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“It’s good you’re honoring the few wishes it sounds like you’ve allowed.”

“One of the reasons I love him is because he demanded so few things. He gave himself to me almost completely, only holding onto the things he absolutely needed in his life, like his job and his anonymity.”

“Matty says Davy helped keep him sane while I was gone. I’m glad the two of them have gotten closer. I’ll probably be going out of town more than I used to, when I go back to work.”

“What kind of hours do you work?”

“When I’m in town, it kind of depends on what’s going on, but mostly, as long as I’m there eight to ten hours, it’s cool. We have a monthly meeting, usually around three or four in the morning, that I have to be at. Mostly, if I’m gone three days with a team, I get three days off when we return, and my salary stays the same. If things are extra-busy and they need me in the office so I can’t have the time off, I get triple-pay for the days I’m out of town.”

“How much vacation time do you get?”

“It’s a high-stress job. I got two weeks the first year, and it jumped to a month the third year. I only have a few months until it goes to two months per year, but it won’t jump again for another five years.”

So, she’d have plenty of time to go on fun trips, another positive.

“When I’m not working, I play a lot,” I told her. “Trips, spas, parties, time chilling at the house. When I’m working, sometimes I only nap a few hours a day at odd times, and kind of binge work, coming up with new material and then practicing it until it’s just right. I found bandmates who work the same, and we frequently practice through the night, nap a few hours in the morning, and then get back to it around noon, maybe another short nap after we eat seven or eight hours later.”

“So, if I can be off when you have downtime? It works now because I have a few weeks off because…” She sighed. “I have a few weeks off. We can maybe talk about why that is later.”

“Davy managed a few long weekends, so he could come to me on tour.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem if I can plan them in advance. Special occasions, I can work twelve-plus hour days and bank some hours, but I need to put it on the books weeks in advance.”

“Tour dates are scheduled more than a year in advance, so that part isn’t a problem.”

There was a knock at the door followed by someone texting me, and I reached for my phone with a sigh. “I think our alone time is probably over.”

Sure enough, it was Mitch telling me they were loading the bus and hoping to pull out before noon if he could get everyone up and out. He even promised breakfast on the bus, which made me suddenly hungry.

“I need to make sure you’re back with your people before we pull out,” I told Micca. “You want to shower here, or go back to your room for that?”

She wanted to have fresh clothes to put on when she was clean, so I had one of the Drake Security guys walk her back to her room, and I texted Brain and told him to make sure Micca made it onto their van because she wasn’t riding back with me.

And I made sure I had her number so I could call and text her.

I made another decision while I showered, and I texted Davy with instructions when I got out of the shower. We were going to handle maintenance the moment I walked in the door, rather than wait.

Chapter 6

Davy

Master had given me four other lines to write, varying from five hundred lines to seven hundred. In all, I’d written three thousand five hundred lines, and had averaged around six hundred lines per day.

And he said that was it. We’d do maintenance when he got home, but there’d be no punishment. The lines were to help me remember. A training tool, and he wanted me to look at them as a positive experience, but I had a hard time with that last bit. I tried, butdamn, it got harder and harder, and having to change pens after every line was bloody genius because it meant I had to write entire lines out, rather than write the same word going down the page over and over, then the next word.

I tried writing every third line with one pen, then changing pens and writing every third line, but I screwed up the count and had to toss pages often enough, I eventually gave up and just wrote them the way he wanted me to — one line at a time, switching pens after every line.

Still, I probably wrote at least five thousand lines in all, if you count all the pages I had to toss because I fucked up too many times. I was allowed two words whited out per page. Any more and I had to toss the page and start over.

The spiral-bound notebook I’d bought had the good pages in it, and all the tossed pages I’d pulled from it were in a large manilla envelope, as instructed. That meant he’d see that I triedto cheat his system, and I didn’t know if I’d be in trouble or not for it.

And then there was the whole thing with Micca. I honestly wasn’t sure how I felt about that situation. She’d only been back a few weeks, and she wasdifferent. I hadn’t talked to Master about her being back because all the stuff with my grandfather had dominated our conversations. I have to write an email telling him about my day, surely I’d mentioned her in them?

I went back and looked, and breathed in relief that I’d told him every time I’d done something with her — at Matty’s house and going out to eat.

I kept an eye on Master’s location on my phone, and I went to the playroom when they got off the interstate and headed up the ridge.

All my lines were on the roll-around cart beside me, and I was standing naked in the center of the room, over the grate, holding onto the spreader bar over my head. Well, naked except for my wrist and ankle cuffs.