Fade Into You (Shaken Dirty 3)
“Right, of course. Sorry.” He blushed wildly, but still made no move to shake his hand. Wyatt was starting to think he was going to be left hanging when one of the guy’s friends nudged him hard.
“Oh, um, I’m Dylan. Dylan Waters,” he said as he finally grabbed on to Wyatt’s hand and pumped it enthusiastically. “And these are my friends and bandmates, Billy Freeman and Jace Brooks.”
“Nice to meet you guys,” Wyatt said as he wrestled his hand away from Dylan’s very enthusiastic grip and extended it to first Billy and then Jace. “So you guys have a band?”
“Yeah,” Billy said. “Big Bad Wolf. We’re just starting out, but yeah. We’re trying to put a show together, get some gigs.”
“That’s awesome. What kind of music do you play?” Judging from their appearances, he was going with punk.
“Rock,” Dylan said. “Like you. We even cover a couple of your songs.”
“Oh, yeah? Which ones?”
“‘Entice’ and ‘Drowning.’”
“Really?” His eyebrows shot up in surprise, since both were solid songs that had performed well, but they were definitely not Shaken Dirty’s biggest hits. “I wrote both of those.”
“Believe me,” Billy told him, “we know. Jace reminds us of that fact pretty much twenty times a day. He’s like, seriously, your biggest fan. He worships you and bores us daily with endless facts.”
“I mean, we’re all huge fans,” Dylan said, glaring at Billy. “It’s not like he actually bores us, ‘cuz we could pretty much talk about Shaken Dirty all day, but—”
Wyatt laughed. “It’s okay. I promise, I didn’t take offense. I’d get bored, too, if I had to hear about myself all day. So much better to just play music, huh?”
He grinned at Jace, tried to invite him to share the joke. But the guy just stood there, blushing wildly and looking at everything and everyone but him. Poor kid.
“Who else do you cover?” he asked, hoping to give him something easy to talk about.
No such luck. Jace just kept staring through him like he was a ghost or something.
“We don’t. Other than your stuff, we pretty much write all our own songs,” Dylan told him. “Or Jace does. He’s the big songwriter of the group.”
“Oh, yeah? That’s really cool. What are you working on now, Jace?”
Jace squeaked in response, but still didn’t look at him.
Dylan rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Sorry, man. I think he’s in shock. Seriously, like you don’t understand how important you are to him. He knows every Shaken Dirty song, every drum fill, every riff. He spends hours every day just wailing on the drums, trying to be as fast and as steady as you are.”
“Yeah, but that’s never going to happen.” Jace spoke up for the first time. “I pretty much suck.”
“You do not, man!” Billy sounded totally indignant. “You’re really good. Not Wyatt Jennings good yet, but who the fuck is?” He turned to Wyatt. “I’m serious, man. It’s like he’s a different person when he’s behind his kit. He’s really fucking amazing.”
“I bet.” Wyatt studied the kid. There was something about Jace that reminded him of himself at that age—which scared him a little, considering how he’d ended up. Then again, maybe if he’d had something to hang on to until he’d found Shaken Dirty, things would have turned out differently. “You know, I’d like to see that. Do you guys have any gigs coming up?”
For a second it looked like all three of them had swallowed their tongues. Then Dylan blurted out, “Actually, we have one at the end of next week. It’s at this bar called The Spotlight. It’s pretty sketchy, but—”
“I know the place. In fact, we played it a long time ago, back when we were just starting out.”
“No way!” Billy crowed. “No fucking way!”
Wyatt shrugged. “We all started somewhere, dude.”
“Yeah, but I’m going to be singing on the same stage that Ryder Montgomery sang on!” Dylan whooped. “I can’t fucking believe it.”
“Believe it. Though, it’s been years. I can’t guarantee they haven’t switched the stage out—”
“If you’d been to the place recently, you’d know they haven’t switched anything out in a long, long time.”
“Same old Spotlight, then,” Wyatt said with a laugh. “That place was decrepit when we played it.”