Page 11 of Reverb

“Do you want a gold star?” I asked him.

Instead of getting annoyed, Denver said, “We all know, so I guess I’ll just say it. It’s weird that you don’t want to give Sienna an interview, because you’ve spent more time with her than we have. You were her roommate on the tour.”

There was a beat of silence. I turned my glare to Neal. He was the only one in on the secret, because he’d seen Sienna come out of my room one morning. I’d made him swear not to tell anyone.

“Watts,” I growled.

He rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t me. I kept my mouth shut, okay? Denver figured it out.”

“I didn’t figure it out.” Axel, sitting behind his drum kit, raised his hand. “I had no idea the whole time. Not until Denver told me on the way back to Portland.”

I felt a bolt of discomfort. I wasn’t worried about myself, because nothing was going to happen to me except for some disapproval and ribbing from my bandmates. It was Sienna who looked unprofessional if the wrong people knew, if the wrong people came to the wrong conclusions. It was Sienna who could lose her fledgling career.

I decided to go with the basic facts, my usual tactic. “Nothing happened,” I said. “She needed a room.”

“Right,” Neal said. “Because Hale wanted her gone, but he didn’t want to fire her because of his contract. So he deleted her from the hotel roster instead.”

I shrugged. Hale had admitted to us that he’d thought we wanted Sienna gone, so he’d done his best to get rid of her from the tour. If he’d fired her outright, the magazine could sue him because they wouldn’t get their promised articles. But if Sienna quit, then the blame fell on her.

The truth was, we had wanted her gone at first. Very, very badly. But she’d somehow stuck it out, and then I’d seen her get turned away at the front desk of the hotel in New Orleans, and I’d seen her sit in her car, scrolling her phone in panic. And even though I saw her as the enemy, something about that had bothered me a fuck of a lot.

Part of it was seeing a woman stranded alone in a strange city, with nowhere to stay as night closed in. And part of it was the realization that maybe, just maybe, we’d been dicks to someone who was just doing a job.

We were dicks—that part wasn’t in question—but we specialized in being dicks to people who deserved it. Bloodsucking record companies, greedy tour promoters, shitty sellout bands like Seven Dog Down—we were dicks to people like that. But when I watched Sienna sit alone in her car as she figured out where she might have to sleep, I’d decided she wasn’t one of those people. And before I knew it, I’d offered to share my room.

And after that? I couldn’t have said why we kept going. Only that she drove me nuts, and she hated me. But she had no one to look out for her on the tour, no one at all, and the only person willing to do it was me.

“She was stranded,” I said. “It didn’t sit right with me. I helped her out. We barely even talked.” Not true, not true. “We didn’t fuck around. Nothing happened.”

That part was true.

“I actually believe that,” Axel said. “Not that it matters. But she isn’t your type.”

I turned my glare on him, wondering exactly what he thought my type was.

“She’s good-looking, though,” Denver said, so I glared at him instead. He grinned his shit-eating grin. If he didn’t have a girlfriend, he could probably snap his fingers and get any woman he wanted, including Sienna. Lead singers were like that, and Denver wasn’t exactly hideous. “I mean it,” he said. “She’s got the sexy librarian thing going on.”

“Definitely,” Neal agreed. “Sexy librarian, but with a dark goth edge. The glasses and the Docs are a killer combo.”

“Smart chicks are always hot,” Axel added.

“She’s ten years younger than us, you creeps,” I said. Axel laughed, and I realized they were ribbing me. Of course they were. I sighed. “Can we fucking play now, or are we doing high school gossip all day?”

I didn’t wait for an answer. I flipped on my amp and started playing a familiar riff. It was the opening to “Baba O’Riley,” by The Who, a sequence that’s played on keyboards in the recorded version, but which I’d adapted for my guitar when I was nineteen. It was the first song the Road Kings had ever played on the day when I had posted for auditions and these three idiots were the only people to show up.

We hadn’t played this in years, and we’d be rusty at it, but that was the point. We’d played at the top of our game for ten weeks while on tour, and that was good, but we weren’t supposed to be great while we were working alone in the studio. You gotta play shitty every once in a while to remember your roots, remember why you do this in the first place. You gotta play like no one’s ever going to listen to you again.

So I played the opening riff, and Neal and Axel came in on cue, and Denver started belting the lyrics about teenage wasteland, and we let it go, mistakes and all. Everything was right in the world, even if just for a little while, because I was playing with my band again.

FIVE

THEN

Sienna

If it was desperation that had put me in Stone’s room that first night, I couldn’t say exactly why I was still there a week later. The front office hadn’t put me back on the hotel roster, but I could have come up with another solution—made a big stink and threatened to sue, maybe, or asked my parents to loan me money, or begged Brit Creighton, the only other woman on the tour, to let me bunk with her instead.

I did none of those things. I had a list of excuses. I didn’t want to start an argument on the biggest job of my career; my parents weren’t rich and I was too broke to ever pay back a loan; Brit, who was Axel’s friend and neighbor, and had been hired as the band’s assistant, would get in trouble or fired if she roomed with the evil journalist. Brit’s job put her in the way of a lot of the band’s secrets, and if they thought she was spilling those secrets to me, they wouldn’t trust her anymore.

---