Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
Tatum
My face flamed as I watched Calix strut around onstage, sexing it up for the Austin crowd.
As he playfully gyrated his hips Elvis Presley style and seduced people with his voice, images of the night before flashed through my head.
His moans, his taste, the way he said my name.
My eyes were fixed on the front of his pants again, and I snapped them up in time to see Otis send me a questioning look from across the stage.
He could see me clearly where I stood in the wings, but I gestured him toward the crowd, reminding him where his focus should be as his fingers didn’t miss a beat on the strings of his bass.
Get your head in the game, King. No one can know what went down last night.
Even though it was me.
I went down.
On Calix.
Fuck!
Shaking my head, I shifted my attention to Tobias, whose shirtless body glistened with sweat under the stage lights.
He was more sparkly than a tatted-up Edward Cullen…
If Edward ever decided to become a coked-out drummer.
He had already left his kit twice in between songs for a hit.
As if on cue, a stagehand ran a stool out to center stage for Calix to play one of their acoustic numbers, and Tobias made a beeline toward where I stood in the wings.
“Do you really think you need any more?” I hissed at him as he passed me and headed for a speaker where Lainey had set up a mirror and baggie of powder.
He went through the motions of pouring out the powder and carding it into rows as I circled the speaker to get in front of him. The opening strains of “Starting at Our Close” drifted hauntingly from the stage as I seriously considered destroying those neatly formed lines.
“Tobias.”
“One minute, Angel,” he murmured, placing a cut off piece of drinking straw to one nostril and inhaling an entire line before swapping sides and repeating the action. He sniffed hard and rubbed the back of his hand against his nose as he eyed me.
“Are you enjoying the show?”
He glanced at his hand and wiped it carelessly on the seat of his pants. I narrowed my eyes on him.
“Don’t change the subject. I’m worried about you.”
“I’m fine.” The scowl he gave me made him look so much like his brother that the breath froze in my lungs.
I shook off the moment, sent him my own scowl, and pointed at his face.
“Your nose is bleeding. That’s not fine.” Snatching a Kleenex from a box stashed behind the curtain, I pulled his face down and dabbed at the crimson fluid bubbling at his nostril.
“I hate that you do this to yourself,” I murmured as I erased the evidence of his addiction.
The music filtering from the stage was so loud that I assumed he hadn’t heard me, but his eyes were sad and as he turned away, I thought I heard him say, “Yeah, me too.”
We made it through the rest of the set mostly without incident until the encore when Harvey decided to pull a woman onstage and dry hump her.
He had picked her out of the crowd, ignoring the scowl of the man beside her who reached for her as Harvey pulled her up beside him.
Calix shook his head and played on as Harvey dropped the melody he’d been plucking out in favor of playing up to the crowd.
The woman giggled and ground her ass against his crotch while he held her hips tight against him.
“Harvey.” Otis’s voice was almost drowned out by the sounds of the crowd, their shrieks of jealousy and screams of adoration on the brink of deafening.
Despite the noise, Harvey acknowledged his best friend with the briefest of glances, then tapped the girl on the ass, whispered in her ear, and pointed her in my direction.
For fuck’s sake. What did he expect me to do?
She traipsed across the stage, face aglow from the attention she’d received.
I tried my best to keep my face civil, already anticipating the world of problems this would cause me.
“Harvey said you’d give me a backstage pass,” she said, her smile twisting into something less pleasant as soon as she passed into the wings.
“Did he?” I asked mildly.
She folded her arms and cocked a hip, her eyes sliding over my body in a look that would put any of the mean girls from my old high school to shame.
She was pretty, in an overly made-up, designer clothing kind of way, and I wondered if this was Harvey’s usual type.
I shook the thought away, reminding myself that from what I’d seen, consensual was Harvey’s type.
And thank God for that, because anything else would have given me more than a headache.
“Listen, bitch. This is my chance to get hot and heavy with that rock god, and the last thing I need is the help getting jealous and trying to clam jam me, so how about you hop to it, do your fucking job, and get me a pass so I can fuck your employer so good he’ll want me to join the tour.”
Excuse me?
Before I could lose my mind at the entitled piece of shit human in front of me, the guys came bounding offstage.
As usual, Toby swept me up and away from Whorie McGroupie, his arms banded tight around my middle as he walked us toward the green room.
He smelled of sweat and aftershave, and I resisted burying my nose in his neck, knowing how high he was.
It wasn’t professional to take advantage of my charges, especially when they were constantly affected by substances.
It was the same reason I stepped in and kept Toby from joining in on any of Harvey’s bullshit.
Otis’s eyes were dark when I met them over Toby’s shoulder.
I cocked my head at him in inquiry, and he gave me a small lift of the lips, telling me he was all right.
Even if we both knew he was lying. It was clear he hated the way Harvey chased groupies, but he shut down every time I tried to talk to him about it.
“You smell amazing, Angel. I’m gonna carry you everywhere from now on.”
I chuckled, slapping at Toby’s shoulder. “You need to go and play nice with fans. Let me down.”
He hoisted me higher in his arms, burying his face in my stomach as he let out a groan that vibrated straight through my core. I gasped, squeezing my thighs together as an irritated grunt came from beside us.
“Put Tater-tots back on her feet, Toby. If I have to go through this, you’re doing it with me.”
I gave Calix an unimpressed look that, luckily, distracted me from the sensation of Toby sliding me down his body until my feet landed on the floor.
With a squeeze of my waist, Toby shouldered past his brother, intentionally knocking into him in a way no one else would dare, and beelined for a table laid out with food and water bottles.
He twisted the lid off the nearest bottle, and I watched his throat work as he swallowed half the contents before stopping for a breath.
I needed to get laid.
Between kicking Adam’s ass to the curb and living in such close quarters on the tour bus, opportunities for a little relief had been few and far between—self service or otherwise.
Add in the fact that I was surrounded by four of the most physically attractive and talented men in the industry, and your girl was feeling hard up.
I didn’t count the little encounter with Calix because, for one, I was trying my hardest to pretend it never happened, and for another thing, it did nothing but make matters a million times worse.
“Where’d Harvey go?” Calix bitched as he took his customary single seat to avoid close encounters with strangers.
“I’ll find him. Can you guys behave yourselves with the fans until I get back?”
Otis gave me a worried look as I spilled out the door and headed for the stage. I diverted my route as shouting echoed from the stage door.
“I want to see my fucking wife!”
A middle-aged man threw himself at the security staff blocking the entrance. His face was beet-red, breathing labored as he backed up and charged the men again.
“What’s happening here?” I asked, stepping up behind them.
The dark-skinned man on my left gave me a quick grin and a wink. Heat crawled up my throat as I noticed how attractive he was, especially when he told me, “Nothing to worry about, Miss King. We’re just keeping the peace,” as he blocked yet another attempt at entry from the irate man outside.
Maybe I could take some time to myself after I sorted this out and scratch the itch I needed to deal with.
“What’s your name?”
“Byron.” The way his lips stretched into a toothy smile told me everything I needed to know. He was on board with whatever I had planned.
Hell yeah, I needed a win.
But first…
“Okay, Byron. Let him in. He’s going to behave so he can get what he wants. Right?” I glared at the man who had definitely been beside the woman Harvey was currently entertaining. I hoped they were almost done because the night had finally started to look up.
Byron gave me a dubious look while his partner glanced between us. When I made no move to back down, they let the slightly subdued husband through.
“Thank you,” I told them, reaching for the man’s arm to guide him toward the green room.
At that moment, Harvey and the woman who was quickly becoming the bane of my existence spilled out of a nearby closet.
Fuck. My. Life.
The man beside me let out a roar, and pain exploded through my face as he threw me off and charged my lead guitarist. Harvey stepped in front of the woman, some latent chivalry rearing its head in the face of this new threat.
I clapped a hand to my mouth, something warm and sticky running through my fingers as Byron magically appeared between the two men.
“Chill out, my dude,” he said, holding a hand out toward the husband.
The woman, safely sheltered behind Harvey’s bulk, fluffed her hair.
“We’re through, Hank. I don’t know why you bothered to come back here. I’m with Harvey now.”
“What the fuck?”
If my nose weren’t throbbing in time to my heartbeat, the look on Harvey’s face would have been priceless. He took a step aside, as though he could belatedly convey he wasn’t, in fact, allied with the woman in any way.
Idiot.
“You can take her now. We’re done.”
I slapped my hand against my forehead, wincing at the impact as Hank roared and tried to charge again.
“Harvey, get the fuck in the green room before I learn guitar and take your place in the band, so I don’t have to deal with your shit anymore.”
He blinked at me for a moment, like he had no idea where the hostility had come from, before giving the woman’s arm a squeeze and walking away like he hadn’t just screwed up the rest of my night.
My head throbbed as Byron looked toward me, silently asking what I wanted to do next.
“Hank, come with me. Byron, could you organize a lift home for the…her?”
I was a girl’s girl most days, but I just couldn’t with that woman anymore. The potential sweat session with a hot security guard disappeared before my eyes as he guided her away, and I watched all the bluster drain out of Hank.
“Why doesn’t she want me anymore?” he asked, his voice thickening with tears.
Fuuuuuuck.
As my head began to pound, I wiped the blood from my lip and steered him toward the nearest empty room to cry out the end of his marriage.
I wished Ruby were here. She was amazing with the tough love. Even if she couldn’t make Hank feel better about his relationship prospects, she could get him on his way with a word of encouragement and a bottle of wine before the Tylenol I hadn’t taken yet kicked in.
Instead, it took me hours to calm him down and wave him off home.
As much as I’d been looking forward to a liaison with the security staff, by the time I waved Hank off in his car, I only had enough energy left to drag my aching head onto the tour bus, swallow a couple of Tylenol dry and pass out on the bench seat near the kitchenette.
Darkness had a special quality to it when you were in an enclosed space.
There was still a moon on most nights of the month, and even when cloud cover kept it from shining, there was the slight glow from the ambient light of the city.
In houses, there was the glow of devices plugged into power outlets and the comforting noises that told you everything was right with the world.
As I opened my eyes, I could hear my breath bouncing back at me from a wall close to my face.
I reached out a hand, praying for the softness of cushions under my fingers.
Instead, there was a metal wall, cold and ungiving.
My heart rate jumped as I followed the smooth surface upward to find a corner above my head.
I was trapped. The space seemed to shrink as I mapped out the surface above me with bent arms. If I turned on my side, my shoulder would almost touch the top.
I reached above my head and whimpered as I encountered the same smooth surface there too.
“Help,” I choked out, my voice barely a wheeze as panic gripped my throat. That wouldn’t do.
“Help me!” I banged my fists against the surface above me.
Visions of coffins buried under miles of dirt drifted through my head as a primal scream tore from my throat.
This was so much worse than the chest freezer.
This was life or death, and the little girl who was trapped allied herself with the woman who couldn’t go back as we shouted at the unfairness of it all.
Hands reached for me, and I fought them off, desperate to escape whatever entity had come to take me away. They couldn’t have me. I deserved more.
Despite my struggles, my body slid backwards, the arms scooping me out of hell and into the light.
My face was pressed into tattooed skin, and I took my first deep breath as the warmth registered against my cold fingers.
The firm flesh beneath my cheek vibrated and, as my hearing came back online, the words “I’ve got you” repeated over and over in my ear.
Wrapping an arm around his neck, I buried my face in the hard chest and allowed myself to be carried to safety.