Page 7 of Oops Baby for the Rockstar
A pair of toffee brown eyes drift across my mind, fringed with dark lashes. Soulful eyes. The kind of eyes you look into once and remember every day for the rest of your miserable life.
Nowthatwas a good time. So good it’s ruined me.
“Maybe she’s out there tonight,” Rocco says, dropping like a sack of bricks into his own chair. Our drummer is never a dainty man, but a good portion of those screaming fans out there are screaming forhim.They like his tattooed arms, his strong chest, his buzz cut, and the mean look in his eye. If only they all knew he’s the mother hen of this group. “Perk up, man. You’ll find her again.”
A string twangs on the guitar, and I silence it with my palm. I sit forward, irritated. “It’s been three fucking months.”
Danny snorts from where he’s picking over a punch bowl of chocolate bars. “Three months of no fucking, more like. Now stop torturing my guitar.”
Jaw clenched, I swipe the nearest thing to hand—a box of Kleenex—and fling it at his head. Danny grins as it bounces off his forehead, way too light to do any damage.
“You want candy?” he asks.
My head drops back, the chair creaking dangerously beneath me as it teeters on two legs. “No.”
No, I do not want candy. I don’t even want to play this goddamn gig, even though a cross country tour with Wishbone was the big dream of my life for so long. The only thing I want isher.
Tamsin.
The girl with the VIP pass, all those months ago.
The girl who lit up the room with her wicked smile, and teased me in that raspy voice, and let me take her back to my hotel suite… then slipped away before dawn.
I mean, whodoesthat? She didn’t even rob me. My wallet was out, ready for the taking, and Tamsin didn’t even take cashfor a cab. She just snuck out while I was crashed out on the bed and probably snoring like an asshole, then disappeared like a wisp of smoke. Like a dream.
If the guys hadn’t met her too, all saying hi and shaking her hand in that VIP area, I’d think she was a hallucination. Even now, on my lowest nights, I’m not one hundred percent sure I didn’t drink something I shouldn’t and imagine the whole thing.
But if it was all in my head, surely I wouldn’t feel thisachefor her. This constant physical ache in my chest, like I’ve been hollowed out and left empty.
Where is she? Why didn’t she say goodbye?
“Fancy,” Zeke says, swinging a chair around and straddling it back-to-front beside a lit up mirror. He pulls a kissy face at the glass, batting his eyelashes. “I could get used to this. An actual dressing room instead of an old locker room. Doesn’t even smell like socks.”
Rocco snorts. “Yet.After a night of you assholes sweating up onstage, it’ll reek as bad as anywhere else.”
Danny says something in reply, but I’m not listening. I’ve tuned them out, suspended on two chair legs, lost in memories from three months ago. In vivid thoughts of silky dark hair, plump lips, soft skin. A sweet, raspy voice and the way it cracked when she cried out as she came.
Tamsin.
My heart thuds in my chest, but it’s a dried out husk these days. Weak and woeful.
“Jett,” Danny says, like he’s repeating my name for the third or fourth time. A candy bar bounces off my chest, and my chair slams back down onto four legs.
I glare in his direction. “What?”
“Isaid, we’re gonna get you laid tonight. No more moping after some random girl. You need to get her out of your system,man, and it’s not like there aren’t enough beautiful women nipping at your heels.”
“No.” My gut lurches at the thought.
“It’s happening,” Zeke agrees.
“Yeah, I’m sick of those hangdog eyes,” Rocco puts in. “It’s like that girl chained you out in the rain, instead of screwing you all night long and then leaving before you had to kick her out.”
“Iwouldn’thave kicked her out. That’s the whole fucking point.”
“She did you a favor, man.” Danny tears a candy bar open and takes a giant bite, then speaks through a mouthful of chocolate and nuts. “Girls don’t want todatea rock star. They want one wild night to brag to their friends about, and then they wanna go and settle down with some sensible accountant. Do the picket fence thing.”
Is that true? Well,Icould do the picket fence thing. It’s never crossed my mind as something to want before, but if Tamsin wanted that, I’d give it to her.
