Page 1 of Wild Fixation
Prologue
Jacob
IT STARTS AS A joke.
My first ever tour has been a whirlwind. I’ve traveled from Seattle, down the West Coast, and across the entire country. Now, we’re making our way north again, with a brief stop in Baltimore so we can pause and catch our breath. In this short time that we have to ourselves, I’m dragging my bandmate, Keannen, with me to Baltimore Harbor to indulge in being a total tourist. We’re a small band, and they included us in the tour so we could open for a far, far larger, more famous band, so we should be able to go to even a crowded tourist destination without anyone knowing or caring who we are.
Even so, that larger, more famous band offers their bodyguard to me and Keannen as we’re waiting in the hotel lobby for our rideshare.
“It’s safer,” Erin, the lead singer, says.
I wave away her caution. “It’ll be fine. No one knows us.”
“Not yet,” she says with a wink. “But okay, if you’re sure.”
“I am.”
She lets the matter drop, and Keannen and I get in our rideshare and head for the harbor. As we pull away from the hotel, I mutter, “I’d take him along, but not for my safety.”
I don’t mean for Keannen to overhear me mumbling about the bodyguard, but the sharpness of his gaze leaves no doubt that he did. I refuse to look at him, even as heat flushes into my cheeks. It’s been a long tour, and Keannen has caught me checking out the huge, muscle-bound bodyguard more than once. What can I say? We’ve been stuck together for weeks now, and Seth is a big, strong, sweep-you-off-your-feet mountain of a man. Between exhaustion and stress, can you blame a guy for stealing a glance every now and then?
“Do not fuck the security guy,” Keannen groans at me.
“Why not?” I say. “He’s a tree worth climbing, that’s for damn sure.”
I’m way too tired to care about Keannen overhearing my pointless fantasies. As soon as we get home, Seth will be working for the much more famous Ten Hours, and I’ll probably never see him again. So I might as well enjoy the perfect view while I have the chance.
Keannen rolls his eyes at me. “Because he’s the security guy. You’re the pretty boy frontman. You can sleep with whoever you want.”
“And what if who I want is a big, stern, beefy security guy?”
Besides, Keannen is wrong about that. I can’t get whoever I want, not when we’re traveling non-stop. And if this tour is successful, we’re going to return home to lives we barely recognize. I’m a cashier at a grocery store. I should never need a bodyguard.
The eye rolling continues, but Keannen lets the matter drop, apparently distracted. I don’t push it either. I’m joking, obviously. Even if we were big enough to require a bodyguard like Seth, it’s not like I could make a move on him. He’s probably straight, and definitely off-limits. This is all coming from the stress and excitement of being on the road for my first tour. It’ll pass the second I get back home.
Soon enough, life will go right back to normal.
Chapter One
Jacob
A few weeks later...
LIFE IS SO INSANELY not normal.
Someone grabs my sleeve. I wrench my arm away, diving for the door, where my bandmate Keannen is waiting to snatch my arm and and slam the door shut behind me.
I lean my back against the door and huff out a breath. Pounding fists thump against the metal. Muffled voices squeeze past the barrier, the shouted questions incomprehensible.
“It’s like a scene out of a zombie movie,” I say.
Keannen snorts. Our tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed drummer sneers at the door as though he can see through it to the press waiting beyond. “Vultures,” he mutters.
He stalks off, and I follow, a little shakier than I’d like to admit. My band, Baptism Emperor, finished our first big tour only a few weeks ago. Our management company thought opening for a bigger band during the tour might be a good way to launch our career, but they, and we, had no idea just how right they were.
Everything has changed since that tour, and so quickly that my head is spinning. A few months ago, I worked at a grocery store and played music in my spare time. Now, I can’t get from my fancy new apartment to the practice space where I’m supposed to meet my band without a flock of reporters hounding me. Our manager, Emmett, assures us it’s because we’re new and it’ll die down, and maybe he’s right. We only have one album, after all, and it’s the one we released ourselves before Emmett scooped us up. The tour was great for sales, but we don’t have our own security team or anything like that quite yet. Surely our lives will go back to normal sooner or later.
I follow Keannen down a dimly lit hall. It’s a hell of a lot nicer than the sorts of places where we used to practice, but some things never change. Musicians are almost legally required to make music in a place that could be converted into a garage.
