Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7) (7 page)

“Did he...what’s going on?”

“She kicked me in the crotch and her neighbor’s little yappyass dog bit my leg and I got waterboarded!” Tyler screamed, his face red with rage and body taut with fury. “Tell Darla I never signed up for this shit!” 

Charlotte went silent. I said, “That’s about right.”

“What?” Charlotte gasped.

“Why are you and Darla calling me and texting me?”

“Because Tyler needs help getting to L.A. for a Tuesday concert, and you’re his only hope.”

“What the hell is he
doing
here? Is he stalking me?”

“In your fucking dreams,” he said under his breath. “I don’t stalk chicks who try to remove my balls with their toenails.” 

Charlotte sighed. “He’s from St. Louis. You didn’t know that?”

“No. What part?”

“What part
what
? Isn’t he there? Ask him.”

I turned to him. “What part of St. Louis are you from?”

“Why the fuck does
that
matter?” he snapped. 

I just cocked an eyebrow and played his silence game. I waited. And waited.

He muttered the name of a neighborhood that was constantly in the news for crime.

Mrs. Wilmer pointed at him. “I knew it! No good comes from that neighborhood.”

My turn to step in. “Thank you for your kind assistance, Mrs. Wilmer.”

“Kind,” Tyler snorted.

“But I’m fine now. Really. Tyler is a friend of mine from Massachusetts,” I said to her. “Where I work.” 

The poor old woman’s shocked face made me feel awful suddenly. “He’s your friend? Why didn’t you say so, Margaret! I would never have treated a friend of yours so poorly, even if he is,”—sniff—“from
that
part of the city.”

Tyler turned a new shade of purple.

“Come on in,” I said to him as Charlotte chattered on the phone. “Let’s sort this mess out.” 

Tyler

I stood in the foyer of her really nice house in shock, dripping all over white tile. The house smelled like cinnamon and lavender and freshly-baked cookies. While Charlotte explained whatever Maggie needed to hear, I was a fucking wreck. Between getting a kick in the nuts that made any female MMA fighter look like a wimp, having fucking Cujo the poodle bite me like I was a chew toy, and some old lady who thought her watering hose was an AK-47, I was done with this day.

Done fucking
done
.

L.A. wasn’t worth it.

Nothing was worth it, least of all multi-colored muppet head over there, with her feet of steel. Holy fuck. Those were some powerful quads behind that kick. 

So why did my mind flit over to thinking about other ways those thighs could...oh, fuck.

She murmured and gasped on the phone with Charlotte. Protested and argued. I knew she was going to hate everything Charlotte and Darla said. Who wouldn’t be pissed to have a person they despised show up at their door needing a favor?

Unannounced, too. At least I wasn’t penniless. Thank God for small favors and savings accounts you can’t drain with a debit card.

But three hundred and fifty bucks was probably what they paid for a month of gardening services here. To these people, I was dog shit. The old bat next door made that clear. Guy from my part of town?

Bad news.

I was bad news, and from the sounds of the argument Maggie was having on the phone with Charlotte, she agreed with Cujo next door.

Bite me.

Maggie got off the phone and moved slowly, reaching for a cookie on a plate. Then she put the cookie in her mouth, picked up the plate, and walked from the open kitchen to the foyer.

She held the plate out toward me.

“Want one?”

I gaped in disbelief. “Antibiotic cream and dry clothes are what I need. Not something out of a Pillsbury commercial.”

She made a face of mock horror. “They’re made from scratch!”

I just glared.

“And you need a ride to L.A.” She chewed, never taking her eyes off me.

“Not sure about that now.”

She frowned. “You
don’t
need a ride to L.A.?”

I snagged a cookie and shoved it in my mouth, chewing like I was eating straw. Rage, fury, embarrassment, and shock all coursed through me. My blood was a soup of those shit emotions we all work so hard to push down. It pumped and pumped through me in a loop, like all that crap would never leave my body.

Maybe that was true. Maybe it was always there and I was fooling myself thinking I could escape it.

But making a stupid, impulsive decision not to go to L.A. wouldn’t help, either.

“No. I do.”

“You do need a ride? Can’t you take a flight?”

“No ID.”

She nodded slowly. Those glowing eyes looked at me like something out of a Pixar movie. “And you can’t take a train, either?”

“Too slow, plus—they sometimes check ID.”

“What happened to your stuff? Your wallet?”

“Got rolled.”

“Mugged?”

I nodded.

“Damn. That sucks.”

“I also got crotch kicked by a chick who looks like something from a Pokemon episode. It’s been a shit day. You giving me a ride or not?” 

Her face morphed into a
WTF?
expression. “Say ‘pretty please.’”

“
What?
”

“Ask me nicely.”

No. I just stared at her. That should work. Most people couldn’t stand being stared at for long periods of time. They always cracked. My calf throbbed where the dog bit me and goosebumps started to form on my arms from being wet and cold, but I locked eyes with her and didn’t move. 

Pretty soon I could barely breathe. Layer after layer of time and space peeled back as I saw Maggie. Watched her glowing blue eyes twitch, saw how the muscles of her mouth stored some words she wasn’t saying. Our breath became the only sound in the room. It filled my ears, like the tide coming in. 

“Don’t you need to go home and pack?” she finally asked.

That’s a normal question, right? Except nothing about this fucked up mess was normal. Nothing about my fucked up home was normal. Nothing about my family was normal. I didn’t really have it in me to answer the question. I stayed silent.

“Well? Tyler? Frown? Hello? When someone asks you a question, the decent human thing to do is give an answer.”

“I don’t have one.”

“You don’t have an answer?”

“I don’t have a home.”

“You’re homeless?”

I thought back on what the apartment looked like after Johnny tossed it. I could answer her question in lots of ways. They all spun around in my head like confetti in a blender. None of them paused long enough for me to see the words.

It was easier to say what she assumed.

“Something like that.”

Alarm filled her eyes. Fuck. That was the wrong answer.

“I have an apartment. Live there with my dad,” I said quickly. Let’s leave Johnny out of this. Too complicated.

The fear receded. You tell people what they want to hear and they mostly leave you alone. Except I couldn’t have Maggie leave me alone right now.

I needed her.

I hated needing people.

“Then why did you say you don’t have a home?” 

I looked around her house, this nice suburban two-story colonial along the edge of the city. No one I knew lived in a house like this except Joe and Trevor and Liam. It was like another world. This was a
home
. Where I lived with my dad and Johnny?

That was just a warehouse for fleshbags.

“I don’t know,” I said. And it was true. I didn’t. No answer came out. Just the cloud of confetti.

Her eyes narrowed. “You say that a lot.”

“There’s a lot of stuff I don’t know.”

She went to open her mouth and ask another question. Normally, I walk away from people when they do this. The questions felt like bullets. But this time, I asked one.

“Why’s your hair half purple?”

She reached up and touched it like she was suddenly remembering it was there. “Oh, this?” One corner of her mouth tipped up. “I was just...” Something in her smile faded. “I was just upset.”

“You dye your hair when you’re upset?”

She shrugged. “Sure. Beats getting high or cutting myself.”

My eyebrows shot up. Man, she just jumped the shark, huh? “You do that shit?”

She shook her head then looked at me, steadily, eyes rolling. “No. That’s the point. I dye my hair
instead
of doing that shit. Weren’t you listening?”

“It’s hard to figure out which of the thousands of words that come out of your mouth I’m supposed to pay attention to.”

She gave me a hard look.

“All of them, Frown. All of them.”

I could taste her heartbeat in my throat.

“Fine. Look, you got a bathroom? And a dryer?”

“What?” The hand holding the plate of cookies started to shake.

I gestured at my body. “I need to dry my clothes. I need a quick shower. And a first aid kit. If we’re leaving now, I need to—”

“Hold on!” she protested. “Leaving
now
?”

My eyes searched the room for a clock. Found one. “Yeah. It’s about a twenty-nine hour drive, and that’s with a good pace. Gotta be there by Monday for the Tuesday show, and that’s cutting it fucking close. So...”

She looked me up and down, then looked upstairs. “Yeah. Um, the shower’s up there. Towels are in the linen closet.”

Linen closet. We didn’t have a linen closet in my apartment. A closet for nothing but towels and sheets? These people might as well be Martha Stewart. 

“Okay.” I walked past her and got halfway up the white carpeted stairs. “I’ll leave my clothes in the hall. Can you, uh...put them in the dryer?”

She let out a long sigh.

“Sure.”

Chapter Four

Maggie

He walked up the stairs and I waited, willing my brain to stop thinking about the fact that he was about to be naked in my parents’ shower.

The past fifteen minutes had just upended my life. Again.  

Charlotte had insisted I needed to do this. That the band’s big break would be ruined if Tyler wasn’t there. She had begged and pleaded, but ended the call with words that haunted me:

“Maybe this is just what you need.”

What? I need to spend two days driving to the west coast to rescue some asshole who didn’t have the decency to turn me down gently when I threw myself at him?

No.

And yet...she’d begged. If Tyler couldn’t make it to L.A., the band was screwed. Their tour would disintegrate and it was like that old kid’s story.

For want of a shoe, the kingdom was lost.

Except in this case, for want of a Frown, the rock stars were fucked.

The bathroom door opened, and I heard a weird, muted thunking sound. Those must be his wet clothes. The shower went on, and I trudged up the stairs slowly on legs made of concrete. A small, tidy pile of—oddly enough—folded, wet clothes were there. T-shirt. Jeans. Socks.

And...hmmm. No underwear.

He must go commando.

A furious blush hit my body like a heat wave, like being in an overly air-conditioned theater in August and walking outside into ninety-four degree weather. My eyes darted to the door, my ears catching the sound of the shower curtain sliding on the pole.

I ran down the stairs and threw his pile of clothes in the dryer.

Kathunk. Kathunk. Kathunk.

The rhythm of the machine soothed me.

I didn’t want to drive halfway across the country with a guy who had just set my heart on a salsa dance. Being contained in a car for all those hours alone with him was about as appealing as, well, being rejected.

But Charlotte was my best friend. You do weird, crazy stuff for your bestie. Mostly so you can throw it in their face for the next six decades.

A cup of coffee, three more cookies, and a thorough reading of all of Darla and Charlotte’s messages later, I was more composed. The GPS on my phone said L.A. was twenty-nine hours away. More than 1,800 miles. A rudimentary plan formed in my head.

That plan was:
no
.

I couldn’t seriously think about doing this, could I? I’d said yes to Charlotte, but that was under pressure. Now, as Frown washed his naked body with the same shower gel I used on mine, as his clothes tumbled in our dryer, and as my foot still tingled with the feeling of crushing his testicles, the absurdity of all of this seeped in.

I began to laugh and couldn’t stop.

The rumble of Lena’s car engine in the driveway shook me out of my thoughts. I heard a car door slam, Attila bark, Lena call out to someone, and then— 

“Why is Mrs. Wilmer standing out there like a member of a SWAT team surveying a hostage situation?” she asked, eyebrow cocked, her suit wrinkled and shirt collar stained with a thin line of coffee.

“Well....”

She froze, her ear turning toward the upstairs. “Is someone showering?” In that exact instant, the water went off.

“No.”

“Maggie!” she whispered, the sound furtive and laden with meaning. “Do you have a man here?”

We both swiftly turned our heads toward the upstairs as a door clicked open. The sound of footsteps on carpet followed. Tyler appeared, his hair wet, his colorful skin on display, because he was only wearing a bath towel tucked around his waist.

“Holy mother,” Lena said under her breath.

I shot her a nasty look that might as well have screamed,
Mine
. 

At least she could breathe. I, on the other hand, lost the ability.

“Oh. Uh, hi.” Tyler gave Lena an awkward look. “I’m Tyler.”

Lena smiled nice and wide, her dimples showing in triplicate. “Hi, Tyler. I’m Lena. Maggie’s sister.”

He walked down the stairs slowly, the towel nearly slipping. He caught it and acted as if there were nothing at all out of the norm about parading around my parents’ house wearing a small piece of terrycloth in front of me and Lena.

“My clothes dry?” he asked me, his face pleasant but not smiling.

“Um....”

Lena bit back a laugh.

“Where’s the dryer?” 

Lena pointed. I had become a statue, completely entranced by the way his tats danced on the strong curves of his muscled chest and arms.