The Bet (19 page)

Before I can stop myself, I say something stupid. As usual. “I’m sorry about how this turned out.”

She folds her arms, shifts her weight onto one leg, and I have to look away to stop my cock from reacting to the way the line of her ass syncs so perfectly with the outline of her lifted tits. “Are you?”

“Look Haley, I know—”

I’m interrupted by the sudden onrush of Lexi’s people to the stage. More than a dozen colorfully-dressed men and women with flamboyant haircuts emerging from the sides and taking up spots with the precision of a military operation.

“Do dancers need to soundcheck too?” Haley says, noticing them as well.

I take her by the arm and lead her off to the side, a sense of joy spiking in me when I see she doesn’t resist – little victories. We stand by one of the quieter corners in the backstage area and Haley promptly assumes her ‘I’ll listen but I’ll also judge’ position again.

“I know you don’t believe anything I say anymore,” I continue, sounding like I’m not pleading, but looking every bit the beggar, “but you’re the best musician I’ve ever worked with.”

I stand aside slightly to let a couple more dancers run to the stage, and when I look back at Haley she’s still glaring at me – only there’s a little more softness in her eyes than there was a second ago. She doesn’t say anything, she’s expecting more. Fine.

I’d beg all night for her.

“Yes, I made a bet. And yes, it was to get Lexi back. But do you think I’d be here if that was all it was? I mean, I won the bet, I got Lexi back, I got you a hit record, I should be happy, right?” I point at my face. “Do I sound like a happy man right now? Or do I sound more like a whining idiot who’s desperate to fix the dumbest mistake he ever made?”

Haley breaks a little, and looks away to try and hide her smile, but I catch it. This must be what coming back from the dead feels like.

“I wish I didn’t feel like this, Haley. I wish I could just brush you off. God knows I’ve had enough practice forgetting about girls. I spent a month listening to your songs, getting Josh to sneak me the demos of you at the studio, playing them over and over again. Torturing myself with how amazing you are. Trying to convince myself that it was just about music, nothing else. But the night you told me about Rex being your father, about how you never even got to speak to him – I knew that even though we come from different worlds, deep down, we’ve got a connection. Something more than music.”

Haley looks down, hiding behind her hair, almost as if she’s once again the shy open-mic’er who was too nervous to play her own songs. When she looks up again, though, she’s back to the new, tough Haley.

“Maybe, Brando. But you still lied to me. You started this whole thing off with a lie. How am I supposed to know where the lies stopped and the truth began? Did you lie when you told me I had something special and should sign with you right away? Did you lie about how you grew up tough and only a love of music got you through? Are you lying right now?”

“Haley, I—”

She raises a hand to stop me from speaking, and I’m so enraptured by the movement of her lips, the lines of her face, by being this close to her again, that it feels like slamming into a train.

“You know what your problem is, Brando?” she says, her voice gentle but lethal. “You’re too good. Too perfect. Too
smooth.
I can never tell when you’re actually
feeling
something. Actually hurting, and yearning, and sad, like a regular person.” She takes a step away from me, about to leave, before turning back. “But this is a start.”

I watch her walk down the long hall of the backstage area, my chest heaving, every bone in my body feeling like it’s just been thrown around in a washing machine. She pushes through the exit doors, and I feel a hole in my chest.

“I wonder if you ever watched me walk away like that.”

I spin around and see her leaning casually against the wall.

“Lexi.”

“You were probably just watching her ass though, right?” she laughs.

I’m not amused. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Why? Did I miss the best part?” she says, pushing herself away from the wall and stepping out onto the stage, where there are roughly twenty people now waiting for her to soundcheck.

I push a hand through my hair, emotions running and striking inside of me like a storm. I start striding in the opposite direction, head down, fists clenched. I can barely tell whether I’m angry at Lexi’s snooping, at having disappointed Haley so deeply, or whether I’m just so fucking hot for her that it’s making me aggressive. Either way, it’s a bad time to bump into her guitarist.

Which is exactly what happens.

He nods a greeting at me, quickening his pace to glide right by, but I put a hand on his chest to stop him, and he almost flails onto my palm like he just walked into a lamppost.

“Oh, hey!” he says, with frightened enthusiasm.

“Brian? Is it?”

“Yeah! You’re Brando, right?”

“Tell me: Do you like Haley?”

“Uh…of course! She’s awesome. Best singer I’ve played fo—”

“I mean,” I snarl, slower this time, “do you
like
Haley?”

I takes a second for understanding to appear in his glazed eyes.

“Oh! No! No, man, come on! No.”

Suddenly I realize how ridiculous this is, how crazy I’m being. The last thing I need right now is to turn into a paranoid maniac who gets into jealous fights with my client’s back-up musicians. I drop my palm and shake my head like a dog shaking off a bad scent.

“Sorry,” I mumble, as if I just woke up. “Forget about it.”

I stalk past him and through the exit doors like a wounded animal. Haley’s going to be on stage in less than six hours. I should be doing the rounds and making sure everything is running smoothly at the venue – but right now I can barely keep my own thoughts together, let alone everyone else’s.

With my head pounding and blood thumping in my veins I leave the venue and make for the hotel, conveniently located just a couple of blocks away. The second I get into my room I slam the door shut and drop back onto the bed.

“What an asshole,” I mutter at the ceiling as I remember the moment Haley told me she found out about the bet. But then again, without that bet, without Davis’ being a slimy opportunist, I’d never have found Haley. I should have told her myself. Should have laid it all out before that greaseball did it for me. That would have been the right thing to do.

The smart thing to do.

I fish out my phone and glance through it at a sea of notifications that sound important but that I couldn’t care less about. I bring up the music video, the one Haley and I filmed together. I tell myself I’m doing it to check on the number of views, maybe check the comments, pick up on the current vibe around her as any good manager should do. But really I just want to see her face. More than that, I want to see her when she was happy, when
we
were happy.

The video starts and I smile. That summery dress that hugged the curves of her body, that shy smile that seems as distant and as mysterious as a star. I watch as she dances and pulls away from me, remember the taste of her ice cream on her lips, the feel of her cool hands on my neck…

Automatically my hand goes to my belt buckle, undoing it before unzipping my fly. I’m still on my back, the phone in one hand, the other already around my hard cock. I stop the video and rewind it during the scene in the sushi bar, the curl of her lips around chopsticks sending all kinds of heat straight through me. I grip my cock harder, as hard as her pussy was tight, stroke it smoothly, as rhythmically as she rode it. I toss the phone aside as the memory comes to me vividly in sensations. The sound of her soft moans as I pressed her against the window, the roundness of her eyes as she looked up at me, the warmth of her mouth. I’m sucked into the memory like a vacuum, unable to stop it even if I wanted to, hand pumping my cock with the ferocity of my want, the fierceness of my desire to make it real.

I roll myself to the edge of the bed a second before coming hard and fast. The heat of lust, the tight knot of desire, leaving my body. Nothing but a deep emptiness remaining.

I regret jerking off the second I’m done. The pain that comes after is even worse, even more difficult to deal with. The fact that Haley’s not actually here seems even realer. When my lust for her is satisfied, it’s impossible to escape all of the other feelings I have for her.

I clean up, and put my belt back on. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror I make a promise to myself. A promise that this is as low as it gets. I’m not meant for this kind of torture, this kind of pain. I’ll give my last breath before I give up on getting Haley back. I don’t care who, or what, stands between us: Lexi, Davis, Rowland, the whole fucking music industry, I’ll take them all down before I let Haley go. She’s mine.

23

Haley

I CAN’T THINK. Somebody has pressed fast-forward on everything around me, and my mind just can’t catch up.

The green room’s big and comfortable, but it only makes me feel smaller and more out of place. Paula’s on the couch, tapping out rhythms on her knees as if she’s already out there, in front of the thousands of fans screaming so loudly we can still hear them through the thick walls of the backstage area. Aaron’s beside her, his eyes closed, hands folded, meditating. Brian’s leaning against the wall, re-tuning his guitar for the twentieth time. They look more or less poised, professional. Ready to go.

Me, I’m pacing around the room like a rat looking for the exit of the maze.

The runner knocks on the door, opens it, and leans in.

“It’s time,” she says.

Everyone gets up – except for me. I take a step back.

“Time? But you just said we had ten more minutes?”

The runner looks at me with a mixture of confusion and sympathy.

“That was over ten minutes ago.”

“Come on,” Brian says, putting an arm around my shoulders. “It’s going to be fine.”

I let him walk me out of the green room, along the hallway that leads to the side of the stage, until suddenly he leaves my side and runs ahead. For a second it almost seems like he’s abandoning me. But then I look up, and see Brando standing in front of me.

He might be a liar. He might have hurt me. I might hate him.

But right now, there’s nobody else I’d rather see.

I look into his cocksure eyes, waiting for him to say something, pleading with him to use that deep, reassuring voice and that commanding presence he has on me. Right now, I need something solid to hold on to, to ground me, and it doesn’t get more solid than Brando.

He steps toward me and cups my cheeks in his strong hands.

“Everything you’re feeling will disappear the second you hit the first chord,” he says, somehow making it sound like the most truthful thing in the world.

“What if I choke? I can’t even remember the first song. I’m nervous just hearing those people out there, what about when I see them? I can’t do it,” I say, raising my hand. “Look, I’m shaking. I can’t play guitar. Tell them I can’t do it—”

“Haley,” Brando says, leaning in so close I can taste his breath, “you’ve dreamed of this moment since you were a kid. Lived it over and over again in your head. I know you have. The big venue, the screaming fans, the flashing lights, you’ve dreamed it all, right?”

I nod, my skin brushing against his rough palms.

“Do you choke or forget the words in the dream?”

“No.”

“This is just like that. Just like your dream. A little bit louder. A little bit realer. But just the same.”

He strokes my hair away from my face and I hear the screaming rise a full twenty decibels as my band makes it on stage. Brando pulls away and steps aside.

I cast one last look at the firm belief in his eyes, gathering the last bit of strength I can from them, and then walk down the hallway and step out onto the stage.

It’s just like he says, like a dream. I walk out and feel like a hurricane hits me. A sea of faces and arms shouting and wailing. A wall of sound that almost blows me back.

I hit the first chord, and before I know it I’m almost done with the last song of the night. If I felt like I was on fast-forward earlier, it’s as if someone pressed the skip button through the concert. But even so, judging by the audience applause, it seems that all those years of relentless practice have finally paid off. I didn’t totally bomb.

“That was awesome, Haley!” yells someone from the group of strangers that mob us as we exit the stage, carrying us in a crowded mass back toward the green room.

“Was it?” I say, barely able to hear myself speak over the excited laughter and whoops of the crowd.

“Holy shit!” Brian says, putting a hand on my back. “I never heard you do that before!”

“Do what?” I say, looking for him as I get pushed and pulled into the green room. “What was I doing?”

“The ad-libs! Talking to the crowd!” Paula says, emerging at my side and holding out a beer toward me. “They
loved
you!”

“Fuck,” I say, bringing a hand to my head to stop the spinning. “I didn’t even know I was doing it.”

Somebody slams two glass bottles together to get people’s attention. We all look in the direction of the sound and see Mike the guitar tech standing on a table.

“First show of the tour…and we
fucking nailed it!”
he screams, shooting his beer-carrying hands into the air and spraying everyone.

The room erupts. Stage techs, roadies, anyone with a backstage pass – they’re all jumping and shouting as if whatever the fans are experiencing outside is contagious. As if on cue, Lexi’s show starts, and the room becomes a congested mass of noise, beer, and post-orgasmic energy.

“Haley,” Brian says, leaning in close so I can hear him over the crowd, “you okay?”

“Yeah,” I say, laughing the last of the butterflies away, “I feel like I just woke up from a coma – but I’m alright.”

Brian doesn’t pull away, and I notice that he’s letting the crowd push his body up against mine.

“You’re amazing, Haley,” he whispers into my ear.