Page 98 of With Stars in Her Eyes

More banging.

Okay.

Take a breath.

Maybe it was someone else. Maybe I was wrong. I dashed to the bathroom and pulled back the curtain just enough to get an even better look at the man standing on Courtney’s front stoop.

It wasdefinitelyhim.

Demetrius Adeyemi was here. In Kansas. Banging on the door of the woman who I’d spent the last two days—er—banging.

“Thea?” Sheets shifted in the bedroom. “Where’d you—”

I dashed back to the room and stood in the doorway, zipping up the jeans, a perilous endeavor since I hadn’t located myunderwear, but I somehow managed it without performing an accidental labiatomy. “Why’s a guy who just got nominated for like ten Grammy awards banging on your front door, Courtney?”

Courtney popped up off the pillow as if I had fired a starter pistol. “What?” Her short blond hair stuck up in every direction, green eyes rimmed with shock, while her voice was even more of a sexy rasp than usual. “No. No. No…”

“Seriously, why the fuck is a multiplatinum rock star yelling your name and saying to stop avoiding him?”

Courtney froze. “Um.”

Um?

That was it.Umwasn’t a pause before a sentence.Umwasn’t an interjection. Yet it was the only answer to my question Courtney offered.

Um.

“Um?” I pulled my tangled brown waves up and twisted so hard I nearly hurt my neck, taming them with a clip that had been carabinered in my belt loop. “I need you to do better thanum.”

When I first saw Demetrius Adeyemi out there, I thought maybe the mushrooms were still affecting my perception of reality. But what kind of self-respecting woman hallucinated her male folk-pop-star crush the morning after nearly two full days of burying her face inside the panties of the hottest woman she’d ever fucked?

I peeked outside again. Nope. He wasn’t a hallucination. He was, however, now pacing and checking his phone like he was waiting for something or someone. Courtney was as still as she had been in my studio yesterday when she had fallen silent there. How could she not tell me that he was coming, or that she knew him?

“Demetrius is an old friend.” Courtney’s expression was unreadable. Why was she just sitting there? “I didn’t know—”

“An old friend that comes knocking on your door at sevenA.M.on a Sunday.”

“I’ve… I’ve been dodging his calls?”

“Why would you dodge his calls? What if he wanted tocollaborate with you or something? How do you even know him?” I was still cold despite wearing a stolen sweatshirt. As I rubbed heat into my arms, a pout appeared on Courtney’s face like she had just realized I wasn’t naked anymore and didn’t like it one bit. That adorably sulky pout transformed into a smirk with the apparent recognition I was wearing one ofhersweatshirts. But my brain didn’t let me enjoy these micro-reactions. It leaped forward a few steps.

“Shouldn’t he be going back on tour right now? I’ve got a bone to pick with that dude anyway. I got tickets for that big festival in New Orleans back in March but then Kestrel left the… left the…” I turned and blinked at Courtney.

Understanding hit me like a meteor that causes a massive, cataclysmic prehistoric extinction event.

The timing.

The flyer in the book.

Courtney’s disastrous performance.

It wasn’t while first chair in some stuffy symphonic orchestra.

No. It couldn’t be…

“No.”

I saw Courtney Starling with new eyes. I imagined her with waist-length hair streaked with that shade of blue. I added sunglasses and a flowy, gauzy dress, and a black electric cello and a microphone. “No…”