Chapter 2
Now
Juliet
I banged open the apartment door and wedged it with my foot. As I sidled through the door, bags in hand, my keys slipped from my fingers and skidded across the floor. Cursing, I scooped them up as I hurried to the kitchen.
In five minutes, I’d be late. Damn it.
I’d thought I had enough time to grocery shop before going to today’s studio session, but one of the cash registers at the store was down, and the elevator in my building was inexplicably slow. Also, I may have slept later than I intended to. Like, thirty minutes later.
Now I had barely a few minutes to put my food away and get on the road to the studio, which was over the Washington-Oregon border in Vancouver. My bandmates didn’t care all that much if I was late—we would work late anyway—but it still made me mad. Why was I always the tardy one? I needed to get my shit together.
I didn’t bother to sort my groceries—just stuffed the bags wholesale into the fridge. My roommate, Amara, had her own food placed carefully in there, labelled as if she was worried I would eat her lettuce leaves and low-fat yogurt. I shoved my shopping bags in and banged the fridge shut.
I turned to the mirror by the door, checking myself. The Road Kings didn’t care what I wore to rehearsal, and even though they were more famous than me, I didn’t dress to impress them. Wide-leg jeans and a tee were perfectly good work wear when you played bass in a rock n’ roll band. My blond hair was tied in a messy, high ponytail, and I’d swiped on mascara and tinted lip gloss. Except for the fact that I’d stopped dyeing my hair and rarely wore my nose ring anymore, I dressed the same way at thirty-two as I did at twenty. I should probably grow up sometime, but today was not that day.
I picked up my purse where I had dropped it on the floor, and my keys fell again. As I picked them up, my phone rang.
“Mom, I don’t have much time,” I said when I answered it. “I’m running out the door for rehearsal.”
“Juliet.” My mother’s voice was stern. “I sent you an email last night, but you didn’t answer it. You can spare me one minute.”
I had to physically strain not to roll my eyes, even though she couldn’t see me. I wasn’t an email person, but Mom was. She was the executive assistant to a high-powered CEO, and emails were her religion. “What was it about?”
“Are you coming to the fitting party next weekend? I have to know. We need numbers for the hotel.”
“Fitting party?” I paused, distracted by the fact that my T-shirt had a stain on it. Did I have time to change into another one? I didn’t think so. “No one said it was a whole weekend. How long does it take to do a fitting for a bridesmaid dress?”
“It isn’t about the fitting.” Mom was clearly exasperated. She likely had explained this to me before, though I didn’t remember. Maybe it was in the email I hadn’t checked. “It’s about the wedding party getting together for a weekend of fun and bonding. You need to be there.”
I lifted the phone from my ear long enough to rip the shirt off over my head. The lace bra I wore underneath only had one hole in it, which was a win. “I don’t think I can do a whole weekend,” I hedged. “I thought I was expected in Seattle just for a day.”
“Juliet, this is your sister’s wedding. You’re the maid of honor.”
She didn’t need to remind me yet again. My sister, Vicki, was marrying her long-time boyfriend, Alistair. They’d been together for over a decade and had two little kids, so when Vicki had announced they were finally making it legal, I honestly hadn’t thought it was a big deal. When she’d asked me to be her maid of honor, I’d pictured putting on a decent outfit and showing up at City Hall. I’d take Vicki out for shots as a bachelorette party, maybe take her to see a male stripper just to make her cringe. Done and done.
So I’d said yes. I had many regrets in my life, but saying yes to being Vicki’s maid of honor might just top the pile. For the last three months, I’d been consulted against my will about hotels, invitations, and dinner options. And dresses—seriously? Who thought I was the person to consult about bridesmaid dresses? So far I’d ducked out of all of it, but the wedding was getting closer, and the pressure was mounting.
Vicki and I had never been close. She was like Mom—decent, sweet, devoted to living on the straight and narrow. Our father was a failed musician who made Mom a lot of promises until she had two kids. Then he’d bailed without looking back, leaving her a single mother to raise us both.
Mom had gotten jobs as admin assistants, then moved up over time to the executive job she’d had for the last decade. Her hard work paid our bills growing up, so I understood why she was the way she was. I understood that Vicki was like Mom, that she was responsible and a good mother to her own kids. The problem was that neither Mom nor Vicki had ever tried to understand me.
I had learned guitar at twelve. I had formed an all-girl punk band at seventeen. I barely graduated high school, I had never held down a real job, and I sure as hell had never gotten married or had kids. A string of hookups and failed relationships with fellow musicians wasn’t the kind of love life that Mom and Vicki had any experience with. They had never understood that I couldn’t live like them. I needed music, I needed adventure, I needed art. I needed more.
I also needed to pay my bills, which was why I’d taken the gig as the Road Kings’ replacement bass player when their original bass player, Neal Watts, took a leave after his son was born.
The Road Kings weren’t chart toppers, but they were known as one of the best live bands who had ever taken a stage, and they had nearly twenty years of success behind them. They had built a studio, had started their own production company, and their latest record was the most popular one they’d ever released. After years playing bass with shitty bands after The Muffins broke up, this was the biggest break I had ever been offered.
And Mom wanted me to put it on the back burner to get a dress fitted.
“Look,” I said as I grabbed another T-shirt from my dresser and pulled it over my head. “I know this is important. I’ll be there, I swear.”
“For the whole weekend,” Mom said. It was a demand, not a question.
“Mom—”
“Juliet, please. This wedding has to be perfect. Tina will be there.” Tina was Mom’s boss, a CEO of her own software company. To Mom, no one on earth surpassed Tina. “I want to make a good impression. I want my girls to get along.”
“I’ll do my best.” What if the Road Kings had rehearsals that weekend? What if we had a gig planned? “I haven’t checked the schedule.”
“I don’t understand,” Mom said, probably for the thousandth time in my life. “It’s just a band.”
And that was the problem right there, why we would never see eye to eye. To me, the wedding was just a wedding. To Mom, the band was just a band. I tried not to let it hurt, like it had so many times over the years, an aching pain like an old bruise that wouldn’t heal. Still, I felt the throb yet again.
I didn’t want to go to this wedding anymore. I had thought it would be a small formality, but now it was an event, with a hotel block and a rented space. The guest list included Mom’s boss and a bunch of other bridesmaids I didn’t know. It also included Finn Wiley. He was the best man.
I hadn’t seen Finn since that night we’d met in his kitchen, even though his brother and my sister had dated the whole time since. I only saw Mom and Vicki at occasional Christmas visits, and though Alistair was usually present for those, Finn wasn’t. I had become very, very good at pretending that Finn Wiley didn’t exist.
I heard snippets of news about him, usually against my will. The music he’d put out after “Ice Cream Girlfriend” hadn’t done well, and after a few years, he’d dropped out of the music industry. His and Alistair’s father had died of cancer three years ago. The last I heard of Finn, he was living in the house he’d bought in the country outside of Seattle, where he’d lived with his dad for the last years of his dad’s life.
Musically, he was a has-been. Every other year, a “Where Are They Now?” article would pop up, and everyone would remember Finn, the cute teenage pop star with the stupid hit song that had gone out of style. They’d take a moment to feel bad that Finn had become such a joke, and then they’d forget about him again.
I would have felt the same way if I hadn’t met him. But every time I heard his name, I remembered that awful night when we’d met while my then-boyfriend was fucking another girl down the hall. I remembered the guarded kindness in his gray-blue eyes, the tousled hair he’d jammed under a baseball cap, the tired shadows crossing his face. He hadn’t looked, to me, like a joke that night or a has-been. He had looked like a boy who was barely a man, carrying the world on his shoulders. Every time I remembered his face that night, I wondered against my will how he was. I wondered if he ever thought of me, if he even remembered me.
He hadn’t gotten married in the years since I met him. I hated that I knew that, but I did.
And he would be at Alistair’s wedding, so I couldn’t ignore him anymore. The thought made my stomach drop.
“I’ll try to be there,” I said to Mom again. “I promise. I really have to go, Mom. I’m late.”
In my car, I turned on the Road Kings’ first album, Sidewinder. I had done a crash course in Road Kings music for the last three months, learning the bass lines. It wasn’t a hardship, because the music was really fucking good. I had seen the Road Kings live twice in my life, though I hadn’t told them that. I didn’t want them to think I liked them too much.
I cranked the music, letting the heady beat, the roaring guitars, and Denver Gilchrist’s otherworldly vocals take me away. By the time I got to the studio, I had stopped hurting, and the only thing I heard in my head was music again.