Brando 2 Page 3

  Now I know what the bodyguards know: Lexi has the consistent, indefatigable habit of making you want to slap her. Maybe it’s her superpower.

  Before I can decide whether I want to hit her or give her a detailed, expletive-ridden account of her many flaws as a person, she’s buried in her entourage and heading away toward the other bus.

  “Uh. We should get going,” Brian says, his voice a little shaky.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask, as we climb onto the bus. “You’re not scared of her, are you?”

  He laughs nervously, then changes the subject clumsily.

  “Check this out! TV, PS4, awesome stereo,” he says, leading me toward the back where Paula and Aaron are already booting up the game console. “And a fully stocked fridge! This bus is pretty much better than most of the apartments I’ve lived in.”

  “Even those beds?” I say, nodding at the cramped bunks.

  He leans in and sniffs. “Yeah.”

  I punch his shoulder. “Eww, gross! I don’t even get why we have a bus though, aren’t we just going to stay in hotels?”

  “Most of the time,” a voice behind me says, unmistakeably strong and commanding. I spin around and see him, stepping onto the front of the bus and making his way back to me. The very sight of him getting me hot for too many reasons to pick one. “But there are a couple of dates that are going to be a squeeze without it. Better this than sleeping on a plane.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I ask tightly, as he nods Brian away toward the back of the bus.

  “What did you think I’d do? Follow you on a bicycle?”

  “You don’t need to be on the bus with us,” I say in a childish voice.

  Brando draws himself close, squeezing beside me in the slim aisle between the beds.

  “I’m supposed to make sure everything is alright, that everyone’s happy. I can only do that when I’m on the ground with them.”

  The bus lurches forward, and Brando falls against me, my face almost in his neck, my hands raising up to hold his chest, his arm grabbing my back to stop me from falling.

  Can hate make you want to fuck someone even more? Because I’ve never wanted to tear Brando’s shirt off more than I do now, in this cramped, moving bus, and ride the weirdly thrilling mix of emotions I’m feeling by holding him to me.

  “Well it’s not alright,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady as he pulls himself back away from me far slower than he could, “and I’m definitely not happy.”

  He leans in close, his lips against my ear.

  “Then it’s my job to make you happy.”

  I shove him back as suddenly and as reluctantly as I shove the hotness I’m feeling back down deep inside of me.

  “I’ll never be happy with you, Brando. Never.”

  I spin on my heel and storm off toward the back of the bus. Because right now, that’s as far away as I can get.

  Chapter 5

  Brando

  Haley’s first show is in San Francisco. Thousands of people, completely sold out, and the news that she was supporting Lexi only made it out a couple of weeks before. It’ll be a baptism of fire, not least because until now Haley’s only played for an audience at open mics, one showcase, and a TV spot. It won’t help that she’s spent the last month cooped up in a studio with Josh. Still, she made it through this far with my help, and I’ll be damned if I’m not gonna help her nail these gigs – even if she doesn’t want me to.

  I turn up at the soundcheck early to wait for her, only to find that she’s even earlier. I watch her guide her band as they blast through a song, and goof around with the ending, turning the song into a silly parody of one of Lexi’s songs. I start smiling, but something about the way she shares the laughter with her guitarist makes me drop the smile pretty quick.

  When they’re done laughing and checking with the engineer in the stands that everything’s okay, I walk straight to Haley – but my eyes are fixed on the guitarist. He gives me a weak wave, before pretending to have somewhere he needs to be and leaving. Haley turns around to see what scared him.

  “Oh,” she says, as if I’m a major disappointment.

  “You guys sounded good.”

  “Easy to sound good in an empty theatre,” she says sardonically. I try to keep my hands to myself as she bends over to put her guitar in its case.

  When she stands back up and looks at me I lose myself for a second. She’s got a new kind of sexiness I’m seeing for the first time. If the girl I met at the open mic was sexy because she was so innocent, naïve, and keen to see the world, this new Haley is sexy for a whole new set of reasons. No more of the round, whites-of-the-eyes looks that she used to get; now they’re hard, like two pools of suppressed fire. The lips that once curled outward as if tasting something for the first time are now tight and ripe. Even the way she carries herself now is different. No more hanging her head, hiding behind her hair, standing sideways: now she stands with her shoulders back, her chin high, and it’s impossible not to notice the swell of her breasts, the roundness of her hips.

  Once upon a time everything about her said ‘take me, I’m yours,’ and now it says ‘you’re mine, and I’ll take what I want.’ I think back to the time we fucked in the studio, my head between her trembling thighs, her fragile body shaking under my hands, and realize I’d give anything to taste her again, this new Haley.

  Before I can stop myself, I say something stupid. As usual. “I’m sorry about how this turned out.”

  She folds her arms, shifts her weight onto one leg, and I have to look away to stop my cock from reacting to the way the line of her ass syncs so perfectly with the outline of her lifted tits. “Are you?”

  “Look Haley, I know—”

  I’m interrupted by the sudden onrush of Lexi’s people to the stage. More than a dozen colorfully-dressed men and women with flamboyant haircuts emerging from the sides and taking up spots with the precision of a military operation.

  “Do dancers need to soundcheck too?” Haley says, noticing them as well.

  I take her by the arm and lead her off to the side, a sense of joy spiking in me when I see she doesn’t resist – little victories. We stand by one of the quieter corners in the backstage area and Haley promptly assumes her ‘I’ll listen but I’ll also judge’ position again.

  “I know you don’t believe anything I say anymore,” I continue, sounding like I’m not pleading, but looking every bit the beggar, “but you’re the best musician I’ve ever worked with.”

  I stand aside slightly to let a couple more dancers run to the stage, and when I look back at Haley she’s still glaring at me – only there’s a little more softness in her eyes than there was a second ago. She doesn’t say anything, she’s expecting more. Fine.

  I’d beg all night for her.

  “Yes, I made a bet. And yes, it was to get Lexi back. But do you think I’d be here if that was all it was? I mean, I won the bet, I got Lexi back, I got you a hit record, I should be happy, right?” I point at my face. “Do I sound like a happy man right now? Or do I sound more like a whining idiot who’s desperate to fix the dumbest mistake he ever made?”

  Haley breaks a little, and looks away to try and hide her smile, but I catch it. This must be what coming back from the dead feels like.

  “I wish I didn’t feel like this, Haley. I wish I could just brush you off. God knows I’ve had enough practice forgetting about girls. I spent a month listening to your songs, getting Josh to sneak me the demos of you at the studio, playing them over and over again. Torturing myself with how amazing you are. Trying to convince myself that it was just about music, nothing else. But the night you told me about Rex being your father, about how you never even got to speak to him – I knew that even though we come from different worlds, deep down, we’ve got a connection. Something more than music.”

  Haley looks down, hiding behind her hair, almost as if she’s once again the shy open-mic’er who was too nervous to play her own songs. When she
looks up again, though, she’s back to the new, tough Haley.

  “Maybe, Brando. But you still lied to me. You started this whole thing off with a lie. How am I supposed to know where the lies stopped and the truth began? Did you lie when you told me I had something special and should sign with you right away? Did you lie about how you grew up tough and only a love of music got you through? Are you lying right now?”

  “Haley, I—”

  She raises a hand to stop me from speaking, and I’m so enraptured by the movement of her lips, the lines of her face, by being this close to her again, that it feels like slamming into a train.

  “You know what your problem is, Brando?” she says, her voice gentle but lethal. “You’re too good. Too perfect. Too smooth. I can never tell when you’re actually feeling something. Actually hurting, and yearning, and sad, like a regular person.” She takes a step away from me, about to leave, before turning back. “But this is a start.”

  I watch her walk down the long hall of the backstage area, my chest heaving, every bone in my body feeling like it’s just been thrown around in a washing machine. She pushes through the exit doors, and I feel a hole in my chest.

  “I wonder if you ever watched me walk away like that.”

  I spin around and see her leaning casually against the wall.

  “Lexi.”

  “You were probably just watching her ass though, right?” she laughs.

  I’m not amused. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Why? Did I miss the best part?” she says, pushing herself away from the wall and stepping out onto the stage, where there are roughly twenty people now waiting for her to soundcheck.

  I push a hand through my hair, emotions running and striking inside of me like a storm. I start striding in the opposite direction, head down, fists clenched. I can barely tell whether I’m angry at Lexi’s snooping, at having disappointed Haley so deeply, or whether I’m just so fucking hot for her that it’s making me aggressive. Either way, it’s a bad time to bump into her guitarist.

  Which is exactly what happens.

  He nods a greeting at me, quickening his pace to glide right by, but I put a hand on his chest to stop him, and he almost flails onto my palm like he just walked into a lamppost.

  “Oh, hey!” he says, with frightened enthusiasm.

  “Brian? Is it?”

  “Yeah! You’re Brando, right?”

  “Tell me: Do you like Haley?”

  “Uh…of course! She’s awesome. Best singer I’ve played fo—”

  “I mean,” I snarl, slower this time, “do you like Haley?”

  I takes a second for understanding to appear in his glazed eyes.

  “Oh! No! No, man, come on! No.”

  Suddenly I realize how ridiculous this is, how crazy I’m being. The last thing I need right now is to turn into a paranoid maniac who gets into jealous fights with my client’s back-up musicians. I drop my palm and shake my head like a dog shaking off a bad scent.

  “Sorry,” I mumble, as if I just woke up. “Forget about it.”

  Chapter 6

  Haley

  I can’t think. Somebody has pressed fast-forward on everything around me, and my mind just can’t catch up.

  The green room’s big and comfortable, but it only makes me feel smaller and more out of place. Paula’s on the couch, tapping out rhythms on her knees as if she’s already out there, in front of the thousands of fans screaming so loudly we can still hear them through the thick walls of the backstage area. Aaron’s beside her, his eyes closed, hands folded, meditating. Brian’s leaning against the wall, re-tuning his guitar for the twentieth time. They look more or less poised, professional. Ready to go.

  Me, I’m pacing around the room like a rat looking for the exit of the maze.

  The runner knocks on the door, opens it, and leans in.

  “It’s time,” she says.

  Everyone gets up – except for me. I take a step back.

  “Time? But you just said we had ten more minutes?”

  The runner looks at me with a mixture of confusion and sympathy.

  “That was over ten minutes ago.”

  “Come on,” Brian says, putting an arm around my shoulders. “It’s going to be fine.”

  I let him walk me out of the green room, along the hallway that leads to the side of the stage, until suddenly he leaves my side and runs ahead. For a second it almost seems like he’s abandoning me. But then I look up, and see Brando standing in front of me.

  He might be a liar. He might have hurt me. I might hate him.

  But right now, there’s nobody else I’d rather see.

  I look into his cocksure eyes, waiting for him to say something, pleading with him to use that deep, reassuring voice and that commanding presence he has on me. Right now, I need something solid to hold on to, to ground me, and it doesn’t get more solid than Brando.

  He steps toward me and cups my cheeks in his strong hands.

  “Everything you’re feeling will disappear the second you hit the first chord,” he says, somehow making it sound like the most truthful thing in the world.

  “What if I choke? I can’t even remember the first song. I’m nervous just hearing those people out there, what about when I see them? I can’t do it,” I say, raising my hand. “Look, I’m shaking. I can’t play guitar. Tell them I can’t do it—”

  “Haley,” Brando says, leaning in so close I can taste his breath, “you’ve dreamed of this moment since you were a kid. Lived it over and over again in your head. I know you have. The big venue, the screaming fans, the flashing lights, you’ve dreamed it all, right?”

  I nod, my skin brushing against his rough palms.

  “Do you choke or forget the words in the dream?”

  “No.”

  “This is just like that. Just like your dream. A little bit louder. A little bit realer. But just the same.”

  He strokes my hair away from my face and I hear the screaming rise a full twenty decibels as my band makes it on stage. Brando pulls away and steps aside.

  I cast one last look at the firm belief in his eyes, gathering the last bit of strength I can from them, and then walk down the hallway and step out onto the stage.

  It’s just like he says, like a dream. I walk out and feel like a hurricane hits me. A sea of faces and arms shouting and wailing. A wall of sound that almost blows me back.

  I hit the first chord, and before I know it I’m almost done with the last song of the night. If I felt like I was on fast-forward earlier, it’s as if someone pressed the skip button through the concert. But even so, judging by the audience applause, it seems that all those years of relentless practice have finally paid off. I didn’t totally bomb.

  “That was awesome, Haley!” yells someone from the group of strangers that mob us as we exit the stage, carrying us in a crowded mass back toward the green room.

  “Was it?” I say, barely able to hear myself speak over the excited laughter and whoops of the crowd.

  “Holy shit!” Brian says, putting a hand on my back. “I never heard you do that before!”

  “Do what?” I say, looking for him as I get pushed and pulled into the green room. “What was I doing?”

  “The ad-libs! Talking to the crowd!” Paula says, emerging at my side and holding out a beer toward me. “They loved you!”

  “Fuck,” I say, bringing a hand to my head to stop the spinning. “I didn’t even know I was doing it.”

  Somebody slams two glass bottles together to get people’s attention. We all look in the direction of the sound and see Mike the guitar tech standing on a table.

  “First show of the tour…and we fucking nailed it!” he screams, shooting his beer-carrying hands into the air and spraying everyone.

  The room erupts. Stage techs, roadies, anyone with a backstage pass – they’re all jumping and shouting as if whatever the fans are experiencing outside is contagious. As if on cue, Lexi’s show starts, and the room becomes a conges
ted mass of noise, beer, and post-orgasmic energy.

  “Haley,” Brian says, leaning in close so I can hear him over the crowd, “you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say, laughing the last of the butterflies away, “I feel like I just woke up from a coma – but I’m alright.”

  Brian doesn’t pull away, and I notice that he’s letting the crowd push his body up against mine.

  “You’re amazing, Haley,” he whispers into my ear.

  I pull my head back to stare up at him. He’s giving me a look I haven’t seen before, a look that makes me feel like we’re the only two people in the room.

  “Thanks,” I say, slowly. “You’re not too bad yourself.”

  Brian smiles at the joke, but his eyes have no humor in them. They’re the eyes of someone seeing something they want badly. He holds my gaze, and I wait for it.

  “You make me kinda nervous,” he says, awkwardly.

  I sip slowly from my beer. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ve just grabbed the biggest opportunity in my life and made it – I feel invincible. Like I can do anything I want, and do it without thinking.

  “Aren’t you always kinda nervous, Brian?” I say, cocking my head to the side, and rubbing the beer bottle against my cheek.

  “Only when I’m around you,” he says.

  I giggle and lean into him.

  “And why’s that?” I purr.

  It takes Brian a few seconds to change his expression from nervous surprise to keen excitement. He opens his mouth to speak, but before he says anything, his cute, boyish face is replaced by Brando’s hard lines and manly stubble, as he sweeps Brian aside like a soft blanket.

  Brando stands over me, his loose shirt hanging over his broad shoulders, the faint outline of those neck muscles I liked so much teasingly traced in soft fabric. His eyes are hard and narrowed beneath his dark eyebrows, two planets that pull me into their orbit.

  “Just like in your dreams, right?” he says, fixing me in place with the symmetry of his face.