Page 22 of Rock & Roll Nights: The Lila and Rivers Edit
Sure, I’d jumped at the chance to spend more time with her on that first night, when we’d had so much to drink we could hardly walk straight on the way to my room. I’d held onto her like she was a life jacket and I was drowning, and I hadn’t given my reputation two thoughts. I’d been too caught up in how good I felt with her.
But that had been one night, and I hadn’t thought I’d ever see her again.
This was going to be weeks of pretending we were a couple. Weeks in which I could screw everything up. I’d seen the way she looked at me that first morning in front of the cameras. Her eyes had been full of her heart, those bottle-green orbs telling me exactly how much she was feeling in the moment, and thathadn’t changed. When she looked at me, I could see a girl on the edge of falling in love.
And I couldn’t let it happen.
Because I wasn’t the guy who fell in love back.
Besides, the truth was this was a fake relationship that I’d agreed to only because it would save our spot on the tour. And she was only doing it for the promise of a contract. It was a business deal. Nothing more.
Nothing less, either. But still. We didn’t mean anything to each other, and I couldn’t let myself think we did.
Period.
The answer was simple. No matter how much I wanted to see her—all the time—I told myself I could only seek her out twice a day. Three times, max. And I could only see her if we could make it into an appearance for the press. If I could, I kept my distance when we were together, and made sure someone else was around to pad us. I tried very hard to keep from touching her.
Unless I fooled myself into believing I didn’t have a choice in the matter.
All too often, I found myself turning to her and trailing my fingertips over her cheek and down her neck, my skin buzzing with the memory of her as I drowned myself in her bright green gaze. I’d watch her bite her lip and stare up at me like I was more beautiful than the moon in the sky, and my heart would soar at the thought of it.
And when I leaned down and pressed my lips to hers, I told myself I was only doing it because there were cameras there to take our picture. I fooled myself with lies about my promise to Taylor and doing things for the good of the band.
And if some part of my mind admitted that I was lying to myself, a much larger part pushed that away as too painful—and too true—to think about.
On our third night on the road, I was backstage, hurrying through our preparations because we’d been late getting into town. The audience was already in the house by the time we rolled in, and though The Leathers had performed first and had at least warmed the stage up for us, we used different equipment and had to change everything out before we could go on. Our roadies were good but weren’t capable of doing it all on their own, so Matt, Noah, Hudson, and I were running around like chickens with our heads cut off, getting amps and speakers onto the stage and ferrying out guitars, microphones, and the drum set.
We should have slowed down. We should have been more careful. But you get on the road, and you get into this place where all you can think about is getting in front of the audience, and I think we all knew that the sooner we got everything set up, the sooner we’d be up there playing.
We had several speakers still stacked backstage and I was reaching up to grab one of them when someone hit me from behind. I stumbled into the stack, swearing, and felt the bottom speaker give... then start to tip.
Oh God.
I looked up at the stack, everything caught in slow motion, and realized that the whole thing was about to go. My eyes tracked slowly—too slowly—to what was on the other side, trying to figure out whether anything was in the way.
Because this stack of speakers was going down.
To my horror, Lila was standing on the other side, her arms full of boxes. She’d been helping the band, I realized. Carrying stuff around for us. Making herself a part of our family.
And now she was standing in harm’s way.
I was moving before I made the decision to do it, rushing toward her with my arms outstretched and my gaze locked withhers. I couldn’t let her get hurt. Couldn’t let her be crushed under falling speakers on my watch.
I got to her in three strides, wrapped my arms around her, and threw us both out of the way, my body surrounding hers so that I was the one who hit the ground first. We rolled over and over, crashing through boxes of supplies and a couple of microphones, and finally came to a stop with her underneath me, her chest heaving and my arms still wrapped around her.
I rose up a bit so I could look down at her and met those green eyes, my breath caught in my throat. “Are you okay?” I whispered.
She huffed out a laugh. “Sure. I was just tackled by an enormous rock star and thrown around, but that’s nothing new. Happens all the time.”
Her eyes flicked to the scene behind me, and she frowned.
“Though I do sort of wonder what you were doing. I mean if you wanted a hug or something, you could have just said so.”
In that moment, I realized that I didn’t hear the crashing sound of speakers coming down or the shouts I would have expected to accompany them.
In fact, all I heard was silence.
When I sat up and turned to look, I saw that the stack of speakers I’d been sure was falling was... still standing there, the speakers stacked like they’d always been.
