Chapter Fourteen
Micah was sitting on one of the deck chairs on the very top level of the cruise ship, the one reserved for only the artists and any entourage they might have brought with them.
She’d already spotted Tatiana looking fierce in a tiny bikini, surrounded by a few other women she assumed were part of her group.
If the situation of this cruise had been any different, maybe she would’ve tried to flirt with Tatiana a bit, just to see if she was all the way straight or if she was a little curious.
But that was the last thing on Micah’s mind now. She just had to figure out how to get through the next four days without wanting to throw herself—or Ryder—off the ship.
“Anyone sitting here?” John said from behind her, gesturing at the chair next to hers.
“No.”
He sat down at the end of his, tilting it forward with his weight. He had to catch himself from falling with one hand down on the deck, and he laughed a little when he settled himself more securely, rubbing two of his fingers that had stopped his fall.
“Are you hurt?”
He examined his fingers, which looked normal at least—not bent or scraped up or anything like that. “Nah,” he said. “I’m fine.”
She thought of his fingers playing the guitar. She thought of them against her nipple this morning, what they would feel like inside her. She cleared her throat. “I think you’re going to need those.”
“I’ll try not to be so clumsy in the future,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”
The wind had started back up a bit—not as bad as the day before, thankfully, but enough that it kept whipping strands of Micah’s ponytail onto her cheeks, sticking against her mouth. She gathered her ponytail with one hand to hold it out of her face.
“He’s not wrong, you know,” she said. “I did snake the album deal right out from underneath all of you. And I never apologized for it. But I am sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am. I should’ve apologized a long time ago. To everyone, but especially to you.”
Why especially to me? she thought he might ask, and then she’d have to decide just how honest she wanted to be. But instead he shifted on the chair, leaning back into it so he was reclining, not even looking at her.
“Ryder shouldn’t have thrown that in your face,” he said.
“Not now, and definitely not as a way to deflect from the fact that he was the one who was being a jackass. He shouldn’t have kissed you like that, in front of everyone, when he knew you wouldn’t like it.
The band had a lot of problems, and was probably doomed in a hundred different ways that had nothing to do with you. ”
That was kind of him to say, but Micah didn’t believe that. She could think of a number of the band’s problems, and unfortunately she seemed to be at the center of all of them.
He did turn to look at her then, squinting against the sun. “I never did get to hear your side of the story when that all went down,” he said. “I feel like it’s my fault that I didn’t ask.”
“You were angry with me,” she said. “You all were.”
“Well, I’m not angry now. And I’m asking now. What happened, Micah?”
Just that question, the gentle way he’d asked it…She felt tears already starting to leak down her face, and she wiped them away, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
“Things weren’t great between Ryder and me,” she said finally. “You had to have noticed that. I know it was adding to all the tension in the band, because we were fighting all the time, and then the whole band was fighting all the time…”
That last European tour, it had felt like they couldn’t agree on anything .
Ryder hated the sequencing of the set list. Frankie kept having technical issues with their rig and because they were overseas with limited equipment, they kept trying quick fixes that never seemed to solve the underlying problem.
Steve had wanted more time to party and see the sights and had rebelled against itineraries that he said were hampering his ability to enjoy himself.
Micah had been exhausted—physically, mentally, emotionally.
It came out in her voice, which she couldn’t even stand to listen to in video recordings from that tour.
It sounded so raw, it broke when she tried for certain notes, and she could just hear the way she was barely hanging on by a thread.
And as for John…well, he’d been withdrawn.
She felt like she’d lost him, ever since she started dating Ryder, and she felt like she couldn’t blame anyone but herself.
He was still around, still steady, reliable John.
But ever since she’d made the mistake of telling Ryder the story of the night she and John had written “If Only” together, he’d gotten it into his head that John was a huge threat to their relationship and possibly to the entire band.
The only way Micah could mitigate that was to spend less and less time with John, and so that was what she’d done.
“God, it’s such a cliché, right?” she said. “Romantic relationships fucking up a band. Except No Doubt and Fleetwood Mac were able to work through it, become better , even. I don’t know why I started dating him in the first place, I always—”
She broke off, not sure how honest she wanted to be. There was giving John the closure he deserved, and then there was just opening up a bunch more doors that were probably best left locked up tight.
“He can be very charming,” John said. “When he’s not being a complete dick.”
Micah choked on a laugh. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess that was it. I was young and stupid, I don’t know. We were all spending so much time together, it was this pressure cooker that nobody else understood…”
“So you two broke up before the band did,” John said, like he was prompting her to continue but also like he was clicking something into place for himself.
“Like the week before,” Micah said. She paused, wanting to feel John out on one of the few things she’d always had questions about, that had been an open wound all these years. “Did Ryder ever show you anything?”
He frowned. “Show me anything? Like what?”
It was possible he was playing dumb, but she didn’t think so.
It was also possible he just didn’t remember, in which case she wasn’t looking to jog his memory.
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s not important.
The point is, Ryder and I broke up—for good this time—and it was messy and ugly and I just didn’t see any way back from it.
Not to him, and definitely not to being in a band with him. ”
“I would’ve kicked him out so fast,” John said. “I was dying for an excuse.”
She believed that now . But then, everything had been so topsy-turvy that she legitimately hadn’t known what to believe. Ryder had said things that made her feel like the band would be on his side over hers, if it came to that, and she didn’t know if she could take it.
“I wouldn’t have wanted you to do that for me.”
“For you ? The guy tunes his guitar with the capo still on, I would’ve done it for me .”
That got Micah to laugh, and John must’ve heard something in the phlegmy sound, because he glanced over at her, reaching out to grab her hand and give it a quick squeeze.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry you went through all that. And I’m sorry you didn’t feel like you could talk to me about it. You can always talk to me.”
She should’ve talked to John about it then. For years and years, he was always the person she’d gone to. But then she’d pushed him away when she started dating Ryder, and she felt like she had no right to ask him to come back. She didn’t know that he would.
“Well, instead I talked to my dad,” Micah said.
“I was talking to him as my dad, but he was listening as our band manager, and…I guess the label had already expressed that they weren’t really happy with us, that they didn’t have a vision for that third record on our contract.
It sounded like they weren’t going to give us any support to record it or promote it or anything.
I asked my dad what that meant, if we were going to lose our record deal and have to pay back any of the money, and he said… ”
She swallowed, knowing this was the part where she really sounded like a piece of shit.
There was no way around it. She could’ve taken all of that information to the band, and let them decide together what to do with it, if anything.
They could’ve waited it out, called the record label’s bluff, let them put whatever meager resources they were willing to into the third album and then walked away with the freedom to decide what to do with their careers next.
She could feel John’s gaze, steady on her face, but she couldn’t look up at him.
“He said you should do the third record on your own,” John finished for her. “And you saw it as your out from the band, as your chance to get away from Ryder, and you took it.”
“I took it.”
And then she hadn’t wanted to answer any questions about it, hadn’t wanted to have to explain.
She knew they were angry with her, and she’d been angry at them —some of it irrational, some of it misinformed and confused from stuff Ryder had told her over the years, but some of it a legitimate resentment toward people who she felt would always think of her in this one narrow way.
Micah Presley, the lead singer of ElectricOh! . She didn’t want to be that anymore.
Legally, the whole process had been almost depressingly simple. The other band members received their cut of the contractual advance and bonuses for that third record…they just hadn’t had any part in making it. Behind the scenes, they’d been bought out.
“But then after,” John said, “why didn’t you take my calls? I even came to one of your concerts once, it was—”
“The El Rey,” she said. “I know.”
“You were really good,” he said.
“I was fucking miserable.”
“You put on a great show.”