the timing too critical, and usually I’d been too drunk.
“Hey, are you guys sticking around?” Quinn asked as we passed by her dressing room. “I want to check in with Graham real fast.”
“Yeah. I want to hear Kira’s voice too. Meet out here when you’re ready?” he offered.
“Sounds good. Nix?” She paused, her hand on the door handle.
“I guess I can call Graham and Kira too,” I said, straight-faced.
“Shut up.” Quinn rolled her eyes. “See you guys in a few.” She disappeared into her dressing room, and Jonas and I continued down the hall until we reached his.
Then it was just me. There was so much electricity humming through me I was surprised the lights weren’t flickering. That was a post-show buzz I expected, one I used to work off with sex, but—
“Hey, you guys were mind-blowing tonight!” A guy with green highlights rushed at me with dilated eyes and a bottle of Jack. It took me a second, but I recognized him—the lead singer of the opener.
“Thanks.” I adjusted my strap and kept moving, keeping my eyes firmly off the destruction he held so casually in his grip. A couple months ago, I would have snatched it out of his hands and taken a few swigs before handing it back.
Fuck, I could taste it on my tongue right now.
“So, we’re all headed out, do you want to come?” he asked, using the bottle to motion toward his band, who were all gathered outside my dressing room.
Hell yes, I wanted to go. I wanted to down a fifth of vodka—or whatever reached my lips first—and smother the emotions that ran amok inside me. Wanted the sweet oblivion that came with a blackout and the dreamless sleep of the wasted. One night. Just one night.
My dressing room door opened, and Zoe walked out, wearing a smile that hit me like a punch to the gut. Fuck the rest of it, I wanted her. I pushed out the memory of saying client like it was a dirty word last night and focused on her eyes.
Zoe. Zoe. Zoe. She might be pissed at me, but she wouldn’t let me go with them. Wouldn’t stand by and watch me fuck up the last ten and a half weeks of sobriety.
“I’m going to take a rain check,” I said to Green Hair, vowing to look his name up later.
“You sure?” His face fell with disappointment as we reached my door. Three of the girls hanging off their members looked at me with wide, hopeful eyes, but I didn’t want them either.
The buzzing in my head roared to be released, but I managed to nod.
“Damn. Well, if you change your mind, we’re heading out in about twenty minutes,” he said. I saw him shake his head from the corner of my eye, but I was focused elsewhere.
“You sounded like you were having fun out there,” Zoe said as I walked past her into my dressing room. I cracked open the nearest bottle of water and chugged the whole thing. Performing sucked the water right out of me. How the hell had I done it drunk?
“I was,” I assured her, dragging my cases from the wall.
Right on time, the stagehands knocked, then filled my cases one by one, tucking my girls in for the night. “They’re coming back to Colorado with us,” I told Zoe as I closed each one of them personally. “It just about gave me hives thinking of someone else bringing them here.”
“Not a problem.” She jotted down something in her planner as she sat back on the counter, crossing her legs.
How could someone so buttoned up be so incredibly sexy? Even her heels were hot.
I finished with the cases, then started to strip out of my sweat-drenched clothes. Zoe looked up, raising her eyebrows. “I’ll…um…wait outside.”
“No.” Outside was too far. Outside meant I had to make another choice of going to get her once I was done or leaving with that other band, and with the energy coursing through me, that was a very bad option to have.
“All right.” She pivoted on the counter slightly, turning her back to me. “You feeling okay?”
“I feel like a ball of billion-watt electricity held together by bones, with some skin stretched over it,” I admitted, stripping off the last of my clothes and shoving my legs into the clean ones. A shower could wait. Everything had to wait.
“Oh.”
I could almost hear the cogs in her mind turning from here.