This morning was killer. I’d taken a shower and made sure I was done up. I put on a nice tight fitting T-shirt. The ladies always seemed to like the tight shirts. Then I’d quickly changed out of the tight shirt into something more respectable because Mia didn’t seem like the kind of girl who’d be impressed by what impressed your average groupie.

After that I turned on the TV and tried to watch a movie, but it was really hard to stay distracted with passive entertainment like that. Watching a love story was the last thing I needed since I was terrified I might be headed for an unhappy ending that’d be a stark contrast to what I saw on the screen, and an action movie with lots of explosions was too mindless.

Too much opportunity for thoughts of Mia to slip into my head. I hated that I couldn’t get her out of my mind even as I loved it.

I pulled out my guitar and started picking randomly at it. That always got my mind off of my problems. The guitar had certainly helped me after the Incident, though a lot of the songs I’d written during that dark time weren’t exactly the kind of thing I could ever perform on stage unless we wanted to completely change the band’s genre and risk getting our asses sued by my ex for defamation or libel or whatever the fuck it was lawyers used to go after people who said mean things about other people.

The last thing I wanted after that fucked up breakup was to put out a song that might make a single cent the bitch could sue me for, so they went into the vault to stay there until maybe some day in the far future when I was dead and wouldn’t give a fuck what happened.

Though even as I was plucking away I found myself humming a tune that turned into the beginnings of a song about how I was feeling, and I was feeling pretty damn good.

It started with some suitably indistinct references to troubles in the past. Vague enough that a bloodsucking lawyer couldn’t come after me and say I was talking about any one girl in particular even though it was obviously about the Incident. Then a little bit about what I’d been missing out on and how I might’ve found it.

I was stuck on some of the lyrics when the knock came at the door and any thoughts of the song disappeared from my head. I really fucking hoped that was Jake, because I didn’t know if I could take much more of this waiting. It was getting close to noon, and I worried that if this kept up for much longer I wasn’t going to be able to find Mia before we had to head off to the next city.

We weren’t scheduled to actually have our next concert until tomorrow, but the guys could be sticklers about getting to the next city with plenty of time. At least most of them were. Blake was usually willing to make an exception if he had a pretty little thing that he wanted to enjoy for a day or so. The guys had even left him behind on at least one occasion, which annoyed me to no end since I’d never gotten that treatment the last time we toured.

I opened the door and was immediately disappointed to see Blake standing there with a huge grin on his face. Inwardly I was groaning and rolling my eyes, but on the outside I took the hand he was holding over his head and clasped it.

“Grant my man!” Blake said. “So how did things go with you and your lady friend last night?”

I hated myself for doing it, for acting like that guy, even as I held his hand in a tight grip and pulled him up into my bus. I forced myself to slap on a goofy grin to match his. This was one-on-one time with Blake, and that meant it was time to act like the player. The man who’d traveled to hundreds of cities and left a line of broken hearts along the way. The man that I hated and really didn’t want to be anymore, but there was another part of me that felt like I had to keep up the charade because Blake and I were brothers-in-arms being the only single guys on the tour.

Blake was like a brother to me, and I worried that if I didn’t act like this it would hurt him. So I kept up an act that wasn’t really me anymore.

“You know I had a good time man! How about you?”

Damn I felt like a slime even as I said it. I felt like I needed to tell Blake that it had been a decade and we were fooling ourselves if we thought we could still treat girls the way we did back then. Not that he would probably understand if I did say something.

And of course I already knew how his night went. Jake told me all about that. He gave Mia’s friend the full groupie treatment and probably showed her the door shortly after. Him turning that Kayla girl loose was probably a big part of the reason why Mia wasn’t here right now. If her friend wasn’t around then maybe she would’ve stuck around.

Then again maybe my reputation would’ve been enough to send her running whether or not her friend was around to be jilted by Blake. Maybe I was getting what I deserved. My karmic retribution for all the crap I’d pulled before the band broke up the first time.

“You know I gave it to her then showed her the door man,” Blake said. “Some things never change. Am I right?”

He held his hand out to slap mine again. I grinned and laughed as we slapped skin even as I wondered how that Kayla girl felt about being loved and left the night before. She’d seemed a hell of a lot more into the band than Mia was. She should know what to expect.

That a long time fan should “know what to expect” and not be surprised about getting shown the door after a night with one of the single guys in the band was enough to send a fresh wave of guilt running through me.

“Yeah, some things definitely never change.”

“So what’s the plan for today? Want to go out and see what there is to see before we head off to the next city?” Blake asked.

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. I hoped he would take it for me leaning back and trying to chase away some of the bright light that was threatening to break through my eyelids and set off the mild hangover that was threatening. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d had to sit back and pause the conversation because my substance abuse from the night before was threatening to catch up with me.

Only this wasn’t the substance abuse that was catching up with me the next day. This was a lifetime of bad choices threatening to catch up to me. This was something special I’d felt with a girl, something more real than anything I’d ever imagined, being thrown down the pisser because of my reputation. Because I had a reputation that was almost as bad as Blake’s. Though I wasn’t sure Mia would even know about that reputation if she wasn’t a huge fan of the band.

Then again if she’d left with her friend who’d been jilted by Blake then she probably knew about the reputation now. I wanted to reach across the room and punch Blake. I wanted to reach into the past and punch myself. More than anything I wanted Mia here. I wanted Jake to pop in and say he’d figured out where to find her.

As though on cue there was another knock at the door. I popped up and walked over, getting a curious look from Blake in the process. Whatever. He could be curious. When I opened the door Jake was standing there with a huge grin on his face.

“Tell me you have good news man,” I said.

“Boy do I have good news,” he said. “Turns out your girl was a contest winner, or her friend was at least. From there it was simple enough to get their information from the radio station and figure out where she works and everything!”

I shook my head and reached out to slap Jake on the back. Holy fucking shit! That was better than I ever could’ve hoped for, and it was fucking fast. When I first asked him to try and track that info down I figured it was crazy. I figured there wasn’t a chance he was actually going to find anything. I’d never been happier to be proved wrong before in my life.

“You’re amazing, Jake. Tell your buddy to throw on another couple thousand to his invoice and then add a couple for you too.”

I could afford it, after all. One of the perks of being a millionaire many times over from traveling the world making music and then turning around and putting that money in a responsible investment portfolio was the ability to throw that money around from time to time. I figured if I was going to make it rain then the least I could do was make sure it was pouring on people who were doing me a solid.

“What’s he talking about man?” Blake asked from behind me.

Blake had turned his chair around and he was regarding Jake and me with half curiosity and half surprise. Not that I should be surprised that he was surprised. In his world the fun was over when the girl was shown the door. He probably couldn’t conceive trying to chase down a girl.

“I had Jake track down the girl from the night before,” I said. “She left with her friend in the middle of the night.”

Blake shook his head. “I’m sorry man. If I’d known you wanted to hang onto that one for a little morning fun I would’ve kept her friend occupied. God knows she was worth it!”

“Yeah, you know it man,” I said. “She was so good that I just have to have round two!”

I don’t know why I was saying that. It was more out of habit than anything else. This is how I’d talked with Blake, how we’d acted around each other, for so damn long that I had a hard time thinking of acting any other way. It was like I was watching myself in an out of body experience, disgusted at what I was saying even as I was powerless to stop it because it was such a deeply ingrained habit.

Jake handed me a slip of paper and I glanced down at it. It was an address.

“What’s this?”

“Address of the place where she works. At least I’m pretty sure it’s the place where she works,” Jake said. “It’s actually a pretty short walk from here, but it’ll be up to you to use your rock star charm to actually get a foot in the door.”

He grinned. As though there was ever any doubt I’d be able to find a way to track her down once I was in the building. All it would take was a lady receptionist somewhere who was between twenty and thirty-five and I’d be in like Flynn, to use a somewhat outdated phrase that still checked out as far as I was concerned.

“So are you going to go track that down? Get another crack at it?” Blake asked.

“Something like that,” I said.

If everything went as planned then I hoped to do a hell of a lot more than “get another crack” at Mia, as Blake had so crudely put it. There was just something about that girl that captivated my imagination. Something about her that left me wanting more whenever I was around her. There was something about the way she was never impressed by the fact that I was who I was that piqued my curiosity and made me want to know more about her.

No, how I felt about Mia went so far beyond the love’em and leave’em approach Blake was so fond of. It went so far beyond a single night’s pleasure. When I thought of Mia I found myself thinking of silly things like buying a house together. I started wondering about the names of our kids, and that was something that had never occurred to me with any girl. Ever.

“So should I tell the guys that they can expect to be delayed?” Blake asked. “I can totally cover for you if you want.”

I smiled despite myself. I might get annoyed by Blake sometimes, but he could also be a good friend. And it wasn’t entirely fair to get annoyed with him anyways considering he was just keeping on the same as we had back in the day. I’d never actually told him how much this stuff annoyed me when he pulled it, and I wasn’t going to bring it up now either. There wasn’t enough time to go into it anyways.

I needed to get out there and find Mia, and figure out exactly why she’d left in the middle of the night. More than anything I prayed that I’d be able to convince her to give me another chance.

“I have to get going man. Lock up after me?” I asked.

“Sure thing. Good luck with your piece of tail!”

I winced as I walked out of the bus. Mia was so much more than just another piece of tail, but that’s just the way Blake looked at the world. If you’re a hammer then everything you see is a nail. If you’re Blake then every girl you see at a concert is a potential groupie to be wined, dined, banged, and tossed back.

I wasn’t going to be like that, though. Things were going to be different this time. I just prayed that my reputation wasn’t finally going to catch up with me and ruin my first true chance at something real.