Through the lobby. Out into the streets beyond. Cameras flashed all around me. Everybody knew I was staying at the hotel and it appeared everyone decided to camp out and take part in the shit show that was Grant Thompson showing off naked for the world.

Twelve years. Twelve years on the road and I’d managed to avoid letting any asshole with a camera get an embarrassing picture of me like that, and then I’d gone and done it to myself by running out of the hotel room completely naked without thinking.

I was going to send a sternly worded letter to the hotel chain as well. I saw how those girls at reception, and one guy who’d been more interested than I thought was entirely proper, had been looking at me. None of them had the audacity to pull out their phones like those girls at the store in the mall earlier, but they weren’t exactly moving to expedite helping me out or anything either.

And I didn’t care about any of that as I stepped onto the sidewalk and found myself confronted by more people with cameras. No, all I cared about was looking at the phone I’d had run over to the hotel while I was getting dressed.

I guess it was a good thing I was still in the habit of keeping spares ready to go, a holdover from the days when I routinely partied to the point that my phones didn’t have a very long service career, and I was really glad I opted for the cloud backup. Otherwise Mia’s number would’ve been lost with the phone she destroyed in the shower.

“We need to talk.”

I thought about that before I sent it. Was it sending the wrong message? I really just wanted to talk to her. I wanted to apologize for everything. To know there was still a chance.

More than anything, though, I just wanted to talk with her. I was feeling a strange new sensation in my chest. In the pit of my stomach. An ache that I was having trouble explaining. Heartache. I was actually feeling broken hearted at the idea that she might never want to see me again, even if I did sort of deserve it for the way I’d treated her, if not directly then I’d certainly been an asshole to her indirectly because I was still having trouble getting rid of some of the habits of my past.

Habits that led to the Incident. Habits that led me to lose Mia, the first girl I’d truly been interested in. The first girl I wanted to have a real relationship with, not just settle down with her because she might be pregnant with my kid.

Yeah, this had turned into a cluster fuck and it was all my fault.

The message went through and I stared at my phone waiting for a response. Held my breath hoping, praying for a response. A response that never came, though at least looking down at my phone had the side benefit of hiding my face from all the idiots who were trying to take my picture.

Including a couple of outlets that hadn’t been interested in me or the band in the better part of a decade. I guess it took a good embarrassing incident to get them to crawl out of the woodwork. The fucking vultures.

They kept following me and I kept right on ignoring them until I found myself standing in front of the back entrance to the arena. And immediately I found myself in a different sort of trouble as some of the fans who’d been waiting the night before were still camped out by the buses. No doubt waiting for a chance to see one of the guys.

Not that it was likely. Those buses were fortresses that were designed to cater to our every need for a couple of days without resupply if need be. I was sure the married gentlemen in the group were probably busy getting busy with their wives. If the bus was a rockin’ and all that.

And Blake. Well, Blake was probably sitting back wondering where the hell I was. He probably had no idea that I wanted to punch him right in his smarmy face. Sure it wasn’t exactly a fair thought, I might as well want to punch a shark for eating fish or punch a wolf for killing cute woodland critters. Blake wasn’t being malicious when he sent me that text asking when I’d be done. Blake was just being Blake, and he was operating under a false idea of who I was. An idea I’d done nothing to stop.

Yeah, that was as much my fault as it was his, but that didn’t stop the urge to punch from rising every time I thought about walking onto his bus and seeing him smiling at me.

I was going to have to get control of that before I reached the buses, but first I needed to make sure I could reach the bus in the first place. Because the crowd of girls gathered around the outside of the chain link fence were starting to notice the walking commotion that was me walking with a crowd of paparazzi looking for a good story.

I’d learned over the years that there were gradations to how dedicated and crazy a fangirl could be. There were the girls who liked our music and thought the guys were hot. Maybe they bought the posters and tore them down when they moved onto the next big thing. Maybe they gave our new music a download which I appreciated, but they weren’t die hard fans.

Then there were the moderately crazy fans who joined the fan club for early access to concerts. They downloaded all of our albums and maybe they still had that poster from when they were younger rolled up somewhere that their husband couldn’t see it because they couldn’t quite bring themselves to throw it away. They were our bread and butter. They came to the concerts and bought the merch and God bless them, every one. Especially since the crazy was never very strong with them.

Finally there were the true crazies. The ones who wrote fanfiction about the group on our fan club forum. At least that was my understanding from the horror stories we heard from our social media guy.

These were the ones who would get into fights if we flicked a pick or a drum stick into the audience. They were the ones who charged the stage. They were the ones who posted pictures of the hair doll they created from putting together locks of leftover hair collected by venue workers who cased the green room when we were done and sold their findings on eBay.

I really wish I was joking about that last one. It took a cease and desist order to get that crazy to stop selling her wares on various craft sites.

And that was the level of crazy I was facing down now as these women turned and saw me approaching. I saw the hunger in their eyes. They were regarding me the same way a shark might regard a nice wounded fish that was limping along leaving a trail of blood, only in my case it was a trail of “news” organizations and photographers.

I had no doubt these women were the craziest of the crazy if they were still waiting outside so long after the concert was over and their chances of seeing anyone from the band were so vanishingly small. Well those chances were about to go back up.

I winced as more of them turned towards me. As they started dashing towards me in a mad stampede. This was it. This was how I was going to die. A broken heart from the one girl I’d ever had true feelings for running away from me. Humiliated on the Internet in the worst way possible. And finally trampled to death by a group of rowdy fangirls who had lust in their eyes that made it terrifyingly obvious they planned on enjoying themselves thoroughly before I went down.

At least that would provide some interesting pictures and copy for the vultures behind me who were looking for something juicy.

I turned back to see if there was any way to escape, but of course the crowd of vultures had closed in around me and they were sniffing blood in the water, though of a different variety than what the fangirls were after. No, they were looking forward to the impending blood bath and they weren’t going to let me get away.

Damn it. Paparazzi on one side and crazy fans closing in on the other. I squeezed my eyes shut. This is not how I imagined this day going when I started.

Squealing tires brought me back to reality. I opened my eyes and was surprised to see a black limo with tinted windows screeching to a halt in front of me. Right between me and the crazy fans. If the crazy son-of-a-bitch driving the thing had cut it any closer he would’ve risked running into some of the equally crazy fans dashing towards me.

As it was they crashed against the other side of the limo with a muted thud and screamed out in frustration as they realized their chance to get me and rip me to pieces, hopefully metaphorically but you never knew when there might be a love knife hidden away in a crowd of crazy like that, had disappeared.

The door on the side facing me flew open and Blake was there gesturing frantically for me to get inside. No words were spoken. They didn’t need to be. Both of us knew what it was like to get caught in a crowd like that, and neither one of us wanted to repeat it. I dove into the limo and stuck my hand out to give the news types a final one-fingered salute before slamming the door shut. I was pushed back against the leather seats inside as the driver hit the accelerator.

“Damn that was close,” I said.

“I’d say. Seems like you’ve been having quite an evening,” Blake said.

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, and it’s all thanks to you, you asshole.”

Blake blinked and then he gave me a one fingered salute of his own, though he was grinning as he did it.

“That doesn’t sound like a grateful man who just had his ass saved by his lead guitarist,” Blake said.

“Hey, he’s not the only one,” a familiar voice said.

I turned and grinned at Jake. Of course he was the crazy bastard who was willing to nearly drive a limo into a crowd of crazed fans. He knew better than anyone else just how bad things could get in the middle of one of those crowds, which made me appreciate him jumping in like that all the more.

“So what happened anyways?” Blake asked.

So I explained everything. How the night had been going so well. How I was really starting to feel something for this girl which got a raised eyebrow from Blake who was always a heart breaker that even eclipsed my record of broken hearts, but he took it in stride. I told him about the text message coming at the single worst moment possible and how Mia found it and it set her off in the worst way. I ended with how that all turned into me being humiliated in the middle of a hotel lobby with people taking pictures of my unmentionables since I had no way of letting the hotel know I was locked out of my room short of going down to the front desk.

“Man, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“How you were feeling about that girl?”

I had a moment to think about that as the limo pulled around to the other side of the staging area and they let us in. I noticed a couple of the guys out there were looking nervously at the other side of the parking lot where the rescue had taken place. I had no doubt that some of the girls who’d gone for me were making a run around to the other side in the hopes that they could get in before the gates were closed, but those dudes moved so fast that the girls didn’t have a prayer.

It was always interesting to see the fear a crowd like that could inspire. It was like a zombie horde, and I was so used to it that I didn’t blink an eye unless I was out there completely exposed like I’d been a minute ago. I still had a bad case of the shakes.

We got out of the limo and stepped into my bus where I immediately pulled out my guitar. That always helped me think. The strains of the song I’d been working on earlier in the day picked up and I noticed Blake nodding right along with. I always appreciated it when he liked something I was putting out on guitar. I was good, but he was an acknowledged deity of the instrument after all.

“I guess I was afraid,” I said.

“Afraid? What are you talking about?”

“Well there was the whole Incident to think about. The last time I got serious with a girl she ended up pulling a Yoko and splitting the band up for a decade. I was afraid of something like that happening again.”

Sure that was part of the reason, but it wasn’t the main reason. And Blake wasn’t making it any easier.

“That’s crazy. Anyone could see this girl is different from she-who-shall-not-be-named,” Blake said. “Besides, if you feel like you’ve got a good thing going with a girl you don’t have to keep it from me.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I guess I worried you’d think you were being abandoned or something. We were the two single guys in the band on this tour. I know I’ve felt left out watching the other guys with their perfect relationships and here I am with nothing because I thought it would be more fun to fuck around the last time around than find something real.”

Blake snorted. “If you think it’s all sunshine and rainbows with them then you’re crazy.”

“What are you talking about?”

Blake shrugged. “Relationships are about ups and downs. Good with the bad. It’s not like they’re all lovey dovey all the time just because they have their wives with them. You have to learn to roll with the punches if you’re going to be in something long term. Which, I might add, is a big part of the reason why you won’t see me in anything long term any time soon thank you very much. I get the highlights and then it’s how d’you do and see you the next time I’m in town, but we both know that’s a pleasant fiction.”

I blinked in surprise. Aside from the last bit about showing women the door when he was done with them that had been a surprisingly profound bit of wisdom. There was going to be good and bad. Well there’d certainly been plenty of that tonight with Mia.

The only problem was I didn’t know how I was going to track her down and prove to her that the good could outweigh the bad. That I wasn’t the guy she thought I was. At least not anymore.

I was still picking at my guitar, lost in thought, when Blake interrupted.

“So what’s that you’re working on? Doesn’t sound like any of the old standards.”

“It’s not,” I said. “I think I’ve finally got something worth writing about here.”

“Fair enough,” Blake said. “I’ll go get my guitar and we can work on it. What are we calling this one?”

I looked up at him and grinned. Things might’ve gone to shit with Mia, but at the very least she’d given me this gift. I was finally in a head space where I could start writing again.

“I’m calling it Mia’s song.”