Page 12 of Dedicated
“You didn’t give any of them your number. Color me impressed.” I watched the girls as they grabbed some plates and piled fruit on them.
He shrugged lightly, stuffing the marker in his back jeans pocket. “Meh.”
“We should hang out tonight,” I said. “Like we used to. We could send Mars out for food.”
His mouth curled in a smile, and I could see him warming to the idea. Maybe having this show under our belts and some solid hangout time would get us out of our rut. I’d definitely rather go into our songwriting retreat on friendlier terms than what we’d been like lately.
“Yeah, that’d be good. Wings?”
“Garlic, teriyaki, honey-glazed?”
He slitted his eyes at me like I’d asked a trick question. “Just straight up hot wings, no need to get fancy.”
I grinned. “Agreed.”
Speaking of the devil, Mars lumbered in and beelined for us, snatching up a bottle of water on his way that looked like a test tube in his huge hand. Another group of fans lingering nearby divided in half to get out of his way. He had a fierce frown painted on his face, but he usually did.
“That reporter’s here, waiting. He’s an arrogant little shit.”
I blinked at Les, and he gave me a wide-eyedno cluelook in return.
“What reporter?”
“Dunno,” Mars said unhelpfully. “Says he cleared it with Levi. Asked who was going first.”
I frowned. Les and I usually did interviews together, but separately wasn’t unheard of. I pulled my phone from my pocket and thumbed through my texts until I discovered one from our publicist, Levi, that had come through while we were onstage:Last minute, sorry. Adam Slade is in town. Wants to do interview for String and Strum. Do it. Profile piece on each of you. Should be good pub.
“We doing it?” Les eyed me skeptically as he cracked a beer.
“Guess so. I can go first. Good behavior,” I warned Les, who grinned like a maniac, instilling absolutely no confidence in me.
“No worries. I’ll dazzle him.”
I should’ve known better than to trust that grin. Les was really good at charming people when he wanted to. Phenomenal, actually. A five-minute conversation with him and he could have people eating out of his palm. And it wasn’t like he was pretending or being fake. If he was talking to you, ninety percent of the time he was interested and was giving you untempered, charming Les, because the rest of the time he wouldn’t even bother, and that was the problem; he was fickle. We once did a disaster of an interview with a guitar magazine that I had to limp us both through. Les was hungover, firstly, but the biggest issue was that he decided he didn’t like the writer.“He’s a closet homophobe. I’ve read his articles,”he’d grumbled. I’d read his articles, too. I always did before we did an interview and I didn’t see it. But Les just shut down. It was right after we’d cut what was to be our slump album, and it certainly didn’t help things that he sat through the entire interview giving one-word answers and looking sulkily out the window the entire time. I think he’d even oinked at one point when the reporter asked him a question.
Chapter 10
An hour and a half later, after I’d finished my interview, Mars and I returned so weighted down with sacks of wings, we could’ve opened our own buffet. Mars split off for the venue, where the roadies were breaking down our equipment. I headed for the tour bus. We’d be driving straight to Indianapolis so we could do a publicity gig pre-show early tomorrow.
The interior was quiet as I elbowed the door open and stepped inside. I’d gotten way too used to our bus. Every time we finished a tour and I returned to my own home, I inevitably walked through it in wonder at having so much space after sleeping in a bunk or hotel room for so many months. I still had rooms that had nothing in them.
I shut the door behind me and could tell by the tinge in the air that Les was there. I didn’t know if it was aftershave, actual cologne, hair product, or deodorant, and I’d never asked, but Les had a distinctive scent that reminded me of a forest at night: dark and green, a little spice, a little wood, a little earth. I figured he was in the back of the bus in the lounge, the one area capable of being fully closed off besides the bathroom. We had a few gaming consoles, a couple of guitars, and God knew what else in there. Mars always made sure it was stocked for us. I couldn’t even remember what we’d put in the original rider, except that Les got denied fresh cut tulips every day—which he didn’t even want; he was just seeing how far he could push it. But he did get his stupid request for a constantly replenished cornucopia of green and purple Skittles.“Best flavor combo ever, man,”he’d said. Les’s extravagance had risen in direct proportion to the number of albums we sold, but he was still nothing like some other bands we knew, and it was one of the things I really liked about him. He was hedonistic to a fault, but also delighted by the smallest things. Like the perfect Skittles combo and high-end hotel soap.
A groan filtered out from under the door leading into the lounge as I set the bags down on the built-in dining table. Plastic crackled, Styrofoam squeaked, and like a bassline underneath came another groan, louder this time. Les. No doubt about it. I’d spent enough time with him to distinguish even the incoherent sounds.
This wasn’t Les’s miserable ate-too-much, fucked-too-much, drank-too-much, took-too-much groan. Heat trickled upward over my neck, spreading across my cheeks. He couldn’t forgo a lay for one fucking night. I shook my head in disbelief, finished setting out the boxes of wings, and strolled to the back of the bus, sliding my hands in my pockets.
When I nudged the door with the toe of my boot, it whisked open with a sound like a sigh.
Adam Slade had sat across from me in this room earlier, all smiles and polite laughter, acting the consummate professional as he asked me his questions. Now he was on his knees, the back of his gray T-shirt rucked up over his hips, the waistband of his jeans loose and sagging to reveal the shadowed furrow of his ass as his head bobbed up and down in Les’s lap. Les’s head was thrown back in slack-jawed ecstasy, his fingers rippling rhythmically through strands of Adam’s hair. He was shirtless, bare chest rising and falling in panted breaths, pecs coated with thin shafts of light that slipped through the blinds on the windows and illuminated the tattoos inked there.
They were both in their own world of arousal and pleasure, and part of me was in awe, wondering how Les had pulled this off. The other part of me was boiling over. It took a minute, maybe the shift of my shadow against the backs of Les’s eyelids alerting him enough to register me. Adam stopped and twisted around to gape at me, his mouth slick and swollen. The same mouth that asked me earlier if I found temptation on the road to be a threat to my relationship. I hadn’t answered. I never answered those kinds of questions.
I felt this strange disconnect at seeing him down on his knees in front of my bandmate. Les tilted his head, a dreamy distance in the gaze he fixed on me. “’Sup, Porter?” I didn’t know if he was slurring from lust or from alcohol, but it didn’t matter. His hand kept on riffling through Adam’s hair, lazily affectionate. Almost possessive.
I tried to logically dissect the sensation roiling inside me and twisting around in my gut, sending hot tendrils snaking up my spine and unfurling over my shoulders. It was anger and it wasn’t. It was disappointment and it wasn’t. It was jealousy and it wasn’t. For every thing I thought it might be, it was also the opposite. And only Les was capable of making me feel that kind of paradox.
“We’re heading out in fifteen minutes.” I backed out of the doorway and shut the door behind me, leaving the wings on the table and not caring whether they got cold or not. Then I slammed out of the bus and headed back into the venue with Mars and the roadies.