Blindsided (21 page)

She approached the door trying to exude confidence, using the same sort of ploy she used to get into the closed rooms of museums. If she looked like she belonged, she usually got away with it.

Apparently, her luck with closed museum wings did not hold when it came to getting backstage at concerts. She filed that piece of information away for future use as a bald man who was as wide as he was tall stopped her with one beefy arm thrown across the doorway. She had gotten into such a long and purposeful stride that she almost clothes-lined herself on his muscles.

“Sorry honey, no one backstage,” he said with a bored shake of his head.

“But Nate’s expecting me,” she said, knowing as she said it that it sounded utterly ridiculous.

She could hear the other women behind her sniggering. If this man didn’t let her through she was going to have to walk back past them and deal with their snide remarks and pitying yet self righteous stares. Ugh.

“Sure he is. Sweetheart, he hasn’t let groupies backstage in years,” the man said.

He seemed to think she was pathetic, but ordinary, as if this sort of thing happened at least once a day. Until then, Chelsea hadn’t had a firm grasp on just how huge Blindside was, how famous Nate was. Good god, the man had women chasing him down. And he was spending the week with her.

“I’m not a groupie,” she said, injecting her voice with as much indignation as she could muster, which was quite a bit. “I’m Nate’s girlfriend. Can’t you just go get him?”

“If I interrupted him for every chick who said she was his girlfriend, he’d never get through sound check,” the man said.

Chelsea opened her mouth to protest being called a chick, when she was interrupted by another man, this one less wide, but still muscular. He looked vaguely familiar. He stepped under the man in the doorway’s arm and lit a cigarette.

“Hey darlin’” he said, looking her up and down with an overtly sexual smirk on his face.

Chelsea may have found him attractive if she wasn’t infatuated with Nate, but she couldn’t figure out why he looked familiar. His open scanning of her body turned her off. The man was taking her clothes off piece by piece with his eyes and it was creeping her out.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

The man shook his head.

“Try to picture me behind the drum riser. I get overshadowed by Nate, but come on, I’m Sean, the drummer. Guess you’re not one of those drummer groupies,” he said, “But come on, give it a try. Once you go drummer, you never go back, I promise.”

Ew, Chelsea thought. Sean continued to leer at her and Chelsea decided to cut to the chase before he decided to do something even more forward, like touch her.

“Sean, I’m Nate’s girlfriend, Chelsea. Please tell me he told you about me and you’ll get this guy to let me in. Or at least go get Nate,” she pleaded with him.

She really hoped she wasnlly t going to have to resort to flirting with him. The thought was so disgusting she wasn’t sure she could even do it.

Chelsea followed him into the building and narrowly resisted the urge to turn around and stick her tongue out at the bouncer and the gaggle of woman standing in line.

###

“Chelsea!” Nate said loudly. He left the microphone he was fiddling with and joined Sean and Chelsea backstage. Chelsea looked a little shaken up and Sean looked annoyed. That could mean only one thing.

“I see you met Sean,” Nate said “Did he hit on you too much?”

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders in a way that even he could recognize was proprietary and kissed the top of her head. She wrapped her arms around his torso as if they belonged there and nuzzled her head against him. Ah, warm Chelsea. Life was good.

She still seemed a little shaken by the whole thing. He’d never had it happen to him personally, but Nate could imagine that being visually undressed by Sean was a totally unique experience.

“He’s really a nice guy,” Nate said as he looked off after his friend.

“I’m sure he is,” Chelsea said as she looked up at him.

Her face belied her true feelings towards him. Nate hoped she would grow to like him. Sean could be a pain in the ass, especially where women were concerned but he was part of the package. Nate wondered briefly if Sean would be even more of a problem than his own self destructive behavior or Chelsea’s constant running.

“Well, you ready for your first concert?” he asked her.

He hoped so. He wasn’t sure he was. All day he’d imagined Chelsea morphing into some groupie before his eyes. It had been so clear in his head. He’d come backstage after their set, and instead of being met by Chelsea in her jeans and shirt, he’d get some glammed up version in heels and a miniskirt and no interest in him, just in Nate Stone, rock star. A person he didn’t even want to be anymore. He’d told Chelsea he didn’t like LA, and that was true, but not the whole truth. But how did you tell your girlfriend you hoped she didn’t turn into a blood sucking groupie? You didn’t. You just hoped for the best.

“You bet,” she said with a smile.

He hugged her tight and hoped like hell that she’d be the same when he got offstage.

###

Chelsea stood backstage watching the opening act, some local band made up of four guys younger than her. They looked like children at a recital, playing their instruments and singing off key harmonies together. The audience seemed to be merely tolerating them as a necessary trial to be gotten through before the real fun began. Nate had disappeared for some pre-show ritual.

Chelsea wasn’t at all sure about Sean. He seemed almost alarmingly predatory in his sexuality, but in retrospect, he hadn’t persisted when she had obviously shown no interest in him. That was a good sign. He was important to Nate, and it would suck if she hated him.

Being without Nate for the afternoon, Chelsea had found herself banging her head against the wall as she tried to think of some way for the two of them to work, but so far she’d come up with nothing. Even though so much had changed in her heart, in reality, nothing else had. Without Nate to distract her, her panic had come fast and furious, and when the car had come to take her to the show, Chelsea had nearly cried with relief.

Broken out of her reverie by the lackluster clapping of the audience, Chelsea started clapping belatedly. Thankfully, the opening band’s set was finished, leaving just a set change between and her first live performance of Blindside. She was excited but nervous. Nate seemed hesitant to involve her in this side of his life, and she hoped this wasn’t a horrible idea.

“You must be Chelsea,” a voice behind her said.

Chelsea turned to look at the owner of the voice and found a woman about her height with dyed black hair and a large amount of black eyeliner. Her lips were painted blood red and her upper body was encased in a red corset. Given her get up, the woman should have looked scary, but she looked fun and inviting.

“Yes, that’s me,” Chelsea said, feeling a little unexotic as they shook hands.

“I’m Madeleine, like the cookie. Take a bite of me and you’ll remember your whole childhood,” the woman said. “I’m Bill’s wife. Call me Maddy.”

Chelsea nodded again, a little taken aback by the incongruity of a Proust reference in a rock club. Maddy was beautiful, but the longer she looked at her, the more she could see the hallmarks of her age, a certain wiseness to her eyes, even if there were no crow’s feet, and a certain confident set to her jaw. She was probably closer to Nate’s age than her own.

“It’s nice to meet you. Do you come to all the shows?” Chelsea asked.

“Only when they’re in town,” Maddy said. “I used to go on tour with them, but now we have two kids in school. I miss it though. It’s just marginally more exciting to be on tour with a band than at home with kids, you know?”

Oh, she was in so much trouble. She’d been ignoring her feeling for him since they had turned dangerously strong, but that rush of possessiveness broke through her defenses. Crap.

“Poor Sean,” she said, “He keeps dating the same girl over and over again, just with different names. It’s sad really, but at least Tasha, the template for all of them, is sweet. The du jours are all sweet too.

“Gretchen was a bitch. She came on their last tour with us, but she’d sit backstage and bitch and moan about her nails and then wouldn’t even hug Nate when he came off stage. She said he was too sweaty. Let me tell you, you can’t really date a musician if you can’t stand a little sweat.”

Chelsea’s mind flashed to an erotic image of herself and Nate on his desk even while it reeled from Maddy’s rapid fire speech.

“No,” she said, barely concealing her laughter, “I think I can stand some sweat. But why did Nate date her if she was so awful?”

Maddy studied her for a minute before answering and Chelsea was suddenly struck with just how important it was to make this woman her friend if she and Nate were to survive. Luckily, she didn’t think that would be a problem. Maddy was intensely likable.

“He was lonely,” she said finally. “Sean’s a dog, doesn’t need more than some chick to keep his bed warm, but Nate’s always wanted more. Gretchen was completely the wrong person to give it to him, but I guess he thought it was preferable to being alone. She wasn’t special, just the most recent. Recent here being two years ago. Then they broke up, and I guess he decided it was better to be alone. Until now,” she finished with a grin.

“Tasha was one of Sean’s first girlfriends. It was a real classic love story. Her father’s an entertainment lawyer. They’re unbelievably rich. And snobby. Tasha fell in love with Sean, who, like Nate and Bill, is, you know ‘from the wrong side of the tracks’.” Maddy made quotes with her fingers. “Her parents had a fit, kept them apart. By the time the two of them got old enough for her parents not to matter, she was back East, in college. Last I knew, she was a doctor in New York. I’m guessing she views Sean as her one flirtation with danger, and that’s it. But for Sean, it’s so much more. Tasha’s the love of his life, that unattainable ideal. Not that he admits that, but every girlfriend he has is blonde, tall and willowy. Just like her.

“Of course, because these guys can basically pick a woman from among hundreds, they’re always about fifteen years younger than he is, but that’s how he remembers her. At eighteen, innocent, etcetera, etcetera.”

Maddy finished her story off with a roll of her eyes and a smirk.

Chelsea processed this and felt sorry for Sean. What a crappy way to deal with romance. No wonder he came across as so creepy. Though clearly, his preference for women didn’t keep him from ogling anyone with breasts. She was many things, but tall, blonde and willowy were not on the list.

“Does it bother you that they have access to so many women? I mean, do you get jealous, or worried?” Chelsea asked, suddenly filled with anxiety about the groupies.

The guy outside had been pretty clear on Nate’s view of groupies, but what if that changed in the future? There was no hope that age would help her. Hugh Heffner was 80 and Mick Jagger, a better parallel, was over 60. According to the rules of rock and roll, Nate had decades of sexual viability left in him.

“Are you kidding me?” Maddy said with a laugh, “He knows I’d kick his ass. Besides, Bill settled down pretty quickly. Much more so than Nate or Sean, although, in the past few years, Nate hasn’t been partying much. I think he’d rather just settle down, but there aren’t many opportunities for that in this lifestyle. Not to scare you or anything if that’s not what you want, but Nate’s pretty much into serious relationship mode at this point.”

“Is that a warning?” Chelsea said.

“Yeah, just some information for you, in case you want to run now.”

“Nah, I think I’ll stay,” Chelsea said with a smile. “If it’s hard to find someone in his lifestyle, how did you and Bill get together?”