Page 3 of Sing Your Heart Out

He speaks with a little bit of a Hispanic accent.

My eyebrows rise. I wipe my hand on my pants, narrowing my gaze on Marco. “Is that right?”

Marco rubs the towel over his face and rolls his eyes. “That is right. I am not here to make friends. I am here to win. Except for Miss Dee here of course, I definitely want to be her friend.”

He wiggles his eyebrows and blows a few kisses her way. Dee turns pink and waves him off.

“He’s terrible,” she says. “You can’t listen to a thing he says.”

But she obviously likes the attention, because she stays and talks with Marco even when I roll my eyes and start to walk away.

“I do not know why you do not just declare the winner of the contest right now,” Marco calls. I pause, looking back to him with an arched brow. He grins. “I have two Latin Grammys. What do you have, eh? Nothing!”

He laughs.

I’m the lead singer and songwriter of the Keepers. We have two studio albums and we have toured with the Raconteurs and Muse. It’s on the tip of my tongue to say it, but I don’t.

I can’t.

Not when half of my songs began in Alex’s notebook, scraped scraps of poems. My fists tighten.

I turn around, eyeing him from the top of his head to his feet on the pavement. “If you are so great, Marco, then why are you here? Hmm? If you are so talented, why doesn’t Dee just take you for what you are?”

Marco’s smile disappears. “It is complicated.”

“Ah.” I nod sagely. “I understand perfectly. You are all talk, but no actual game.” My lips curve upwards into a smile. “It’ll be a pleasure competing against you, you little— “

He launches himself at me with a roar. I’m more than happy to rough him up a little bit, but I think that I read absolutely no violence in the house rules.

Dwayne appears out of nowhere to step between us, his ire up. “Dee! Come here and get your man!”

He stops Marco, throwing me a look over his shoulder. “Head inside, please.”

I shrug a shoulder and turn, doing as he commands. Dee, Dwayne, and Marco have a whispered conversation that I would like to listen to, but I just keep walking.

Mellie hasn’t moved an inch. She still sips from her mug, looking at me as if I’m the problem here.

“What?” I ask.

“Keep walking, stranger.” She sets down her mug and proceeds to ignore me entirely.

I sigh and head back towards where I left my luggage. There are a lot of rooms left to claim and a lot of people yet to arrive.

2

Sarah

Ilook out the bus window, my sense of excitement at war with my nerves. Everything is the same color here, beige that has cooked under the sun for millennia. All the houses and businesses here are short and squat and same-looking. Considering where I’m running from, the most vibrant part of downtown LA, Las Vegas is unimpressive so far.

It’s been a relatively short bus ride here. Just four hours. Four hours of peace, without Martin’s voice harassing me to do things differently. Saying that if I had any sense, I would stick close to him and never look back.

Look how wellthatturned out.

Tasting something bitter in the back of my throat, I take a sip of water from a plastic bottle. Then I double check my makeup in a compact I have handy. It looks good, except for the greenish circle of still-healing flesh under my right eye.

Martin was always better at talking with his fists. It’s a big part of the reason I left him in the middle of the night without a word.

Thus, the trip impromptu trip to Vegas. Martin hated the idea of me living with anyone other than him, hated me having any job other than as a washed up lounge singer at a third-rate hotel.

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