7. Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
Mia
A lready, I was doing a terrible job of pretending I didn’t give a shit about Tyler Sullivan. He’d driven a hard bargain in negotiations with my mother, which made her practically swoon when she got off the phone. Since he’d arrived, Laura had taken the lead, showing him around backstage and through various buses. Each time Mom put her hand on his arm, or flicked her hair, or stared up at him like he was the second coming of Tom Ford, I wanted to vomit. This time, the rolling stomach had nothing to do with morning sickness.
“Not like that with him, huh?” Taryn chided in my ear. “You’re launching daggers at him and your mother from across the stage. Do your sound check before she notices.”
Tearing my gaze away, I glared at Taryn. “She’s all over him like a dog in heat. It’s fucking distracting.”
“Distracting? Why’s that? You have a thing for dogs in heat?”
“No, I have a thing for my manager not sexually harassing my employees. It’s illegal.”
Taryn threw her head back and laughed, drawing Rebecca’s attention from a stagehand she’d been talking to at the bottom of the stairs. She took the steps two at a time to join them.
“What’s so funny?” Rebecca asked.
“Mia’s upset that her mother finds the newest addition attractive.”
Rebecca glanced over her shoulder at Laura, cozied up to Tyler as they flipped through some costumes on a rack. “Not my type, but I’m not blind. Objectively, he’s attractive. You know your mother.”
All too well . Other than his age, Tyler didn’t fit the sort of men my mother favored. Wild men who didn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves was her addiction. If there was a bad choice within a mile, Laura Malone would be dry humping him by the end of the night. I crossed my arms and rocked back on a heel, forcing myself not to look at Tyler again. He wasn’t a bad choice, so I had no reason to worry about Mom.
“Sometimes, I think Laura doesn’t want men on the crew because it distracts her more than it’s a danger to you,” Rebecca said.
A danger? I supposed they were, although I wouldn’t have used that word, exactly. Not about these guys on tour. Men were great until they weren’t, and I’d had more than my fair share of them who went after pieces of me or other women as though they were entitled. A hand grazing my ass. A murmured comment about a private show. A low whistle as I wandered past. There were men like that who worked the venues, but they didn’t keep their job long. My mother and I had a reputation. I didn’t need men like them on tour buses, at the gym, at the afterparties in my bus, and as soon as they showed their true colors, they were fired. In my experience, less men meant less hassle, less chance of something going wrong, less chance of a misunderstanding .
In those first heady days and weeks after I’d signed my contract at fourteen, I’d learned about men, especially men who held a hint of power or authority. At the time, someone like me didn’t dare cross them. Usually, they were the ones hitting the emergency stop on an elevator, locking their office doors, cornering me at a party, causing me to look over my shoulder for my mother, clutch her hand tightly, make her promise never to leave me alone with any of them ever again. Once I worked up the guts to tell her, Laura hadn’t left me, not without seeing our secret signal, a sign I was confident whatever man was involved wouldn’t corner me, try to steal something. I gave her the signal the night I asked Tyler to my hotel. With all my heart, I wished I hadn’t.
I finished my sound check and realized Mom had disappeared somewhere, leaving Tyler in the wings of the stage, watching me with his arms crossed, a hint of a smile. A flutter in the pit of my stomach made me want to erect barriers, pretend his presence didn’t matter.
“My mother showed you around?” I breezed past him, barely glancing in his direction.
“She did.” His hands sank into the pockets of his black denim jeans, and he turned on his heel to follow. “Can you run me through your routine with Bonita for costume changes? Laura said a few of them are quick.”
Pasha, my constant shadow, joined me at the end of the stairs, and I didn’t turn to look at Tyler when I called over my shoulder, “Ask your assistant, Verity. She looks after merchandise too, which you’ll oversee. I have things to do. If she’s useless, talk to Taryn or Rebecca. They can run you through or schedule you a couple minutes with me before the show.” My stride never faltered as I headed to the bus.
The next thing on the agenda was a surprise appearance at some superfan’s birthday party. Those events were press generators, and they did one every few months to show how connected I was to my MiaMites. They’d named themselves, obviously .
“Yeah, sure.” Tyler’s heavy footfall paused behind me. “If you’re too busy, Laura offered to give me a breakdown.”
I stopped and half-turned, tilting my head at Tyler. “No. Talk to Verity. If she’s useless, talk to me. For the record, I fucking hate repeating myself.” My words were sharp. I didn’t want him spending more time with my clingy mother. Instead of apologizing, I stared him down. So, I was a bitch. Better he learned now. There was no room for softness on tour. He listened, or he left.
Or at least that was how I’d always worked things in the past with the few men I’d struck up an arrangement with, but Tyler wasn’t like them. Sending him away, especially after a certain point, wasn’t an option.
“Does anyone like repeating themselves?” Tyler’s tone was mild. “I don’t want to fuck up. If you’re too busy, you don’t get to dictate who isn’t too busy to help.”
I stepped toward him, even though he towered over me. “I do get to dictate. This is my show. My job. Consider me your dictator.”
“Can I call you that?” He raised his eyebrows, a hint of a grin threatening at the edges. “Mini-dictator?”
My expression clouded, and I frowned. He never bit back; instead, he sifted through my blows as though they were mere puffs of smoke. “No, you can’t call me that.”
“You want to dictate things, but you don’t want anyone to acknowledge that you’re acting like a dictator.” His eyes darkened a fraction. “You’d rather dominate in private?”
I met his gaze, and a memory jumped between us. A hotel room. Dim lights. His tongue pressing against my core, licking and sucking, making me feel like I couldn’t get enough. My hands tangled in his hair. Faster. Harder. More. Don’t stop. Don’t ever fucking stop .
Tearing my gaze away, I turned my back on him, burying the memory. “Call me whatever you want. Just don’t fuck up or else I’ll have to fire you.”
“Noted,” Tyler called. “No fucking…up.”
The urge to turn back, give him another piece of my mind surged through me. Would it work? Already, he was meeting my annoyance with mild reason. Why fight when the other person wouldn’t fight with you? Luckily, I knew someone who met a fight head-on, just like me.
I found Mom in the office portion of her private bus, which was her second-favorite place to be after she was done in the center of the stage, screaming at random workers about any and all injustices she could find.
“Ah.” Laura turned in her swivel chair after I drew the door tight. “My gorgeous daughter. You want me to fire him yet? Personally, I think he’s lovely.”
I suppressed an eye roll at her fake British accent that she loved to put on as a bit between the two of us. Sometimes the gesture made me laugh. Today, I wasn’t in the mood to be amused. “I saw how lovely you found him. Lovely while you riffled through my costumes. Lovely while you dragged him from bus to bus. Probably lovely as you shoved your tongue down his throat.” I ran a finger along the windowsill and didn’t look at her, as though her response meant nothing. Tyler was nobody, after all.
“Now, now.” Laura made a tsking sound. “I’ll save that for the end of the tour.” She winked and turned around again. “Never mix business and pleasure. ”
“Except, you do it all the time.”
“Sure, with local stagehands or whoever I want who doesn’t travel with us.” She cast a glance over her shoulder and then scribbled a note to herself before turning around. “Name the last time I fraternized with a roadie.”
“You used the wrong F word there.” I sank into the couch and stared at her. Technically, the rotating opening acts didn’t count as people on the road with us, but her sexual conquests weren’t as fleeting as she made them seem either. Had she slept with someone in a role like Tyler’s before? No way to be sure.
“I was surprised you were okay with him joining the crew. I know we’d met him before, and he had the okay from Sarah…”
“And that was enough.” I bit the tip of my pinky finger. The hard plastic didn’t offer the same comfort as my brittle nails. Other than going to see Tyler, I couldn’t remember the last time I lied to my mother. We didn’t always get along, but a couple of years into this madness, we agreed that the only way to survive was to be honest with each other, even if we weren’t with other people. Tyler had said something similar in his bid to convince me to keep this thing growing inside me. Never to each other .
“Well, he’s delicious and old enough to be your father, which suits me just fine.”
“He’s only old enough because you and my sperm donor had me when you were twelve.” I ran my finger along the arm of the couch. “Did he look thirty-five to you? I didn’t think he looked that old.”
“Your father was twenty, and I was eighteen when we had you.” Laura flushed and flipped her hair. “And thirty-five is not old.” She narrowed her eyes. “How’d you know his age? Why would you ask him? ”
Already I was messing up and piling lies on top of lies. Everyone knew you didn’t compound lies—remembering them became too hard. My list of who had been told what when was only going to grow in the coming months, hopefully not in direct proportion to my uterus.
“Thirty-five is old.” He just wasn’t too old. Or at least, not too old to find him attractive.
Once .
I found him attractive once.
“Kenny Connors is meeting us in Nashville when we stop there.”
“Why?” Kenny was a producer I’d been forced to work with by my label when I first broke out. He’d gotten me alone under some guise of helping me. Instead, he’d helped himself. Unease slithered down my spine.
Laura rotated her chair and leaned back. “Word on the street is that he wants to take the lead on your next album.”
“No chance. None. Not happening.” Pinpricks burst across my skin, and I rose to my feet, pointing my finger. “You know what he did.”
“Do you want to go after him?” Our gazes connected for a beat.
My shoulders slumped, and I ran my hands down my face. Back then I wanted to ruin him, rip him apart with my bare hands. Laura wouldn’t let me. That had been before I understood how the industry functioned, how much women were expected to bury for the sake of their career. “I don’t want to work with him again. I’ll quit before I work with him again.”
“We have contractual obligations.”
At this moment, I longed for my mom instead of my manager. The contract, whatever money was at stake, was nothing compared to the anxiety brushing against my chest cavity, wiggling up my throat. “ I won’t work with him again. We can meet with him, but it’s only to tell him ‘no.’ I don’t care how high we have to go, how much shit we gotta stir. The answer is no. Pasha comes to the meeting. You come to the meeting.” Kenny was a door locker. And that fucking office was soundproof. Sometimes, I wondered if he videotaped the shit he pulled in there. “The answer is no.”