Rhythm, Chord & Malykhin (5 page)

If it wouldn’t have been for Sacha stopping again and turning to look down at me, his mouth pulled tight at the corners, I wouldn’t have known he’d heard what I said. His dark eyebrows were halfway to his hairline. His eyes were huge as they flicked to the side.

I narrowed my eyes at him, heat crawling up my neck. “Don’t… say… anything.”

He coughed the fakest, most forced cough in the history of coughs. “Say anything about what?” he asked slowly, hesitantly. He even added a little questioning shrug at the end.

It was a lot harder than it seemed to not laugh. “Exactly.” I shrugged back at him, wanting to kick myself in the ass for having such a big mouth.

Sacha gave me a low-lidded glance before visibly pursing his lips together and coughing one more time. I didn’t miss the way his mouth pulled up into a tiny, short smile before he managed to wipe it off his features altogether. Sacha scratched at the bridge of his nose and glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes again before finally grinding out, “You’re sure you’re fine with eating that, then?”

At that point, it wasn’t like I could say no even if I wanted to. I nodded, which earned me another smile from him.

We walked a block in silence, each of us giving the other a few curious if not a bit awkward glances, like neither one of us could think of what to say until Sacha broke the silence. “Are you having fun on tour?” he asked as we came to the first crosswalk.

“Yeah, besides dealing with the heat.” It had been hot in every single venue we’d been in over the last two weeks, and me complaining about it said something; I’d lived in Texas my entire life.

He groaned. “It never gets easier to handle, trust me. I’ve been touring six months out of the year for the last ten and it hasn’t gotten any better than that first summer the band spent in a van with no AC.” Sacha shuddered at the memory, and I think I could have exploded at his cuteness.

“Ten years?” I asked him, looking up. He didn’t look twenty-one or even twenty-five but he didn’t look over thirty either. His face was still relatively unlined, except for these deep laugh lines on the sides of his mouth. How old was he?

“Ten years in August,” he reiterated. Sacha turned to look at me with those clear gray eyes. “Is this your first tour?”

I snorted as a dozen memories of the five years I spent on and off with Ghost Orchid blew through my brain in the span of a second. “No. I used to leave with Eli, but about two years ago, I decided to go to school full time and stopped. This whole bus thing is new to me. We used to get around in a van,” I summed it up, leaving out a few details that didn’t seem important.

Sacha grinned at me slyly. “I guessed that when you didn’t take shoes into the showers with you.” He looked down at my tennis shoes and waggled his eyebrows. “I heard you got fungus from it.”

I wasn’t even going to bother trying to guess which asshole spilled the beans on my foot problem. It could have been any of them. Pricks. I’m not sure where the action came from, but I bumped his arm with my own. He was so much taller than me, I was hitting closer to his elbow than his shoulder. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

And just like that, he was nudging me back with a big grin on his face. The corners of his deep-set eyes crinkled. “I bet your skin looks raw, huh?”

Just at his mention of raw-looking skin, that crease between the balls of my feet and toes started doing this weird itchy-burn sensation I’d become familiar with. I’d been smothering my feet in cream for two weeks and changing my socks twice a day per Mason’s instructions. What no one tells you in those athlete’s foot commercials is how long those creams take to work.

“Sucking ass” just barely began to describe the experience.

“It happens to everyone,” Sacha added when I didn’t respond immediately.

I snickered, remembering the last time I’d heard those exact same words. “I’m pretty sure Mason has said the same thing about having The Clap.”

The laugh that exploded out of him in response was so unexpected that I jumped a little at first.

It was so infectious it made me snort.

“That is… that’s absolutely not true,” Sacha snickered in between bouts of clear, loud sounds of enjoyment.

“That’s Mase for you.”

He slapped a long-fingered hand over his mouth as he laughed. “I thought I heard him say last week something like ‘it’s all fun and games until someone gets crabs.’ But I thought I imagined it.”

Oh god. I burst out laughing just as loud as he’d been going at it a few moments ago. “Yeah, that sounds like something he would say.”

His head tipped down enough so that our eyes met. Very intently, he asked, “Is he serious or does—”

“Oh, he’s serious most of the time. I went with him to a free clinic when we were seniors because he’d gotten crabs from a girl on the drill team.” It had been our secret until he got drunk one night and told everyone willing to listen about his previously itchy privates. I’m pretty sure the staff had assumed I’d given them to him but who knows.

Sacha’s mouth gaped in amusement for a second before he stopped abruptly in front of a storefront. “The restaurant is in here.” He gestured toward a glass door to our right, opening it and waving me inside.

The small restaurant was homey with burgundy walls, round black vinyl-covered tables and a counter directly in front of the door with a menu mounted above it, written in chalk. There wasn’t anyone in line and I took my time looking at the various items listed for that day. Sacha stood next to me, deciding what to get as well. After a couple of minutes, an older lady in an apron and a hairnet made her way out of the kitchen and took our orders.

With our drinks in hand—some tea drink for Sacha and water for me—we took a seat at one of the empty picnic tables.

My unexpected eating buddy took a sip of the yellow drink in a clear red cup and raised his eyebrows. “You’ve known Mason for a long time then?”

“I’ve known him and Gordo since I was five. We all grew up together,” I explained. “They’re like the brothers I never wanted.”

He smiled. “But you and Eli really are brother and sister?”

“Oh yeah. He likes to say he shoved me out of the way to come out first.”

Sacha blinked. “No shit? You two really are twins?”

I knew he hadn’t believed me! Then again, most people didn’t. My brother had more physical traits in common with Bigfoot than he did with me. “Yup.”

He still made a face that said he wasn’t entirely convinced. “But he’s twice your size.”

Twice my size. I could give him a hug for being such a terrific liar. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he tried to eat me in the womb.”

Sacha burst out laughing again, making the lightly tanned skin on his face glow. His complexion was so clear it almost radiated; it made him even more attractive. “Jesus. They said you were funny, but I didn’t believe them.”

Funny Gaby. I smiled and held back the sigh creeping around in my chest. How many times had I friend-zoned myself by joking around? A dozen? It wasn’t even that I tried to be funny; I just grew up around smart-asses. You either learned to adapt or you died. Well you wouldn’t really die, but you’d get verbally eaten alive by the folks that were supposed to love you; apparently they just loved making fun of you an equal amount. My siblings and the two idiots could find the smallest things to tease me over.

I pushed all five of them out of my head and smiled at the man sitting across from me. That longer hair at the top of his head and the shorter buzz cut along the sides were really flattering even when he didn’t have it perfectly in place.

“What about you and your band? Have you been together a long time?” I asked.

“Isaiah—do you know Isaiah?” he asked, and I nodded. “Isaiah and I have known each other since middle school. We started playing together in high school, doing some cover band stuff, and then we met Julian. He’s the big guy,” Sacha explained, like I didn’t know the names of the people I’d been on tour with for the last two weeks, but I didn’t correct him. “The three of us started TCC when we were sixteen, and then slowly added members over the years.”

Was asking his age considered flirting? I wasn’t positive, but I decided that I didn’t care. “So you’ve been together…?”

“Eleven years.”

He was twenty-seven. Huh. That sounded about right. I whistled. “That’s a long time.”

“It is.” He shrugged. ”But I wouldn’t want to do anything else… most of the time.”

I smiled at him, his words hitting home. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life now that I was done with school. The only thing I did know was what I didn’t want. That didn’t exactly help any, but I guess that’s what this tour was for. To give me some time to figure things out.

What was the rush, right?

The same woman who had worked the counter came over with our order. Sacha’s bowl was shades of green and brown while mine was a red curry dish. It must have been a sign of how hungry we both were that neither one of us said a word as we tore into our food. When I finished before him, I got up and ordered Carter the same thing I’d gotten.

He smiled at me from behind the rim of his glass as he finished off the last of his tea when I sat back down. “Thanks for being a good sport and eating here. I usually have to pay one of the guys to come with me.”

“Why? They don’t like Thai?” I asked. I wasn’t a picky eater. You could put a vegan dish in front of me, or fried chicken, and it was going to get devoured.

“Not at all. None of them like spicy food,” he said, setting the glass on the table.

“But not all of the food is spicy…”

He blinked. “I know.”

“Babies,” I muttered, a little unsure how he’d handle me calling his friends that.

He beamed at me. “Huge babies.”

“They don’t know what good food is.”

“Right? If it were up to them, we’d get fast food every day. All I’m asking for is a little Chipotle at least.”

“Chipotle’s high class.” I smiled.

He lifted a shoulder. “I’m a high-class kind of guy.”

Yeah, I couldn’t hold the joke back despite how inappropriate it might be considering we didn’t know each other well. But screw it. Kicking him in the ass was like jumping ahead three months in a friendship. “You know who else is high class? Hookers. Hookers are high class.”

Sacha didn’t even miss a beat. He blinked those clear gray eyes at me and asked very seriously, “Do you know from experience?”

Was he seriously calling me a hooker on our first expedition out?

By the smile on his face, I would say yes. Yes, he was.

I think I’d found a friend.

I
had
to refer to the list of dates we had on the wall. Every day felt like a near repeat of the one before, and after the first week of The Rhythm & Chord Tour, I’d lost track of what city was next. Since there usually wasn’t enough time to go sightseeing, one place looked just like the rest; maybe one venue was nicer than the other but since that was really all we got to see, it didn’t make a difference.

I texted Laila back:

A minute later, I got a response from her:

She knew exactly what I was referring to: her twenty-second birthday, Mardi Gras in Galveston, two in the morning. If I tried, I could still hear my screams at her flashing an unsuspecting crowd after one too many Long Island Iced Teas.

I’d helped her change out her catheter more than once in the past, so it wasn’t like I was horrified or anything remotely close by her bare boobs. But still. I felt obligated to give her a hard time over it.

I set my cell back down and sighed.

It was only about three in the afternoon, and we’d been parked at the venue for close to two hours. My brother, Mason and a couple of the guys in The Cloud Collision had decided to go “hang out with some friends in town.” In reality what this meant was that they were doing something they couldn’t do in the bus.

As much as I loved Eli and Mason, I hated seeing them high or drunk, so I opted out of tagging along. Instead I plastered myself in the back room of the bus with one of the books I’d stuffed in my bag before leaving home. I was on
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
this week. Even though I was having fun spending time with my three idiots, still getting to know Carter, and sucking at Mario Kart when I played against Mason in the morning, the whole living-with-ten-other-people-thing was difficult.

Even though I missed my parents, Rafe, Gil, their kids and Laila, I missed the lumpy bed at my parent’s house even more. It was the things I took for granted, like showering without shoes and hanging out in my room half-naked, that I missed the hell out of.

But I knew it wasn’t any of those things that were really bothering me right then. I was a little bit aggravated with Eli for still doing the kind of shit that had gotten him in trouble in the past. We’d agreed before I joined the tour that he’d tone down the drinking as one of my conditions. He’d been holding onto his end of the bargain so far, but I wasn’t betting on the streak continuing today.

There was also the chance I wasn’t giving him enough credit, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

“Can I come in?” a soft voice asked, the door to the back room cracking open.

“Of course,” I answered, recognizing Sacha’s low timbre on the other side.

His dark head of hair peeked in before he swung the door open. “I wasn’t sure if you were doing something.” His eyes flickered around the room cautiously before he plopped down onto the length of the couch opposite the one I was sitting on.

“I’m just reading. What are you up to?” I asked, eyeing the lean muscles beneath the tank he was wearing. Sacha had on shorts that were riding up his thighs, showing off what seemed like meters of nearly pale skin beneath dark leg hair. He was also wearing a scuffed pair of running shoes, not his normal set of clean black ones.

He scratched at the short hair on the side of his head. “I’m waiting for Julian to come back,” he explained, referring to the guitar player for his band.

“Didn’t he go with my brother?” I swore I saw him get into the taxi with the other morons. If that was the case, there was no way the group was coming back anytime soon. Much less coming back sober. I wouldn’t bet any money on the chances of them being able to stand on two feet when they returned.

Now that I thought about it, I should probably try and have my camera app open on my phone just in case something ridiculous happened during the show.

“He said he was only going for a couple of hours.”

I hated people telling me that they would do something and then not. Disappointment was bitter. It wasn’t like it was my fault Julian had taken off, but I felt bad he’d left Sacha hanging. I would much rather take someone being blunt and hurting my feelings in the process, than let me down.

I sighed before breaking it to him. “They’re not coming back soon.”

Those translucent gray eyes that bordered on sky blue blinked in my direction.

“Were you planning on doing something?” I asked.

“We were going to go for a run,” he explained with a shrug. “It isn’t the end of the world.”

Slipping my legs off the couch to plant my feet on the floor, I raised my eyebrows at him as I set my book on the seat next to me. “I’ll go with you if you want.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I used to run track.”

“You did?” He made it sound like the idea was preposterous. Rude. It may or may not have been because I complained about the bus being too far from the venue back in Birmingham when I was moving merch bins, but in my defense, it had been raining.

Either way, I couldn’t help but scratch my forehead before amending my answer. “In high school.”

Sacha flashed those perfect white teeth on display. “What you’re meaning to tell me is that you’re pretty much a professional track star?”

I made sure to keep my features even as I nodded. “Exactly.”

His eyes widened playfully. “I’m pretty fast,” he warned.

“We’ll see how fast you are,” I said and immediately felt a little weird for inviting myself. “But only if you want the company. If you don’t, I completely understand.” And I might cry a little, but I kept that part to myself.

Running was one of the only things I’d kept up with over my life, especially in the time since my breakup; I made time for it a few days a week on the treadmill or when I didn’t mix it up with the Stairmaster. I figured my ass and thighs could thank me when I was forty. But it had been more than two weeks since the last time I’d made an effort to put my legs to use.

But Sacha was the same person who took me accidentally kicking him in the ass like a champ, and had gone out to eat with me so I wouldn’t go by myself. He hadn’t given me the smallest impression that he was anything but a nice guy. “Come with me,” he said, already waving me forward.

“Are you sure?” I asked,

The singer rolled his eyes. “I’ll wait for you outside.”

“Let me change,” I looked at the thin sweatpants I’d had on since the night before, “and find sunblock. I’ll be quick.”

Sacha tipped his head to the side. “I have some—”

Of course he did, with that clear skin that somehow managed not to be pasty.

“—get dressed and I’ll grab it.”

Grabbing semi-clean shorts and a sports bra from my backpack, I changed into them as quickly as I could and threw my T-shirt back on. I also grabbed some cash that ended up getting stuffed under a bra strap. If we were going to suffer from heat exhaustion, I was stopping to get something to eat at some point afterward; he just didn’t know it yet. After letting Gordo know that I was leaving since he was the only one who hadn’t taken off, I found Sacha waiting outside of the bus with a small tube of aloe vera-based sunblock in his hand that he tossed over.

I’d like to say that I focused on putting the sunblock on my own body, but I didn’t. Correction: I couldn’t.

When Sacha peeled off his shirt and began smothering the cream onto his freckle-spotted shoulders, arms, chest, neck and even the shell of his ears… I was entranced. It was like seeing a meteor shower. Or having candy for the first time after you’d tried going on a diet.

Except way more magnificent.

Sacha even had these small light-brown moles dotting his abs and back. He had a trim, muscular frame that I admired from the corner of my eye every time he was shirtless. He had the body of those swimmers that Laila and I groaned over every four years, and he was putting lotion all over himself. It was better than watching porn. Hell, better than watching Robby Lingus porn. Good grief. I finished slathering myself sloppily while he put his shirt back on.

“Do you know where you want to go run or are we figuring it out as we go?” I asked as I bent over to stretch my hamstrings.

“East. There’s usually less people in that direction,” Sacha said.

I hummed like I knew what direction east was without searching out the sun and chirped up an, “okay.”

Five minutes later, we were both stretched and ready to go. He tipped his head to the left with a playful smile and asked, “Are you ready, Jesse Owens?”

I snorted. “I was born ready.”

Sacha snickered before nudging my forearm with the back of his hand.

We started off with a slow jog to warm up for what seemed about a mile. He tempered his step so that he wasn’t twenty feet in front of me considering his legs were almost a foot longer. He shot me a glance over his shoulder once and I nodded. Then we took off.

He wasn’t kidding when he said he was fast. He really was. He had the stride of a long distance runner but the potential, restrained speed of someone who possibly ran sprints for fun. Luckily for me, I’d been a sprinter in high school, so it didn’t kill me too much to catch up with him.

At first.

One mile.

Two miles.

Three, four and five miles.

My lungs started to get tight.

Six miles.

Seven miles.

My calves began cramping.

By the eighth mile, I was struggling with my breathing and my cramps passed “aching” and went straight to “cramping.”

Honestly, I had no clue where we were, much less where the venue was. What made it worse was that Sacha looked sweaty but not nearly winded enough. What the hell was he? A cyborg?

It was probably another half a mile before I decided… that was it. I couldn’t keep going without dying.

“Hey, hey,” I wheezed as I came to a stop.

It took a second for him to slow down and turn around. His face was pink, perspiration dotting along his temples. “Are you all right?” he asked sounding just slightly out of breath.

I was sucking in air through my nose raggedly as I nodded, pressing a hand flat to the part of my stomach that was the most deprived of air. “I can’t… I need to stop.”

Those gray-blue eyes swept over me for a second as I stood there, one hand on my hip, the other over my belly button. My loose shorts were clinging to my legs and my shirt was definitely plastered to me. Then there were the pit stains. I didn’t even want to think about the pit stains and the damp spots on my shorts. Whatever. Who cared. Sacha saw me after the show was over every night when my mascara was runny and I smelled like week-old socks. Plus, it wasn’t like I was trying to get a boyfriend or anything.

“I don’t… run… for distance,” I panted.

He took a big visible inhale through his nose and nodded. “That’s okay.”

“You… can keep…” I didn’t think I was out of shape but apparently, I was. “You can keep going,” I rushed out. “I can get back by myself.”

Sacha shot me a look as he moved closer to the side of the building to get out of pedestrian traffic. “No. I’ll walk back with you.”

“Walk back?” That came out sounding as panicked as it was meant to. “The entire way?”

“Yeah.”

All I could do was stare at him. Did he not know I was on the cusp of death?

The sheer terror on my face earned me a laugh from the tall man. “I’m fucking with you. Let’s walk a little, and then we’ll catch a ride back.”

“If… I… wasn’t so…”

He grinned, cutting my threat off. “Let’s go. Are you hungry?”

I nodded.

“Want to get something to eat?”

I managed to nod again.

We walked for almost twenty minutes in silence, taking our time. I was still too out of breath to talk so I focused on calming down. Eventually Sacha hailed a cab and we both climbed in.

It was the choked laugh from the other side of the backseat that had me turning my attention toward him. He was sitting with his back to the corner, a smug smile on his face. “Are you gonna live?”

“Barely.”

His eyebrows went up as he smiled even wider. “You went a lot further than I thought you would.”

Wait a second.

“Julian and I usually only do five miles,” he explained.

I stared at him; there could be no other way to describe what I did besides maybe referring to it as a glare. I sat there with my chest expanding and retracting while still trying to recuperate, processing what the hell had just come out of his mouth. “Are you joking?”

He shook his head.

I kept my gaze on him for a brief second longer, extended my middle finger against my thigh in plain view and turned to face out the window.

Sacha laughed.

Okay, I smiled. A little but not much.

Neither one of us said a word until he instructed the driver to drop us off at the end of a block that didn’t look particularly familiar. “This place is pretty good,” he noted pointing at a decorated glass door as we climbed out of the cab after fighting over how to pay the fee.

I still wasn’t on speaking terms with him, though I’d caught my breath and followed him inside the restaurant, which wasn’t as cool as I would have liked. The smell of roasted chicken made my stomach growl.

He raised his eyebrows at me from the other side of the table after a waitress brought two glasses of water over. “Still mad at me?” he asked.

I narrowed my eyes at him as I took a sip, taking in how he still looked relatively put together and not at all like he’d tackled eight miles half an hour ago. “You run marathons, don’t you?”