Southern Rocker Boy (Southern Rockers Book 1) (22 page)

Sure enough, my “debut” performance with Ariel was trending. The only group scarier than new followers who professed their instant love for me was the group that attacked me for breaking up a great celebrity love. I slammed the laptop shut.

Lacy was already at the club by the time I got there on Sunday. “I was going to ask you what happened to you,” she said as she handed me my phone. “But I figured you can’t make a call without your phone.”

I took the phone and tossed it aside, taking her into my arms instead. For a crazy moment I wanted to beg her to go away with me, far away from Southern Nights, far away from Austin and far away from all the craziness that threatened to consume us.

“Are you okay?” she asked, as though she could feel me tremble.

I nodded. “I’ll be better on Tuesday.”

She smiled. “Me, too.”

“Lacy, we have to talk,” I said as I pulled away.

“That sounds serious.”

“It is,” I said. I couldn’t find the words to assuage her. “But no matter what, you have to believe that I love you.” I held her face and looked into her eyes, which grew wider and more fearful by the moment. She nodded and I kissed her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I sighed as I held her closer. I had everything I ever wanted right here in my arms. Why would I risk losing her? What on earth could possibly be worth it? I gave her another kiss before I let her go. “Nothing I can’t make right.”

I left a bewildered Lacy to find Gay. I was going to give her an ultimatum. She accepted Lacy and me as a pair or she didn’t represent us at all. The minute I walked into her office, she rounded the desk with a big hug. “You did it!” she proclaimed victoriously as she handed me an envelope. I opened to find a check from Carrington Entertainment for ten thousand dollars.

I stumbled back against the wall. This kind of money would change the lives of my family, rescuing us from financial ruin and setting us right on our feet again. It was too good to be true. “What’s this for?” I asked when I could resume the capability of speech.

“The most successful PR campaign of the summer,” she grinned. “Because of you, no one is asking Ariel about her defunct relationship with her ex, who had been caught canoodling another starlet. It was an embarrassment, and you gave her dignity back to her.”

“By making it look like we were having hot sex?” I shot back. She waved her hand in that dismissive way.

“Please. Everyone assumes everyone is sleeping with everyone anyway.”

“Not everyone,” I said.

Her eyes met mine. “Everyone.”

I sighed as I folded the check and put it in my pocket. “Oh,” she added. “There’s just one more thing. By cashing that check, you agree that anything that happened between you and Ariel, or didn’t, isn’t to be made public. The rumors are to stand unchallenged.”

“So it’s hush money.”

“It still spends the same,” she said. She walked back to her desk. I followed her.

“There’s more to it than this, isn’t there?” I asked. I had researched Jasper Carrington and I knew some of his familiar tricks. He wasn’t going to pay some nobody from B.F.E. that kind of money just to parade around half naked for a video. He was paying me to be a stand-in, and suddenly I knew it. “She’s really fucking Carrington, isn’t she?”

“Probably,” Gay said as she referred to her computer. “That’s why next weekend is so important, Jonah. You need choices. Believe me, you’ll be a lot more appealing to Baxter if he thinks that Carrington is going to make an offer. Why do you think they decided to come to Austin, Texas?”

I stared at her incredulously. She hadn’t been kidding. She really did know how to play the game. She wasn’t about to put all her eggs in Carrington’s basket after what happened with Tony Paul. The options she talked about were hers. She handed me a piece of paper. “This is your set for Monday. On the other side is your set for next Saturday.”

“I thought you said you were going to give Lacy a chance,” I snapped.

“I did. And I am. But I like to be prepared either way. You should learn it just in case.”

I sighed before I snatched the paper and stalked from the room. If it weren’t for that ten-thousand-dollar check in my pocket, I might have grabbed Lacy’s hand and walked us both right out of there.

But I wouldn’t jeopardize Mama or Leah for anyone, not even Lacy. This was our ticket. However I felt about how I got it, that check fulfilled a promise I made to my dead father. I was going to take care of my family and nothing was going to stand in my way.

That next weekend I was going to impress the shit out of Graham Baxter so that I could leave Jasper Carrington in the rearview mirror where he belonged. I had heard the horror stories, of new artists he had screwed over with shady contracts. There was that business when he cheated with the woman who was now his wife, when he knocked her up while he was still married to someone else. He moved her out of the country to minimize the damage, after attaching her to one of his biggest acts to keep her at arm’s length but under everybody’s noses.

And now he had just paid me five figures so he could hide his newest mistress, a pretty, polished skank who was ready to fuck me simply because I was around.

I wanted as far away from that mess as possible.

I walked to the stage to prepare for our set. No one else in the industry may have had any integrity, but by God I was going to hold onto mine for all that it was worth.

My only ally at this point was Lacy. I knew that she would never forfeit her character for her dream.

At least that’s what I thought until she walked out onto the stage in that bodysuit unzipped all the way past her pierced navel (that was new,) revealing a red lacy bra that pushed her breasts together and offered them up like Sunday brunch.

My jaw dropped open as I stared at her. When my eyes traveled back to her face, I could see the hard glint in her eyes. She was pissed. And Lord only knew which of the many reasons she had discovered to be angry with me.

“Lacy?” I echoed.

“You like?” she said as she twirled.

I liked her in everything, but at that moment I was afraid to confirm or deny. I just sat there on my stool, speechless.

She shoved a page of notebook paper at me. It was a brand new set that she had selected. We would open with a couple of fuck-you anthems from Joan Jett and Pink, duet with “
Stop Dragging My Heart Around
,” and she’d end the set on “
Undo It
.”

I sighed as I left the stage and headed to the dressing room. When I got there, I saw my phone sitting on the makeup table. I picked it up. There was a new photo message sent from Ariel. It was a still photo from the video shoot, taken at the hotel when her naked body was straddling mine. “
See you next time
,” she wrote, adding a kissy face emoticon. I crumpled into the chair. The door closed behind me. I looked in the mirror to see Lacy standing behind me, her eyes rimmed with tears.

“You got a message while you were away,” she sneered.

“I see that,” I said, tossing my phone onto the table.

“I tried to call you last night. All night in fact. I guess I know why you didn’t answer.” She waited for me to deny it, but we were far past that now. I knew how it looked. And I knew how it would sound if I tried to tell her about the video now when it was a convenient excuse. “Naturally when you didn’t answer I went online to see how the show was going.” She laughed humorlessly. “The pictures painted quite the story.”

My stomach dropped. So she had seen the photos. She just hadn’t believed them until that twat Ariel sent me an unsolicited photo. “It was all a lie, Lacy,” I said.

“Apparently,” she snapped.

I spun around to face her. My voice was strangled in my throat. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I swear to God.”

Her hand was on her hip as she glared at me. “A picture paints a thousand words, Ace,” she said.

I stood to face her. “I need you to trust me, Lacy,” I said. “I didn’t betray you.”

“You betrayed me the minute you tried to dress me up like one of your sluts!” she cried before she belted me hard across the face. And I took it. “I told you what Tony Paul did. I told you what it did to me. How could you, Jonah?”

My voice was quiet. “I was trying to help.”

“I don’t need your help,” she sneered. “I’ve been on that stage since I was your sister’s age.”

I met her gaze dead on. “And how far has it gotten you?”

She hit me with her other hand. Again I took it. “Go to hell!” she said before she turned away. I grabbed her wrist.

“Gay is going to fire you, Lacy.”

She turned back to face me. “What?”

I sighed as I pulled the new set list from my pocket. “Graham Baxter is coming to the club next weekend. She wants me to perform as the feature act for Dreaming in Blue. I told her that I wanted it to be Blaze or nothing. I begged her for one last chance to show that you could do everything I was doing. She said that if you didn’t follow her rules over the weekend, she’d know that you were beyond her help.”

She stared at the set list. “So you have to choose,” she said. It echoed her previous prediction.

I pulled her closer. “No, that’s just it. I don’t have to choose. You can do this with me. We can do this together. It doesn’t have to be either/or, Lacy.”

She laughed. “God, are you really that stupid, Jonah? Gaynell is never going to help me succeed, no matter what I do. These outfits? They’re a punishment. They’re a judgment. And I’m the little paid monkey she can keep on a string because I have no choices.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why would she go to that much trouble to sabotage you? It doesn’t make any sense.”

A lone tear slipped down her cheek. “For someone who wants me to trust him so much, you sure have a helluva time trusting me. Don’t you, Ace?”

She pulled her arm from mine and spun out of the room.

Despite the meltdown in the dressing room, Lacy decided to go with Gay’s set after all. We rehearsed together, but it was strained, particularly the romantic songs of longing and yearning that suddenly felt much more poignant than they did before. She played to the crowd, a plastic smile plastered on her face. But despite her façade, I could see through to the pain underneath. It cut everything we sang with a sharper edge. After the last song faded, she raced to the dressing room, which she locked to change. I leaned against the door and waited. Jacinda walked by. Our eyes met but we said nothing.

Lacy opened the dressing room door. She was dressed once again in her street clothes, a dark hoodie covering her face. She wouldn’t even look at me as she walked off to find a nameless bouncer to walk her to her car.

I walked into the dressing room to change into my clothes. I pocketed my phone after I deleted Ariel’s photo. The hired car took me back to the apartment, where I stared at my silent phone until the sun came up.

I was quiet as I was driven back to the club that Monday evening. Gay was already in the dressing room, with ideas of what songs to sing and how to dress, and how many M&G tickets she’d get to sell that night. I was quiet as I listened. I didn’t put up a fight. I didn’t argue.

I had one week left to prove to myself that this wasn’t all some sick joke. That I wasn’t some convenient little paper doll to prop up people more famous than me. Lacy wouldn’t talk to me. I had to find out if any of this other shit was worth losing the only woman I ever loved.

I sang my songs. I performed like a little puppet on a string. Then I went backstage and smiled big for every photo, even though my heart was broken and my stomach was eating itself with dread.

Gay brought me my check before I left. “You forgot to pick this up yesterday,” she said. “But I guess with ten thousand big ones in your pocket, it wasn’t a pressing need.”

She was smiling and quite proud of herself. “I have one question for you,” I said softly. “Do you hate Lacy?”

She was stunned by the question. “Why do you ask that?”

“She thinks you do.”

She laughed. “Of course she does. That girl is delusional. She keeps trying to drag personal feelings into a professional environment. It never ends well,” Gay added as she looked me over. “But I sense you’ve figured that out by now.”

“She says that you’re trying to sabotage her. That you never had any intention of helping her succeed.”

“I see,” she said. “And what do you think, Jonah?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I told her. “Nobody says what they really want to say. It’s nothing but secrets and innuendo. Maybe I could trust somebody if they just told me the truth.”

“You already know the truth, sugar,” she said softly. “Everything I told you in how to dress and what to sing and how to perform, I’ve told her. More than once. And you’ve seen her resist me every step of the way.”

I looked away.

“She’s had all the same chances as you have. She just hasn’t had the balls to take them. That’s no one’s fault but hers. I’d really hate to see one more career crash and burn because of her foolish choices. Admit it. Would you have all the money and the success you have now if you had followed her example?”

Reluctantly I shook my head.

“It’s a new day, Jonah. Things don’t work like they used to. Now you can become a celebrity before you ever do anything of note, just because you convince the masses you’re important. It doesn’t make you any less of an artist to take advantage of the opportunities that have come your way. You get to cash your ticket and be who you want to be while she’s still singing in a bar somewhere.”

“It’s not fair,” I muttered.

“Of course it’s not fair,” she said. “Who said it had to be fair? This isn’t some fairy tale, Jonah. This is the real world.”

I met her gaze. “No, it’s not. It’s a land of make believe, you said it yourself. It’s all about the illusion.”

“Isn’t everything?” she challenged. “Look. You’re tired. It’s been a long, chaotic week. Take a few days off to clear your head. Practice your songs. Prepare for the weekend. We’ll reevaluate everything on Thursday when we see where everybody stands.” She patted me on my shoulder. “Who knows? She may surprise us both.”

I nodded and watched her walk away.

That night was just as sleepless as the night before. I was exhausted, but all I could do was stare at my phone. My eyes were bloodshot and my mind was muddled when I prepared breakfast for Leah, who was perusing the class list of the new school she was about to start in a few weeks.

It had been quite a summer.

Fortunately Leah was in good spirits and good health, so I tried to keep the important things in perspective. She asked me to sing, but I shook my head. “I’m fried, Peanut. I need a break.”

“Okay,” she said as she evaluated me carefully. She may have only been a pre-teen, but she missed nothing. When she asked me if Lacy would be coming over, I simply shook my head. She knew better than to pry any deeper than that.

Instead we played board games and, as always, she soundly kicked my ass because she cared more about winning and I cared more about making her happy. I finally waved the white flag, so she flounced off to play her favorite video game. I was cleaning up the mess when someone knocked at the door.

I was shocked when I saw it was Lacy standing in the door frame. I instantly wanted to take her into my arms, but the look on her face stopped me short. She was still angry, still hurt… still distrustful.

“I didn’t expect to see you today,” I said softly.

“It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yeah,” I agreed before I opened the door to let her in. Leah brightened immediately.

“Lacy!” she exclaimed as she ran over to her new friend. She threw her arms around her, which Lacy reciprocated. “Where’s Cody?”

“At home,” Lacy answered. “I kind of needed to see your brother alone today.”

Leah nodded as if she understood. “I’ll give you some privacy,” she said before she disappeared into the room she currently shared with my mother.

After that weekend, we were planning to shop for something else.

I motioned toward the furniture that filled the tiny room. “Please. Make yourself at home.”

She nodded. She started for the sofa but changed her mind halfway through. She disappeared down the hall and into my bedroom.

I raced after her.

The minute I shut the door behind me she threw herself into my arms. It was a kiss so fierce and so desperate it took my breath away. “Lacy,” I breathed but she shook her head.

“Shh,” she said as she pulled me to the bed where we fell together. “Don’t talk. Just make love to me, Jonah.”

I groaned as I crushed her to me, kissing her hard. I thought I’d never hold her in my arms again, and yet there she was, warm and real and willing. I slipped my hand under her shirt and she wrestled with the fastener on my jeans.

It was happening so fast that I didn’t know what to make of it. I pulled away slightly. “Lacy,” I started again.

“You said you loved me,” she murmured as she wrapped her leg around me. “Prove it.”

Without another word I tore off her shirt and buried my face between those beautiful tits. I feasted on her with my mouth while my hands promptly did away with any obstructive clothes in the way. I couldn’t wait to bury myself in her. I was crazed for her and had been since the day we met. She opened her legs and pulled me between her legs. “Fuck me, Jonah,” she pleaded softly as she writhed against me.

I could barely come up for air but I had to. This was crazy. I looked into those beautiful dark eyes, searching her soul. Finally I untangled myself to reach for a condom. Before I could tear into it, the look on her face stopped me cold.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I could ask the same of you,” she said. “Why a condom now?”

My brain scrambled with Gay’s and Jacinda’s warnings. “You can’t be too careful,” I shrugged finally.

She wiggled out from under me and pulled herself into a sitting position on the side of my bed. “I guess you’re right,” she said, her voice catching.

I reached for her shoulder but she shrugged away as she hopped off the bed. “What’s wrong?” I asked, confused by this about-face, although I didn’t know why. She had run hot and cold since I met her.

She turned to me, her eyes rimmed red with unshed tears. “Nothing is wrong. If you don’t count the fact the man who claims to love me doesn’t trust me.”

“Because of the condom?” I asked.

“Don’t play stupid, Jonah. It insults us both.” She reached for her discarded clothes to begin dressing.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. I didn’t want to think what I was thinking, but her behavior was highly suspicious. She showed up out of the blue just to fuck my brains out, but put on the brakes the minute I tried to protect ourselves from life-changing consequences. “Did you want another baby?” I finally asked.

She burst out laughing, a hollow, humorless sound. “Of course that’s what you’d think. Hear that from your best buddy Gay?” She slammed out of my room and I chased her down the hall, out the door and all the way to her car.

“Lacy,” I said as I grabbed her arm. “What the hell is the matter with you?”

Tears poured down her cheeks. “They say that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. So I guess that clinches it. I’m insane.” She tried to pull away but I wouldn’t let her.

“Lacy,” I repeated as I stared down into her face.

She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. It was for the new lineup on Saturday, with Blaze opening the show and my going on second before the headlining act. “Congratulations,” she said as she handed it to me. “You made it.”

“This isn’t set in stone,” I insisted. “Gay told me that we could reevaluate on Thursday.”

“There’s nothing to evaluate,” she said with deadened eyes. “I already told Gay I wasn’t interested in the feature spot.”

I was flummoxed. “Why would you do that?”

“I told you,” she shrugged. “I don’t want that. I don’t want any part of the lies, the manipulation, the backstabbing and the mudslinging. I just want to sing, Jonah. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Fame changes people. Just look at you.”

“That’s not fair,” I insisted. “I’m still the same guy you met months ago.”

She looked me over in my new clothes, with my styled hair and my new beard. Even the boots were new. “See?” she said as tears poured down her face. “Just another lie.” I stood looking at her helplessly. Finally she said, “Goodbye, Jonah.” She slipped into her car and revved the engine.

“Lacy!” I called from the other side of the window. She didn’t look at me as she backed out of the parking lot and sped away. “Lacy!” I screamed.

But it was no use.

She was gone.