Chapter Four
Lennon
Before we head overseas, the label throws us a huge party. They rent out a club in Manhattan, inviting all kinds of industry people and all of our friends. It’s a good party, even if I’m not really in the mood for it. They get some celebrity chef to cater, and there’s an excellent bar set up. They clearly spared no expense.
My first order of business after arriving is to find a quiet spot, preferably near an exit, to relax and enjoy my beer in peace. I get my wish—for approximately three minutes. That’s how long it takes for Reed to find me.
“How ya doing, man?”
I close my eyes briefly before turning to my older brother, forcing some semblance of a smile onto my face. It’s a struggle. I never realized how annoying four little words could be. Then again, I never thought I would hear those words so many damn times. Every day. From every brother. Not to mention my dad. And guys from the label. And Paige and Sam and Levi and, and, and…
“Great,” I say. “How are you, Reed?”
“Fine, fine.” He looks out over the room. “Pretty good crowd.”
I nod. “Looks like the label’s going all out.”
“Dad says they’re really pleased with the sales volume so far. The album’s been holding pretty steady into the fall.”
He doesn’t have to fill in the blanks for me to know that they’re relieved by that. My little shenanigans this summer meant cutting the US tour early, not to mention starting Europe late. Though no one in the family would ever admit it, I was pretty sure the label wasn’t the only ones to wonder if the revised schedule might slow down our sales. On the other hand, entertainment media likes nothing better than a little speculation. And they devoted plenty of ink and airtime to wondering what in the hell we weren’t telling them about me after my motorcycle accident.
“Len?” Reed asks, and I shake my head, realizing that I was zoning out. I need to watch that. It’s bad enough they’re constantly asking me how I feel—it will only get worse if I start showing obvious signs of brooding.
“I’m fine,” I say, my voice a little sharp. He watches my face long enough to make me want to scream. “Reed.”
“Okay,” he says, but I know he doesn’t believe me.
“Where’s Paige?”
“Around somewhere. She was talking to Karen and Daisy the last time I saw her.”
“Won’t she be looking for you?” Translation: please walk away.
“Nah. Daisy had an ultrasound today. None of them have been able to shut up about it for hours.”
“What about Dad? Have you seen him?”
“You trying to get rid of me, Len?” He gives me a quick grin.
“Yes. Is it working?”
He laughs, slapping my back. “Not even close.”
To my great relief, I catch sight of Daisy and Paige heading our way across the room. Paige is talking a mile a minute while Daisy nods. “Looks like she can’t get a word in,” I say.
Reed sighs. “I know the feeling.”
But as his girlfriend approaches, his smile grows. He might tease her about her motormouth as much as the rest of us, but it couldn’t be any more obvious that Reed is every bit as crazy about her as he was from the start. I feel a pang of something like loneliness somewhere deep in my chest and look away.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he says as she sidles up next to him, wrapping an arm around his waist.
“Hi, baby,” Paige says in that cheery way of hers. “Hey, Len. How’s it going?”
I should really start keeping track, I think. We have to be nearing some kind of record for number of times someone can be asked a variation of that question.
“Fine, Paige. Just like I was when I saw you in the limo earlier.”
Daisy offers me a sympathetic smile. “Len, I want to introduce you to someone.” She slips an arm through mine. “If Reed can spare you for a second.”
“Oh, he can,” I say quickly. Daisy smirks a little and leads me away. “Who do you want me to meet?”
“No one. I just wanted to get you away for a minute. You looked like you were about to punch your brother.”
I blow out a breath, trying to ease the tension in my shoulders. “It’s like having a babysitter following me around all the time.” She opens her mouth, and I cut her off. “Don’t say they’re just worried about me. I know, okay?”
“Wasn’t going to say that,” she says mildly.
I blow out another breath. “Sorry, Daisy. I don’t mean to snap.”
She pats my arm. “God, Len. You don’t have to apologize to me.” We walk around the perimeter of the room, and I try to let myself relax. Daisy is about the only person in my life right now who might understand how I feel. I offer up a small prayer of thanks that my little brother got his head out of his ass long enough to keep her around.
“They should lay off a little after tonight,” she says. “I talked to Daltrey about it. He said he was going to talk to the other guys.”
“Thanks, Dais.” I doubt it will actually pay off. It’s way too much to hope for that my brothers will stop driving me crazy. But I do appreciate the effort.
“I hear you had an ultrasound today.” I look down at her. “Everything going okay?”
“Baby looks totally healthy.” A little look of satisfaction comes across her face. It’s getting familiar, that look. I see it on her and Daltrey’s faces all the time. Like they couldn’t possibly be happier about the direction their lives have taken. A part of me feels a little jealous about that look, about that certainty that life is good and happening the way it’s supposed to. But mostly I’m happy for them. No one deserves that kind of happiness like Daisy does.
“Are you going to spill the beans?” I ask. “Can I look forward to a niece or a nephew?”
She laughs. “I’m not finding out. I want it to be a surprise.” She grins. “Which is killing your brother, let me tell you.”
“Then by all means, keep it a secret. Anything that tortures Daltrey is a damn good idea.”
She tilts her head a little so it’s resting on my shoulder. “I’m so excited, Len. We’re all going to have so much fun with this baby. Can you even imagine?”
I try to, I really do. My brothers and Daisy, Paige, Sam, maybe Levi and Karen, all hanging out in Tennessee or on a tour bus somewhere with a kid. It’s hard to picture it, though, even with the evidence of her pregnancy becoming clear in her midsection. Then again, it’s hard to picture anything beyond the next few weeks. When I try to see my life after this tour, everything seems hazy, blurred. Whatever the future holds, it’s not showing itself to me.
I wonder if that should scare me.
“Oh, look,” Daisy says, her eyes on something across the room. “I think your opener is here. That guy Daltrey is talking to has to be in a band. Normal people don’t just go walking around with hair like that.”
“Are you saying people in bands aren’t normal?”
She merely rolls her eyes before redirecting her attention to Dylan, Intrigue’s keyboardist, who, admittedly, is rocking a particularly bright shade of blue streaks in his spikey hair. “I’ve never heard of these guys, but Dalt said they were really good?”
“They’re awesome.” I scan the room to see if the rest of Intrigue has joined the party as well.
“Are there really two girls in the band?” she asks. “I’m totally in favor of that. We need a little more estrogen backstage.”
“Hey, your best friend is coming with us. And Karen and Sam are meeting up with us in Paris. It’s starting to feel like girls are completely taking over—”
I don’t remember how I was going to finish the sentence. I don’t even remember what we were talking about. Every bit of space in my brain is completely occupied by the sight across the room.
Haylee. Haylee in a dark purple leather mini dress, her long black hair pulled into a messy pile on top of her head. The dress is strapless, showing off miles of bare ivory skin, vivid tattoos stretching across her right shoulder and halfway down her arm. She’s standing with her bassist—James, I think—by the bar, laughing at something he says, and I’m pretty sure there’s no air left in the room.
“Lennon?” Daisy asks, sounding worried. Belatedly I realize she’s tugging on my arm. “Len?”
I shake my head, trying to clear it.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” But my voice is shaky, and it still feels hard to breathe. Holy shit.
“Len—oh.”
I finally manage to tear my eyes away from Haylee long enough to look back at Daisy. Her gaze has followed mine to the bar, and her eyes are wide.
“Who’s that?”
“That’s, uh, Haylee Hunt. The singer. For Intrigue. The opener.”
She looks up at me as I ramble on, and I know that she can see everything on my face. To my very great relief, she doesn’t smirk, though her eyes do seem to flash. “Want to go say hi?”
Before I can answer, she’s half dragging me across the room. I’m still trying to catch my breath, still trying to make my brain work. I don’t understand what’s happening to me, why the sight of her has me so worked up. It’s not like I’ve never seen her before. I’ve been following Intrigue ever since we saw them play back in Houston. Hell, it was my idea for them to open for us in Europe. It wasn’t like it was a secret that she was gorgeous. If I needed any reminder of that, I got it a few weeks ago when I saw her in the rehearsal space. I was even more sure of it when I heard her sing.
But none of that prepared me for seeing her now, and I have no idea why she seems so different. The clothes are part of it—she’d been dressed in jeans, Doc Martens, and an unbuttoned faded flannel shirt over a tank top that day at the rehearsal space. About as far from the purple leather dress in front of me as possible. There’s no denying the fact that her body is insane in a dress like that. But it’s not her body that has my palms sweating and my chest feeling tight.
It’s her face, I realize. She’s laughing, and it somehow transforms her. That thing that I saw in her eyes at the rehearsal space, that indefinable but so familiar, broken down something that I recognized immediately—it’s gone now. She’s laughing with her friend, her eyes bright, face relaxed, whatever secret worry that haunted her forgotten for a moment.
She’s so beautiful.
“Wait,” I tell Daisy, pulling on her hand as I stop dead in my tracks. “Daisy, wait.”
She turns to face me, confused. “What?”
“I… I can’t do this.”
“You can’t go say hi?” She’s smiling, her tone light. She has no idea how close to freaking out I am.
“No.”
The smile immediately vanishes. “Lennon?”
“I just… I just need…” I’m having trouble breathing again, for entirely different reasons this time, and Daisy’s eyes go wide.
“What’s wrong?”
I don’t answer. I don’t know what to say. How can I explain to her that the idea of standing so close to something so beautiful makes me sick to my stomach? She’ll think I’m crazy. I am crazy.
“I’m getting Reed,” she says, pulling away.
“No.” The word is loud enough to cause several heads to turn in our direction. “I just… I’m going to go outside.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Please don’t.” The hurt and worry in her eyes sends a stab of guilt through me, but I’m turning away from her before I can even think of apologizing. I just want to get some air, try to get ahold of myself. Try to swallow the damn lump that’s lodged itself in my throat.
“Lennon!”
I ignore her and push through the crowd. Cash catches my eye from across the room, and I curse under my breath. He’ll follow me. Or Daisy will. Deal with them later, I tell myself. Just get out of this room.
But then Levi is standing in front of me, and I really think I might start screaming. He takes one look at my face and grabs my arm, pulling me through the crowd. We’re probably causing a scene, but I don’t even care. When we reach the lobby, I move to the doors, but Levi tugs on my elbow. “There’s press outside.” Instead he pulls me in the opposite direction to a door marked Staff. He leads me through without knocking, ignoring the stares of the club employees we pass. Down a long hallway, through another set of doors, and we’re finally outside.
It’s just an alley, and a pretty grimy one at that, but the fresh air is exactly what I needed, and I take huge, gulping breaths. Levi stands a few feet away, watching me, silent.
“Sorry,” I finally mumble. “I don’t, uh, know what that was.”
“It’s okay.” He looks away, rubs his face. “You feel better?”
“Yeah. A lot. Uh… thank you.”
Levi shakes his head. “Nothing to thank me for. You… want to talk about it?”
“No. Really, I’m fine.”
He stares at me for a minute, clearly trying to decide if he should believe me. “Cash saw you,” he finally says.
“Yeah. Daisy too.”
“Want me to go in and head them off?”
I’m so relieved I could hug him. The only thing I want in that moment is to be left alone. “Thank you.”
He opens the door but pauses before walking through, turning back to me. “It’s not too late to call this off.”
“Levi—”
“I’m just saying, man. It’s never going to be too late, okay?”
“I don’t want to call it off.”
He nods, but I can tell he’s not convinced. Thankfully he doesn’t push it. “You’re not going to take off, are you?”
“I’m going to sit right here in this shitty little alley like a good boy, Levi.”
He ignores my sarcastic tone. “I’ll see you in a while.”
Once he’s gone, I grab a nearby milk crate, turn it over, and collapse onto it, trying to get myself under better control.
I’ve had a lot of weird reactions to shit over the years, but this one has to take the cake. Never before has the sight of a pretty girl sent me into freak-out mode.
I rub my forehead, wondering if I should call my shrink. That would be Daisy’s advice if I told her what set me off. I could practically hear her voice, the way it sounded when she was scared but trying to stay calm. “Dr. Jacobs can talk you through it,” she would say. I close my eyes, hating the idea of some therapist knowing my brain better than me.
“Then talk yourself through it,” I mutter aloud. What the hell just happened? I was looking at Haylee and thinking how gorgeous she was. Thinking how happy she looked and how different it was from the way I saw her at our meeting. And that made me feel…
Unworthy. Broken.
I draw in a ragged breath, knowing I hit it on the head. The idea of talking to her freaked me out because I knew I didn’t deserve to talk to someone like her. I would just fuck it up, the way I fucked up everything else. Seeing her in LA I thought, maybe, that we had some things in common. Thought she might be someone who could understand some of the sadness that seemed to plague me. But to see her so happy… I would just bring her down. I bring everything down.
I can’t help her either. The errant thought startles me, making me sit up straight. Where did that come from? I can’t help her… either? Who else hadn’t I helped?
There’s an itchy feeling in my chest that I don’t like, and my skin is warm. I close my eyes again, taking deep breaths. There’s a memory at the edge of my consciousness, trying to break through, and it scares me. I’ve had this struggle before, and it always freaks me out, this feeling that my brain is trying to remember something I would much rather leave forgotten.
“Oh,” a soft voice says, making me jump. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”
I spin on the milk crate to see Haylee standing there in the doorway, the light from the hallway beyond throwing her face into shadow. I feel a momentary panic—what if being close to her has me freaking out again? I don’t want to experience that in front of her.
“I’ll just go back in,” she says, hesitant, and I realize I’ve been staring at her for a good twenty seconds without responding.
“No, it’s okay,” I say even though I’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea. “Do you want to… sit?”
She doesn’t answer for a minute. “You don’t mind?”
“Not at all.” I grab another milk crate and turn it over a few feet from me.
“Thanks,” she says, sounding relieved as she sits. “I just needed to get out of there for a minute.”
“I know the feeling.”
I realize that she’s added a bulky leather jacket over her dress to combat the cool air. The sleeves trail down over her wrists, way too big for her. It’s not her jacket, I think. One of her bandmates’? A sudden rush of jealousy has me shaking my head. You’re crazy, Lennon.
“So, who are you running away from?” she asks.
You, actually. “My brothers. They get a little… pushy.”
Haylee pushes some loose hair out of her eyes. “I know the feeling.”
“You have brothers?”
She shakes her head. “No. But pushy bandmates is something I can relate to.”
We sit in silence for a moment. “Is that why you needed to get out of there?” I ask. “Bandmates bugging you?”
She shakes her head but doesn’t answer. It’s dark in the alleyway, but I somehow get the feeling that if I were able to see her face better she would look a lot more like the girl I saw in the rehearsal space than the one whose beauty just took my breath away.
She clears her throat. “Crowds sometimes are… hard for me.”
“Me too.”
She snorts. “We picked a damn good career to go into then, huh?”
I find myself chuckling, a reaction I never would have imagined myself capable of only a few moments ago. Haylee laughs too, and the sound makes my breath catch.
“Your brothers don’t seem to mind the crowd.”
“Are you kidding me? My brothers are attention whores. They freaking love the crowd. Any crowd.”
She laughs again, and I’m reminded of the feeling I got when we got nominated for our first Grammy award.
“So you’re the quiet brother?” she asks, her voice playful.
“Is it that obvious?”
“There’s always a quiet brother,” she says.
“Then I guess that would be me.”
“That’s good to know. Before the tour starts.”
“So you can avoid me and my maudlin ways?”
My eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and I can see that she’s smiling. “On the contrary. I like quiet.”
“Me too.”
And we sit there in the quiet for a long time, a few feet away from each other, the alley dark around us. A lot of people would be uncomfortable, just sitting there with a near stranger without talking. But Haylee doesn’t seem to mind. As for me, I’m feeling better than I have all night. There’s something comforting about it. Sitting in the dark without having to say a word. Without the pressure to fill the silence.
“Why didn’t I meet you before?” she finally asks. “Back in Houston. I only remember Reed and Cash.”
“We did meet. But I was by myself. And I didn’t tell you who I was.”
She’s watching me, squinting at my face like she’s trying to remember. “Why not?”
I shrug. “You were standing on your own, drinking a beer. And you’d just finished your set. I didn’t want to bug you. Sometimes… people get a little weird when they realize who we are. Who my brothers are, at least. Lots of times they don’t recognize me and…” I realize that I’m babbling. “Anyhow. I told you that you played a good set, and you thanked me. Not very memorable.”
She’s still watching me. “I wish I had known.”
I shrug. “No big deal.”
She makes a funny noise in the back of her throat. “Well, the only thing I do remember is Cash. I was pretty wasted, to be honest. But I remember Cash—”
“He hit on you.” It’s not a question. I already know the answer. It was before Sam. Of course he hit on her.
“Yeah.”
“And that’s all you remembered about us.” I have a sudden memory of her face at the rehearsal space, how pissed she looked when she started that last song. I’d gotten the feeling then that she didn’t think very much of us. “He’s gotten a lot better,” I assure her.
“He was fine.”
I sigh. “Knowing how Cash was, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t.”
“Believe me, I’ve seen much worse.” Her voice has suddenly gone hard.
“How much worse are we talking?” I blurt out, the thought of some guy pushing beyond Cash’s brand of creepy flirting making my stomach sink.
“It’s no big deal.” But it’s obvious she’s lying. Whatever she’s referring to, it most certainly was a big deal to her.
She had some kind of problem with security. The thought comes from nowhere, the recollection as hazy as it is sudden. I scan my memory, trying to come up with the details, but little surfaces. I definitely remember people from the label mentioning her name a few years back, some kind of fan situation. They’d gotten really concerned about security. A stalker? I think it happened shortly after we met her in Houston, around the time Daisy and Daltrey were going through all of their drama. I would have been distracted…
“You can just ask me,” she snaps, and my eyes go to her face. Even in the dark I can see her scowl. She looks mad. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly. And I am. I know what it feels like to have people wondering about you, trying to piece together all the details of some sordid little scandal in your life. “What you said, about seeing worse, it made me remember that I heard something about you, but I can’t really…” From the look on her face, I’m not doing a very good job appeasing her. “I’m sorry,” I say again, feeling lame.
“You really don’t know?” she asks, her tone disbelieving.
I shrug. “I try to ignore most of those industry rumors. And if I’m remembering the timing right, one of my brothers was having his own share of drama at the time…”
She narrows her eyes, searching my face, and I get the sense she’s trying to decide whether to believe me. “It’s a shame you didn’t pay attention.” Her voice is so bitter it actually sends a chill down my spine. “It was a great story. Lots of drama and excitement—everyone was talking about it, you know. Up-and-coming singer gets held at gunpoint by a crazy stalker.” I wince—the wrong move, apparently. Her eyes narrow further. “That’s not even the best part. Because after it was over, I completely lost my shit. And there’s nothing our business loves to gossip about more than a girl who can’t deal, right?”
“Haylee—”
She stands. “On second thought, maybe air wasn’t such a good idea.” She’s at the door before I can even move, pausing to look back at me. She’s bathed in neon light now, her expression clear for the first time since she came outside. She may as well be wearing a mask, her features are so tight, her eyes so empty. “Don’t worry, you can always ask your contacts at the label for all the juicy details.”
Then she’s gone, leaving me alone in the dark, wondering how I managed to screw that up so badly.