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But Dad isn't here. I am. I'm partying with rockstars and hell, the boys always look so damn good, wouldn't it be nice if I felt good, too?
“Hey, Muse, can you zip this up for me?” I ask, peeping out the curtain and finding only Michael waiting for me outside the dressing room. “Where's Muse?” I ask as Michael's eyes lift up and catch sight of me in the dress.
“Holy shit,” he says and I feel my cheeks warm with the unspoken compliment. “With that red hair and those eyes, you should wear green every-fucking-day.”
“Thanks,” I say as Michael ruffles up his dark hair and glances over his shoulder.
“Muse slipped away to grab something. Knowing him, it's probably inappropriate as fuck, and probably a gift for you.” He smiles tightly and steps forward. “Need some help?”
“Um, yeah, that'd be great.”
I turn around and sweep some hair over my shoulder, completely conscious of my bare back, the straps of my bra.
“So what'd you end up picking out for Vanessa?” I ask casually, desperate to know for whatever silly reason. I can't even believe I'm acting like I've got some stupid crush on Michael Luxe. I have the other four musicians in his band. Can't I just leave it at that? What the hell is wrong with me? And the guy has a damn girlfriend that he's buying expensive jewelry for.
Besides, whatever he is now, however faithful he's been to Vanessa since his indiscretions, he's still a cheater. And I could never get involved with a cheater again—especially not one who, you know, cheats on his girlfriend to be with me. Gross.
But then his warm fingers brush my spine and fire shoots through me, stealing my breath away in a vibrant blaze of heat. With slow purposeful intent, Michael drags the zipper up my back, scattering the butterflies in my stomach, making me wonder how the hell I'm going to stay standing up if he keeps touching me.
“There,” he says, releasing me at the brink of my own annihilation. I glance accusingly over my shoulder, but if his eyes are heavy-lidded and his sexy lips parted, he acts like he doesn't give a fuck. “All zipped up. God. I forgot how much I loved helping a woman get dressed.”
“You don't prefer to get her undressed?” I ask and as soon as I do, I regret it. Our eyes meet and my sex clenches tight; sweat pools on my throat and lower back. Sexual tension stretches tight between us, explaining away all of the anger and the stress of the last few days.
Michael didn't want me on the bus because … he's attracted to me?
Maybe?
I swallow hard and he licks his lower lip. He's flirting, but I don't think he means to do it.
“Yeah, well, let's just say that a year of celibacy is a year too long. I can't wait to see Vanessa.” He smiles wickedly at me, like we're sharing some sort of dark, delicious little secret.
“What do you think of the dress?” I ask, just to get him to look at something other than my face.
What a mistake.
Having Michael Luxe examine the long, pale lines of my legs, the tight pull of the dress across my hips and breasts … that's a beautiful sort of agony.
“You look perfect in it,” he says and then his smile gets even darker as he reaches out and traces a single finger over my hip. “Although you want might want to size up. You are curvy as hell, Lil.”
Lil.
He has no right to call me Lil. But I want him to keep doing it.
I reach up and adjust the tags hanging from the inch wide strap on my shoulder, peering down at the three figure price tag and feeling my eyes widen. My turn to curse.
“Fuck. There's no way I'm letting Muse buy me this,” I laugh as I drop the tags, wanting to break whatever the hell this moment is with Michael. “The last time I got a dress this expensive, Kevin was buying me some hideous black frock to wear to one of his dad's corporate lawyer parties.”
“How expensive was that dress compared to this one?” Michael asks, his voice a little breathy. I tell myself not to look down, not to examine his navy jeans for … that. I look up and our eyes lock again.
“Um, half as?” I say and then gasp as Michael reaches over and snaps the tags off the front of the dress.
His smile is … well, it's not romantic anymore.
“Tell the boys they can thank me later for this one,” he says and then steps back, dropping the curtain into place and leaving me completely … breathless.
I took the flirting with Lilith too far.
I know that, and I feel like such an awful fucking shit for it. I try to call Vanessa in the car on the way back to the venue, but she can't or won't answer. Doesn't matter. Three more nights until I get to see her, kiss her, fuck her. Once I do, Lilith won't even be a blip on my radar.
Right.
I'll just look right past her curvy naked form draped all over my bus for the next week and a half, ignore the moans escaping from her lips as my friends fuck her and I wish like hell that I was fucking her, too.
Jesus.
Why did I buy her that damn dress? That skintight fucking green dress that turns her hair to fire and brings out the color in her eyes?
Goddamn it, I am fucking losing it.
Must be all the sex hormones, just chemicals and shit backed up and screwing with my brain. I mean, I've been masturbating like five times a day for the last week, but it doesn't seem to help. It's hard to feel satisfied with a bottle of lube and my own five fingers when the guys are having these wild orgies in the back rooms of nightclubs and shit.
I lean against the wall and pretend I don't notice Paxton and Lilith making out three careful feet away from me. His hands are all over that old Hollywood body of hers, tracing those curves with arduous reverence, cupping her ass and dragging that green dress up several terrifying inches.
Fuck.
I rub my hands down my face. I really don't want to go onstage with a hard-on, but if they keep this shit up …
My hands fall to my sides and I catch sight of our manager, Octavia, watching the two of them kiss and fondle each other. The expression on that thin pixie face of hers is nothing short of murderous, and the way she's looking at Lilith … I would not put it past Octavia to stir up some imaginary trouble for her in the future.
The old brick wall behind my back and the shiny polished wood floor beneath my feet reverberate with sound, shaking me up, turning my blood into this frothy mess of emotion. I need to see Vanessa. And I need to stop obsessing about some strange girl that none of us knows a damn thing about. For all we know she could be some undercover reporter or something.
But that hurt in her eyes when she talked about her father … nobody can fake that level of emotion. It's been sixteen years since my parents died, and I still think about them all the damn time.
I make a point to keep my attention off of Pax and Lilith and study the crew backstage. During our last tour, we had a bunch of gossipy assholes on staff. This time, the label's really buckled down and I have yet to see anyone act less than professional. Sure, they still party and smoke pot and fuck, but the gossip and the drama is at a minimum. Of course, everyone's curious about the new girl, the girl that's sleeping on our bus, that's been kissed and fondled and teased by every member of our band except for me.
“Thanks again for the dress,” Lilith says, surprising me. I manage not to show it and glance casually in her direction, my body reacting instantly to the swollen redness of her lips, her dilated pupils and the dark eyeshadow around her glittering gaze. She's so ethereally beautiful in that moment that for a second there I question if she's even human. Maybe she's a succubus come to steal the souls of the boys on my bus? Considering her name, that would make some sort of sense.
“You're welcome,” I say as she leans against the wall next to me. Whether by accident or design, our arms brush and desire coils tight and hard inside of me. I'm sorry, Vanessa, I think, but I can't control my thoughts, just my actions.
I scoot a few careful inches away—even though it fucking kills me.
God, I need to get laid.
“Wher
e'd Pax go?”
With great fucking effort, I tear my gaze away from Lilith and close my eyes against the smoky backstage haze. Pax says everyone here looks like a card-carrying member of the dark faerie court, like at any moment they might shed their beautiful glamours and morph into something hideous. Sometimes, I even believe that.
“Your manager said she needed him.”
I smile meanly, my eyes still closed.
“I'll bet she did.”
“She really likes him, doesn't she?”
“Guess so.”
There are several long moments where neither of us talks. The kick drum shakes the ground beneath my feet and the aching melancholy of the lead singer's voice tears into me, giving me the jitters, making me excited to get onstage in I way I haven't felt for a long time.
Or hell, maybe that's Lilith that's doing that? This isn't the first time I've felt another band's music inside of me, listened to them pour their hearts out onstage. The only factor in this equation that's been changed is this girl, this Mary Sue that I shouldn't like but do anyway.
I think I kind of want to get up there and show off.
“That's for the advice in the jewelry store,” I tell her as I crack my eyes open and drop my gaze down to Lilith's face. She's studying the action backstage with a novice's gleam in her eye, but a practical set to her lips that says she knows this life isn't all glitter and drugs and sex. There's not a single guy on our bus that hasn't had it hard, that hasn't hated his life so damn much that he's wanted to die. That's what makes Beauty in Lies so fucking good. We play our music with pain. “I never did tell you what I picked out, did I?”
“You don't have to tell me if you don't want to,” she says, pushing away from the wall, her dress reflecting back stray shafts of light from the stage as she moves. “My mom didn't reveal that story about my dad until she was on her death bed. Some memories are just too precious to share.”
“Why did you tell me then?” I ask, digging my fingertips into the bricks behind me, looking for some way to ground myself. “If it was such a big secret?”
“My parents are both dead,” she says as her eyes get this far away look that I recognize so damn well. In the mirror, in my friends' faces. Maybe that's why they like this girl so much? Misery loves company—especially when that misery's born from the same monster. Lil's monster looks awfully familiar. “One is ash; the other is about to be. All they are now is their stories, their secrets. At this point in time, I'm the only one that knows them. If something were to happen to me, everything they were would die along with me.”
She smiles and reaches up to squeeze my arm.
“Now you know, too. It makes me feel better, thinking that there's somebody else out there carrying around the secret of the rhodonite tear.” She points to her jingling charm bracelet and laughs a little. The sound is forced and tight, but it stirs some warm, primal bullshit in my belly. Like I have any claim on this girl whatsoever. This feeling alone is reason enough to stay away from her; I feel like I'm betraying Vanessa with my thoughts.
When the fuck did I let myself get beaten so damn low?
Vanessa and I really need to have a talk about our relationship.
Lilith watches me for a moment, her eyes big and green, lashes long and dark. I'm not sure if they're natural or not. Do redheads have red eyelashes? I have no fucking clue.
“Michael, it's showtime,” Octavia says, popping up and putting a hand on my arm. She throws Lilith a tight smile that's about as inviting as a bucketful of rusty nails and moves away, giving us one last second to be alone.
“Do you think some pasts are so dark they overshadow the future no matter what you do?” I ask, and I have no idea where that question comes from.
“Is that what you think?” Lilith asks, looking up at me with a curious smile, red tendrils of hair falling across her pale forehead. Without thinking, I reach out to brush them away, letting the atmosphere of the evening get to me. With all the glitter and the sex and the smoke, everything feels sensual and desperate, like this is my last night on earth.
If it were, I'd probably choose to spend it with Lilith; I want to know what that sad mouth tastes like, what that curvy body feels like beneath mine in bed.
“Maybe.”
“Then we're both fucked I guess.”
She tries not to smile when she says it, but I can tell she doesn't believe that at all.
Her confidence … somehow makes me feel a hell of a lot better about my own life.
Beauty in Lies takes the stage behind that same long white curtain I saw at the first show, the animated sequence projected across it making the Chicago crowd shout and cheer as colorful confetti fills the air like red and pink rain.
I lift my face to it with a smile, letting little bits of paper stick to my sweaty skin as I curl my fingers around the bar of the metal divider in front of me. My body leans toward the stage like a flower fighting to kiss the sun as I listen to a voiceover introduce the band to the city. People push against me, their bodies stacked tight, tense and giddy with excitement.
At this particular venue, I'm not allowed to stand in front of the divider with the roadies—it's security staff only—so when their backs were all turned, I snuck behind them and climbed the fence to stand in the crowd. The people waiting there were surprisingly excited about it, cheering me on and letting me cut in front of them.
A sense of camaraderie settles over the massive room as the curtain slides up and away, revealing the now familiar silhouettes of my boys—and Michael, of course—as Pax makes his way to the front of the stage and I feel my mouth tingling with the memory of his kiss. Honestly, I was surprised he wanted to kiss me in public, in front of all the tour staff, the venue staff, his glaring manager. But if Pax wants to keep whatever relationship he has with me secret, he doesn't act like it.
I try to imagine what the public would think if they found out that I was fucking four of the five members of the band. Would they think less of the boys? Would they think less of me? I decide then and there that I don't give a shit. This is my body and my life and when I'm with them—any of them—I don't feel the gaping darkness of my own mortality, the inevitability of my loneliness, the wrenching ache of my father's demise.
“Hello, hello, Chicago,” Pax says, dressed in a charcoal grey suit with a white shirt and a red tie. His cufflinks are pairs of silver drumsticks that I can't quite make out from where I'm standing. No, from here, they're just these two spots of glimmering metal on a man that's all polished perfection and easy, cold grace. “We're Beauty in Lies from Seattle, Washington. My name is Paxton Blackwell, and this”—he pauses to lick his lips and pull the mic off the stand—“this is Me in Ruins.”
“On the count of three,” shouts a drunk brunette standing next to me. “One, two, three. WE LOVE SEATTLE!”
Her friends shout and cheer with her as I laugh and the crowd goes nuts as Pax stalks to the edge of the stage and wraps his tattooed hands around the mic, whispering the first few lines of the song without any accompanying music.
“I was up; you were down. We weren't making a sound.” Pax points up and down along with the lyrics, and Michael starts strumming his purple guitar. “I'd have killed and died for you. Don't be cruel; I always played by the rules.”
Cope starts drumming and the room around me erupts into chaos: people shouting and pumping their fists, cheering and jostling me with their movements.
“WHY. DID. YOU. BETRAY … !” Pax growls, his voice deep and dark and completely chilling. My skin prickles with goose bumps as he drags the last note out and tilts his head back, dirty blonde hair gleaming in the purple haze of light that covers the stage. “Betray and destroy and ruin me? YOU OBLITERATED MY CHANCES OF BEING HAPPY!”
Pax lets go with a wordless animalistic scream while Ransom picks up the backup growls.
“THERE'S NO MORE CHANCE OF BEING ME!”
“YOU DESTROYED EVERYTHING THAT I COULD BE!” Pax shouts, taking over again, slamming h
is foot against the stage, rocking out to his friends' music as the crowd forms a mosh pit just a few people away from me. They spin and whirl and kick and fight, spiking my adrenaline, making me wonder if I should join them or be afraid of them.
“There's just no way to recover it, that friendship we built. You ruined it, burned it and made it wilt. Somehow you worked your way to the deepest part of me. Were you curious to see me bleed?”
“WHY. DID. YOU. BETRAY … betray and destroy and ruin me?” Ransom sings, his fingers wrapped around his black bass, his hoodie up and his eyes shadowed and dark. He stands relatively still, sweat dripping down his face as he sings into a mic stand, leaving the rest of the show up to Muse, Pax, and Michael.
Michael.
Ugh. I try not to look at him, but his words backstage have gotten stuck in my head.
“Do you think some pasts are so dark they overshadow the future no matter what you do?”
I had no idea how to respond to that. The moment felt so heavy and important and then it was just … past and I wasn't sure if I'd made things better or worse. Clearly, he's not my responsibility, but there's so much regret and self-hate inside of him. Seeing him punish himself like that, I almost want to talk to Kevin, offer up my forgiveness. But there's no way in hell Kev's as aware of his own failures as Michael is.
“There's just no way to replace, the things you stole from me in that race. That crash and burn deserves more than just my spurn because you shackled me to this pain. And you, you're the only one to blame.”
“WHY. DID. YOU. BETRAY … betray and destroy and ruin me?”
My mouth parts, my sweaty hands slick as they curl around the metal divider. The drunk Seattle girls from next to me flick their hair in my face as they thrash in time with Muse and Michael. The two guitarists turn and put their feet up on the dais where Cope sits, worshipping him as he pummels his kick drum, grips his sticks in tight fingers, his short red hair stuck to his sweaty forehead.