Chapter 13 #2
We reach the center entrance, where a curly-haired woman in her late forties dressed in a Spokane Pavilion polo is waiting for us.
“Liam Bishop?” she asks.
He sticks out his free hand, and she shakes it. “Yes, ma’am. And this is my girlfriend, Paige Lancaster.”
Girlfriend.
Girlfriend!
The woman turns, leading us into the venue. “I’m Leanne, the events coordinator. I’ll show you the dressing rooms for the talent, and the load-in and load-out areas.”
Liam moves the guitar handle back to my hands and nods at a lawn chair someone’s left up on the hill. I throw him a thankful smile as I break off from Leanne’s path and climb the rows until I’m nearly at the top.
The sun is climbing higher, but I’m still in a shaded, cooler part of the venue. I pull my guitar out of the case and throw the strap over my shoulder, sitting in the lawn chair. Liam and Leanne’s tiny specks disappear around the back of the empty stage.
Then, I’m alone.
For hours, I work on the song, giving it the working title “Breathe for My Body.” The sun arches, burning my neck, then curves behind me, taking its turn with my shoulders, but I don’t move, wiping sweat from the crown of my forehead and mumbling to myself the way you can only do in absolute private.
Changing the lyrics, testing out this bridge, then that one.
I’m vaguely aware the stage is now littered with gear, people moving back and forth arranging speakers and foot pedals and microphones.
It isn’t until I’m pretty sure I’ve given the song my best shot without a second pair of ears that the universe allows me to pay attention to something else:
Sound check.
“Testing, testing,” comes Penelope Parker’s voice, blasted across the entire venue. “Paige Lancaster, if you can hear me, give us a wave!”
Oh, my fuck.
Penelope freaking Parker just said my name.
Into a microphone.
I start sweating again, profusely this time, as my hand comes up stiffly, my elbow at a sharp ninety-degree Barbie angle. The wave is stilted and awkward.
Down below, all seven people onstage cheer.
“If you are truly Liam Bishop’s girlfriend, and you’re not being held against your will,” Penelope goes on, sarcasm dripping from her voice, “give us another wave!”
I do as commanded, laughing out loud. The people onstage cheer again, one of them jumping up and down this time. Is that Misha?
After a muffled shout Penelope mutters, “Yeah, yeah, Liam, I was just verifying. Sue me. Check, check, check, chhhhheckkkkk. Spohh-CAN. Spohhh-CANNNN. Hello, Spokane!”
A guitar riff joins Penelope’s voice, then the drums. I pack up my guitar and head down toward the noise, my stomach tightening with nerves.
Obviously these people love Liam if they’re messing with him. I was concerned my own sisters might not understand why he’s with me; what will the band and crew think? They know this version of him better than I do. Will they be confused how I fit here? With Liam, with them?
I chew over what to reveal about our situation all the way down, guilt spreading into every finger and toe.
“PAIGE!” Misha calls as I head toward the stage. She’s behind the keyboard dressed in an oversized Titans T-shirt and a pair of biker shorts, anklets bejeweled across her skin just above her Birkenstocks. She waves at me big.
“Paige!” Bright-eyed Penelope Parker leaves her mic and leaps off the stage, bounding toward me like an antelope. She’s short and thin, almost waiflike, with Nordic-blond hair and skin I imagine I could crack if I squeezed her too hard.
Penelope has no such reservations. She pulls me into a hug with way more force than I’m expecting, squealing like a little girl.
“I can’t believe you’re real! I mean, Liam mentioned you years ago, and here you are!
In the flesh!” Penelope pulls back and observes me, tilting her head up to do so. I’m not tall, but she’s short.
“Come.” She pats the neck of my guitar case twice, grabs my free hand, and leads me in the direction from whence she came. “We need you onstage.”
“Wait.” I freeze and Penelope turns back. “That’s not—I’m not—I’m just here…”
“With Liam,” Penelope finishes, smiling warmly. “I know. But Misha says you’re good with arrangements. That’s my favorite part of sound check. We’re nearly done with the boring stuff.”
“No, really, I—”
No, really. I drop her hand and take a step backward, right into Liam’s chest. Even without turning—even before he wraps an arm around my waist—I know it’s him.
His voice is a warning. “Stop overwhelming my girlfriend on her first day, Penny.”
Penny crosses her arms over her chest, pouting. “But I want to bond with her.”
Liam’s grip on my waist tightens possessively as though he’s direly afraid of that happening.
“You should be with your band on the first day,” I jump in. “I’ll join you for sound check another time.”
“Tomorrow?” Penelope asks. “In Seattle?”
“Um, yes. In Seattle.”
“If she feels like it,” Liam clarifies.
Penelope rolls her eyes at him and twirls, anteloping back to the stage.
“Penelope is a pint-sized ball of demands,” Liam mutters in my ear. “Don’t cave for her if you don’t actually want to play with them.”
I spin, propping the guitar case on its base between us. “Believe me, not hell or high water could get me on that stage if I didn’t want to go, not even Penelope Parker. But I don’t mind sound checking in any empty venue with someone else’s music.”
“Today it’s sound check, tomorrow it’s opening for her,” Liam mutters. “That’s how Penelope is. She’s fucking sneaky.”
“You have to like her a little bit if you agreed to another one of her tours.”
“Can’t remember why. She made me replace a speaker earlier because she stubbed her toe on it, and therefore it’s forever cursed.”
“Musicians are a superstitious bunch,” I say with a grin. “Though nowhere near as bad as baseball players.”
Liam’s smile is forced. He doesn’t meet my eyes. “Good thing we don’t have any of those around here.”
My eyes narrow as I watch him. He’s acting fidgety, his focus switching between my left shoulder and the stage. And because I know him, I know why.
“Oh, my god.”
“What?”
My voice lowers. “You’ve slept with her. Penelope.”
I don’t mean it to come out accusatory, but it does.
Liam’s silence is his answer. He looks sideways at the ground.
I feel like I’m going to throw up. My mind fogs with jealousy.
“If I weren’t here, would you be sleeping with her all summer?” I ask.
He finally meets my eyes, sighs, and answers honestly, the only way he knows how. “Who knows. Maybe.”
I want to curl in on myself until I evaporate.
Liam told me he wasn’t dating. He didn’t say anything about being celibate.
“We can talk about it tonight, if you want to,” he says. “You know I’ll tell you the truth about anything you want to know.”
I nod, my heart still pinched. “Okay.”
Without ado, he grabs my case and heads backstage. “You finish the song?”
I try to shake the last thirty seconds off. “Yep.”
“How’s your breathing?”
“Thought maybe you could tell me,” I quip back, my voice weak, mind still a bit unnerved.
Liam shoots me a fond smirk—while I marvel over how easy it is, despite everything, to joke with him about lyrics so weighted—and stashes my guitar in a cubby. Then he puts a hand on my back and leads me toward the dressing rooms. We head inside the one labelled simply Band.
Three men are finishing their lunches in here. One is tattooed along both muscled arms and has spiky brown hair. Another looks like Tarzan, oversized and bearded, his hair pulled into a low bun. The last is a slender guy with red hair and glasses.
“Guys,” Liam says, and they all glance up from their sandwiches.
“Liam!” Tarzan stands from the couch, dunking his sandwich into a widemouthed trash can. “Good to fucking see you, dude!”
“You’d have seen me earlier if you hadn’t been late.”
Tarzan ignores this, pulling Liam into a hug and clapping him twice on the back, hard. “There was a girl, there was some alcohol, there was a dead cellphone. What can I say?”
“We haven’t even started the tour yet, Marlowe.”
Tarzan equals Marlowe. Tarzlowe.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You missed half of sound check,” the tattooed guy says.
“So did Jake,” Tarzlowe says, gesturing at the skinny one.
“Only because I got locked in the bus bathroom,” Jake replies. “Liam, can you get that looked at? You got the TaskRabbit app?”
“Not my job. Talk to David.”
“I’m Josiah,” says the tattooed guy, nodding at me from the couch. “Siah for short. I remember you from backstage at CMA Fest, with Misha. Pleasure to meet you.”
“You too,” I say. “I’m Paige.”
“What’s your story, Paige?” Marlowe asks. “You friends with Misha?”
“We went to school together at Belmont,” I answer.
“Are you dating her?” Siah asks.
“No.” Liam’s exhale is heavy. “Paige is my girlfriend.”
“No shit!” From the ground, Jake laughs around a mouthful of sandwich.
Marlowe cracks a grin, too. “Girlfriend, huh?”
“Yes,” Liam says, his tone level. “Get a good look at her, boys. I wouldn’t want any of you to misunderstand this introduction.”
“We’re not going to hit on your girlfriend, Bishop,” Marlowe says, but he sounds thoroughly unconvincing.
“The lack of faith is insulting,” Siah adds, spreading his arms along the back of the couch.
“I was fully prepared to hit on her until ten seconds ago,” Jake admits.
Liam looks at the ceiling, hands on his hips. “Anyway. Now that we’ve established this, Paige and I will be going.”
“Us too.” Siah stands, dusts crumbs off his jeans. “But Paige—you should ditch Liam and travel on the bus with us some nights.”
“What the fuck did I just say, Si?”
Siah holds up his hands in innocence. “To play, man! Music. Other than sound check, it’s the only chance we get to mess around.”
Liam glowers at all three of them before turning to me. “You should do that, if you want to,” he says, then grabs my hand and tugs me out of the room.
My waist, my back, my hand. He’s touched me more in the last five minutes than he did all of last night.
“You’re very supportive of my playing music with the others on this tour,” I note with amusement. “Just in a very angry manner.”
“Because those three are almost as good at picking up women as they are at their real jobs.”
“Well, you must be in good company with them.”
Liam’s laugh hitches before it fully forms. “You didn’t even realize I was trying to pick you up when we first met.”
“That wasn’t your fault. I’d conditioned myself not to think I could be a man’s first choice.”
Liam slows near the bend in the semicircular hallway, where two other dressing room doors are labelled Opener and Personal Security.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Nowhere. I just wanted to”—he cuts himself off when I face him. Down here, there’s nobody in sight. Liam’s eyes soften. His thumb strokes my wrist before he drops my hand—“talk to you alone for a minute.”
A headiness pulses through me as his eyes rove my body. I’m wearing a T-shirt and jean shorts, but Liam’s looking at me like he sees lingerie.
“It was weird,” he murmurs. “You up there in the stands, where I could see you but knew I should be focused on something else. Like…”
“Your games,” I agree.
He smiles gently. “Carlos used to yell at me from first base every time he caught me looking at you.”
“I remember,” I say through a laugh. “It wasn’t that big of a stadium. But I can stay at the hotel tomorrow if—”
“No.” He leans over me. “Come as often as you want. Carlos never got that just because I like to look at you every now and then doesn’t mean I’m not getting the job done.”
I smile. “Okay. I’ll be here. Or there. Wherever.”
“The Seattle WAMU Theater.”
“Right. Exactly.”
Liam smirks, dropping his hands into his pockets. “Feels good,” he mutters.
“What does?”
A small shake of his head. “All of it, Paige. Just … all of it.”