The Boy Next Door

I tried not to feel too disappointed as he walked out of there without saying another word to me. I knew how important the band was to him. I shouldn’t feel slighted. They had to come first. Still, standing there alone in the backroom, straightening my clothing and feeling the dampness between my thighs, I couldn’t help but feel cheap.

If I was going to have Jayson, I wanted him to lay me down on soft sheets, to take his time with me. I wanted to lie together all night, his arms around me, his body warm against mine. I wanted soft caresses and sweet kisses.

I wanted the promise of something more. That was what I was really missing here, and what I was really craving. Standing there alone in the backroom, I knew that things were no more resolved than they had ever been. We hadn’t talked about the terms of a relationship. There was no relationship. He was just a guy I had slept with a few times.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying not to feel disappointed with it all. I remembered what Piper had told me: if I wanted him, I could have him. I had something that the rest of the groupies didn’t have.

I had felt that way earlier in the night, anyway. I tried to cling to that feeling now.

I headed out into the bar, pasting a smile on my face. I knew that if Jayson was dealing with Carter, it was probably going to be an all-night thing with Carter crashing at his place again. I tried to tell myself that that was fine. There would be another time.

In any case, it sounded like Luke was involved in things too, which meant that Piper probably wasn’t getting anything more out of him that night, either. We would head home and do this again another night. No big deal.

As I was on my way back to Piper, though, a cute bottle-blonde stepped into my path. “Hey, new girl,” she said in a way that was anything but friendly or welcoming. “Listen, I know you don’t know how things work around here, but there’s a bit of a hierarchy where it comes to us. I’ve got dibs on Jayson.”

I blinked at her, barely believing the words had just come out of her mouth. She had dibs on him? Like he was just some toy for them to squabble over. I made a face of disgust. Who was this chick?

“I think that’s up to Jayson to decide,” I said.

The woman narrowed her eyes at me. “You might be having fun with him now, but you know it won’t last,” she said coolly.

I rolled my eyes. “You have no idea what Jayson and I have, so why don’t you just butt out?”

She loomed closer. “I’ve seen a lot of bands, and I’ve never seen a musician be faithful for long. That’s not the kind of thing that a girl like you is looking for, and we both know it. So why don’t you leave him for someone who can handle him?”

I bristled, but before I could say anything else, she turned and sauntered away toward the bar, not giving me a backward glance.

I frowned. I didn’t want to believe what she had said to me, but on the other hand, she had given voice to some of the same fears I’d had about Jayson from the start.

And hell, I had seen him come home with Mark and those two girls, hadn’t I? I didn’t even know if he had been faithful since the first time we had slept together, and that had only been a matter of weeks. Granted, we had never outright talked about fidelity. How could I ever expect it from him, though?

They weren’t even famous yet. They might be a big enough thing to keep playing shows and to have a coterie that followed them from bar to bar, but they weren’t a huge sensation like they could potentially be if they pulled it together and were heard by the right people.

How could I compete against all the other women who would throw themselves at him once he really made it? I just couldn’t do that.

It wasn’t that I lacked self-esteem, I was just realistic. I was some girl from a small town in the middle of nowhere. My life had been somewhat sheltered, now that I thought about it, and I knew that I lacked a certain sophistication and worldliness. I was destined to wind up with someone quiet and gentle and small-town just like me. That was just the way things worked.

In any case, I had to admit that there was a reason we had never discussed the relationship thing, or even discussed whether this fling was a thing that would continue. It wasn’t just that we could barely be in the same room with one another without ripping off one another’s clothes. No, the real reason was that I knew exactly how that conversation would go.