Page 36 of Naughty Dreams
The look in Roy’s eyes brought him to a different and far better place in his head. “I’m sorry. Sir. Is it okay if I touch you? I’d like…it would help.”
No bullshit. Fortunately Roy saw it. Roy controlled the decision, gripping DJ’s wrist and bringing his hand back to his chest. Beneath the tank, he could feel Roy’s beating heart. “It’s all right.”
“Yeah. Thanks to you and your team.” Fuck, he was trembling. Roy’s hand covered his and stroked. Soothed.
“He didn’t know how to aim for shit. He could have killed a fan. Is that girl okay? I shoved her.”
“Bruised but not shot. I think her parents will be okay with that.”
Roy shrugged out of his shirt, thank God, and put it around DJ’s shoulders, over the open, short-sleeved shirt he wore. He’d been right about how the tank defined Roy’s upper body. DJ decided it wasn’t just the shirt that could help him get warmer.
“Shock makes you cold,” Roy told him.
“I had your shirt cleaned and returned to your room.”
“Yeah. After pilfering it. You can keep this one. The rips and blood stains don’t meet my company dress code, and I won’t set a bad example for my team.”
“Did my fans do that?” He gestured to the blood on Roy’s shirt.
“One of the girls I pulled off of your assailant had flailing arms and multiple rings. I think it was a pewter dragon holding a ruby that got my neck.” Roy touched the cut and shrugged, dismissing it.
DJ put his arms through the sleeves and surrounded himself with the heat and scent of Roy. “If he’d been standing in the crowd, he could have shot me point blank in the face when I came up to do autographs.”
“Yeah. But he wasn’t. And this kid would have been noticed. He didn’t blend with your fans.” Roy’s jaw tightened. “He was approved to be on site, which complicated the issue, but he was emotional and disorganized. Not much planning went into this, which means once he exposed himself, the take down was straightforward. Regardless, we’ll go over how it happened to improve our game.”
Roy cocked his head, a sign he was listening on his earpiece. “Got it. Thanks. His girlfriend works for the studio. She told him she’d had sex with you after your rehearsal yesterday. She wanted to break up with him and thought that would keep him from chasing after her. Sorry, DJ. I know the tabloids will turn it into the truth.”
“I don’t worry about that shit any more. It doesn’t mean anything. Moss has become so good at turning their lies to our favor, they’ve also almost given up doing it. We take all the fun out of it.”
DJ stared moodily into space, his jiggling knee against the table leg making the remaining Captain Crunch bounce in the condiment cup. “Keep drinking water, DJ,” Roy said, nudging it toward him.
DJ took an obligatory swig. “You know, in the early days, we played everywhere. Garage parties, weddings, taverns, roadhouses. We picked up core fans who are still with us today.They remember when we were earning less than a hundred bucks a gig. Sometimes all we got was free beer.”
“You miss it sometimes, I’ll bet.”
“Yeah. But…we dreamed of the whole rockstar fantasy, all of us did.” DJ’s expression darkened. “None of us ever imagined someone would kill us because of the impact they think we made on their life.” He lifted his gaze to Roy. “I’m not talking about this messed-up kid.”
“I know. Would you change anything about the road you’ve taken to get here?”
Roy wasn’t going to reassure him, because he knew better than DJ what they were facing. That wasn’t very comforting. However, once he thought it through, his question pointed DJ in a different, better direction.
“No,” DJ admitted. “We’ve made our mistakes and had regrets, but there’s nothing big in our decisions—or lack thereof—that we’d change. And we’ve been damn lucky with where we ended up. It’s why we called ourselves Survival with Grace. That was our original name. We thought it would become SG, you know, like U2. Moss told us to shorten it to Survival, but because we were stubborn and thought it meant as much to our audience as it did to us—it didn’t—we put the other in parentheses on our first album. Survival (with Grace).”
He sent Roy a self-effacing smile. “The best thing any artist can do for their career is get over their need to be precious.”
“Noted. I plan to become a world-famous author when I retire. Write exposés on all my clients.”
“And lose all your royalties to their lawsuits because you’ve broken their NDAs.” DJ chuckled. Then he started like someone had goosed him with a thousand volts.
His phone was buzzing.Jesus.
Moss had probably picked it up on the news and wanted to touch base. Or Pete, Steve and Tal wanted to know why the hellthey weren’t being allowed into the break room. He should have told Roy not to block them, but Roy had known what DJ needed, and DJ had let Roy take that lead, keeping the world at bay.
It was a weird but not bad feeling.
He hit the speaker phone function, because whether itwasMoss or the band, they’d want Roy’s input to reassure them. “Yeah?”
“I would have protected you.”
