Evolution (3 page)

There were plenty of guys who came through the club every night. After a while, they all started to look the same. Just more random guys, some hot, some not, who were looking for a hookup without complications. I’d met more than my fair share of “daddies” who wanted to take care of me. My friend Cris often encouraged me to find someone, said I was too young to be on my own. But I did okay, and Cris wasn’t one to talk since he was barely nineteen himself, and he’d lived on his own forever.

“I’ve just got one of those faces.” He proceeded into the living room with his cup in hand. “You should eat something. There are eggs in the fridge. The protein would be good for you.”

I wasn’t hungry, and the offer seemed a little odd. “Ever go to Down Low?” I asked, adding a touch more cream to my coffee.

“I’m not gay.” Yet he knew of the club, obviously.

I sighed and gulped down the rest of my brew before rinsing the mug and putting it in the dishwasher. No need for me to make a mess. The one thing I’d learned pretty fast about making my own way was there was no one else to clean up after me, ever.

I followed him into the living room, only to pause in the doorway. Frames decorated the walls behind the massive sofa: gold records, album covers, and autographed pictures. A Grammy perched on the shelf in the corner. The reality hit me like one of those cartoon safes.

“You’re from Triple Flight. Lead guitarist, Kerstrande Petterson.” Rock god, guitar genius, and heartthrob to millions. TF had traveled the world a few times. I’d even seen them in concert, always stuck in back where the cheapest tickets were, but I’d been there. Five years ago they’d been the youngest rock band to ever grace the cover of
Rolling Stone
. Kerstrande didn’t look any different than he had the last time I saw him on TV.

“Just figured that out now?”

Again I felt stuck, like I had in the car last night when I’d hit him. Heart pounding, body frozen, mind racing. We were ruined. Evolution was over. Sure, we’d never had the musical genius of Triple Flight. Not been signed by the age of fifteen and billionaires by the age of eighteen, but we were good. We were real.

“Are you crying?”

I brought my hand up to my face and felt the warmth of tears. Sure enough. First I hit the guy with my car then I make a fool of myself by crying like a baby in front of him. “No,” I denied it.

An uncomfortable silence filled the room until he said, “So you’re in a band.”

“I’m sorry. Please don’t ruin us. We’re just starting out. Making our own album and everything. Robert and Joel didn’t do anything. I’ll just quit, let them find a new singer. It’s not their fault. This is their dream….” Mine too, even more so than theirs. But I would give it up for my friends. After all, it had been my mistake.

“Decent singers are hard to find.”

A dime a dozen, really. I’d auditioned for a couple hundred bands before Rob and I had formed our own. Kerstrande stared at me like he didn’t know what to make of me. “Making your own record? You probably won’t sell more than one or two thousand copies. The big companies have the dollars for promotion—that’s what all bands need. Is that what you’re here for? Promotion? Call the press, make it happen.”

“You think I planned this? Do people try to run you over often?”

“No. That’s new.”

Yet not. His snarky attitude said it all. He expected people to take advantage of him. The humor was a shield. I got that, since I used the same cover myself sometimes, but I wasn’t looking for anything. “Do I seem the type?”

“Everyone’s the type, kid. Everyone wants fame, fortune, and power. What they don’t get is that getting all that puts you in a fishbowl. No one is really your friend, and no one wants you for you. Merry Christmas. Santa Claus isn’t real.”

I sighed. “I don’t want fame, power, and fortune. I’d like to have enough money to eat and keep a roof over my head, but I sing because I love to sing. I want people to smile, maybe even escape from their pain for a little while. I didn’t know who you were until I came into this room. Sorry I interrupted your self-pity party.” I turned toward the kitchen, hoping I could find my keys so I could get the hell out. I felt bad for the guy, but not enough to let him dink me around. I’d left school and my old neighborhood because of guys like him and was so done with that. Guys who were bullies just ’cause it made them feel important. “Where are my keys?”

His eyes met mine, and we shared a glare. He was the first to look away. “You’re right. You’re not smart enough to have done this on purpose.”

Okay, now he was going too far. “At least I’m not a conceited prick who needs to flaunt money and pay people to be his friends. Where are my keys?”

“Better a prick than a sociopath.”

Was he having fun with the banter? Did no one talk back to him? What the hell? “Seriously, I already told you I didn’t do it on purpose.” Just because he was Kerstrande Petterson didn’t give him the right to be a jerk. I frowned, remembering something he’d said last night. “And who are you to make fun of my name when your name is so weird?”

He blinked and said nothing for a few seconds. “I get it. You’re schizophrenic, right?”

“Only if I can change the meaning of schizophrenia to being really pissed off that you won’t give me my keys!” I was so done with this conversation.

He threw the keys at my feet. “Get out. I’ve had enough of that cotton candy hair of yours.”

“Gladly.” I scooped them up and headed for the door. When it closed behind me and I headed toward the parking lot outside, I felt momentarily lost, like I should go back, apologize, and try to get him to see that I wasn’t after him for money. But just like all things in life, I had to keep moving forward. The only person’s view on the world you could change was your own. Everyone else had to make their own damn decisions.

My car looked dented and slightly battered. I knew how it felt. At least it still ran. After a quick trip home, I fed my cat Mikka, who just glared at me like I’d been neglecting her. I changed into work clothes, skimpy, tight, and see-through, and cleaned up my raccoon eyes. Some of the waiters wore only hot pants, but I’d had too many hands on me to suffer not having something between them and me.

It was early enough in the day that the worst of the crowd hadn’t arrived yet. Mostly it was people just stopping in for an early dinner. Even my bandmate, Rob, who was as straight as guys got, came in for a soda and some food. He sat in my section, watching whatever sports game played on the big screen. He shared his food with me while I cleaned around him and waited on the few people who lingered near the bar. The music, barely at a dull throb, let me tell Rob about my encounter with Kerstrande Petterson. I left out the dream, since Rob often freaked when I went into too much detail about my sex life.

“I’m surprised it’s not on the news.” He took a sip of his soda and flipped his long rock-star-esque hair out of his eyes. He always wore tight jeans and leather, hair almost screaming eighties; I’d seen the pictures in his mom’s high school yearbook. But there wasn’t much I could say since mine was skater punk on neon steroids.

“They broke up years ago.” I remember sobbing over the last release in memorial to their greatness. I’d been fifteen at the time.

“Still, he’s local. Seems like anytime some local celeb farts, we know about it.”

Someone squeezed passed me and then slapped my butt before sitting down at Rob’s table. It was Joel, our keyboardist. He winked at me, not at all bothered by the half-naked men dancing in cages this early in the evening. Rob always went out of his way to look away from them. Joel played both sides of the fence, so he looked his fill. “Hey, rock star. You should flip the TV to channel ten.”

My heart skipped a beat, but I went for the remote and changed the station.

“Former guitarist Kerstrande Petterson caught on tape with a young man. Are they lovers? You decide.” The picture posted on the screen was a dark blurry image of him carrying me in a fireman’s grip up to his apartment. That explained why my stomach ached today. I’d bounced on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “The New York native has refused all comments, and we are still searching for the identity of the young man.”

“Damn,” I mumbled.

Rob’s eyes, large as saucers, stared at the news. Had he not believed me before?

Joel grinned. “I totally agree. You’ve been holding out on us. Shacking up with a rock demigod. He owns half of REA Records now. You can’t do better than Petterson to help Evolution.”

“I hit him with my car. It was an accident. I don’t want anything from him.” Especially after the talk I’d had with him that morning.

“He looks fine in the photos. Maybe he’s seen you here a few times and was playing hurt to get you to go home with him.”

“It’s not like that.” Besides, I wasn’t going to hang onto the guy for his fame, money, or other crap. I was old enough to make my own way in the world. Just working at Down Low provided me with plenty of opportunities for sugar daddies. But getting paid to spread wasn’t the way I lived and sure as hell not how I worked.

The evening crowd started to file in, and my friends left. I let the work take my mind off the events from last night. Petterson would forget about me soon enough anyway, and I’d forget him. Maybe.

I danced to the music, sung along to some of my favorite tunes, and winked at a ton of drooling daddies who piled in after the workday ended for most. More than a handful of men had their hands on me as the evening progressed. I shrugged them all off, thinking only of the stranger in my dreams who had held me so tightly. It couldn’t have been Petterson. He wasn’t nice enough to hold anyone that way.

When I finally got home to my studio apartment, it was after 2:00 a.m., and I dragged myself to the microwave to watch the Styrofoam box spin. The best thing about having a small place was that I never had far to go. Not for food, to the bathroom, or to sleep.

I stripped out of my shirt and dug into the food while perched on the edge of my futon. A spot just above my left collarbone had been bothering me all day. Either a really big spider had gotten me at Kerstrande’s or he’d given me a hickey. My brain kept going back to the memory of the nip of teeth. If I had to endure another bite to experience more of those kisses, I’d be all over it.

Tossing the food aside, I kicked off my pants and pulled a blanket up, wondering if I’d dream of him again. The phone rang. Who the hell called this late at night? Had my mom had some sort of emergency? I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Genesis Sage? This is Five Live News calling. What is your relationship with Kerstrande Petterson? Are you business partners? Lovers? Are you the reason he gave up stardom? Does he feel that Triple Flight would lose popularity if he came out?”

I hung up the phone, feeling the fear of the fishbowl closing in on me. Obviously they’d found me. Someone buzzed the call box from downstairs. “Genesis Sage, are you home? This is Ten News. We’d like to ask you some questions.” I turned off the phone, trembling a little. They’d have to ask Kerstrande if they wanted answers. It was his fishbowl, not mine, and I didn’t want to swim.

Chapter 3

F
OUR
days of dodging the media and another four hours of rehearsing with Devon’s supervision left me feeling like I had been sucked up in a vacuum, spun around, and spit into the trash. Joel and Rob handled the criticism better than I. Devon had a cruel streak when it came to me. Sometimes I feared it was because I’d never taken him up on his many offers for activities outside of work, but
friend
was all he was to me.

Since the picture turned up of me with Kerstrande, we’d had hundreds of requests to perform a headlining show. We’d turned most down. Our manager booked us at Hard Light, the biggest indie club in the city. No opening act, just Evolution in front of a million cameras. Joel said it was standing room only. I doubted anyone really wanted to hear me sing. They just wanted to stare at the freak who had been caught with an ex-rock star.

Devon sipped lemon water and put his feet on the table, stretching out like a lazy cat. Always the predator, whether he was singing, dating, or just existing. He projected that sense of extreme confidence, much like a business shark. His shadows swirled around him tonight, live and hungry-looking. The past few weeks he’d grown worse. More critical, darker, and sometimes downright scary.

“Bad press can be turned into good press.”

“How can I turn this into something good? They don’t want me. They want some sideshow.” I pulled on black leather pants and a white wife beater. All the lights would make me sweat like a pig, but I’d try to keep it as cool as I could. Rob had asked me to tone down the color for the night, and I promised I would. In fact, other than my hair, my blue rainbow shoes were the only color they would see on me tonight. Even my nails were painted black. I could be butch too. Well, sorta.

“Be you,” Devon told me. “I like you just fine the way you are.”

I sighed at him. “If only life were that easy.” The fact that Hard Light had about a half dozen ghosts, one of which was putting a gun in his mouth over and over again just ten feet from where Devon sat, made my anxiety rise. I really hoped the stage was clean. No need to give the guys more reasons to stare at me like I was crazy.