Page 18 of Reverb

Stone

Sleep tight, baby. Dream of me.

I tossed my phone on the bed. My pulse was pounding, my breath tight. The apartment was too quiet. I had the urge to break something, the urge to get wasted, the urge to play in front of a crowd and feed off their energy while I ripped their hearts out. I wanted to find Sienna Maplethorpe, rip her clothes off her, and do everything to her. Everything. This was the worst, and she was right. I was a pig.

For a second, I was so riled up and turned on that I forgot where I was. Then I remembered: I was about to go out with Angie, and I was trying to figure out what to wear. How fucked up was that?

I turned back to the closet. I settled on black jeans, a black sweater, and black Chucks. It wasn’t an outfit that screamed business, but it wasn’t one that said Hey, let’s fuck either. It would have to do.

Time to see what my new agent really wanted from me. I turned and walked out the door.

SEVEN

THEN

Sienna

Every tour, I learned later, has a low point. There’s a moment when it seems endless, monotonous, almost hopeless, like you’re going to live in a hotel room and eat half-warm greasy eggs for breakfast forever. The exhaustion catches up with you and you can’t stand any of the people you’ve been cooped up with for weeks.

My moment came as we were leaving Chicago. I woke up fighting off a cold, my head fuzzy and my throat sore. I wanted to sleep, but instead I had to get in my rental car yet again and drive myself to Cleveland, where yet again the Road Kings would refuse to talk to me. I was tired, deeply sorry for myself, and I wished I’d gotten on a plane home all the way back in New Orleans, when I could have salvaged some dignity.

Stone dumped his few belongings in his bag. He was somehow very good-looking today in the cloudy early morning light coming through the window. “You look like shit,” he commented when he saw me sitting on the bed, dressed and trying to make myself get moving.

It was the last straw. Yes, I looked like warmed-over crap, but he didn’t have to comment on it before he got onto his cushy bus and napped all the way to the next city. “Is that the line you use on all of your groupies?” I snapped at him.

He grunted, unperturbed. His shoulders flexed beneath his T-shirt as he zipped his bag. He didn’t answer the groupie question. “Toughen up, Maplethorpe,” he said, as if he had a psychic ability to say exactly the wrong thing. “There’s still a long way to go.”

“Toughen up? Toughen up?” I stood and began jamming my belongings into my suitcase. “I’ve lasted this long. I’m in testosterone hell, and I have to drive, and I’m sick—”

“You’re sick?” Stone took a second glance at me, his gaze taking me in more sharply. “Get over it,” he said, shrugging. “This is the nicest tour we’ve ever been on, by far. The others were rougher and longer. I’ve played shows with the flu more than once. We’ve never even had a tour where we got our own rooms before.”

“Wow, Stone, that’s interesting. Just fascinating. You know, the kind of thing we could talk about in a fucking interview.”

“You’re not getting one. You want a Flintstones vitamin or something, kid? They make them chewable for people your age.”

“You’re such an asshole!” I shouted it at him, but Stone didn’t flinch, didn’t even get angry. He just stood there like the wall of granite he was. “I want to write a good article! I want to earn my way in this business! I want the same opportunity you’d give me if I were a man!”

I kept jamming my belongings into my suitcase. My eyes were watering, but it might have been the low-grade fever. After a minute, I realized he hadn’t spoken, so I turned to look at him.

He had finished packing and was watching me, his gaze speculative. It was like he’d never seen me before.

“What?” I shouted after a minute, because even his silence was getting on my last nerve. Honestly, couldn’t he say anything?

Stone blinked, then looked down at his zipped-up bag. “Nothing,” he said, picking it up. “See you in Cleveland.”

“I’m not going to Cleveland!” I was in full meltdown mode now. “I’m getting in my car and driving back to Portland. Your stupid band can rot for all I care.”

He didn’t react, just walked calmly to the door. It was so enraging that I picked up the sneakers I was about to put on and threw them at his huge, retreating back. He ducked one of them nimbly, and the other bounced off his shoulder. He didn’t even flinch and left without another word.

I groaned and flopped on the bed. My head was throbbing. My body cried out for sleep. Shame washed over me, followed by abject embarrassment. That had been, without a doubt, the most juvenile, unprofessional thing I had ever done. I had no idea who this woman was, but she wasn’t me. She was a shrieking, awful shrew, every sexist cliché in the book. If Stone made fun of me or snubbed me now, I wouldn’t completely blame him.

After a moment of self-pity, I got up, retrieved my shoes, and put them on. I left the hotel and got in my car. The Road Kings’ bus had left the parking lot, leaving me to ride their dust as usual. I found two Tylenol at the bottom of my purse, dry-swallowed them, and picked up my phone so I could plan my route out of town.

A notification popped up, and it took me a second to recognize what it was. It was from the app I used for music on my phone. Someone who used the same app had just shared their entire library with me.

I tapped the notification. Stone Zeeland had shared his music library with me, and it was an embarrassment of riches. There were well over four thousand songs here, everything from the sixties to music that had been released last month. I recognized some of the bands, others not at all. I also saw things that weren’t on any streaming platform—live recordings, bootlegs, and B-sides that Stone had probably acquired in physical media and digitized to his phone or to a hard drive. For a music lover, it was the same as if I’d been given a key to the Smithsonian and permission to wander around all I wanted.

As I was staring at this, processing it, a text popped up.

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