Wild Open (5 page)

In the morning, maybe she would start seriously looking for a new band to play with. Maybe Luka was right. She had never loved anything as much as she loved being on stage. Her office job was fine, but it didn’t make her chest feel like it was too small to contain her bursting heart. She missed that feeling.

She would admit it to herself: she’d been in a funk. A rut. She hadn’t done anything worthwhile since the band split up. She’d stopped playing her bass; she’d stopped doing much of anything with music. She woke up, went to work, came home, sat in front of the television, went to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.

So maybe the whole embarrassing incident with the Saving Graces and the guy at the bar hadn’t been so bad after all. Maybe that was what she’d needed to snap out of it.

Her phone rang after dinner, when Luka was washing dishes and Bryce had retired to the sofa with his own glass of wine. “Hot date?” Bryce asked, as Leah fumbled around in her purse.

“The hottest,” Leah said. Her fingers closed around her phone, and she fished it out. She didn’t recognize the number.

She answered.

“Hey, is this Leah Zielinski?”

The guy completely butchered the pronunciation of her last name, but she was used to it. “That’s me.”

“This is James Park, with the Saving Graces. We were all really impressed with your audition today. We’d like to hire you on for the rest of the tour.”

Leah pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at it in shock. Then she realized the guy might be saying something else important, and hastily pressed it back against the side of her head. “Uh, wow. You want to—really?”

The guy laughed. Leah wondered which one he had been: the intense guy in the middle, or the one on the left who looked like he didn’t want to be there. Or her guy.
Hers
, in ironic quote marks. The one whose name she didn’t even know.

It wasn’t him. She would recognize his voice.

Bryce was giving her an intense look and moving his hands in a way that was probably meant to convey a question. She made a quelling gesture and turned her back on him.

“Really,” James said. “We’re kind of on a tight deadline, though. We’re playing a show in San Francisco on Monday evening. So you would need to be able to drop everything and get on a bus tomorrow afternoon.”

“I can do that,” Leah said. Luka was leaning out of the kitchen now, eyebrows raised. She would call work tomorrow morning and quit. Her boss would be furious, but she was okay with burning that particular bridge. “How much longer is the tour?”

“One month,” he said. “So you’re in?”

Leah took a breath. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I’m in.”

CHAPTER FOUR

She drove downtown the next morning to sign the paperwork. James had given her the address of a hotel in Beverly Hills, and she expected a five-star boutique monstrosity with a rooftop pool, the kind of luxurious place where real rock stars stayed; but when she pulled up in front, she was a little disappointed to see that it was just a mid-range chain hotel, and not very fancy at all. What was the point of dealing with all of the press coverage and crazy fans if you didn’t even get to live in the lap of luxury while you did it?

She went inside. A man and woman were sitting on a low bench near the front desk, and after a moment she recognized them from the audition yesterday: the woman with the clipboard, and the Asian guy who had been sitting in the middle, the one who had seemed to be in charge. They both stood up as Leah approached.

She didn’t see
her
guy anywhere. Maybe…

Speculating was pointless. She would find out soon enough.

“Leah Zielinski?” the woman asked, holding out her hand and smiling. She was wearing a bright yellow dress and earrings that brushed her shoulders, and Leah looked down at her own frayed jeans and wished she had dressed up a little. “I’m Rushani Aachari, the tour manager for the Saving Graces.”

Leah shook hands with her and then with the man, who said, “James Park. I’m the drummer and, I guess, unofficial responsible adult.”

It sounded like a joke, but he wasn’t smiling. He was very good-looking, and he wore his plain white T-shirt and faded blue chinos like they were haute couture, but he had a serious expression on his face that belied his tattoos and floppy ex-skater hair. It was very clear to Leah that these two were the people she needed to impress. The contract hadn’t been signed yet; they could still change their minds.

“I’m really excited about the opportunity to tour with you guys,” she said to James.

His mouth pulled to one side. “Don’t speak too soon.”

Leah didn’t have any idea how to respond to that. He
must
have been joking, but she couldn’t read any humor in his face at all.

“Stop it, James,” Rushani said. “You’re scaring her.” She glanced around, and even though the lobby was empty aside from the woman at the front desk, she said, “Let’s go up to my room. We can talk in private.”

A small knot of anxiety began to form in Leah’s stomach. What on earth was going on here?

Aside from the open suitcase on the floor, Rushani’s room didn’t look like anyone had stayed in it at all. The bed was neatly made, and there was none of the usual travel mess strewn around, no toiletries on the counter or pizza boxes lying open and half-empty on top of the desk. Rushani gestured to the sole armchair in one corner and said, “Please, take a seat.”

Leah sat, holding her tote bag on her lap. She had seen this movie. Someone would pull out a knife, or reveal they weren’t quite human. Leah, as the hapless and innocent heroine, would scream, or possibly faint, or else prove herself to be a member of that peculiar movie species known as the “strong female character” and bust out her awesome karate moves. Blood would be shed. All might end well, or tragically.

Rushani and James sat side by side on the bed, both of them staring at her, and Leah waited for their jaws to unhinge in perfect sync and their faces to peel back to reveal their true selves, scaly lizard people from the Delta Quadrant.

“There’s something about the band that you need to know,” Rushani said.

Leah suppressed a hysterical giggle.
We’re all blood-sucking vampires from outer space!

Rushani glanced at James, who didn’t react. “The bassist quit, as you know,” she said. “It was a long time coming. The lead singer is sort of… difficult.”

“Andrew,” Leah said. She had done some reading last night, after she got the phone call from James.

“That’s right,” Rushani said. “He’s going through a… difficult period. It’s important that you’re aware. He may treat you quite horribly. The rest of us will do our best to run interference. If you think this will be a problem for you, please let us know now so that we can move to the next person on our list.”

Difficult period? What did that mean? Rushani’s description was so vague that Leah couldn’t really figure out what she was talking about. But she knew it was a kind of trouble she had no interest in. She’d done her time in the band drama trenches. She had no interest in entering a meltdown situation. Plus, with that whole awkward situation at the bar—maybe it was better that she bowed out now, before things got any more complicated.

James had been watching her closely, and now he said, like he was reading the thoughts off her face, “Leah, I’m going to be honest with you. Andrew is a huge pain in the ass. I want to throttle him on a daily basis. But we are completely fucking desperate, and you were so far above and beyond anyone else we saw audition yesterday that I will pay you just about any amount of money to put up with his bullshit for a month. The fans really loved Kerrigan, and they’re all freaking out about him quitting. The only way for me to not feel totally ashamed about dicking them over is to replace him with someone who’s at least as talented as him.”

In the silence that followed, Rushani started laughing.

“What?” James asked her. “Why are you laughing? What’s so funny?”

“So much for negotiating!” Rushani said, wiping tears from beneath her eyes.

Leah recognized the hard edge to her laughter. It was what you did when the only alternative was utter despair.

“It’s just the truth,” James said. “We can afford it, Rushani, come on. I want her to know what she’s getting into so we don’t have to find a second replacement bassist.”

“You’re right,” Rushani said. “Okay. Well. Leah, that’s all there is to it. Andrew can be pretty terrible. The rest of us, I think, are not so bad to be around. We have nice buses. We eat good food. You’ll be paid well. I hope you won’t turn us down.”

Leah knew the smart thing to do was to politely decline and be on her way. She hadn’t called her boss yet. Her job would still be waiting for her on Monday morning. But James’ appeal had stirred something in her, the part of her that remembered what it was like to care about fans, to want nothing more in the world than to get on stage and see someone’s awestruck face gazing up at her. She could tell that James had that some passion in him. He cared about the music. She thought it would be nice to make music with someone like that again.

“There’s just one thing,” she said, and felt herself flushing. “I sort of, uh.” This was mortifying, but she had to spit it out. “The other guy in your band—I don’t know his name…”

“O’Connor,” James said. “Don’t worry about it. He already told us.”

“Oh, God,” Leah moaned, and buried her face in her hands.

“You don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” Rushani said, her voice very kind. “These things happen.”

“Well, it was a mistake,” Leah said, “and I don’t want you to think I was—I don’t know. Sneaking around, or trying to hide anything. It won’t happen again. Not while we’re on tour.”

James had been leaning forward, elbows on his knees, but now he sat up and turned his head toward Rushani.

“I see you looking at me,” Rushani said.

Leah said, “I really had no idea—”

“Girl, get over it,” James said. “You made out with him at a bar. That is basically the tamest hook-up imaginable. Nobody is going to judge you. As long as it doesn’t happen on tour, we’re golden. You know how things can get messy.”

“I know,” Leah said grimly. Experience was the best teacher.

“All right,” Rushani said. “Should we sign the paperwork, then?”

Leah went through the contract very carefully, but there was nothing at all suspicious about it. All of the clauses were standard. She would receive a flat rate, not a percentage of tour proceeds. If she backed out within the first two weeks, she forfeited 75% of her pay. She would receive no royalty payments from current or future album sales. Et cetera. She flipped to the final page and scrawled her signature on the line.

When she looked up, James was standing in front of her with a large and very impressive camera. “Let me just get a few pictures.”

Leah raised one hand to touch her face. “What? Now?”

“Now,” he said. “I’ve already drafted a blog post about you. We need to push this out through social media so the fans aren’t taken by surprise in San Francisco. If I do it right, they’ll actually be looking forward to seeing you.”

“Right,” Leah said. She tossed her hair over one shoulder and wished she had worn some earrings. “Okay.”

“Say cheese,” James said.

Someone knocked on the door.

“I’ll get it,” Rushani said, and hopped up.

Leah was facing the door, and so she was looking right at him when he came through the door. The guy,
her
guy. O’Connor.

“Okay, brooding and tormented works,” James said, and took the first picture.

* * *

O’Connor loitered by the bathroom, feeling awkward, while James conducted his impromptu photo shoot. He had been—okay. He had been hiding in his room, talking to one of his brothers on the phone. He hadn’t expected her to still be here. Leah. But there she was, and it would look too suspicious for him to turn around and leave again. So he waited.

Her brown hair was loose over her shoulders in glossy waves. She kept glancing at him. He tried to pretend he wasn’t watching her out of the corner of his eye.

Rushani came over after a minute. “Where’s Andrew?” she asked, in a careful undertone.

O’Connor shrugged. “I’m not his minder. Still asleep, I guess.”

She glanced at her watch. “That’s possible.” It was about 10:30, and Andrew hadn’t been awake before noon a single time that week unless someone dragged him out of bed. Rushani gave O’Connor a look he recognized all too well. “Would you go check on him? Maybe see if you can introduce him to Leah.”

Her scheming was completely transparent, but if he called her on it, she would deny everything. “We’ll see. It looks like James is keeping her pretty busy right now.”

“I’m almost done,” James said. “What’s going on? You need her for something?”

“Travel arrangements,” O’Connor said, the first thing that came to mind. “Departure tomorrow.”

“Okay,” James said. He looked down at the screen of his camera, scrolling through the pictures he had taken. “Sure. I guess I’m done. Thanks, Leah.”