CHAPTER 7
Evan
A cupboard opening, the rattle of a cup against granite counters, and I come slowly awake. I assume we’re in Atlanta at the venue, as the bus is quiet and at a standstill. Morning sunlight is filtering through the blinds on the bus window above me. I roll from my back to my side, craning my neck so I can verify that Red is indeed not in the driver’s seat, before I look into the kitchen.
Emma’s standing at the counter, making a cup of coffee in the Keurig. She’s already dressed for the day, her hair sleek, shiny, and without a stray strand to be seen. She’s wearing what I’ve come to dub as her “mom wear” of perfectly pressed Bermuda shorts and a prim little blouse with lace around the collar. It’s buttoned to her throat. I suppose it was too much to hope she might come out in a see-through negligee with nipples pushing outward and maybe a tiny silk thong underneath that would show her bare ass through the material.
I have to stifle a groan, particularly as I realize I’ve got morning wood—getting imminently woodier as I think about Emma in a negligee—pressing against the loose cotton material of my sweatpants. I rearrange the blanket over me, hoping to make the “tent” less obvious before clearing my throat and saying, “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” she answers in a somewhat flat, professional voice. “Would you like some coffee?”
“I’ll get some in a minute,” I say as I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the couch, planting my bare feet on the floor. I didn’t bother pulling the couch out into a bed last night as I was too tired by the time I was ready to go to sleep. Even worse, I couldn’t get to sleep, my mind plagued with a variety of worries.
What if I suck when I get up on that stage?
How am I going to deal with my former band and their ridiculous lawsuit?
Let’s not even get into the stress I feel over having to decide if I want to cut a deal with one of the record labels.
And the thing that repeatedly kept me from falling asleep was wondering how I was going to deal with Emma. She thinks she’s here to work for me, and on its face… that’s true. But my motives are far more selfish. She’s here merely because she intrigues me. I’ve got the leverage and privilege behind me that ensures she stays within my line of sight so I can figure out how I want to play with her.
Last night, she read over the lawsuit brought by the members of my former band, Kickback—sans Keith Carina, of course. It essentially alleges that they jointly own the copyright of certain songs on my Core Deviance album and they were entitled to a portion of the royalties. That album went platinum in less than a year, and because I published that as an indie artist, those royalties all came to me—less the production costs Midge fronted. After I paid her back her investment with interest—at my insistence—the resulting monies I pocketed has me set for life.
Emma spent an hour grilling me on how those songs came to be, and I told her I wrote the lyrics and composed the music for those songs, the original intent to be played by Kickback. I showed them the songs, and we played them together a few times. We made some minor chord changes together as a band, but no changes were ever made to the lyrics.
“I did some basic research earlier and there are two types of copyrights,” Emma explained. “The first is for the composition of the song, and the second is for the recording of it.”
“I composed those songs,” I reminded her. “Every word and musical note was my creation.”
“But the band helped you make some changes,” she pushed at me.
“Minor chord changes,” I scoffed. “But those songs are my creation. They’re my art.”
Emma nodded as if she understood me, but spent a few seconds scribbling down some notes. Then she asked me, “Tell me about the bad blood between you and the members of Kickback.”
So I told her everything.
Keith Carina, Joel Paxton, and Neil Hartsough formed Kickback with me during our freshman year together at Carolina. We’d all played in bands while in high school, not together of course, but that was really just fooling around.
Kickback was different though.
We were good.
I mean really good.
I was lead guitarist and vocals. Keith was on bass, Joel was drums, and Neil was on keyboards. We started out just playing cover songs at college hangouts, but we became really popular. All of us struggled with school and studies, and the more gigs we booked, the more we all blew off classes. We finally decided to go full time with our music during our junior years, all dropping out with not even a backward glance, a fact my parents are still pissed about despite my success now.
“What caused the band to breakup?” Emma had asked me point blank.
I gave it back to her as simple as I could make it. “Greed.”
Her eyebrows raised in question, so I explained. “We were at a crossroads with the band’s future. I had all these great songs I’d created that were just begging to be recorded. Around the same time, a very minor record label had interest in us and made us an offer. The guys wanted to take the offer, and I didn’t. I wanted to either hold out for a bigger deal with a larger label, or record the stuff ourselves. I had Midge willing to front the production costs.”
“Midge?” she asked with surprise.
“Well, yeah,” I told her with a fond smile. “She believed in me. Hell, she helped raise me, so I’m like a son to her. She had no qualms about giving me the money to record and produce Core Deviance.”
“So you split over whether or not to take that deal?” Emma surmised.
“Yes,” I admitted with a flush of burning anger toward my former band. For their short sightedness and greed for quick money. For the inability to trust me and our talent—that we could be bigger than what that dinky little label was offering us. And really fucking pissed that they’re now snapping at my heels, hoping for me to throw them some scraps from my success without them.
Ultimately, Emma said she’d need to do some more research, but that she would work on some responsive documents to their lawsuit. And with that, she took the provided laptop from the desk and walked back into the bedroom where she shut the door. It was after one AM the last time I’d looked down the hallway and still saw light shining out from underneath the door. Thereafter, I just stared at the ceiling until I was able to finally fall asleep, using the sound of the bus’s tires on the pavement to help me along.
“I’m going to take Sirius for a short walk,” Emma says, and I jolt out of my memories. “Then I’ll come back here and get to work.”
“Sounds good,” I say as I stretch my arms upward and roll my head to loosen out some minor kinks. That couch wasn’t all that comfortable.
My gaze slides to Emma and she’s blatantly staring at me.
Well, at my naked chest.
She just stares, transfixed, and my dick gets infinitely harder. Lowering my arms, I rub a hand across my chest as if I’m just casually scratching it and watch as her eyes follow along. Just to see what she’ll do, I give a little tug on the silver ring through my right nipple.
Emma’s entire body literally jolts and her eyes snap to mine, filled with complete mortification. Her cheeks are bright red and she starts to stammer, “Um… um… um…”
I grin at her, release the nipple ring, and stand up from the couch, letting the blanket slide to the floor.
“Like what you see?” I ask her in a husky voice, seeing if I can get her riled up like I did in the police station.
Her face lowers in embarrassment, but I know the minute she locks eyes on my erection because her eyes fly back up to mine, cheeks the color of a fire engine.
“Sorry about that,” I say with a grin and a nod downward. “He’s frisky in the morning.”
“Oh, God,” Emma mutters and spins away from me, leaving her freshly brewed cup of coffee on the counter. “I need to get Sirius and take him for a walk.”
She practically runs to the bedroom and slams the door shut.
Grinning, I decide to go ahead and knock out a quick shower. I get rid of my hard-on the old-fashioned way—with a lot of soap, a quick hand, and a few lewd thoughts of getting Emma out of those pressed Bermuda shorts at some point in the very near future.
♦
It’s almost midnight by the time we all climb—rather noisily—onto my bus. I immediately see the shut bedroom door with no light shining through the slight gap at the bottom.
“Dude… tell me you have beer,” Cap slurs as he stumbles in behind me, then pushes past me to the fridge. He’s my drummer for this tour and looks like a slightly younger version of Tommy Lee.
“Shhh,” I say way too loudly as I weave back and forth. “We don’t want to wake Emma.”
At least I think that’s what I said. My words are slurred too.
“Yes, we do,” Jimmy yells as he barrels up the steps. He’s the bass player. He’s twenty-one, but looks like he’s about thirteen. I bet he has a hard time getting laid. “It’s our last night to party before we officially start this tour tomorrow.”
I wince because there’s no way Emma just slept through that.
“Yeah, Emma,” Cap calls out toward the back bedroom. “Come out and play with us.”
I stare hopefully at her door, because while I’m feeling guilty we’re being loud asses when she’s trying to sleep, I would like to see her. She’s had her nose pressed up against the laptop all day, working right up until dinnertime. I invited her to go out with us, but she primly declined.
So primly I wanted to pull her away from that computer and kiss her so hard that her “mom clothes” would magically fall off or something. I mean, seriously… the woman has to only be twenty-five or so. She needs to update that wardrobe.
But she was firm she wanted to continue working, and that she’d make a sandwich later.
That was several hours ago, and many beers had been drunk by me and my musicians tonight after dinner. We barhopped for a while and then decided to come back here to continue the party. Well, I think everyone was about ready to call it a night, but I foolishly invited everyone onto my bus, thinking perhaps I’d get Emma to come out and hang with us.
A crashing sound behind me has me wheeling around, almost falling over, but I catch myself by throwing a hand out to the back of one of the swivel chairs. I see Dilana careening off the driver’s seat before she rights herself. She’s got a bottle of tequila in her hand and her red lipstick is smeared as if she’d given all of us blow jobs.
Dilana is on keyboards. She has long, dark hair she’s worked into long dreadlocks over the years that are held back by a silver-threaded black headband.
She hadn’t given us all blow jobs, of course, but had been making out with that tequila bottle because she apparently drinks like a fish. Dilana is the wildest out of all of us, and I’m pretty sure her sleeping bunk is going to be seeing a lot of action on this trip. I don’t know how many times tonight she mentioned she was horny.
“Let’s play some strip poker,” Dilana yells, and I truly do wince this time. That was really loud, and as if on cue, Emma’s bedroom door flies open so hard it rebounds off the wall with a crack.
Sirius comes flying out, his puppy butt wagging hard at the prospect of new people to play with. He reaches Cap first, who barely gets turned around before Sirius launches at him. Cap’s as drunk as all of us, and he goes crashing to the floor with sixty pounds of furry dog on top of him, licking his face. Jimmy starts laughing so hard he doubles over, then falls back on the couch, and Dilana takes a huge swig of the tequila, wipes her mouth, which smears more lipstick, and exclaims, “I said I want to play strip poker.”
My eyes slide to Emma, and I brace for her to go off on us. She stands there in pajama pants done in gray and turquoise stripes and a loose white t-shirt that has a modest V-neck.
With narrowed eyes, she glances down to Sirius slapping Cap’s face with his tongue, to Jimmy who is still laughing on the couch and oblivious to the tiny woman glaring at him, and then finally over to Dilana, who leers right back at Emma.
Slowly, she looks to me and in a very formal voice thinly laced with a pinch of disgust, she says, “You are all being unbelievably rude. If you intend on partying in this bus, I insist you put me up in a hotel so I can get some sleep. Some of us have to work in the morning.”
At this, Jimmy stops laughing, and Cap manages to push Sirius off him so he can sit up. Dilana steps up to me, throws her arm around my shoulder, and tells Emma, “Come on, girlfriend. We’ve got tequila and strip poker. You should party with us.”
Emma’s nose wrinkles as she looks to Dilana, but she’s very polite when she says, “No, but thank you. I just want to sleep.”
“Emma…” I start my apology off, hoping perhaps to convince her to join us for a drink.
But she lifts her chin in the air and asks in a frustrated voice, “What’s it going to be, Evan? I’m really tired and would like to get some sleep.”
With a sigh, I push my fingers through my hair and, staring straight at Emma, I say, “Sorry gang… you heard the lady of the bus. There’s not going to be a party here.”
Dilana is the first to respond by spinning on her heel and careening back down the steps as she says, “Strip poker commencing in the other bus. Come on, dudes.”
Cap pushes up off the floor with amazing dexterity, but a little too fast as he falls onto the couch right beside Jimmy. But then he pops right back up and gives a little bow toward Emma. “Sorry for waking you up.”
He turns and slaps Jimmy upside the head. “Come on, man… Dilana might be getting naked right this very moment.”
Both men stagger their way out of the bus, leaving Emma and me standing on opposite ends looking at each other.
“I’m really sorry that—”
“Sirius… come,” Emma says sternly and the puppy jumps up and runs to her. Without another word, she turns her back on me and goes back into the bedroom, shutting it quietly behind them.
I stare at her door for a few minutes, still feeling slightly guilty but also acknowledging the little sting of rejection. So she doesn’t want to hang with us…
Fine.
My new band seems like they’re a ton of fun, and this is a night to celebrate. Our last night of freedom before the tour starts, and I’m not nearly drunk enough to do that justice.
Grabbing a six-pack of beer from the fridge, I don’t give Emma another thought as I head out to join my musicians.