I turn up at the soundcheck early to wait for her, only to find that she’s even earlier. I watch her guide her band as they blast through a song, and goof around with the ending, turning the song into a silly parody of one of Lexi’s songs. I start smiling, but something about the way she shares the laughter with her guitarist makes me drop the smile pretty quick.

When they’re done laughing and checking with the engineer in the stands that everything’s okay, I walk straight to Haley – but my eyes are fixed on the guitarist. He gives me a weak wave, before pretending to have somewhere he needs to be and leaving. Haley turns around to see what scared him.

“Oh,” she says, as if I’m a major disappointment.

“You guys sounded good.”

“Easy to sound good in an empty theatre,” she says sardonically. I try to keep my hands to myself as she bends over to put her guitar in its case.

When she stands back up and looks at me I lose myself for a second. She’s got a new kind of sexiness I’m seeing for the first time. If the girl I met at the open mic was sexy because she was so innocent, naïve, and keen to see the world, this new Haley is sexy for a whole new set of reasons. No more of the round, whites-of-the-eyes looks that she used to get; now they’re hard, like two pools of suppressed fire. The lips that once curled outward as if tasting something for the first time are now tight and ripe. Even the way she carries herself now is different. No more hanging her head, hiding behind her hair, standing sideways: now she stands with her shoulders back, her chin high, and it’s impossible not to notice the swell of her breasts, the roundness of her hips.

Once upon a time everything about her said ‘take me, I’m yours,’ and now it says ‘you’re mine, and I’ll take what I want.’ I think back to the time we fucked in the studio, my head between her trembling thighs, her fragile body shaking under my hands, and realize I’d give anything to taste her again, this new Haley.

Before I can stop myself, I say something stupid. As usual. “I’m sorry about how this turned out.”

She folds her arms, shifts her weight onto one leg, and I have to look away to stop my cock from reacting to the way the line of her ass syncs so perfectly with the outline of her lifted tits. “Are you?”

“Look Haley, I know—”

I’m interrupted by the sudden onrush of Lexi’s people to the stage. More than a dozen colorfully-dressed men and women with flamboyant haircuts emerging from the sides and taking up spots with the precision of a military operation.

“Do dancers need to soundcheck too?” Haley says, noticing them as well.

I take her by the arm and lead her off to the side, a sense of joy spiking in me when I see she doesn’t resist – little victories. We stand by one of the quieter corners in the backstage area and Haley promptly assumes her ‘I’ll listen but I’ll also judge’ position again.

“I know you don’t believe anything I say anymore,” I continue, sounding like I’m not pleading, but looking every bit the beggar, “but you’re the best musician I’ve ever worked with.”

I stand aside slightly to let a couple more dancers run to the stage, and when I look back at Haley she’s still glaring at me – only there’s a little more softness in her eyes than there was a second ago. She doesn’t say anything, she’s expecting more. Fine.

I’d beg all night for her.

“Yes, I made a bet. And yes, it was to get Lexi back. But do you think I’d be here if that was all it was? I mean, I won the bet, I got Lexi back, I got you a hit record, I should be happy, right?” I point at my face. “Do I sound like a happy man right now? Or do I sound more like a whining idiot who’s desperate to fix the dumbest mistake he ever made?”

Haley breaks a little, and looks away to try and hide her smile, but I catch it. This must be what coming back from the dead feels like.

“I wish I didn’t feel like this, Haley. I wish I could just brush you off. God knows I’ve had enough practice forgetting about girls. I spent a month listening to your songs, getting Josh to sneak me the demos of you at the studio, playing them over and over again. Torturing myself with how amazing you are. Trying to convince myself that it was just about music, nothing else. But the night you told me about Rex being your father, about how you never even got to speak to him – I knew that even though we come from different worlds, deep down, we’ve got a connection. Something more than music.”

Haley looks down, hiding behind her hair, almost as if she’s once again the shy open-mic’er who was too nervous to play her own songs. When she looks up again, though, she’s back to the new, tough Haley.

“Maybe, Brando. But you still lied to me. You started this whole thing off with a lie. How am I supposed to know where the lies stopped and the truth began? Did you lie when you told me I had something special and should sign with you right away? Did you lie about how you grew up tough and only a love of music got you through? Are you lying right now?”

“Haley, I—”

She raises a hand to stop me from speaking, and I’m so enraptured by the movement of her lips, the lines of her face, by being this close to her again, that it feels like slamming into a train.

“You know what your problem is, Brando?” she says, her voice gentle but lethal. “You’re too good. Too perfect. Too smooth. I can never tell when you’re actually feeling something. Actually hurting, and yearning, and sad, like a regular person.” She takes a step away from me, about to leave, before turning back. “But this is a start.”

I watch her walk down the long hall of the backstage area, my chest heaving, every bone in my body feeling like it’s just been thrown around in a washing machine. She pushes through the exit doors, and I feel a hole in my chest.

“I wonder if you ever watched me walk away like that.”

I spin around and see her leaning casually against the wall.

“Lexi.”

“You were probably just watching her ass though, right?” she laughs.

I’m not amused. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Why? Did I miss the best part?” she says, pushing herself away from the wall and stepping out onto the stage, where there are roughly twenty people now waiting for her to soundcheck.

I push a hand through my hair, emotions running and striking inside of me like a storm. I start striding in the opposite direction, head down, fists clenched. I can barely tell whether I’m angry at Lexi’s snooping, at having disappointed Haley so deeply, or whether I’m just so fucking hot for her that it’s making me aggressive. Either way, it’s a bad time to bump into her guitarist.

Which is exactly what happens.

He nods a greeting at me, quickening his pace to glide right by, but I put a hand on his chest to stop him, and he almost flails onto my palm like he just walked into a lamppost.

“Oh, hey!” he says, with frightened enthusiasm.

“Brian? Is it?”

“Yeah! You’re Brando, right?”

“Tell me: Do you like Haley?”

“Uh…of course! She’s awesome. Best singer I’ve played fo—”

“I mean,” I snarl, slower this time, “do you like Haley?”

I takes a second for understanding to appear in his glazed eyes.

“Oh! No! No, man, come on! No.”

Suddenly I realize how ridiculous this is, how crazy I’m being. The last thing I need right now is to turn into a paranoid maniac who gets into jealous fights with my client’s back-up musicians. I drop my palm and shake my head like a dog shaking off a bad scent.

“Sorry,” I mumble, as if I just woke up. “Forget about it.”

Chapter 6

Haley

I can’t think. Somebody has pressed fast-forward on everything around me, and my mind just can’t catch up.