Knot Their Opening Act (Britrock Omegaverse #2)
1. Jez
CHAPTER 1
Jez
The smallest tent at the UK’s biggest outdoor music festival is full, and every last person in it has come to see me. It sounds like a dream, and it is. But it’s also a nightmare, because the crowd is only feet away from where I stand.
I remind myself of where I was three years ago almost to the day. Gratitude doesn’t seem a big enough word to describe how I feel. As I look over to the side of the small stage and Viv shoots me a grin as bright as a thousand camera flashes, I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.
“Thanks again for coming to see me when the sun’s shining and the beer tent is next door,” I say into the mic, one hand on my guitar neck. Laughter ripples around the tent. Behind me, my drummer Andy and my fellow guitarist and backup vocalist Shay are making appreciative noises and gestures toward the crowd. Someone throws a bouquet of hand-picked flowers tied with a hair band onto the stage, and my heart wants to explode.
My mind, however, is trying to suffocate me.
I lick my lips and lean toward the mic again. “This is my last tune for the afternoon. Check me out on social media. This song is called Broken in Three . See you in the audience for tonight’s headliners.”
Total lie. I will be on the side of a hill somewhere watching from as far away as I can get while still being able to hear it.
Hoots and hollers fill the tent then quiet down as I strum the opening chords for my biggest hit yet, which was a discarded song for my last album—my second album so far—but when I played it on a live radio show, they were bombarded with calls and we decided to release the recording. Honestly, I think it was Broken in Three that landed me this gig.
For the last thirty-six months I’ve been playing every coffee shop, club, café, and small festival I could get myself squeezed into. Or, I should say, Viv’s gotten me squeezed into. I’ve done dates with some up-and-coming bands, and been getting pretty decent radio play here in the UK. I look around as I sing the words that are already becoming an anthem among fellow broken-hearted twenty-somethings, and capture the moment in my mind’s eye. This might be the biggest crowd I ever get, or the last— the phrase I tell myself every time I’m on stage. I will never take this for granted.
As I bring the song to its end, the crowd lets loose with raucous applause and clamp down inside on the nausea that’s bubbled up all day. I take my guitar off, alarmed but then not really at how sweaty the strap is. I hand it to the waiting tech, who’s probably seen worse to be honest, and wave at the crowd, then tuck my hair behind an ear and beeline for Viv on the side of the stage.
She’s five months pregnant, with triplets no less. And it’s only been nine months since she joined her pack, her scent matches and the loves of her life. I told her she didn’t need to stand (or sit) beside the stage the whole set and she keeps rejecting my nagging requests to go rest in the VIP tent. But she did disappear halfway through the set and was gone for an entire song. Toilet, I assume.
The crowd may be shouting my name as they leave the tent for their next event of choice, but they’re still leaving. And that’s the reality. My sets are always short. The crowd always has something better to do after. And I remind myself of that each time I’m on stage, too. Because I have no illusions that I’ll ever be the headliner that they’re waiting all day to see.
“I bet you anything half of the people recording that on their phones will upload it to social media and Tristan will be sitting at home scrolling through his feed and kicking himself in the nuts,” rambles Viv quickly. She leads me through the crowds, with a security volunteer walking on my other side, as we head to the VIP tent where I can just chill with a drink in relative peace and let the exhilaration slowly ebb out.
I’d rather it was my hotel room. But I don’t even have a hotel room. My flat is a half an hour away but I’m not headed home until after the party ends tonight. Once the buzz of playing wears off, as it always does, the anxiety is fast to completely take over.
Developing claustrophobia when your lifelong dream is a being a stage performer is the universe’s idea of the worst cosmic joke ever.
Viv gives me a towel and a questioning look, which I return with a shake of my head and a slow exhale. It’s an exchange choreographed over years of my performances. It means, “this sucks but I’ll live.”
It’s not been the hottest summer so far, even though the sun beams down, but there were two fans pointed at the stage at my request. I never want to be known as a demanding diva, so I rarely ask for a thing. But moving air is about as big a help as I’ve so far discovered in the twelve years since I was diagnosed with both claustrophobia and generalized anxiety disorder.
“That was so tight, so sweet, so smooth,” warbles Viv, who is practically skipping, with her long red mermaid waves cascading down her back. She’s dressed in the perfect festival outfit—Wellington boots despite it not being forecast to rain this weekend, a short sundress dress, and a shiny black jacket that’s half-hanging off her shoulders. She’s even got a freaking flower wreath in her hair that someone running a stall gave her as we walked up to the New Artists tent before my set.
“Sounds more like a sex review than a set review,” I say with a snicker. Heat rolls off my face and chest, and I hug her to me, one arm around her shoulder. “Thank you so much for this. We got here because of you, lady.”
Though I probably should’ve had you dress me. I’m terrible at picking gig wardrobes. For this, my most important show to date, I wore a tight midriff-bearing t-shirt and an ankle-length skirt, and my worn-out but comfy-as-hell combat boots. So far Viv hasn’t given unsolicited fashion tips, but I always feel inferior in the glamour department. Still, my music has never been about flashy fits. Just raw storytelling. And somehow, it’s been enough. Though cotton-candy blue hair has become my signature at this point.
“Well, I have a surprise up my sleeve,” she says as we approach the VIP tent.
Suddenly I’m aware of my bladder. “Ooh, can the surprise wait until after I’ve found a toilet?” I look around and my gaze falls to a grim row of portaloos. I point at them. “But not those ones.”
Viv winces and checks her watch. “The toilets we used earlier are well on the other side of the field. Can it wait? Or would you be able to manage in those?”
She knows better than anyone on this earth that I would rather trim my own toenails with my teeth than use a portaloo. Amazingly, I’m not worried about germs, and I carry hand sanitizer everywhere anyhow. It’s the confined space. Even the thought starts up a flash of perspiration to add to what’s already there.
I exhale shakily. “Can this surprise just wait for a while? We can come back later?”
She bites her lip and looks at me. “I’ll text the surprise we’ll be there in fifteen and see if that’s okay. I think he’ll understand.”
After we finish our business, thankfully sans a major queue, we return to VIP and my mind has considered and discarded every “he” surprise she could have for me. Honest to God, if she’s run into Tristan and asked us to kiss and make up, I will disown her.
But she would never. Viv is my soul twin, and she would be the first to tell him to fuck off into space if we ever saw him again.
She tugs me gently as a wall of people wanders right toward us, heads down over someone’s phone, not looking up to see they’re about to crash. The security volunteer walks around to shield me, but I’m not worried. As long as I’m not hemmed in a circle or in a small space without an easy exit, I’m usually okay. Except for the few, rare times when I’m not.
“Ooh, I know,” I say. “Is it a man with bottle of champers, because God knows I could really use one of those.”
“Nope. It’s even more explosive than that.” I raise an eyebrow. Viv’s green eyes are enormous as she grits her teeth in an excited, silent squeal. “Just wait, just wait,” she trills.
“Okay, waiting,” I say with an amused voice. After a few steps, I whip my head toward her and pull her hand down in excitement. “Oh my gosh. Did you meet Gav? You did, didn’t you?”
Gav Macallan was Viv’s favorite singer in the world, and since he’s headlining tonight on one of the two main stages, I figured Viv would try to sniff him out. My heart leaps in my ribs at the thought of her getting his number.
“No! Oh, God, no. Not yet, anyhow! This surprise isn’t about me! Well—” She picks up the pace across the grassy field. “I’m not not part of it, but it’s you I’m excited for.”
I wrack my brain. None of my favorite artists are performing here today, but Arcadia Echo is closing the festival on Sunday and they’ve been a huge inspiration of mine.
My style’s nothing like theirs, but I’ve always tried to write my country-flared acoustic indie pop to be nothing like my favorite artists’ styles. Of course I’m influenced, but I don’t ever want anyone to think I believe I could play those kinds of energized shows. Viv describes my music with ridiculous phrases like “ playful shoe-gazing revenge heartbreak songs to the tune of a lullaby.”
I take in the sights and let out a breath I’ve been holding since Viv secured this gig. She graduated with a degree in arts management from the same school where I barely held a passing grade in marketing, but by that time I already had a catalog of over fifty songs. All my time was spent writing in my room, just me and my guitar, and after two years in the same Artists Guild in Bristol, we escaped with her connections and my first, hastily-recorded demo which led to the two-album deal I got from a small London label.
For a while at school, I felt like we were pushed together as partners because I wanted to perform and she wanted to manage, and whenever we’d pair up, instructors would put us together. I sometimes felt like a puppy she took under her wing. But she never once treated me that way. She’s only ever said she saw a light in me and wants the world to see it, too. I don’t know what I did to deserve her as a business partner, or as a friend.
We head into the VIP tent, which isn’t as teeming as I expected. It’s only gone 1 p.m. but lots of bigger up-and-coming names are out there about to start their various sets, and any of the headliners or bigger names of the early evening aren’t going to be slumming it in here. So with a small group sat around a table in the far corner, a woman behind a free bar just beside the door, and the five-piece folk band that played before me sitting on the ground in a circle over a box of pizza, it is impossible to not notice the man sitting with hands folded and earbuds in talking on his phone but staring at the tent door as we walk in.
Ash fucking Knightley. The head of the biggest artist management company in the UK. The manager of the award-winning Arcadia Echo. And the magician behind some of the most successful touring acts of the past five years, launching each one of his clients to stardom.
The security volunteers nods at us as he heads out but I barely notice. I grab Viv’s arm and yank. “Holy shit, are you seeing what I’m?—”
“ That’s the surprise!” she hisses gleefully. “He wants to speak to you!” Viv then quickly rearranges her face in to a calm, even smile as she leads me by the hand to Ash’s table. He looks down at his phone set before him, mumbles a few words and then I hear, “Gotta run, I’ve got an artist here. Thanks, babe, see you tonight.”
Fuck me. Ash Knightley.
He’s not much taller than my 5’9, and his chiseled cheekbones and cool blue eyes are even more handsome in person, with his trademark thin cream-colored cowl scarf around his neck, even on this sunny day. But I’m not quaking in my literal boots because of some crush. His wanting to speak with me can only be about one thing.
I’ve never been good at hiding emotions and now’s no exception. Tears threaten the corners of my eyes but I will them away. I can’t even blink though. I’m just staring at his hand, held out to me. Viv leads me around the table and we stand inches away.
“Mr Knightley, I’ve snagged her from her throng of fans,” says Viv flippantly, though I alone can hear the undercurrent of insane delight and pride underneath. “I’m pleased to introduce you to my client, Jesamine Jacobs. Jez.”
Still not blinking and aware my eyeballs are about to dry out, I grab the end of my aqua-dyed blonde hair and twirl it around one shoulder as my right hand jabs out for his. He stands, shakes it, bows, and then, without a smile, says, “Ms Jacobs, pleasure. I’ve got twenty minutes. This festival is always so damn rammed with meetings, so I’m afraid I was only able to catch your first three songs, but I have a question for you. What are you doing for the next four months?”