Winter Waites (Aster Valley 0.50)

As the noise of the concert crowd swelled around me, I fired off a response to the stranger. “You can have him. But close my fucking door before the cat gets out.”

I squeezed my eyes closed and sent a prayer out for Dillie’s safety. Hopefully she was asleep under my fuzzy blanket in the bedroom and didn’t even realize there were two assholes abusing our kitchen.

When I opened my eyes back up and saw Gentry Kane staring at me, I wanted to cry like a baby. What would it be like to have a man like that instead of a selfish asshole like Brian? Gentry Kane, who’d done such an amazing job working the crowd at his concert, I’d felt like I was the only person in the room.

Hell, I’d felt like he’d been singing only to me. Like… like it had just been the two of us in the room and he’d cared about me. It was silly.

I winced in low-key embarrassment. How many other fans at concerts had fantasies about the lead singer? My crush on one of the hottest folk-pop musicians of the decade wasn’t something I shared with other people. Ever.

It had started ten years ago when I was a first-year student at Colorado State. GUS had still been Gentry’s Unlimited Sweets back then, and they’d played a free concert in the park on a stunning late afternoon in April. I’d been lying in the grass most of the day filling my biology textbook with highlighter in an effort to keep my grades high enough to retain my scholarships. When the first strums of a haunting guitar solo had made their way over to me, I’d sat up and looked in the direction of the music.

The man singing had wavy, dark hair peeking out from under a beaten-up red ball cap. His hands had held the microphone as he crooned out the lyrics to a song I’d never heard before. As I’d gathered up my things and made my way closer to the performance, I’d felt my chest tighten and my heart trip up. The man’s voice had been fucking gorgeous, the kind of harrowing sound that snuck fingers deep into your solar plexus and grabbed you right in the gut.

The lead singer had wide shoulders and a narrow waist. The ripped jeans had molded perfectly to his fit body, and when he’d leaned back the slightest bit to take in a deep breath for a long note, the movement had lifted his T-shirt to reveal a tantalizing strip of pale skin with a dark trail of hair leading under his low waistband and webbing belt.

Fuck. The man was sex on stage. Pure, delicious sex. And his voice made me hard.

I’d stayed for every last note and then had raced back to my dorm to try and find every bit of information on the band I possibly could. After that, I’d listened to Gentry Kane’s sultry voice enough to know every word of every song he sang. When the band hit it big and shortened their name, I’d felt a proprietary sense of ownership that I’d known them before all that.

Through college and the following years of occupational therapy school, I’d turned to the familiar sounds of my GUS albums for comfort, energy, relaxation, and anything else I needed that no one else could give me. Their songs were the soundtrack of my early adulthood, and I could count on them to soothe me even now as I was facing the reality of yet another failed attempt at a relationship.

As I’d turned to leave, I’d even imagined Gentry himself calling out to me to stay, to wait for him. As if he couldn’t help but want me.

I let out a humorous laugh and didn’t let myself look back. I needed to get home and make sure Dillie was okay. Leave it to selfish prick Brian to make me miss the second half of the GUS concert. He’d made fun of me for liking the band so much, comparing me to his little sister, who was still in high school and obsessed with Ariana Grande. I half wondered if he’d arranged all this bullshit just to ruin the night I’d been looking forward to for so long. With my student loans breathing down my neck and the half year of lost income during the requisite volunteering and clinicals, it had taken me months to save up enough for this night.

After hopping into my jeep and cranking up the heat, I got on the road back toward Aster Valley. My job placement at the outpatient clinic attached to the regional hospital there had been a godsend. It had moved me far enough away from my family in Colorado Springs to make me feel like my own person. I may not have had much—a shitty rental in a trailer park near the hospital, a beat-up old jeep that wasn’t much to look at but cranked every time I needed it, and a little calico bestie who slept curled up above my head every night regardless of who else was in the bed—but it was all mine. Which was why I was in such a hurry to get back to Aster Valley and kick that asshole out of my place.