Bad Boy Romance: Nick (Romantic Suspense Alpha Male Romance) (New Adult Rock Star Contemporary Short Stories) (Hard Rock Star Series Book 2) (8 page)

****

We got out of the radio interview unscathed, and I climbed
onto the bus quickly the minute we were out of the station’s offices. Maybe if
we were lucky, I’d have a little time to spend with Olivia before we had to do
the next interview at the club we were playing at. I’d left her working on more
content for the magazine, compiling pictures and writing an article that would
go up on the
Record Spin
website in a few days.

I walked through to the lounge; but Olivia wasn’t there. I
frowned, hearing Jules giving Mark shit about something—some comment he’d made
that I barely cared about. Alex was talking to Ron about scheduling something
or other, and I didn’t care about that either. I walked to the back of the bus.
“Hannah? You seen Olivia? Did she go somewhere or something?”

“She was in the lounge last time I checked,” Hannah said
with a shrug. “Working on another article for the magazine.” I sucked on my
front teeth and tried to think. The only place on the bus I hadn’t looked
through was the bunks.

The guys were settling in the lounge when I walked back
through. “Anyone see Olivia go anywhere? I don’t want to leave her stranded,” I
said, trying not to sound as anxious as I was starting to feel.

“Why would she get off the bus?” I shrugged, continuing onto
the bunks. I went to my bunk first—just on impulse. She wasn’t there. The next
option—and the most obvious one—was her own bunk.

Sure enough, when I tugged aside the curtain, there she was,
curled up on the bed, facing the wall. “Liv? What’s going on? What’s up?” I
looked back at the lounge and decided that it was probably better to join her
in the bed—if she would let me—than to stand outside of the bunk and try and
talk to her. I climbed up and pulled myself onto the bed behind her.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Olivia said, her voice creaking
and breaking. I tugged the curtain back into place behind me.

“Obviously it’s a big deal,” I pointed out. I shifted closer
to her on the bed. “Come on, Liv. Tell me what’s going on.” I pitched my voice
low, my lips only inches away from her ear.

“We got found out,” Olivia said after a moment’s silence.
Her voice was flat. “Someone sent pictures to my editor. He emailed me while we
were checking into the hotel, but I didn’t see it until you got to the
station.”

“What’s so wrong about that?” I wrapped my arms around her,
pulling her body against mine. “I mean, how terrible can it be? We’re in the
open now.”

“He’s thinking about pulling me from the assignment,” Olivia
said. “Looks like the rest of the guys are going to get to argue over who gets
the money or how to split it.”

“Why does he want to pull you?”

“Because it’s a scandal! Everyone’s going to be going on
about me being a slut. I’m ruined.” She shuddered against me and sobbed,
turning her face towards the pillow. “All anyone is going to ever associate me
with is fucking the guitarist of Molly Riot.” I tightened my grip on her and
Olivia struggled against me, pulling away. “I knew this was a mistake. I knew
it was stupid and a bad idea and I did it anyway.”

“It wasn’t a mistake!” I heard the guys in the lounge
starting to go quiet—not quite stopping their chatter, but certainly going
about it a lot less. I didn’t care. “Look, Liv—it happens all the time. Julian
Casablancas got together with his band’s assistant manager. Dave Grohl married
someone from MTV.” I pulled her tightly against me until she stopped
struggling. “We’ll convince your editor that it’s actually
better
that
you’re dating me.”

“And if someone bitches that the only reason I wrote
something is because I’m fucking you? What then, Nick? Women’s careers get
ruined over this.”

“Yours won’t.” I kissed the top of her head, holding her
body against mine, feeling the tension in every muscle. “I swear, Olivia. I
won’t let anyone ruin your career over this. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing to you,” she said, her voice tight and so bitter I
could almost taste it. “When you break up with me in two months or four or six
because you want something new, you can forget all about me, and not give a
single shit about what my career looks like.”

“By the time I break up with you—if I ever do, which at the
moment I’m not planning—no one is even going to remember this.”

“They will if it goes to press,” Olivia said. “And I can
just about guarantee that the kind of person who would find my fucking editor’s
personal email to send him pictures of us together is exactly the kind of
person who’d send the same pictures to a bunch of other people.”

“So you come clean with it,” I suggested. “Make it your next
article on the site. Talk about the ridiculousness of having a relationship on
the road.” I gripped her so tightly I knew it was probably more than a little
uncomfortable for Olivia, but I couldn’t make myself let go of her. “If you
don’t freak out over this and you handle it like it doesn’t matter, then it
won’t matter.”

“Just…just let me be for a little while, Nick,” she said.
She sounded exhausted—so thoroughly exhausted that my grip loosened without me
even thinking about it. “I need to cry over this and try and get…get myself
together, and I can’t do that if you’re insisting that everything is going to
be fine and dandy and fucking wonderful. I need to—I need to think. And I can’t
think if you’re right here next to me.”

“I’ll be quiet,” I said lowly. “I’ll just lie here, and you
can cry all over me, and when we get to the venue I’ll change my shirt and no
one will have to know.” I glanced towards the curtain. “Well, no one other than
the guys and the crew on the bus.”

“Just leave me alone for a little while,” Olivia said.
“I—I’ll talk to you about all this later when I’ve figured out what I want to
do.” I wanted to argue the point; I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t going to
just leave her alone. I wasn’t going to let it end like this—and I could tell
she wanted it to end. When she did talk to me later, she was going to argue for
us to be over. But I couldn’t make myself do it. I kissed her forehead and let
go of her, and then I slipped out of the bunk and climbed down along the wall,
and went into the lounge.

“What happened?” I threw myself onto a couch and shook my
head.

“Someone sent pictures of us to her editor,” I said as
quietly as possible. “Her editor’s considering taking her off the assignment.”

“So we say that we won’t work with anyone else,” Alex
suggested. “I mean what are they going to do? Risk making a bigger scandal out
of this by having to explain the cancelation?”

“She’s afraid it’s going to ruin her career.” I sighed.
“Fuck, I need a beer.” I needed more than that. I stood up on unsteady feet and
went back to the bunks. I found my vapor pen and the little tiny jar of hash
wax; at one point in its life it had been a container of lip balm or something.
I went back into the lounge and Dan handed me an open beer. I put a dab of
brown, sticky hash on the atomizer of my vape and took a quick hit, holding the
tingling vapor in my lungs for as long as I dared. I exhaled and took a sip of
my beer.

“Take it slow,” Jules suggested from the table where he and
Dan were playing Battleship. “You don’t want to go into the show blasted out of
your mind.” I shrugged.

“She’s going to end it,” I said quietly. I lit a cigarette
and blew the smoke out of my lungs in favor of another hit of the hash. “The
fuck does it matter if I play bad for one night over it?”

“That’s some bullshit,” Alex said, scowling at me. “You’ve
never, ever let any of the rest of us have the excuse of breaking up with
somebody for playing bad. You don’t get it either.”

“I’m not going to fuck the show over,” I said. “I just…” I
shook my head. “I just want to get stoned enough to leave her alone. If I don’t
then I’m going to keep trying to talk to her and just make things worse.” I
took another hit and then set the vape aside, starting on my cigarette in
earnest. I knew better than to get wasted before it was even two in the
afternoon. “I just thought—for like, the first fucking time in my life—that I’d
found something I wanted to really keep. And then this shit happens.” I looked
at each of the other guys in the band in turn. “If I ever find out who did this
to her, I’m gonna fucking break his ass.” A little smile tugged at Jules’ lips.
For a second I couldn’t help but suspect my band mates; there were only so many
people who could have gotten pictures of Olivia and me together, after all. But
none of them would’ve done something like that.

“You figure out who it is and we’ll
help
break their
ass,” Mark told me. I took a deep breath and a sip of my beer.

“I can see the headline now,” I said, grinning wryly. “Molly
Riot Share Jail Cell After Felony Assault.”

****

Olivia avoided me the rest of the day, and I tried to fill
the void that I’d gotten used to spending watching her work, helping her get
the best possible pictures or sound bites from the crew or the rest of the
band. I stayed on the stage even after we’d finished up sound check, playing
meandering little runs on my guitar. It sounded off-pitch, but every time I
checked it against the built-in tuner, it was dead on.
This is why you’ve
never gotten close to anything like this,
I thought, picking out a mournful
little OK Go tune. It took me a minute to remember the name: “Let it Rain.” I
played the melody fill over and over again and then switched to the rhythm,
murmuring the words to myself under the noise of the amps and speakers.
“Cruise
control distressed her/ kinda cursed and kinda blessed her/ engine running on
the fumes…vision blue and blurry/ fallen angels in a flurry/ spinning through
the empty room…”

The thing that shocked me was that I’d never even considered
the possibility of it ending between Olivia and me. She’d say that I was going
to eventually move on from her, get tired of her—but it had never occurred to
me to think that she might end it. Not really. I’d just thought things would go
the same way that they’d been going; that I’d just keep ending up in her bed or
her in my bed, and then once the tour ended, we’d switch off going to each
other’s apartments, fucking like animals, eating dinner together and getting
wasted and having a good time. Even if I never thought of it being something
serious—something like a committed relationship—I’d figured it would just keep
being the way it was.

I switched to another OK Go tune almost without thinking.
The low-slung groove suggested itself in my brain, the lyrics flowing through
my head as I played the soulful low melody.
I want you, yeah I want you/ I want
you, yeah I want you bad/ So bad I can’t think straight, so bad all my bones
shake/ so bad I can’t breathe… And in the light of morning for twenty-one days
straight, there you are beside me…

“Nick! You’re going to play the calluses off your fingers,” I
missed the note and hit the wrong chord, startled by the sound of Alex’s voice
shouting over my playing. I sighed and stopped playing altogether, setting the
guitar down on its stand.

“I was practicing,” I told Alex as I walked past him. “What
else have I got to do? Olivia doesn’t want to be in the same room as me.”

“You have two choices,” Alex said, following me. “You fight
for her, or you give her up and find someone to take your mind off of her.”

“She won’t let me fight for her,” I pointed out. “She wants
to be left alone to figure everything out, and that’s going to mean that she’s
going to figure that she should end it and hope that appeases her fucking
editor.”

“I had Ron put in a call to
Record Spin
,” Alex told
me. “He told them that we see no problem with Olivia continuing, and that we
aren’t interested in working with anyone else. He’s going to have to eat the
scandal or it’ll blow up in his face.”

“But what about her?” I remembered what Olivia had said.
“She’s going to have to try and live it down too. Especially if it gets out in
the press in general, they’re going to treat her like some kind of groupie.”
Alex shrugged.

“Keep her by your side if you can’t live without her,” he
suggested. “That way if someone talks shit you can take care of it. But are you
that serious about her?”

“I’m more serious about her than I’ve ever been about
anything in my life other than this band,” I told Alex. I frowned; the words
had just left me—I hadn’t thought about it even for a second. But they were
true; I’d never been serious about very many things. My family, the band, and
my own pleasure were the only things I’d prioritized for years—even above
school. The only reason I’d graduated at all had been because my life was
easier finishing and getting the damn diploma than it would have been dropping
out and having to pay my parents rent.

“Then fight for her, asshole!” Alex grinned at me. “Jesus,
you may be like—easily fifty women ahead of the rest of us in terms of honing
your skills in the sack but Christ if you have no idea how to deal with a
relationship.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Until
Mary you nuked every relationship you were ever in as soon as the girl started
talking about being serious.”

“Nope—only when they started asking about when I’d be stable
enough to support children,” Alex countered. “Mary is happy with the way things
are between us for now, and if she wants kids eventually…” he shrugged. “We’ll
cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“How do I fight for someone who doesn’t want to be around
me?” I crossed my arms over my chest. Alex chuckled.

“You lure her to you,” he told me. “You make it impossible
for her to stay away, and then you don’t give her the option of you
not
fighting for her.” I considered that. I smiled to myself slowly and started to
form a plan in my head; I thought I knew Olivia well enough to know what to use
to lure her back to me, at least long enough to get my point across to her.

“Thanks, Lex,” I said. “I’m going to grab a shower. I’ll
catch you in the green room later.”