Seven
SEVEN
THIS IS WAY WORSE THAN SEXY THOR
I cannot process the mirage walking toward me looking like forbidden sex in painted on jeans. When our eyes meet, his narrow as he tries to place me. I watch his face as his brain makes the connection, hesitating a fraction of a second.
“Wow,” he says right as I say, “what are you doing here?”
“Okay, great,” Jasmine says, launching into her speech about the competition, a speech I now cannot hear because Best Kiss of My Life is standing right in front of me grinning like I was the best kiss of his life.
He looks as stunned as I feel, which is very, very stunned. My brain is emitting one loud unending screech, like I’ve slammed on squealing brakes but the car’s still plummeting over a cliff. How is he here? How, exactly, am I supposed to compete against his whole…everything?
This has to be some sort of unspoken competition violation, like a bride forbidding hot bridesmaids so she doesn’t get upstaged. Contestants must be of average attractiveness so as not to distract from the headlining act.
That’s when it hits me.
Oh God, my song.
I wrote a song about the alcove, about him, about that night. It’s objectively better than any song I’ve ever written, which is why I chose it for the audition, but I never imagined I’d be singing it in front of him . He’ll for sure know I’m singing a song about his hands on my hips and his tongue in my mouth and exactly how much I liked it and I will have to die dead on a livestream in front of thousands of people.
“What are you doing here?” I ask again.
Our guitar cases clank against each other. I set mine upright between us like a barrier. He mimics my action, giving us even more separation.
“I’m here for the Sparrow audition.” He looks around with a fake sort of shock. “Is this the wrong room? Jasmine did say Room F, right?”
“But you never said…that night when…you never said you were a musician.”
“Never said I wasn’t.”
He has a self-assured twinkle in his eye and it’s all roaring back now. His look-at-me charisma, the way he read lead singer the second I laid eyes on him. He was and is the kind of guy who winks and gives you finger guns and you don’t even care because he’s that attractive . I’m moments away from the biggest opportunity of my career and suddenly I’m up against someone so hot it burns your retinas.
“I was hoping I’d run into you, you know, around town,” he says. “Never imagined it’d be here, us competing against each other.”
“How did you even get here?”
“Same way you did I imagine.”
It’s too much, seeing him and being near him when he’s consumed so much of my thoughts over the last few weeks. It’s like seeing a celebrity in the wild. You think you’ll know what they look like but in person they’re always so much more. He is more. Too much. I’m drowning in shock.
“Are you any good?” It’s a ridiculous thing for me to ask since it absolutely doesn’t matter. He’ll get votes just for looking into the camera with that face. I bet he could sing the ABCs while banging spoons together on his knee and people would clamor to vote for him before the song was over.
“On stage or in the sack?” he asks. “The answer to both is…wait, are you still off musicians?”
He follows that zinger up with a toothy grin and oh my God I am going to commit a felony. Best Kiss Ever or no, I do not intend to lose my long-awaited spotlight. I’m here to win, not be bested by Captain Lady Boner in solid black Chucks.
“Kick Raines,” he says, hand out.
I take it and look him pointedly in the eye. “Kick, that’s…an interesting name.”
“Maybe I’m an interesting guy.”
“Is that why you’re so comfortable seducing strangers at parties?”
I pull my hand away and fluff my hair with my fingers.
“I’ll admit,” he says, his voice all husky and knee-bending, “it’s not often I come across a half-naked girl in an outdoor kitchen talking about crushed ice and making suggestive,” he pauses, pursing his lips, his eyes doing the damn sparkle, “suggestions.”
“Your memory is a bit more salacious than the reality of the moment. I was fully clothed.”
He scratches at his neck, his fingers grazing over his clavicle tattoo. “You’re different.”
“Different than what?”
“That night.” A small, secret smile pushes against his mouth. “The alcove.”
The word alcove falls off his lips like an invitation. Hot liquid want pinballs between my thighs.
Bing! Bing! Bing!
But I made my rule for a reason. Now is not the time to break it.
“Look, that whole thing was…great, but…I wasn’t supposed to ever see you again. ”
He wiggles his fingers out to the side like he’s a Toro at Rancho Carne High School. “Surprise.”
I roll my eyes but I’m also smiling so wide I instinctively raise my hand to cover it. I hear my name and turn my head away from Kick, attempting to listen to what Jasmine’s saying since we’ve already missed the bulk of it.
Our bodies are half facing each other, half facing the stage. Kick sets his guitar case on the ground. He crosses his arms and widens his stance, making himself the tiniest bit shorter. His hair is a riot of dishevelment that’s completely begging for someone to run their hands through it.
The way I ran my hands through it.
The way I want to again.
He leans in close and puts his lips right next to my ear. “Love the hair.” I look straight ahead like I didn’t hear him, but I can see his smirk out of the corner of my eye, like he’s already won the unnamed competition between us. “I didn’t take you for a pop princess .” When I narrow my eyes at him, he shrugs and says, “I figured you were more folklore less Lover .”
I give him a slow, measured head-to-toe once over. “I absolutely did take you for a rock god wannabe with artfully rumpled hair.”
He feigns surprise. “You think my hair is art?”
We’re flirting. We shouldn’t be flirting.
My body is still very attracted to his body, humming at his proximity, pushing me to drift closer to him while my brain fights to move farther away.
My body needs to get it together.
Because this guy is a musician and my immediate competition, both of which mean he’s a hard no.
Don’t say hard.
Oh God.
“You still haven’t told me your name,” he says.
I catch his eye, looking for his angle. “I’m Mari Gold. ”
He pauses long enough to make me nervous. “It’s great to officially meet you Mari.”
“We’ll be collecting votes for twenty-four hours,” Jasmine says, “so about this time tomorrow, one of you will be joining Sparrow for their Grand Total Tour this summer. Sound good?”
A few contestants clap and I snap to attention. The audition has already started. I need to get my head in the game. Now that Kick Raines has entered the competition I’m going to have to work even harder to win.
Jasmine checks her phone. “We’ll get started in about ten minutes as long as the guys get here on time. Shades of Grey, you’re up first. You can go ahead and get set on stage.”
“Jasmine, I’d like to get a few photos before we start,” Emily says, “for the press release?”
“Emily. She’s the one who invited me here,” Kick murmurs into my ear, which seems like an excuse to get close to me. “Who invited you?”
“Don Sparrow.” It comes out exactly as sassy as I intend for it to, but he grins at me.
We leave our guitars and climb the three stairs up to the stage. Jasmine and Emily get to work assembling us all into two long rows. Emily puts Kick next to me, both of us right in the center with Kick’s two bandmates behind us.
“Isn’t this adorable, Goldie? Our first photo together,” Kick says, nudging me with his elbow.
“Don’t worry. Once I’m on the tour, I’m sure there will be lots of photos of me you can download and admire. You can show your friends the one that got away.”
“I don’t see you running.”
His breath is on my ear and my cheeks burn with the heat of it.How is he so cavalier about this? You’d think he knew I was going to be here and planned this whole thing.
“Kick? Mari?” Emily says, calling us out like little kids talking during class. Pink-haired girl catches my eye and gives me a wide-eyed thumbs up, like good for you get it girl .
Emily snaps a few photos with her phone. I try to look cool and unaffected but probably look terrified. I came here thinking all I needed to do was give a kick ass performance and now I’m completely thrown off by Kick Raines’ elbow brushing my arm.
We all file back off the stage. Shades of Grey stays on to plug in their guitars. The lead singer runs through a vocal warm-up full of hmms and oohhs and bum bum bums, sliding up and down the scale.
I whip my phone out of my unlaced boot and walk away from the other contestants, making sure Kick doesn’t follow me, and call Cass.
“Why are you calling?” she barks on speaker. “What happened?”
“Remember the guy? The one from Jackson’s party a few weeks ago?”
“Mari, there are bigger things to focus on at this exact moment than some stranger danger make-out. I know you said it was epic but the livestream starts in less than five minutes. You need to focus!”
“He’s here.”
Long pause. I can totally see her face in my mind and its equal parts comical and stressed, mouth open in shock and brows drawn together in horror, eyes half-scared, half-pissed.
“What do you mean he’s there?”
“The guy whose tongue surface I memorized is a contestant. He’s competing against me to win the opening slot. His name is Kick Raines and he is here .”
She lets out a low whistle. “Plot. Twist.”
“And he walked in looking all smug, like, haha guess what I’m here. He even made a snide comment about my hair. Called me a pop princess!”
“Asshole. Your hair looks incredible.” She pauses. “And yours will too, Zoe.”
“Do you remember the time Jackson invited us to that Johnny Cash tribute show downtown at the War Memorial Auditorium? Colton Rhinehart performed?”
“Didn’t he do ‘Hurt?’” Cass wonders.
“I was there that night,” Zoe says.
“Anyway, remember after Colton’s performance I was going on and on about how he’s a sexy Thor and I wanted to ride him all the way to Asgard?”
“We turned around and he was standing right behind us,” Cass says and Zoe laughs.
“Watching Kick Raines walk into this rehearsal space was worse than Sexy Thor.” I’m trying to keep my voice as low as possible. “What am I going to do?”
“What do you mean what are you going to do?” Cass’s voice gets all high and pitchy, the yin to my low whining yang. “You get your perfectly styled ass on that stage and blow everyone else out of the water. I don’t care if that dude’s name is Kick or Stomp or Smack. The fact is, you, Mari Gold, are a shining star and no one else is going to get in the way of that. This audition is for you.”
She’s right. This audition is for me. I’m here to prove something, if not to Sparrow, at least to myself. I can’t let anyone, not even Kick Raines, get in the way of that.
I hang up with Cass and look over at Kick and his overly confident grin, his sparkling eyes framed by those hideously long eyelashes, and I make a decision.
I am going to kill this audition.