Page 46 of Midnight Stage

His eyes widen, realizing the severity of the situation. He didn’t just fuck up. He almost ended his career before it even began.

“Fuck, man,” he grunts, still clutching his stomach as he tries to get back to his feet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“Let me make myself clear,” I growl, not giving a shit that Rae could turn around at any moment and see exactly what’s going on out here. “You don’t touch her. You don’t breathe near her. You don’t even fucking talk to her unless she talks to your first. Raleigh is mine. Always has been.”

He visibly swallows and quickly nods as real fear flashes in his eyes. “Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t serious. I was just . . . I wasn’t going to touch her.”

I hold his stare for a long moment before finally turning away, more than ready to get this rehearsal underway. There’s a lot to go through today. The dancers should be here in the next hour with the pyrotechnics team to confirm the final arrangements, the wardrobe team will want final confirmations as well as the sound and lighting team, despite all of this having been sorted out weeks ago.

Grabbing the neck of my guitar, I settle in front of the microphone. “Let’s take it from the very beginning,” I tell the guys, knowing they have the set list memorized, and with that, Rock counts us in.

The moment we start playing, Marley excuses herself from the office, leaving Lenny and Rae to talk, and as I sing the very words I wrote for her, I watch their conversation quickly morph into a heated argument, but from where I’m standing, it looks as though Rae is the one with the upper hand.

Hands fly while Lenny paces back and forth, and when Rae turns around in anger and goes to storm for the door, Lenny dives after her, begging her to come back. I watch as Rae lets out a heavy sigh and clearly accepts whatever Lenny is saying, but the subtle smirk on her lips tells me she just played him and got whatever it is she was hoping for.

They talk for another twenty minutes before Lenny strides out of the office, leaving Rae to do whatever it is she needs to do, and as I continue playing, I watch her stride around my office, making the desk her own. From her new position at the desk, she now has the perfect view of the studio, and I know without a doubt, it’s her stubborn nature that has her refusing to look up.

Marley comes back in a moment later, holding a brand-new laptop still in its box and delivers it to Rae, who doesn’t waste a moment diving in and getting herself set up. As she works, I can’t help but be thrown back in time to the days we would practice while she worked on her laptop, doing homework, putting together the flyers for our gigs, and pushing us on every social media account she created for the band—accounts we still use to this day. Only now we have a whole team responsible for posting, and we don’t have to lift a finger.

The day quickly begins to pass with Rae lost in her work as we perfect our sets. When the dancers show up, she barely even notices, even after catching them all over me yesterday. Before Rae stormed through here, I was more than happy to allow Stacey and Jessica to distract me with their bodies and provocative dance moves, but today, I couldn’t care less.

As we take a break, I jump down from the stage and walk across the studio to get a drink, and with every step I take, I feel Rae’s stare tracking me. I almost want to look up, just to catch her in the act, but I won’t dare. Being here in my space is just as hard for her as it is for me. This isn’t just my studio, it’s my home, and there was a time I thought that it would someday be ours, that we would raise a family here.

After taking a drink, I glance up to notice Dylan has followed me, and after grabbing a drink for himself, he steps in beside me and nods toward Rae. “You think she’s okay in there?”

“Yeah,” I say as a small smile pulls at the corners of my lips. “Look at her. We should have brought her on the second she graduated college. She’s in her element. She hasn’t stopped all morning. Not to mention, you saw the way she played Lenny. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’s ever been able to do that apart from Axel.”

“Yeah, kinda badass,” he says. “But you know she never graduated, right? She was talking about it last night after the whole naked street run. She said that after the funeral, she spiraled, kinda the same way we all did, but she couldn’t pull herself out of the darkness and everything just . . . sucked for her. She never completed her degree, never got to graduate, and eventually moved back home to Michigan.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. Wasn’t all she said last night though,” he says with a sharp edge in his tone.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, watching one of the label’s assistants pause at the door of Rae’s new temporary office, knocks, and then walks in with lunch. Rae thanks him, and as he walks back out, he pulls against the door to close it, only it doesn’t quite seal.

“She hasn’t heard any of our newer music,” he tells me, his gaze locked on the cracked door just as mine swivels around to meet his stare.

“The fuck?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” he tells me. “She’s avoided every album since the first tour. She doesn’t even know the titles.”

I shake my head, unable to process what the hell he’s trying to tell me. “But all those songs, I wrote them for her—”

“Yeah, she’s never heard them,” he confirms as my head spins.

There’s no fucking way.

She used to lay on her bed reading while I wrote. My lyrics were so entwined with her, they could have easily come from her brain instead of mine, and to know she hasn’t even heard these songs that have been out for years is almost absurd.

A wave of anger takes over me, and for a moment, I consider storming in there and demanding answers, but it quickly morphs into a strange mix of sadness and regret. All those years, knowing I couldn’t reach out to her, I thought I could communicate through my lyrics. I would imagine her begging Axel for early copies of our new albums and sitting in her bed pouring over the lyrics, knowing that I was speaking directly to her. But to know she never even attempted to hear them guts me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

“Come on,” I say. “We’ve got shit to do.”

Dylan and I make our way back to the stage, and as I reach for my guitar and hook the strap over my shoulder, I look to Rock. “We’re doing ‘Cold Hearted Bitch.’ ”

“Huh?” he says as he reaches for his drumsticks. “That’s not on the setlist.”

“Oh, he knows,” Dylan mumbles under his breath.

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