“I couldn’t deal with it, Peyton. I couldn’t go to college with him.” His hands grip the edge of the aluminum table. “It was as if my brother had died and a stranger had taken his place. It had always been us, yet suddenly I was alone. I had to get away from the loss. The loss that stared me in the face every day,” he says hoarsely. “From the heartbreak of losing my brother and best friend.”
For one long moment, I stare at his sad face, taking in the glare of tears in his eyes, and imagine losing Jill like he lost Seth. It would be devastating. Then, without thinking, I’m across the flagstones and in his lap, hugging him to me and trying to absorb the raw pain pouring out of him. His hands grip my back and he shudders underneath me as he buries his head against my neck and shakes with sobs.
Feeling wetness on my neck, I mumble, “I get it. I really get it. You’re not an asshole.”
His fingers dig into my back and we hold each other, rocking and gripping and mourning what can’t be changed. It’s an embrace filled with sorrow and desolation. I’m not surprised to find I’m crying too. For him, for Seth, for the loss of what they had. Gone now. Forever lost. The sadness of it is overwhelming.
The resonance of a throat clearing loosens my grip on Sam. When the beam of a flashlight hits us, I almost fall out of his lap.
“It may be the middle of the night,” the person holding the flashlight behind us says, “but this is still a public place, not a bedroom.”
He lowers the blinding light a bit and I can make out a guard uniform.
Sam whips his head around. “Fu—”
I slap my hand over his mouth. “It’s not what you think,” I say, mortified at the guard’s insinuation. I start untangling myself from Sam’s lap. “We were—his brother . . .” I stand and pull my hand from Sam’s mouth. “We were just hugging.”
The guard makes a harrumph sound, and Sam shoots up to standing. “Are you blind, old man?” The guard lifts the light again and Sam puts up a hand over his face. “Get that shit out of my eyes!”
The guard lowers the light a bit.
“Seriously?” Sam wipes an arm over his wet cheeks. “The one time I let myself cry like a baby, some asswipe thinks I’m fu—”
“Okay,” I say loudly, cutting Sam off and reaching for his arm. “We’re going to go.” I drag Sam by the arm toward the door leading to the lobby. “Sorry for hugging on your patio,” I say in a tone laced with sarcasm.
The guard doesn’t respond, and I don’t wait, just drag Sam into the lobby and then to the elevator.
Inside the elevator, Sam leans his forehead against mine. “Now, that guy is an asshole.” A giggle escapes me, and Sam reaches up and wipes the wetness from my cheeks with his thumbs. “Thanks for listening to my shit, Peyton.”
The elevator doors open. We don’t move.
Troubled by his despondent tone, I catch his wrists. “It wasn’t shit, Sam.”
He shakes his head against mine. “It’s never-ending shit.”
My grip tightens on his wrists. I want to fix this and help him, but it’s unfixable.
He pulls our entwined hands to his mouth and lowers his head to give my knuckles a whisper-light kiss. “Thanks again,” he murmurs, lifting his head back up and looking at me with his warm sky-blue eyes.
The touch of his mouth lingers on my skin, brings memories of the caress of his mouth on other parts of my body, and my breath catches at the tenderness of his gaze.
“Come on.” He gently pulls his wrists from my grasp and turns me toward the hall with a hand on my shoulder. “We’re going to be dragging ass tomorrow.”
As we tread down the hall toward our room, I wish for the millionth time that I’d never fallen for Seth. Now I wish I had fallen for Sam instead.
Chapter 18
Standing inside the U-shaped configuration of foldout tables that make up our booth, I slide another card through the credit device attached to Romeo’s phone. Selling T-shirts, hats, and CDs is a mind-numbing experience. I’ve come to hate running the booth. But the band has no one else, and the earnings at the end of a night total from about three hundred to a thousand dollars. Not too shabby for an up-and-coming band. I can’t imagine what the other bands pull in. They have multiple booths, with long, long lines.
The next few hours will drag. We just got to Richmond this morning, but right after the show, once the crew packs everything up, we’re hitting the road again around two a.m. to drive to Philly. And we won’t arrive until early morning. I’m not looking forward to the next run of concerts and bus trips we have lined up.
The muffled first riffs of Luminescent Juliet’s “Midnight” echo through the venue as I fold up a T-shirt, slide it into a bag, and hand it over to a guy with a pink Mohawk. He purposely brushes his hand along mine in the process, smiling slowly. “When you’re done, I’d love to buy you a drink.”
My standard concert outfit has become a pair of denim cutoffs, cowboy boots—my dumb ass didn’t bring fashionable yet comfy shoes—and a Luminescent Juliet T-shirt. Of course I have one of each of the three designs, which put the band’s name and logo across my chest. Not the most flattering outfit, yet male rockers seem to like it. I’ve gotten a few compliments on it, and a few propositions like the current one.
I force a smile. I don’t have anything against pink Mohawks, and of course this guy doesn’t know I have a boyfriend. But hello, dude, you could be a serial killer for all I know. “Tempting, but I have to work all night.”
At that moment Mike, the roadie whom Romeo pays to cover the booth so I can take pictures, slips in to take my place. “Hey, Peyton.” He reaches for Romeo’s phone in my hand. “Go on. They just went onstage. I’ll take care of this.”
Mohawk guy frowns.
Ignoring him, I go snatch my camera from behind a bin of T-shirts and then slip out of the booth. Getting backstage is not an easy feat. First, I have to get through the masses in the hallways around the arena. Then I have to take a tunnel that goes under the bleachers and around half the arena. Next come the checkpoints where I hold out the pass around my neck for inspection. Once out of the tunnel, I pass the green room and spot the Brookfield guys being interviewed by the local media.
I pass an area where backstage ticket holders are getting pictures taken with members of Griff.
The excitement on the fans’ faces always gives me a little surge of exhilaration. I’d never been backstage until this tour, but I have been to several concerts. My first was the most exciting. When I was fifteen, my grandpa took me to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers when they were on their Stadium Arcadium Tour. Each time I see backstage pass holders looking giddy and wide-eyed as they meet the bands, I remember how I nearly pissed my pants with excitement during the hour-and-fifteen-minute ride to the Palace of Auburn Hills. My grandfather and I had nosebleed seats, yet we both had an awesome time.
The music from the stage gets louder as I continue my journey, and I hear the guys break into “At the End of the Universe,” an energetic song that I’ve loved from the first time I heard it. Some songs need to grow on you. Not this sucker. Fast and rocking—I immediately liked it.
The area directly behind the stage was a bitch to get into until the roadies got to know me. This is the place where the instruments are tuned and shined up, and where costume changes are stashed. Fans are never allowed here. A few roadies wave to me as I pass but most are busy.
Heading around the back of the stage, I go out onto the floor past the bouncers instead of my usual spot in front of the stage, and I use my concert ID to make my way backward through the crowd on the floor to the sound booth. The perfect place to get pictures of the Luminescent Juliet guys all together, playing onstage. Earlier this afternoon, wearing a smile and a low-cut shirt—a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do—I’d stopped by with a large pepperoni pizza to ask the engineers if I could get a few pictures during the concert. Between the pie and the cleavage, it didn’t take them too long to agree to let me into the most off-limits area of all.