I had to refer to the list of dates we had on the wall. Every day felt like a near repeat of the one before, and after the first week of The Rhythm & Chord Tour, I’d lost track of what city was next. Since there usually wasn’t enough time to go sightseeing, one place looked just like the rest; maybe one venue was nicer than the other but since that was really all we got to see, it didn’t make a difference.

I texted Laila back:

A minute later, I got a response from her:

She knew exactly what I was referring to: her twenty-second birthday, Mardi Gras in Galveston, two in the morning. If I tried, I could still hear my screams at her flashing an unsuspecting crowd after one too many Long Island Iced Teas.

I’d helped her change out her catheter more than once in the past, so it wasn’t like I was horrified or anything remotely close by her bare boobs. But still. I felt obligated to give her a hard time over it.

I set my cell back down and sighed.

It was only about three in the afternoon, and we’d been parked at the venue for close to two hours. My brother, Mason and a couple of the guys in The Cloud Collision had decided to go “hang out with some friends in town.” In reality what this meant was that they were doing something they couldn’t do in the bus.

As much as I loved Eli and Mason, I hated seeing them high or drunk, so I opted out of tagging along. Instead I plastered myself in the back room of the bus with one of the books I’d stuffed in my bag before leaving home. I was on The Boy in the Striped Pajamas this week. Even though I was having fun spending time with my three idiots, still getting to know Carter, and sucking at Mario Kart when I played against Mason in the morning, the whole living-with-ten-other-people-thing was difficult.

Even though I missed my parents, Rafe, Gil, their kids and Laila, I missed the lumpy bed at my parent’s house even more. It was the things I took for granted, like showering without shoes and hanging out in my room half-naked, that I missed the hell out of.

But I knew it wasn’t any of those things that were really bothering me right then. I was a little bit aggravated with Eli for still doing the kind of shit that had gotten him in trouble in the past. We’d agreed before I joined the tour that he’d tone down the drinking as one of my conditions. He’d been holding onto his end of the bargain so far, but I wasn’t betting on the streak continuing today.

There was also the chance I wasn’t giving him enough credit, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

“Can I come in?” a soft voice asked, the door to the back room cracking open.

“Of course,” I answered, recognizing Sacha’s low timbre on the other side.

His dark head of hair peeked in before he swung the door open. “I wasn’t sure if you were doing something.” His eyes flickered around the room cautiously before he plopped down onto the length of the couch opposite the one I was sitting on.

“I’m just reading. What are you up to?” I asked, eyeing the lean muscles beneath the tank he was wearing. Sacha had on shorts that were riding up his thighs, showing off what seemed like meters of nearly pale skin beneath dark leg hair. He was also wearing a scuffed pair of running shoes, not his normal set of clean black ones.

He scratched at the short hair on the side of his head. “I’m waiting for Julian to come back,” he explained, referring to the guitar player for his band.

“Didn’t he go with my brother?” I swore I saw him get into the taxi with the other morons. If that was the case, there was no way the group was coming back anytime soon. Much less coming back sober. I wouldn’t bet any money on the chances of them being able to stand on two feet when they returned.

Now that I thought about it, I should probably try and have my camera app open on my phone just in case something ridiculous happened during the show.

“He said he was only going for a couple of hours.”

I hated people telling me that they would do something and then not. Disappointment was bitter. It wasn’t like it was my fault Julian had taken off, but I felt bad he’d left Sacha hanging. I would much rather take someone being blunt and hurting my feelings in the process, than let me down.

I sighed before breaking it to him. “They’re not coming back soon.”

Those translucent gray eyes that bordered on sky blue blinked in my direction.

“Were you planning on doing something?” I asked.

“We were going to go for a run,” he explained with a shrug. “It isn’t the end of the world.”

Slipping my legs off the couch to plant my feet on the floor, I raised my eyebrows at him as I set my book on the seat next to me. “I’ll go with you if you want.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “I used to run track.”

“You did?” He made it sound like the idea was preposterous. Rude. It may or may not have been because I complained about the bus being too far from the venue back in Birmingham when I was moving merch bins, but in my defense, it had been raining.

Either way, I couldn’t help but scratch my forehead before amending my answer. “In high school.”

Sacha flashed those perfect white teeth on display. “What you’re meaning to tell me is that you’re pretty much a professional track star?”

I made sure to keep my features even as I nodded. “Exactly.”

His eyes widened playfully. “I’m pretty fast,” he warned.

“We’ll see how fast you are,” I said and immediately felt a little weird for inviting myself. “But only if you want the company. If you don’t, I completely understand.” And I might cry a little, but I kept that part to myself.

Running was one of the only things I’d kept up with over my life, especially in the time since my breakup; I made time for it a few days a week on the treadmill or when I didn’t mix it up with the Stairmaster. I figured my ass and thighs could thank me when I was forty. But it had been more than two weeks since the last time I’d made an effort to put my legs to use.

But Sacha was the same person who took me accidentally kicking him in the ass like a champ, and had gone out to eat with me so I wouldn’t go by myself. He hadn’t given me the smallest impression that he was anything but a nice guy. “Come with me,” he said, already waving me forward.

“Are you sure?” I asked,

The singer rolled his eyes. “I’ll wait for you outside.”

“Let me change,” I looked at the thin sweatpants I’d had on since the night before, “and find sunblock. I’ll be quick.”

Sacha tipped his head to the side. “I have some—”

Of course he did, with that clear skin that somehow managed not to be pasty.

“—get dressed and I’ll grab it.”

Grabbing semi-clean shorts and a sports bra from my backpack, I changed into them as quickly as I could and threw my T-shirt back on. I also grabbed some cash that ended up getting stuffed under a bra strap. If we were going to suffer from heat exhaustion, I was stopping to get something to eat at some point afterward; he just didn’t know it yet. After letting Gordo know that I was leaving since he was the only one who hadn’t taken off, I found Sacha waiting outside of the bus with a small tube of aloe vera-based sunblock in his hand that he tossed over.

I’d like to say that I focused on putting the sunblock on my own body, but I didn’t. Correction: I couldn’t.

When Sacha peeled off his shirt and began smothering the cream onto his freckle-spotted shoulders, arms, chest, neck and even the shell of his ears… I was entranced. It was like seeing a meteor shower. Or having candy for the first time after you’d tried going on a diet.

Except way more magnificent.

Sacha even had these small light-brown moles dotting his abs and back. He had a trim, muscular frame that I admired from the corner of my eye every time he was shirtless. He had the body of those swimmers that Laila and I groaned over every four years, and he was putting lotion all over himself. It was better than watching porn. Hell, better than watching Robby Lingus porn. Good grief. I finished slathering myself sloppily while he put his shirt back on.

“Do you know where you want to go run or are we figuring it out as we go?” I asked as I bent over to stretch my hamstrings.

“East. There’s usually less people in that direction,” Sacha said.

I hummed like I knew what direction east was without searching out the sun and chirped up an, “okay.”

Five minutes later, we were both stretched and ready to go. He tipped his head to the left with a playful smile and asked, “Are you ready, Jesse Owens?”

I snorted. “I was born ready.”

Sacha snickered before nudging my forearm with the back of his hand.

We started off with a slow jog to warm up for what seemed about a mile. He tempered his step so that he wasn’t twenty feet in front of me considering his legs were almost a foot longer. He shot me a glance over his shoulder once and I nodded. Then we took off.

He wasn’t kidding when he said he was fast. He really was. He had the stride of a long distance runner but the potential, restrained speed of someone who possibly ran sprints for fun. Luckily for me, I’d been a sprinter in high school, so it didn’t kill me too much to catch up with him.

At first.

One mile.

Two miles.

Three, four and five miles.

My lungs started to get tight.

Six miles.

Seven miles.

My calves began cramping.

By the eighth mile, I was struggling with my breathing and my cramps passed “aching” and went straight to “cramping.”

Honestly, I had no clue where we were, much less where the venue was. What made it worse was that Sacha looked sweaty but not nearly winded enough. What the hell was he? A cyborg?

It was probably another half a mile before I decided… that was it. I couldn’t keep going without dying.

“Hey, hey,” I wheezed as I came to a stop.

It took a second for him to slow down and turn around. His face was pink, perspiration dotting along his temples. “Are you all right?” he asked sounding just slightly out of breath.

I was sucking in air through my nose raggedly as I nodded, pressing a hand flat to the part of my stomach that was the most deprived of air. “I can’t… I need to stop.”

Those gray-blue eyes swept over me for a second as I stood there, one hand on my hip, the other over my belly button. My loose shorts were clinging to my legs and my shirt was definitely plastered to me. Then there were the pit stains. I didn’t even want to think about the pit stains and the damp spots on my shorts. Whatever. Who cared. Sacha saw me after the show was over every night when my mascara was runny and I smelled like week-old socks. Plus, it wasn’t like I was trying to get a boyfriend or anything.

“I don’t… run… for distance,” I panted.

He took a big visible inhale through his nose and nodded. “That’s okay.”

“You… can keep…” I didn’t think I was out of shape but apparently, I was. “You can keep going,” I rushed out. “I can get back by myself.”

Sacha shot me a look as he moved closer to the side of the building to get out of pedestrian traffic. “No. I’ll walk back with you.”

“Walk back?” That came out sounding as panicked as it was meant to. “The entire way?”

“Yeah.”

All I could do was stare at him. Did he not know I was on the cusp of death?

The sheer terror on my face earned me a laugh from the tall man. “I’m fucking with you. Let’s walk a little, and then we’ll catch a ride back.”

“If… I… wasn’t so…”

He grinned, cutting my threat off. “Let’s go. Are you hungry?”

I nodded.

“Want to get something to eat?”

I managed to nod again.

We walked for almost twenty minutes in silence, taking our time. I was still too out of breath to talk so I focused on calming down. Eventually Sacha hailed a cab and we both climbed in.

It was the choked laugh from the other side of the backseat that had me turning my attention toward him. He was sitting with his back to the corner, a smug smile on his face. “Are you gonna live?”

“Barely.”

His eyebrows went up as he smiled even wider. “You went a lot further than I thought you would.”

Wait a second.

“Julian and I usually only do five miles,” he explained.

I stared at him; there could be no other way to describe what I did besides maybe referring to it as a glare. I sat there with my chest expanding and retracting while still trying to recuperate, processing what the hell had just come out of his mouth. “Are you joking?”

He shook his head.

I kept my gaze on him for a brief second longer, extended my middle finger against my thigh in plain view and turned to face out the window.

Sacha laughed.

Okay, I smiled. A little but not much.

Neither one of us said a word until he instructed the driver to drop us off at the end of a block that didn’t look particularly familiar. “This place is pretty good,” he noted pointing at a decorated glass door as we climbed out of the cab after fighting over how to pay the fee.

I still wasn’t on speaking terms with him, though I’d caught my breath and followed him inside the restaurant, which wasn’t as cool as I would have liked. The smell of roasted chicken made my stomach growl.

He raised his eyebrows at me from the other side of the table after a waitress brought two glasses of water over. “Still mad at me?” he asked.

I narrowed my eyes at him as I took a sip, taking in how he still looked relatively put together and not at all like he’d tackled eight miles half an hour ago. “You run marathons, don’t you?”

“Nah.” He put the glass to his lips, but I could still catch a glimpse of the corners of his mouth. “Half-marathons.”

Half-marathons. “Thanks for telling me that now,” I snorted.

“You didn’t look winded, and I figured you would tell me when you couldn’t go any further.”

I grumbled and shook my head just as the waitress came by to take our order.

She had barely left when the dark-haired man sitting across from me asked, “So, are you on summer break?”

“Nope, I finished school about a month ago. I just… haven’t been able to find a job yet.”

Saying it out loud was weird. I knew it wasn’t unusual to not find a job right after graduating. Half the people that had finished school at the same time as I did were struggling to land one. It didn’t help that the degree I’d gotten wasn’t exactly bursting with employment opportunities either, but it still made me feel a little raw. When I first told my family I wanted to study history, the first thing out of my dad’s mouth had been, “What are you going to do with that degree? Why don’t you do accounting? Or nursing?”

It was a sore subject, to say the least.

Sacha asked what I studied and I told him.

“Are you planning on teaching?” he asked.

“No…” For a second, I thought about telling him that I wanted to do research or work at a museum, or something. But I couldn’t. I’d gotten my degree in it because I liked learning about history; that was all. “I don’t really know, to be honest. I’d rather not teach, though. I think I’d be pretty terrible at it. The kids would probably laugh at me if I tried to be firm about something.”

Sacha nodded solemnly. “You’ll find something, just give it some time. I used to get shit thrown at me onstage when I was younger; if I would have given up every time I heard ‘you suck’ being screamed at me, who knows where I’d be right now.”

This guy used to get stuff thrown at him? He had one of the best pitches and ranges I’d ever heard and he killed his performance every night. “You really had people throw things at you?”

He snickered. “Yeah. The first time was at a high school talent show. This asshole threw a Coke bottle at me and by the end of the song, I’d pretty much been booed offstage. I only stayed on because I’m stubborn.”

I had to slap my hand over my mouth so that I wouldn’t laugh. “If it makes you feel any better, one time, I had a dance recital when I was probably seven, and I threw up all over the stage. I was so nervous. I remember telling my mom I didn’t want to do it but she made me anyway.” There was footage of it too that someone in the family dug out every couple of years when they needed a laugh.

Sacha covered the lower half of his face with the bottom of his T-shirt, and closed his eyes simultaneously. His shoulders shook with restraint. “What did you do?”

“I cried my eyes out,” I laughed.

“I fell off the stage once,” he added, smiling huge.

“You didn’t!”

“I did. I just walked right off of it—”

Yeah, I burst out laughing, picturing it.

“—It’s the single most embarrassing moment of my life onstage,” he said right before tossing his head back and laughing his ass off. “That’s what I get for not paying attention.”

It was the “onstage” that got me. Once I got myself under control, I raised my eyebrows at him. “And offstage?”

He ran a hand through the loose hair at the top of his head and closed one single, gray eye. “I had to take a crap into a plastic bag once. The bathroom on the bus was clogged, and we were in the middle of nowhere during a thunderstorm.”

For the record, there’s no way in hell you can hold back a laugh when someone tells you that they took a crap in a plastic bag. Especially not when the story is told in a matter-of-fact voice. It wasn’t possible. On the other hand, it didn’t help that Sacha’s face took ‘striking’ and ‘handsome’ to a different level. I’ve always figured that people in the upper echelon of beauty—sans Mason—were incapable of doing the ridiculous things that semi-attractive people like myself do; like fart or burp in front of others, smell or have stinky shit. But apparently Sacha, whose last name I still didn’t know, was the anomaly.

He’d taken a crap in a plastic bag.

When I had to hunch over and press my forehead against the vinegar-and-lemon smelling table, Sacha poked me in the shoulder. “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” he said with another laugh that didn’t hold a lick of embarrassment in it.

I looked up to see that his grin was telling me a story about an incredibly handsome man that didn’t take himself too seriously.

It was like finding a four-leaf clover.

“Did I gross you out?” he asked when I didn’t immediately respond.

I scowled and shook my head. “Are you kidding me? Have you talked to Eli?” He nodded, but there was no way he’d interacted with him enough to not be fully aware of my brother’s mental impairment. I couldn’t see Eli talking to someone for longer than twenty minutes without making some rude and/or inappropriate comment.

“There’s four of us kids in our family, and Eli and I used to have to ride the bus to school together in the morning, so we had to wake up earlier than everyone else. He’d make sure to get up before me every single day for years so that he could purposely leave me ‘presents’ in the toilet,” I snickered. “You can bring on the brown pickles with me anytime.”

Sacha chuckled, his index and middle finger pressing against his temple. “What you’re trying to say is that Eli’s to blame for making you this way?”

“Hey!” I cried. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted or not.

“I mean it in a good way. You’re beautiful—“ I’m not sure how I managed not to fall off my chair. “—And you don’t have a problem talking to me about The Clap, diarrhea and vomiting. You’re fun, Gaby.”

My ears went red. Too worried about saying something dumb, I held out my hands at my sides in a “what can I say” gesture.

Sacha smiled and opened his mouth right before the sound of loud beeping coming from his pocket tore his attention away from the table. Pulling his phone out, he asked me to hold on before answering the call. “Hey… I just finished going for a run… yeah… I’m about to eat.” He shot me a smile when he glanced up. “I’ll see you soon… I miss you too… okay… bye.”

The chances that the person he was talking to on the other end was a family member could be pretty high, but my gut feeling said otherwise. Someone that good-looking had to have a significant other in the picture.

“Girlfriend?” my mouth spewed without a second thought.

He simply shook his head, and I missed the way one of his eyelids lowered in denial. “Old friend.”

Friend?

Sure. I almost snickered. I’d grown up alongside three boys, two of them becoming manwhores right before my eyes. I understood how they worded their sentences. An “old friend” that you told you “missed” was more than likely an ex-girlfriend or an ex-buddy you used to do things with that you probably wanted to do more things with in the future. Sacha didn’t seem to be like my brother or Mase, but still. An “old friend” was an “old friend.”

It wasn’t my business, though, so I pushed Sacha’s friend and conversation out of my head and smiled over at him, close-mouthed.

He only smiled back at me. The silence settled around our shoulders in a weird fit.

“Are you ready to go?” I asked him.

Sacha nodded and we got up, making our way out. Neither one of us spoke up as we walked back to the venue. I didn’t know what to say, and I guess he didn’t either. We smiled at each other a couple of times when we’d stop at a corner and wait to cross the street.

I heard the guys before I saw them. We were rounding the nearest building to the venue when Eli’s booming laugh mixed with two other boisterous ones. Immediately, I felt this big ball of dread form in my stomach, my shoulders tightening.

I knew Eli inside and out. I could recognize his laugh when he thought something was kind of funny, really funny, not funny at all but he was attempting to be nice, and I was all too aware of the texture his laugh held when he’d either drank too much or smoked pot. And while he was a grown man and I had no right to tell him what to do, there was a reason why one of the conditions I made before coming on tour with him was that he kept the drinking, and by default the partying, to a minimum. Especially when I was going to have to put up with his crap afterward.

Eli laughed again, and I took a deep breath, already palming my chest for the tour laminate I had on a lanyard so I could go into the building through the front instead of the back door.

Sacha’s hand nudged my arm. “You all right?” he asked when I looked up at him.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I forced a smile onto my face when Mason’s voice pierced through the air.

He frowned. “You don’t look fine.”

We were getting closer and closer to the corner of the block where I would either go in through the front or walk a few more feet and make my way to the back where the bus and trailer were. “I just…” I blew out a shaky breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and shook my head as if I wanted to shake off this entire situation with the idiots. “I don’t like being around Eli when he’s on something.” I had a sudden flashback of the night that had finally been my breaking point, when I decided I didn’t want to keep going out with GO. I’d been so pissed that I didn’t speak to any of them for months after that tour ended.

“He’s that bad?” Sacha asked.

I lifted up a shoulder, fighting off the anxiety trying to make a home in my chest. “Not bad, he just… says really stupid stuff. They all do.” Hurtful, personal stuff that none of them had any business sharing.

He nodded as if he understood, and maybe he did. Most people had that one friend that turned into a wrecking ball once they had drunk too much or done something else that changed their personalities or thinking process.

When we got to the corner in front of the venue, I touched his side. “I’m going in through the front.”

Sacha tipped his head down. “I should start getting dressed so I can begin warming up.” He flashed me that bright white smile one more time. “If you ever want to go running again, let me know. You’re a better running buddy than Julian.”

I couldn’t help but smile and nod.

The dark slashes of his eyebrows went up. “I’ll even let you off easy with only seven miles next time if you want.”

I fought the urge to push him away like I would have if he were one of my demons and snorted instead before backing away. “Go put your make-up on and warm up, Celine.”

I could still hear my brother laughing when I entered the venue less than a minute later.