” I said, my voice full of promise.
I was close enough to see the hazel almost completely swallowed up by her dilating pupils. My eyes dropped to her mouth in time to see the tip of her tongue flick out, wetting her puffy pink lips.
“Calix,” Otis warned, taking half a step closer, as though he could diffuse the situation by becoming a human barricade.
I broke the stare-down not because of Otis’s interference, but because I had shit to do.
She was a distraction I couldn’t afford right now, especially while Toby was still MIA.
Scooping up the keys to the shitty panel van we’d been sharing since Toby won it in a backroom poker game between sets in our early days playing in bars, I bee-lined for the door, already running through a mental list of places I might find my brother. It was too early in the day for him to be in one of the clubs downtown, and he’d sworn to me he wouldn’t pick up a needle again, so injecting rooms were out. I hoped. It didn’t mean he hadn’t picked up a pipe in someone’s basement and gottenhimself in the shit. I knew he hadn’t been arrested because I would have heard about it already, so that left…
“Where are you going?”
The voice had a surprisingly strong tone to it. She was also far closer than I was comfortable with. Side-stepping to establish some space between us, I continued toward the parking lot behind the studio.
“Out. Stay here, Harvey and Otis can look after you until I get back.”
Her feet clipped across the tiled floor as she, annoyingly, kept pace.
“Forget it. I’m already down one band member; I’m not losing another in my first hour of managing you guys. Wherever you’re going, I’m coming too.”
“No.”
I pushed through the emergency exit and made no attempt to catch it for her as I continued toward the van. The curse that came from behind me was something I’d expect from my mouth, not some rock manager wannabe who knew nothing about the real world. I assumed. She seemed to have a relationship with her mom, which was something Toby and I had never had.
“You can’t stop me,” she puffed, catching me again as I unlocked the driver’s side of the van.
“Wait.” She grabbed my arm as I turned to get in.
The gesture was so sudden and unexpected that I couldn’t hide my reaction. Ripping away from her grasp, I jerked back into thehinge of the car door, only barely suppressing the urge to lash out.
She threw her hands up, allI’m unarmed,and took a large step back.
“I’m sorry. Look, I just…I need you to understand. I know I’m an outsider—trust me, I’ve heard Ruby’s rants about introducing new people into a band dynamic—but I’m here to help. I really need this job, and if I’m honest, I’m hella hungover right now, and a nice quiet ride in the car sounds like about as much socializing as I’m capable of. Just…trust that I’m not here to fuck you.”
I raised a brow at her choice of words, but to her credit, she just shrugged and rounded the van to claim the front passenger seat.
Twenty minutes later, we were crossing an unassuming intersection into a part of town I wished I didn’t know so well. On the surface, it looked like a suburban paradise. Cookie-cutter display homes with white picket fences, nothing more than a white-collar facade for the bullshit that went on behind closed doors.
Three intersections later, I took a left, then a sharp right into the driveway of my least favorite person in the world, and that was certainly saying something. The bored trust fund baby was a crutch my brother returned to again and again when life felt too real. I knew it was stupid to blame him. Toby was an adult and capable of making his own choices, but the easy access to anything mind-altering you could think of made him my brother’s best friend and my personal nightmare.
Taking a slow breath, I counted a ten second exhale, then did it again for good luck before I switched off the ignition and turnedto the woman riding shotgun. True to her word, the second I left the parking lot at the studio, she had put her head back and closed her eyes. They were open now, though, and trained right on me.
“Stay here. I won’t be long.”
