3. Chase
In the passenger seat of Chase’s car, Lydia readied herself for the six-hour road trip ahead much like a pilot preparing for takeoff. With the AC vent meticulously adjusted to the precise right angle, she checked her glittery makeup in the mirror, then treated the seek button on the radio like the shoot button on an arcade game.
Chase, concentrating on getting past the bottleneck on I-5 North, didn’t say anything until she made a concerning pause on a talk show about the stock market. “What are you doing? I like 95.5.”
“Too bad.” She took a prolonged sip of her cherry slushie and jammed the button again. “I think I know something you’re going to like more.”
“I swear to god, Lydia. If you make me listen to ‘Thumb-tumping’ or ‘Tube-humping’ or whatever the heck it is again—”
“It’s ‘Tubthumping’, and you know you like it, but no—shh—shut up.”
Lydia got to 106.7FM and held up an index finger manicured in neon yellow glow-in-the-dark polish with the number one on it. Her others finished writing out the new year, 1998. She cranked the volume up to max, and the broadcaster’s energetic voice boomed out of the speaker system.
“Next up we have a new band hitting the scene. You might have caught them on TV, but if not, you need to catch up…”
“Holy shit, woman. You’re gonna give me hearing loss,” Dallas shouted from the backseat.
“It’ll complement your IQ loss nicely,” Lydia fired back.
Zak’s guitar wailed through the speakers as their song faded in, faintly accompanied by crowd noise from the live recording.
“How’d you find out about this?” Chase asked, lowering the volume to a more respectable level once the initial shock of hearing his own voice on the radio wore off.
“Sarah from work listens to this station. She asked me if it was my brother’s band they’ve been playing around this time. And then she asked for your number, again.”
Chase let out an immediate, “No.”
“I know, I know. I’ve got those digits stored in my safe instead of my address book after what happened last time,” she assured him. “But still, it’s cool, right? Like, super cool.”
So cool that all he wanted to do was share this moment with Zak, but she was driving her car up to San Francisco with Alex, Edge, her dog, and a trunk full of equipment while he was stuck with the guitars, Dallas, and his sister, who didn’t want to miss the band’s biggest local show yet. They had been asked to headline a rooftop New Year’s Eve party at one of the largest clubs in the city. And though the trip would’ve been worth it for the exposure alone, they were being paid two grand a piece plus travel and lodging for one three-hour concert.
He wondered if Zak had found the station, too, or if she’d popped in a cassette like she usually did to avoid hearing even a millisecond of that obnoxious appliance store advertisement she hated.
“The coolest,” Dallas said facetiously. He slurped up the last of his frozen drink. “And as for Sarah, you’re welcome to give her mynumber instead.”
Lydia grabbed the driver’s seat headrest and turned toward the back. “You don’t know her.”
“I know her name,” Dallas argued. “That’s more than most.”
Chase heard the flick of a lighter, then a drawn-out, “Oww,” before Lydia faced forward again, burning cigarette in hand, and rolled down her window to discard it at eighty miles per hour.
“That’s going to make the whole car smell.” She wrinkled her nose. “You’re disgusting.”
“Filthy, baby.”
Chase caught Dallas’s smirk in the rearview mirror and tried not to let his own amusement show.
Lydia’s head jerked forward as Dallas kicked his feet up on the back of her seat. “Why couldn’t we take Edge? I like him better.”
“Join the club,” Dallas said.
“Or Zak?”
“She’d rather drive that beater of hers off a cliff than let anybody else get behind the wheel.”
“Maybe that’s just what she wants you to think.” Lydia crossed her arms over her chest and looked out the window. “Are you even legally allowed to operate a vehicle, or did the DMV finally get something right?”
It was silent for a moment. Then a plastic card flew over the center console. Dallas’s driver’s license.
Lydia took one look at it and burst out laughing. “An organ donor, huh? If I were a surgeon, I wouldn’t touch your lungs or liver with a ten-foot pole.”
“Luckily, there’s plenty on the outside you can touch if you want. No MD required.”
Chase cranked the volume back up on the radio. Only five hours and forty-five minutes left.
The rest of the band met them in the second-floor dressing room after checking into the hotel and dropping off Snickerdoodle.
Hours remained before their show, but partygoers were beginning to trickle into the venue to check out the opening bands.
The crowd was two-thousand strong this evening, though two-thirds of them would be mingling in lower levels, watching the live music from projector screens and sampling the different bar foods available on every floor. Lydia was among them, and by now Chase was certain she’d already scoped out at least a dozen prospects for her first victim of the new year.
Zak checked to ensure her three guitars had arrived safely, hesitating before coming over to claim the empty seat on the couch next to Chase.
They were friends, first and foremost. It was a promise he would always uphold to her, and it pained him to see her question it.
“Fun drive?” she asked upon noticing the mopey look on Dallas’s face.
“Depends who you ask.” Chase glanced at the cigarette burn on Dallas’s arm, a by-product of his tussle with Lydia. “Wanna make a trade on the way back?”
Zak rested a finger on her bottom lip. “Alex for Lydia?”
“Deal.”
“Seriously?” Dallas spoke up.
Zak ignored him as she scanned the room. He knew that look. Either a cigarette or a caffeine craving had struck. But she’d quit smoking, so he handed her the rest of his Dr. Pepper.
“My hero.” She gulped down the last half of the can and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“We’re on the radio,” he said.
Not only was he dying to put an end to this stilted conversation, he’d also been dying to tell her the news for hours. It felt wrong to know before she did when the music was so much more hers, and all of theirs, than it was his.
“Which station?” Zak asked. Like the disappointment of being miscategorized would outweigh the excitement of being on the radio in the first place.
He couldn’t help but chuckle. “106.7”
Supposedly that was an acceptable answer, because a wide grin overtook her face as she shared the news with Edge and Alex, who were carrying in the kick bass.
“No shit,” Edge said. He looked like he was about to follow that up before Alex snapped at him to concentrate.
Alex had recently upgraded his drum set and added a customized head with their logo, vowing to make it better than the one they’d used during Amped after the management team refused to let him take it home. Chase couldn’t honestly tell the difference between a good kit and a bad one, but the new black-on-black with the holographic demonic spade symbol looked sharp, so he imagined that goal had been achieved.
“How did we sound?” Zak grabbed Chase’s forearm, drawing him closer before he realized she wasn”t pulling him in at all. He was just projecting his ever-present desire to be near her.
She had this sparkle in her eye that existed only for music. On some occasions, he thought he had seen it when they stayed up talking in bed. But when it came to the band, the guitar, the gift he had bought her—there was no masking the way her face lit up. Her eyes looked like spring grass after a rainstorm. Her sarcastic mouth curved up with only sheer delight.
Not a moment passed that he didn’t think she was beautiful. But when she was happy, she was breathtaking.
“What do you think?” he said in return, knowing he’d camp out in the car with her when they got back to LA and wait for the station to play their band again. “We sounded like rock stars.”
Chase had no doubt they would be approached by another swarm of managers and label lackeys before the night was through.
They were completely in sync, and more than that, they were back to having fun on stage. No more cameras in their faces, no more tailoring songs to adhere to themes and stipulations. And thankfully, the meddling producers and Dallas’s dealer had both been left behind in New York.
Everyone had taken turns stealing Chase’s microphone throughout the show to bullshit around with the audience and with each other. It was equal parts rock and comedy at this point, a fairly accurate representation of who they were, but no one had complained yet.
Their intermission marked the countdown to midnight. Saint of Spades still had an hour left to play as the party raged on, with a DJ taking over from one to three a.m. Normally they would take their break backstage, towel off the sweat, and grab some water, but tonight was a special occasion.
They gathered together at the front of the stage.
Ten.
Nine
Eight.
The lights lowered.
Seven
Six.
Five.
A member of the crew passed out a round of Shirley Temples.
Four.
Three.
Two.
Golden light cascaded over the dance floor.
One.
Fireworks boomed overhead. Liquor flowed at the bar. Couples kissed under a starless sky like they were exchanging nuptials instead of meeting for the first and last time tonight. The festivities were all muddled background noise through his earpieces, but when Chase’s eyes found Zak’s, her thoughts were loud and clear.
“Happy New Year,” he read on her lips.
Chest heaving from running around on stage, she clinked her glass against his and tossed back the entire contents of the flute in six seconds flat like a college kid shot-gunning a beer. She pressed her tongue against her cupid’s bow to catch those last few drops of soda.
He no longer cared to drink from his glass. He wanted the taste of grenadine mixed with the taste of her. Now. Not later, not back at home.
There were very few times he ever thought Zak wanted him as badly as he wanted her, but the way she was looking at him right now told him tonight was one of those times.
His self-control was ironclad after so many months of compartmentalizing their off-stage relationship with their on-stage one, and it had become even easier to separate the two when she put up all her best defenses.
But then she was staring up at him with those green eyes after she had already done a thorough job of making him second-guess all her brutal words.
“Happy New Year,” Chase said.
He swore he was going to keep his hands to himself as he sipped at the toast. He even made a wish as he swallowed, like drinking a mocktail on New Year’s Eve was the same thing as blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.
Mental clarity for the last hour of their show was what he thought he wished for.
But that was before Zak grabbed him and kissed him. Right there. On stage. For two thousand people to witness.
His mind went blank.
He nearly stumbled off the edge of the platform.
By the time he got around to kissing her back, people were no longer screaming about the concert or the holiday. They were screaming about what was going on, front and center on the rooftop stage. And none of it mattered because her arms were draped over his shoulders, and the strings of her guitar were vibrating against his stomach as they caught on his belt buckle.
Kissing her on stage was a fantasy he’d played out a thousand times. It was impossible to see her so in her element and not fall further for the most raw version of everything that made her so unforgettable, so unshakable. It was her most passionate, her most unrestrained, her most honest, her most precise. It was her dialed up to the max.
For someone who couldn’t get enough of her, that was the most tempting idea in existence.
The sweet, sparkly tang of cherry flooded his mouth as she kissed him like they were behind a locked door in the open air. As people whistled and talked, and the sky burned with splashes of multicolored light. Only when camera lenses began to shutter did she pull back and seem to fully realize that she had acted on a wild impulse.
But it wasn’t regret etched into the arch of her brows or the tilt of her lips.
Zak smiled for the crowd, not for him, and held up her empty glass. A white spotlight illuminated her to the audience and the video cameras, and she squinted to see through its blinding brightness.
As though it were just another act in their show, she tilted the microphone stand in her direction and shouted, “Let’s fucking rock ‘98, San Francisco!”
She shattered the glass over one of the amplifiers.
The crowd went wild.