Happily Ever Aftermath: A Romantic Comedy (The Aftermath Series Book 1), page 7
I pulled up “Quimbara” on my phone. Even through the shitty little speaker, the pulse, crackling percussion, and astonishing, joyous energy was electrifying.
“Oh my god, I love this!” Sheree said. Mal was already drumming on the table, and Archer was wiggling his tiny hips. “Is this the one I should learn?”
“Hang on,” I said. “Let me pull up . . .”
By the third song, she’d gotten Ken to radio bus three, and suddenly, her percussionist and drummer were climbing our bus stairs. Mal looked like he’d died and gone to heaven.
We’d narrowed the possible songs down to either “Oriza Eh” or “Cao Cao Mani Picao” when I noted she wasn’t getting anywhere without a brilliant horn section. That necessitated a call to bus four, where her trumpet and sax were both going to sleep. Soon our crowded front lounge was filled wall-to-wall with brilliant working musicians, all of whom were digging Celia Cruz.
As they should’ve been.
“Archer can sing the Johnny Pacheco parts,” Sheree said casually. By now, Archer, Mal, and I were standing in the back of the front lounge to get out of the way of the band. “You wouldn’t mind, would you, Archer?”
He shook his head woodenly. “Mind,” he said as if hypnotized. “Mind—no. Not at all.”
“Great. And . . . I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten your names.” She looked at Mal.
“I’m Mal,” he said. “That’s Ian.”
“Great. Mal and Ian. Thanks. You guys will sing backup with my singers?”
We both nodded robotically. She could have asked us to clean the toilets and we would have done it. Sing onstage with Sheree? Um, yes please.
Her sax player (he’d introduced himself as Leo) told her there was no way he and Eric could cover the part. “You need some Cuban horn players to fill out the sound.”
“I’ll get Clinton on it,” she said, pulling out her phone. Who the hell was Clinton? There was too much going on to keep track. “You’ll all help me audition them, right?” We didn’t know who she was talking about, but whatever you want, Sheree. Whatever you want. “Marco is going to love choreographing something for the dancers. I hope I can pull off my part.”
It was dazzling watching them work. By the time Charlotte woke up and began barking to go out, they had the bones of “Oriza Eh” worked out, and Sheree insisted on taking the dog for a walk along the side of the highway, Emmett never leaving her side.
The musicians said their good-nights like we were all old friends. They filed out to their buses, now rumbling in a waiting line behind ours.
Nicky was next to me as the four of us stood by Ken to peer out the window. “Do you suppose it’s like Air Force One?” she asked. “Were we bus one as long as she was aboard?”
Ken was in a good mood. “Anything you want. Unless it’s number two. I told you.”
We all chuckled, and Sheree brought Charlotte back on the bus. Overhearing Ken, she made sure to hand him the neatly knotted poop bag. “Take care of this, won’t you, Ken darling?”
“Oh, you brat!” Only for Sheree would Ken allow such talk.
She was laughing as she turned to depart for the evening, but she stopped by me. On my right side. I tried to look away, but she caught my eye.
“After Miami, we’ve got Montgomery and Louisville. See if you can come up with some suggestions for songs I could personalize to each city. I’d love to hear your ideas. In fact, take a look at the whole tour. Would you mind?”
I laughed, crooked and ugly, but she didn’t mind. She smiled back when I said, “I don’t mind. Louisville has a huge blues tradition. Are you—”
She held up a hand. “Don’t get started now. I’m full of Cuban rhythms. We’ll talk later. Good night, you guys.”
She went down the stairs and picked up her Emmett shadow.
We sighed as one as Ken closed the door and waited for the star coach to take its star back and lead us down the road. “She’s awesome,” Archer breathed. We all nodded.
Time to come back down to earth. It was four in the morning. I shook myself. “All right. Where’s this dog sleeping tonight?”
Archer and Mal both spoke up, but Nicky overrode them. “She needs her own den,” she said. “The books say that’s good for her. I have baby gates. I’m going to wall off the kitchen table.”
“Not on her first night,” Archer said in that voice that made women melt. “She can sleep with me.”
“If you teach that dog to sleep with you,” I said, “before you know it, she’ll take over the bed.”
“This angel? This little darling?” Archer cuddled Charlotte, who licked him sleepily. “No way.”
“It’s a bad idea,” I warned, but he wasn’t listening.
Nicky tried again. “You can’t. You’re in a middle bunk. If she gets up while you’re asleep, she’ll fall out.”
“Then I’ll sleep in the bottom bunk across from Nicky. Tonight Charlotte and I are sleeping together, aren’t we, lover?”
Nicky looked a little breathless at Charlotte’s good fortune, but at least she would be beside Archer. Was that better than being under him? Hard for me to judge.
I grabbed Mal as he headed back to the can. “Dude, sleep in the back lounge with me.”
“The fuck?”
“Come on. I slept so well when I had someone sleeping beside me.”
He paused. “You mean you haven’t . . . since the bike crash?”
I shook my head, hiding my embarrassment. “You think someone wants to sleep next to this? No. No one.”
“Ian. It’s been months.”
I glared at him. “I’ll have you know that one of the side effects of insomnia is a lessened desire to . . . sleep next to someone, so you can shut the fuck up. I don’t want to spoon you. Just sleep on the sofa.”
“Quit ordering me around. I’ll be back there in ten minutes.”
I chucked him hard on the shoulder, knowing he’d realize I was thanking him. Another good night’s sleep, and I would own New Orleans as surely as I had owned Charlotte.
8
LATE NIGHTS AND EARLY MORNINGS
NICKY
The view before me had such a nightmarish quality that I knew from the start that I was dreaming. Why don’t I just wake myself up? I asked myself as things began to go wrong.
But that’s the way with dreams. If we could control them, they’d never turn into nightmares.
I was back in the storage room at the Atlanta stadium, except the black ceiling was miles overhead and the boxes, unmarked and indistinguishable, were stacked to dizzying heights.
And tipping.
The dark pathway between the stacks was lined with ragged boxes and stretched into the distance.
At first, I was able to catch the tipping boxes and push them back into alignment, but something was shifting them. Some huge hand one aisle over was after me. I caught two boxes, one with each hand, and pushed them back, fighting the weight of the boxes on top.
And a box on the other side teetered.
I leapt ahead moments before it crashed to the ground, spilling out a blooming flower of Sheree T-shirts.
I could repack them. I’d find a tape gun. Get them back onto the stack. I could do it.
Until the next box wobbled.
And then the next.
And then I was running as an avalanche of crates thudded down behind me—crates like the one I’d lost. Heavy wooden cubes, each one holding forty-eight bedazzled jackets.
Soon I was gasping for air as I ran, but I was managing to stay ahead of the cascade of heavy wooden crates until the walls groaned as they creaked into motion, narrowing the path and brushing against my arms as I pumped desperately for more speed.
No! No, I had to get out!
I must have hit my head against Archer’s bunk above me in my attempt to escape, because when I jerked awake, my forehead was throbbing. Again. Just as it had when the guitar player had woken me the night before.
At least I hadn’t disturbed Archer. It was more important for him to be rested for concerts. He had to hold the whole world in the palm of his hand. Banging on the bottom of his bunk couldn’t help.
No—wait. He was across the passage from me, sleeping in the other low bunk with the puppy. Two curtains and a few feet of empty space were all that separated us. Archer and I were sleeping together.
If I could sleep.
Then I was thinking about how little space I had overhead. Too little space. Like the boxes collapsing on me. The space was crushing me.
I had to get out. Now.
I rolled out from under the curtain, landing with a quiet thump on the hallway floor. The air was immediately cooler. It filled my lungs. It slowed my slamming heart. It stretched out to left and right. To openness. To space.
Oof.
No one came to check on me. No godlike lead singer, no scarred guitarist, no smiling drummer. I was both annoyed and relieved that my panic had gone unnoticed.
With the exception of a wrinkled, sniffing, charcoal-gray snout poking out from under the curtain in the opposite bunk.
Charlotte slid out of Archer’s bunk as if she had no bones at all. She ended in a dignity-free puddle in my lap, her head on the rug between my crossed legs and her doggy butt up in the air, the long whip of her tail gently bouncing off my nose.
Oh, yeah.
Now I felt better.
And maybe Archer would wake up and wonder where she’d gone.
I cuddled Charlotte, and she wriggled in delight. Silence from Archer, which was fine. It was fine. He needed sleep.
Between us, Charlotte and I shifted her position and then mine until I was sitting in the kitchen banquette and she was against my chest, standing on my thighs with her puppy paws splayed over my shoulders.
I let her wiggling adoration fill me with the peaceful calm of dog therapy. I hadn’t been asleep long. She didn’t need to be walked yet. I kissed her heavy head and persuaded her to curl up on the bench seat beside me.
The good thing about the bus was that, generally speaking, every possession I owned was in arm’s reach. I fished my laptop out of my backpack and put in some time getting work done. There was plenty on the To Do list.
Charlotte rolled on her back and amused herself by banging her back feet into my arms as I typed.
“You naughty thing, why don’t you go to sleep?” I played with her paws, and she tried to gnaw on my fingers. We let the peace of the nighttime fill us.
“Is this a private party, or can anyone join?” The quiet voice spoke from the hallway. But it wasn’t gorgeous Archer. Just the scarred guitarist.
“Hey, Ian. Join us. We’re exercising our back teeth if you want the agenda.”
He slid into the booth by Charlotte’s snout, leaving me the wagging tail to contend with.
“Hey, pupper. Hey, you baby. Aren’t you excellent? What a good hound you are. You’re an Aftermath dog now, aren’t you? Yeah. Yeah, that’s good, huh? You want something to chew? Hang on.”
Ian was the tallest of us, and his wingspan meant just about everything in the bus was within reach. He snagged a rubber puppy ring from the floor and offered it to Charlotte. She seized it with a mock growl, which made him laugh, his ruined face raising in half a smile.
“Yeah, baby, that’s better, huh? You fierce warrior. You wolf pup. Oh, you’re so tough.”
Ian played with Charlotte, and I forgot about his scar as he and the dog wrestled.
Puppy though she was, her back feet were big and strong. I oofed when I took a big push in the belly. “Thanks, dog. Calm down, huh?”
Ian picked it up. “Calm, Charlotte. That’s a good girl. You’re just a baby. Time to sleep. Come on, calm down.”
His big hands stroked her as she gnawed her ring, and the energy flowed out of her with every caress. Her enormous head thunked against his hip, her whip tail wagged once against my leg, and Charlotte surrendered to sleep on the bench between us.
“Look at that,” he breathed as he fondled one of her silky ears. “Christ, I wish it was so easy for me to fall asleep.”
“No good with Mal, huh?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Mal. He sprawls, you know? Takes up a lot of space. And he’s not . . . I don’t know. Restful.” He shrugged and looked down the dark hallway to the back lounge. “He’s in there right now, sleeping like a baby. Like this baby.” His half smile was wistful as he stroked Charlotte. “And I’m wide awake. As usual.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you doing up? It’s five thirty in the morning.”
I was evasive. “Just don’t want to sleep right now.”
He nodded, narrowing one eye at me as if he was very wise. “Uh-huh. Nightmares again.”
I shivered and sniffed an inhale to clear away the tension. “Yeah.”
He acknowledged my laptop with a tip of his chin. “So you’re working instead.”
I shrugged. “I’m having classic anxiety dreams. I figured I might as well use this time to address my anxieties and figure out how to dial it back so I can sleep. And there’s a lot on the list too.”
His long leg came up under the table to rest on the seat beside me, bare foot sticking out from plain gray sweats. He settled more comfortably. “Okay, hit me with it. What’s on the list?”
I tried to shake him off, but he was focused on it now, and there was nothing on this bus that was going to distract him. Still, I was able to quietly backspace over item number one, which was—embarrassingly—just the name Archer.
As in, how to get on the same mattress as him. But I didn’t need to have it written down to know about it.
“Okay,” I said and crossed my arms defensively. “The first thing is my capstone project. I’m four days into a sixty-two–day tour, and I still don’t have my adviser’s approval.”
“Right. The T-shirt. What’s the big deal?”
I huffed, trapped between laughter and annoyance. “No big deal. At all. I just have to write up a description of the project, get Mr. Diventura’s approval, design the promotion that will make the shirt sell, design the shirt, and get it made and delivered. Oh, and get all the contracts signed by the near-invisible Bruce, who has to run it by Legal. Nothing to it, right?”
“What promotions?” Ian was now squinting at me in the low light.
“Well, that’s the second thing on my list—or rather, the third thing, since the contract itself is giving me nightm—stressing me.” I flicked a finger against my screen. “Bruce, the tour manager, gave me access to the Lyre Records drive with the concert contracts on them.”
“Yeah?” He wasn’t nearly as interested as he should have been.
“All of the contracts,” I stressed.
He raised a lazy eyebrow, and then his foot thudded down as he sat up again. “All the contracts? Like, you can see Sheree’s contract? Fuck a duck, let me see!”
He grabbed for the laptop, but I stopped him. “Right. Now you understand. But here’s the thing. I signed a nondisclosure agreement before I joined the tour. I bet you did, too, didn’t you?” He nodded. “Sure you did. Lyre Records is not made up of idiots. And you can bet there will be a log on this computer drive. They’ll be able to see who opens things and when.”
Ian sat back, pulling in his arms like the stove was hot. “Oh.”
“Oh. That’s right. So, I have access, but I’m not going to look at any of this stuff. Not the contract with the bus drivers. Not how much the dancers get paid. Nothing. Including anything that would tell me the industry standard for merch payouts.” I sighed, overwhelmed by the painful depths of my ignorance.
“Ask Bruce,” Ian suggested. “Or the guy with the porn ’stache.”
“Dean.” Dean the Leaner. “Those people are oddly reluctant to share any information with me. I don’t know why.”
“They let you into the contracts, though?”
“Yeah. That’s a little weird, isn’t it?”
We both fell silent, thinking our circular, useless thoughts. He slumped again, and a large bare foot reappeared by my thigh. “So . . . that’s confusing.”
“That’s what I think. Bruce says there are contract templates in here, but I’m not sure I want to be poking around looking for them, you know? I guess I could look at the Aftermath contract.” I brightened at the thought. “That wouldn’t be wrong. I’m supposed to do your promotions too. I need to know what your contract says about marketing. And there’s probably something in there about merch! Is there?”
Ian was blinking at my new enthusiasm. “Well, I know we didn’t get merch rights.”
“Yeah, but is there anything about merch in there? If it’s a standard contract?”
“I guess. Maybe.”
“Maybe?” Sound of a mental record needle scratching. Attention shift. “You don’t know what’s in your own contract?”
He shifted. His shoulders were now tipping away from me. “Well, it was really long. I mean, like, really long. Fifty pages or something.”
“You didn’t . . . you didn’t read it?”
“Morey read it.”
“Morey, your manager? He and I discussed what you need in a contract, but he doesn’t seem terribly, um—”
“Yeah. Morey’s a good guy, though. He told us the Sheree tour contract was okay to sign.”
“Huh.” I didn’t want to scare him. “Does Morey happen to be a lawyer?”
He chuckled. “Morey is barely a manager. But what were we going to do, say we weren’t going to tour with Sheree?”
I blinked and tried to remember that not everyone was one capstone away from a Master in Business Administration. Take this slowly, girl. “Okay. Well, Ian, I’ll offer you a good rule of thumb for your entire life, okay?” He was grinning at me like I was cute. Annoyance fizzed through me. “Don’t sign legal documents until they’ve been reviewed by a lawyer.” He was still looking smug, and I had to resist the desire to pull out some insults from my childhood with my brother, like You numbnuts.
“Yes, teacher.”
I flipped my hands up dismissively. “Fine. Your problem, not mine. Anyway, I’m going to pull your contract out of here and see what it says about promotions and merch. That will at least give me a starting point.”
