WILDER: A Rockstar Romance (7 page)

I couldn't drag them into my shit either.

A brief flashing thought whirled through my brain.
I could go home. If I only had a normal family, a supportive family, I could go home and be safe.

But I didn't have a normal family. The look on my mother's face if I came back, the triumph mixed with disgust... I could see it now. She would do everything in her power to make sure I could never leave again.

I had no place to go.

You do
, a small voice in the back of my head reminded me. I was shaking my head even as the reasons started piling in.

I would be safe. Keir wanted to save me. Tours had security, people would need clearances and background checks just to get near us. All I would need to do was say that Kevin was not allowed near me, and that would be that.

Rolling from town to town, city to city, there would be no way he could find me.

It was the only way.

I had to go on tour with Ruthless.

I had to spend the next month on a bus.

With Keir.

Chapter 13

Keir

The storm boiling up on the western horizon had nothing on the black thundercloud that was my brother's face.

Rane glowered, Pepper brooded, Balzac muttered… And even Twitch was uncharacteristically quiet as we waited inside the tour bus for the go-ahead to leave.

There's being protective, and then there's being annoying. I got that they didn't want Scarlett coming because they worried about me, but fuck that noise, I was a grown-ass man. This was getting irritating.

I needed more sleep, more coffee and to be left alone, and I wasn't getting any of the above on this tour bus. 

The car I had sent to pick her up rolled up next to us. I wouldn't have blamed her for wanting to wait until the very last minute, but Scarlett was right on time.

Rane mumbled something when he saw the driver open her door.

I'd had enough.

Angrily, I smacked my hand down onto my armrest. Twitch nearly fell out his chair. "Hey," I said, loud enough for everyone to hear. "I did this, okay? This is my fuck up. Me. Don't take it out on her, okay?"

No one answered me.

But no one objected either. At least, not yet. It was too early in the morning for brawling.

It would come soon enough.

Satisfied that I had made my point, I turned my attention back to Scarlett.

A part of me that I was ashamed still held so much sway wanted to shout out loud in triumph over seeing her again.

Even though she clearly wanted to kill something. Possibly me.

No, definitely me.

Her face was bare, clean of makeup, and the wind lifted her hair as she crossed the bus lot. Her pretty lips were twisted in an odd grimace, the kind of expression she wore when she didn't like something but was too afraid to speak up and defend herself. I had seen that expression before, had it etched into my brain, to be honest, but I never thought I would be the cause of it.

This is such a mistake.

From the window, I watched her pause, collect herself, then lift her head up high. Something old and unresolved squeezed at my heart.

When she boarded the bus, I smiled at her. She smiled back, just the barest little twitch of her lips, an involuntary jerk meant to be nice.

Then she settled into the frontmost seat up behind the driver and opened her notebook and began writing.

And that was that. Rocco, our driver, put the bus in drive, and we were on our way.

The fans would be disappointed, I'm sure, if they saw how mundane the beginning of Ruthless'
Desolation City
tour really was. They were probably imagining something wild, something more rock 'n' roll. Maybe me and Rane christening the start of the tour by licking champagne off some chick's tits.

That wasn’t going to happen.

Scarlett's perfect, untouchable tits aside, the only other ones available were Pepper's, and the thought of asking her to lift her shirt made my balls retreat in fear.

Maybe that was how we rolled back in the day, with a tit-christening party to kick things off, but we were pros by now.  This was our third tour, and the longest one we had ever committed to. We planned on spending this first month traversing the lower half of the United States, hitting several cities in quick succession along the way, before traveling up the East Coast to finish with a hometown show in Buffalo. It was going to be grueling—we knew that from experience too—and so this morning, on the start of the first leg of the
Desolation City
tour, what we wanted most was to catch a few hours of sleep before we played tonight.

I wondered what it would be like to play for Scarlett again.

Then I got angry at myself all over again for drunkenly offering this interview in the first place.

This wasn't how it was supposed to be with us, with her frostily ignoring me, and me regretting every second I spent screwing things up. We were supposed to be easy with each other.

We were supposed to love each other.

We did love each other.

Once upon a time, anyway.

I stood up from the captain's chair I had occupied while pretending to read and made my way back to the bunk I had claimed.

I laid down and closed my eyes. The memories were going to fucking come. It was better that I wasn't staring her down like some creeper when they took over.

I could still conjure up the smell in the air that bright June morning. It smelled like wet earth, honeysuckle and the overlying smell of a day that was going to get really hot before long.

I didn't know if I had ever noticed how the air smelled before I met her. That's what she did to me. She made everything more acute.

That bright, aromatic June morning was when I first noticed Scarlett Sawyer.

Of course, that's not to say that I had never seen her before. She was always around, a shadow on the edge of my peripheral vision, overlooked in the way only a teenager could overlook a child.

But that morning, I was newly eighteen and pissed the hell off. I stood in front of our cramped bathroom mirror, studying the bruises on my torso. They were fading into a sickly, mottled green, and were marks of shame. Three days ago, Joey Martorana and his gang of thugs had chased me down and jumped me after school over some smart-mouthed thing Rane had said about Joey's sister. When four-on-one proved too difficult to overcome, I ran. But I hadn't run fast enough. They caught me and inflicted the beating of a lifetime.

I was pissed. And when I got pissed at something, I started looking for solutions. Since the solution here wasn't my fists, I had to start thinking of something else to fix it.

Two days of serious thought gave me my answer. I could fix this, not just by getting stronger, but by getting faster too.

I needed to start running.

That June morning, I woke up early, padding softly past my father's bedroom, where his heavy snoring told me he'd worked a double last night. I stepped in all the right places, so as not to make a creak down our stairs, and opened the door to the basement.

As the oldest, Rane had pulled rank at thirteen and demanded the basement be given over to him. I didn't much mind because I was down here most days and nights anyway. Besides, he slept more deeply when he thought I couldn't bug him, and that made it easier for me to steal his shit.

Rane had tried running, tried out for the track team back in freshman year, but like all things, he soon grew tired of it when it didn't go exactly his way. When his natural talent stalled and he had to actually start training, he had shelved his beautiful running shoes.

And there they were, sitting right where he left them, the faint odor of dirty feet still hanging in the air. I wrinkled my nose, but grabbed them anyway, ignoring the thick coating of dust. My father had spent all his money that month just to get me another amp and lessons with the voice instructor at the music school. I wasn't about to ask him to buy me running shoes as well.

Besides, I intended to fix this on my own.

It was one of those mornings where heat hung in the air like a promise, but for now, the weak sun kept it at bay. I stretched a little, feeling the blood start to pump through my limbs, and felt that dogged determination that I always felt when I had a new project at hand.

Our house was the shittiest house on the block. There was no getting around this. My dad didn't have time to do maintenance, and neither Rane nor I could be bothered with anything more than just making sure the crap didn't get piled all the way to the rafters. But the houses on the rest of the block, those were actually pretty. Each one of them tried to outdo each other, whether by their own hand or, more often, with professional landscapers hired to cart away anything that died and had the nerve to be unsightly.

The prettiest house on the block belonged to the Sawyers next door.

In our neighborhood, filled with the disease of one-upmanship, not calling attention to yourself drew the most attention. Scarlett moved like she didn't want to be seen, along the edges of your sight, never fully stepping into your line of vision where you could actually confront her head on. That had been my experience of her.

Until that morning, as I stretched in our broken-up driveway and looked across our pitted, brown lawn to see her dead on.

She was standing on her porch, stretching, dressed in running shorts that rode just a little too high on her thighs. Those thighs, because that's where my horny teenaged eye went immediately, were long and coltish, like a gazelle's, and she moved like one as she stretched, light and easy, her talent for not calling attention to herself making her movements short, controlled and fucking beautiful.

I stopped in my stretching and smiled appreciatively, taking in her height, tall for a girl, her tits, small but perfectly round, and especially the flatness of her sixteen-year-old belly and the thick rope of honey blonde hair that swung in a long ponytail as she moved.

She looked up from bending at the waist. I smiled, then I waved.

She drew herself up and tossed that rope of hair behind her shoulder. And then she began to run.

Scarlett Sawyer ran like a gazelle, a cheetah. She moved with an easy feline grace, her feet barely touching the ground as she rapidly put distance between the two of us.

I had a new goal, a new project to work on.

I was going to catch her.

My first day out as a runner kicked my ass. I was man enough to admit it. She lapped me, and then some, and when I finally arrived back on our block, red-faced and wheezing, she was standing in her drive with her hands on her hips.

But she smiled at me, and that's what counted. That's when it all started.

I made it a point to go out the same time the next day. And the next. We started running together. Well, not together. Not at first.

First, I had to catch her.

That's
how it started with Scarlett. With the literal thrill of the chase.

I opened my eyes, and for some reason, I was smiling.

I chased her down back then. She always ran faster than me, until I fixed that. I worked my ass off until I could catch up with her, get to know her, bring her around again.

Wasn't this just more of the same?

Chapter 14

Scarlett

The biggest, loudest band in rock 'n' roll is asleep, rocking gently inside the metal spaceship that carries them swiftly down the highway.

Inside this great metal beast, all is quiet, but I know it won't be for long. The Wilder brothers like their music like they like their life—loud and chaotic. I know this firsthand, having grown up next door to the chaos.

I flipped my notebook shut and stared out of the window. The rain that had been threatening all morning was finally falling, beading up in a light gray mist that obscured the view of the passing highways.

Ruthless had spent the last week playing a series of dates in California. We were now headed out east on I-10, our early morning start calculated down to the precise second to land us in Phoenix in time for the sound check. Everyone had fallen asleep almost immediately, so in tune were they with touring. But I couldn't help but feel the snub. They were back there, snug inside the lushly appointed bunks that lined the back of the bus, and I was up here writing about them. 

I knew them all, but no one had bothered to even say hi.

The first time I became aware of Keir Wilder, it was not from sight.

It was from sound.

I leaned back again, trying to put my thoughts into words.
I grew up with music that had no consequence. It wasn't expressly forbidden, more like something we just didn't "do." Music was background noise in the grocery store and the pop station piped in at my father's dental practice. I didn't know that music could make me feel until the start of the afternoon run I always tried to squeeze in before dinner and homework took me past the Wilder garage at the precise moment the fledgling band called Ruthless started playing.

I had seen Keir before, jogging through the neighborhood. Sometimes he caught up with me and we jogged together.  I thought he was hot in a dangerous sort of way, and also thought he was way too old for me.

I had seen him before, yes. But that was the first day I heard him.

I felt the vibrations reverberate through my chest. The soles of my feet tingled.

And then Keir started to sing. A bluesman's wail, a honeyed scream. Ragged and raw and full of all the emotions I had never been allowed to feel. I stopped short on the sidewalk, my run forgotten as I felt the power of music for the very first time.

I didn't know how long I stood there, but by the time Keir finished his song, I was a different girl. The kind of girl who nodded when he beckoned me into that dirty garage.

I set my pen down again. The next part was too painful to share. But the words were flowing too fast to stem the tide. I picked it back up again and turned to a blank page in my notebook.

Walking into his house after practice felt like I was breaking some taboo. "Want something to eat?" he asked casually.

"It's not dinner time yet," I pointed out.

He looked over his shoulder. "What does that matter?"

"Well, it's not time to eat."

He let out a small laugh. "I literally just heard your stomach growl," he said.

I felt flush on my cheek. How did I explain that hunger didn't matter? Meals were at set times, with food my mother chose. Just doing this? Just walking in and taking food from the unlocked fridge? It was making me feel distinctly uneasy.

"Scarlett," Keir said gently. "What do you want to eat?"

I tried to quell my rising panic. "Do you have a piece of fruit?" I asked, my voice high and tight.

He chuckled as he opened the fridge. "Maybe? Not really sure. I think we’re going to head up to the grocery store pretty soon."

"You guys do your own grocery shopping?"

"Yeah." He slammed the fridge shut with a bang that made me jump. But no parental figure jumped out of the woodwork to yell at him for making too much noise. "My dad works a lot. He needs us to help him out."

He said it so casually. They were a team, I realized. His dad, his brother and him. Looking out for each other. And his father...his father trusted him to do the right thing when he went to the grocery store. He didn't need to be watching over his shoulder to make sure that he bought the right kind of milk, the right kind of bread. And I had a feeling that if he bought the wrong kind, there wouldn't be a three-hour screaming lecture to follow.

That night, my mother came into my room as I was scrambling to finish the homework I neglected that long, perfect afternoon.

I froze as she entered.

My mother allowed me my runs, but I was certain she'd be able to tell that I had skipped today's workout in favor of laughing in Keir's kitchen like I didn't have a care in the world. I was certain that she'd be able to somehow smell him on me, the traitorous mix of man and desire.

She stood in the center of my room, her eyes going everywhere. I waited, not saying anything, trying to see the room through her eyes. What had I missed? A speck of dust, a book out of place on my shelf? My bed was made, my windows were free of fingerprints, infractions that had earned me her ire in the past.  I looked harder, wondering what it was that she saw, wondering why she looked so livid. From what I could tell, there was nothing that I had missed.

But there was always something I had missed.

"Do you remember what today was?" she asked me. 

My whole body went on red alert. That's what I had missed. I had forgotten about her presentation to the library board. She was expecting me to ask about it at dinner, but I was still lost in my daydreams of Keir.

"How did it go?" I asked brightly, pasting a wide smile across my face.

But she wasn't fooled. "You forgot, didn't you?" she said. Her nostrils flared white.

"Oh no, no, of course I didn't, Mom. I'm so proud of you. I'm sure you did really well." I hoped that was enough.

She smoothed her hair. "Well, I was clearly the right choice for the coordinator position," she said.

I nodded enthusiastically. "Well, that's always been clear. You're way better than Beverly Wilshire."

Her eyebrows knitted together. Instantly, I realized I had said something wrong. I backtracked quickly through my head—what had I said? Was it about Beverly? Was it about her position, even though it was only as a volunteer? Where had I made the mistake?

"You are an awfully ungrateful little shit. I did not raise you to speak that way about your elders. Beverly Wilshire is very good at her job."

"Of course, of course. I'm really sorry, Mom."

"I raised you better than that."

"You did." I bit my lip. "That was wrong of me. I'm sorry."

She shook her head. "I should've known better than to hope that you would remember. You're so selfish, Scarlett."

She slipped from the room, and I breathed a sigh of relief in spite of her harsh words. Perhaps that would be all, just a cutting remark. Those I could handle.

Besides, some of them were true. I was selfish. Instead of staying home with my family, who had given me everything, I started spending every afternoon in the Wilders' garage. While my mother volunteered and my father managed his dental practice, I steeped myself in rock 'n' roll rebellion. I was there, watching, as they assembled the band. And I was there at their first shows around Buffalo, sneaking out of the house so I could be there, cheering them on wildly as their number one fan. I was there watching as Keir snaked his way under the microphone in those first few shows, stretching upwards like he was reaching out for a kiss. I was there, flushed and breathless watching him, desire boiling off my skin like a vapor.

The music of Ruthless was the soundtrack to my awakening. Keir and his songs made me love myself for the first time in my life, and the feeling of blossoming confidence was opiate in my system.

Of course, by that time, I had fallen madly in love with Keir Wilder.

Music and love boiled through my veins in equal measure, leaving me frustrated and restless, not knowing what the hell to do with myself. Suddenly, not just the house, the block, but the entire city of Buffalo was too small to contain me. I needed to get out.

Keir was my ticket out.

I set my pen back down again, appalled at what I had just written. This was too raw, too personal to allow it to be splashed all over the pages of
Auteur
.

I thought for a moment, then scratched everything out and started over again.