Much as she didn’t want to admit it, Jay’s touch was part of her muscle memory and the way he held his guitar was sparking all kinds of responses. Goose bumps along her arms, a change to her breathing. She’d had to dump her jacket. Her nipples stung, and it was too easy to imagine herself stalking over to Jay, ripping the guitar out of his arms and slamming her lips on his.
They’d started with a kiss like that. Long teased, almost rage-induced after a fight about the set list and Jay’s insistence they shouldn’t do covers. All the Fiddler’s audience had wanted was covers. She’d been right about that. She’d been wrong about the kiss. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. It was where her adult life started.
The beauty of hiding in the upstairs loft of the old church hall was that Jay would never know the effect he was having on her. Abel had banned her and Errol, but she’d snuck in to watch the rehearsal, expecting it to degenerate into hopeless infighting and maybe an actual smackdown.
There’d been a lot of snide comments and sideways looks and then they’d simply gotten down to it like professionals. Whatever resentment and angst they were feeling was being channeled into their instruments.
Jay took a back seat playing rhythm guitar like the old days, letting Abel lead, even in vocals on songs he’d written where he’d once been up front.
After the fact she hadn’t had to step in a break up a fight, that’d been the surprise of the morning. She’d expected Jay to be a dick about that arrangement. She’d expected him to be a dick in general. He was on rich lists now. Nothing he’d couldn’t buy, nowhere he wasn’t welcomed. He’d only agreed to play the Grumpy Fiddler because he was guilty as sin.
Now sweating up a storm for a secret audience of one, he was sin personified.
And she was damned to writhe in the flames of hell for all eternity because her mortal enemy was making her wet.
Her phone chirped, and she tore her eyes away from Jay’s fret mastery to look down at her screen. Earlier she’d sent Teela a photo of him in all his hunk of rock god glory. She snickered over Teela’s reply, Sold. Haydn Delany was so last year.
Evie responded Jay was so last decade
Teela came back with Aged to perfection.
Helps with tix sales. Besides you’re taken.
I’m leaving Haydn. Besides you don’t want Jay.
Evie paused. Jay had called her a liar and it would be lying to say she didn’t want him. I want the body. I don’t want the hassle of the man wearing it. And right now prowling around the rehearsal space like an erotic dream. There was simply no value in backsliding into a thing with Jay, even if it was only glorious angry sex. He was in the country for ten weeks and then he’d go on tour and back to wherever the heck he currently lived. It might as well be the moon.
Need to protect my heart, Tee.
Priority one. Fair call.
It was sensible to sin bin Jay, and yet wholly unsatisfying, like finding your bubble wrap had already been popped, neither of you had condoms when you really needed them, or the wrong pizza got delivered.
Phone still in hand, she risked filming the guys from over the balcony. Once she posted they’d know she’d been spying on them.
“Sucks to be in a rock band,” she said. “Everyone wants a piece of you. No one sticks around to clean up the mess.” Except that was a part of her job and she loved every minute of it.
She checked the footage. A little dark. Grip’s arms were a blur. Abel looked suitably in the zone, hot and bothered in a good way, and an arc of sunlight from the one window illuminated Jay as if he was an avenging angel come to save the world with an expertly laid riff.
She wouldn’t be human if she didn’t still desire him. She wouldn’t be sane if she acted on the urge.
He was self-taught where Grip and all the Tice kids had years of music lessons, scholarships and competition wins, layered over natural talent. Music was in their genes. That’s part of what stung about Jay’s defection and success. It was off the charts unexpected.
Errol as much as told Jay he didn’t have the right stuff to make it, that his best bet was to play with trained musicians and stay in the background where he wouldn’t trip over his lack of experience. He saw Jay as a dreamer, a flake, a song-writing fluke who didn’t know he’d gotten lucky a couple of times and didn’t have the discipline to go the hard yards to turn chance into skill.
He saw him as a starter boyfriend who Evie shouldn’t get too attached to.
He was the only one not astounded when Jay quit. He’d had to eat his words since then, but not about Jay being the boyfriend you practice heartbreak on.
She set the video to post on the fan page right after the one from yesterday’s media conference where the guys from both bands mingled with entertainment press to talk about the tour.
Local boy made good, Jay had
been the star of that particular event. Evie had to stop Oscar leaving before it was over. Isaac got a migraine and Abel white-knuckled it, at one point saying think of the money to himself so loudly it was picked up by a hot mic and ended up on the seven o’clock news and a bunch of radio broadcasts, fortunately played off as a huge joke.
There’d been no guarantee anyone was going to show up for rehearsals or if they’d remember how to play with each other, but the sound Evie heard rising up in the space was full of rhythm, melody and grunt. It wasn’t the original PoP sound, it was better. Jay was better, he played better, his voice was better, and everyone down there knew it.
Her brothers might be a little sour in their grapes but they were also big enough to acknowledge the truth. That had to be the reason why when they quit playing and starting roughing Jay up, the pushing and shoving was all in jest and no one needed an ambulance.