Gluttony (5 page)

“No more drinking tonight,” Adam said. “Not for me.”

Kane gaped at the three of them as if they’d sprouted antennae. Then he nodded with sudden understanding. “I get it.” He grinned. “I spooked you. Look. I’m sure none of us have any secrets….”

He turned to Harper, who met his stare without flinching. He knew what she had to lose—and she knew he was daring her to chicken out.

“But let’s just say, hypothetically, we all do,” he continued. “So I suggest a pact. We’ll hit the buffet and drink to it. Anything we find out about each other this weekend … well, it doesn’t count. All secrets forgotten as soon as we leave the city limits. After all, what happens in Vegas—”

“I don’t drink to lines that are so old, they have mold growing on them,” Harper snapped.

“What happens in Vegas
stays
in Vegas,” Kane finished, arching an eyebrow. “Agreed?”

They nodded, and they shook on it. Not that it mattered. Harper knew she was the only one with a secret that really meant something—and there was no way in hell she was risking exposure. Pact or no pact.

“Good. Let’s get some cocktails and make it official,” Kane ordered, charging toward the buffet. “Eat, drink, and be merry, folks, for tomorrow—we do it all over again.”

Reed was buzzed.

But it wasn’t the drugs. It was her. It was the blond hair, the blue eyes, the cotton-candy lips—all of it like a doll, a picture in a magazine. Picture perfect, but so real, and so unpredictable, starting with her inescapable, unbelievable choice: him. From honor roll to rolling blunts, from superstar to slacker—he didn’t even remember how she’d woven her way into his life. She’d just appeared. As if he’d been asleep and then, on waking, there she was. Part of him.

After Kaia … Beth had helped him. Not to forget—never, he had promised himself. But Beth had helped him survive the remembering. To live.

He had never asked her why she was hanging around the slums of his life, maybe because he knew it wouldn’t last. But Reed had never before cared about the future. Why start now?

“Guess I should have changed into a bathing suit,” Beth said, stretching out on the edge of the pool and skimming her bare toes across the water. “We could have gone in the hot tub.”

Reed had only ever been in one hot tub in his life, and it was a part of his life that was over now.
It’ll be fun,
he heard Kaia’s voice say, somewhere in the depths of memory.
Promise
.

“I don’t do bathing suits,” Reed said, and—except for that one time—it was true. He gestured down to his black AC/DC T-shirt and dark, well-worn jeans, his standard uniform. “This is it.”

Beth stood up, her long legs mostly bare beneath the sheer pajama shorts, and joined him on the lounge chair. He scooted over to give her room, but she barely needed any, stretching out alongside him, wrapping an arm over his chest and twining her legs with his. The pool area was nearly empty.

“You can’t see the stars here,” she mused, resting her cheek against his to look up at the sky. “Too many lights. It’s weird.”

They’d both grown up under the bright, too-clear desert night sky, where civilization—or what passed for it in Grace—faded away just after nightfall. The city haze was disconcerting, like the sky was closing in on them—or like the stars had disappeared altogether. “Get used to it,” he warned her. “Next year …”

“Yeah, next year.” She fell silent, and in that silence, he saw it all: graduation, summer, and then the day she packed up her stuff and moved to L.A., to college, leaving him to his deadbeat, dead-end life. “About that …,” she murmured. “I’m not going.”

Reed didn’t say anything.

“I’m not—it’s not what I want anymore,” she said softly, and he could feel her arm tighten around him. She was still searching for the stars. “Maybe if I’d gotten into Berkeley, things would be … maybe if a lot of things had happened, or hadn’t happened, or—” She stopped, and shivered against him. He began rubbing his hand up and down her arm. “It’s not me anymore,” she finally said. “It’s not what I want.”

“So next year, you’re just going to …?”

“Stay in Grace. Stay with—” She turned away from the sky, toward him, and rested her hand gently against his cheek. “I know we don’t really talk about—I mean, we’ve never, about next year, but I thought you might … be … happy.”

Happy that she’d given up the only dream she’d ever had, to get the hell out of Grace and move on to something better? Happy that, ever since they’d gotten together, she’d never talked about what she wanted or where she was going, had just lain around on the couch with him listening to his music and smoking his pot? Happy that, unlike him, she had a real future, and she was giving it up?

“Yeah,” he said, tipping his head forward and kissing her, still overwhelmed by the taste and feel of her lips, as much as he had been the first time. “I guess I am.”

They stuffed themselves on prime rib, shrimp cocktail, fresh fruit in a honey-lime yogurt sauce, jalepeño poppers, garlic-roasted pork loin, fried chicken wings, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, several hearty helpings of chocolate cheesecake and, since none of the half-asleep Midnight Magic staffers seemed to doubt their flimsy IDs, several pitchers of beer.

Merry was an understatement.

“Thish is awesome,” Miranda slurred as they stumbled up the Strip back to their hotel. All her ridiculous fears about secrets and lies had long since been forgotten. “I love Vegas.”

“Viva Las Vegas!” Harper shouted, flinging her arms in the air. “We love you!”

No one even bothered to stare.

“Shhhh!” Miranda spit out the warning, along with a frothy spray of saliva, and gave Harper a light push—or not so light, as it nearly knocked both of them to the ground.

“Steady,” Kane cautioned, pulling her back up. Miranda wanted to say something filled with sparkling wit and sex appeal, but the world was spinning and all she could think to say was, “Woo-hoo! Vegas!”

And then she saw it. Saw him. Twenty feet tall, looming over their heads. Jared Max, lead singer of the Crash Burners, her absolute, all-time favorite band. Jared Max was a rock god—hotter than Adam Levine. Hotter than Justin T. Hotter, even, than Kane.

Miranda sank to her knees in the middle of the sidewalk. “Harper,” she gasped. “Harper. Look.” She pointed, tipping her head away from the billboard as if it blazed like the face of God.

Crash Burners—LIVE
One Night Only

And a bright yellow band slung across the image, blotting out the drummer’s head. S
OLD
O
UT
!

“Harper,” she moaned. “They’re heeeeere. And we’re missing it.”

Harper joined Miranda on the ground as the guys gaped at them, obviously unable to understand the crisis at hand.

“We’re going,” Harper said, throwing her arms around Miranda.

“Sold out,” Miranda keened, her brain too clogged with fatigue and liquor to form complete sentences, much less rational thought.

“We’re going, birthday babe,” Harper cried, letting herself fall backward on the sidewalk and squealing as Adam hauled her to her feet. “I promise.”

My turn,
Miranda thought blissfully, watching Adam prop Harper upright and then turning to stare at Kane, trying to send him a silent message. “Come and get me.”

Or had she said that part out loud?

Kane laughed and grabbed her hands, hoisting her up. She didn’t want to let go, so instead she let herself sag against him, the Crash Burners and the amazing, inaccessible Jared Max entirely forgotten.

Kane might not have been quite as hot, and he might have been half drunk and all tone deaf, but he was there, he was real and, if only for the too-brief duration of the walk home, he was all hers.

chapter
3

“Ugh, what time is it?” Harper rolled over in the bed and smashed a pillow over her head, trying to block out the painful morning light.

“Shhh, it’s still early, go back to sleep,” Miranda whispered. She climbed slowly and carefully out of bed—but Harper, half hung over and half drunk, felt every pitch and roll of the bed, as if she were seaborne. She had resolved not to drink much the night before—but the stress in her head and Kane’s incessant needling had proven too much. One beer, she’d told herself. One beer, and no more.

She could clearly remember gulping it down and, as the welcome warmth spread through her body, reaching for another. After that, things got a little fuzzy.

Now, too few hours later, even Miranda’s careful tiptoes toward the bathroom sounded like elephant footfalls, slamming against the beer-saturated walls of Harper’s brain. Forget sleep; it was all she could do to keep her head from exploding.

So she lay awake and very, very still. And she heard everything.

The bathroom door closing.

The water running.

And the unmistakable sound of Miranda puking her guts out.

Harper would know it anywhere.

The toilet flushed and the water kept running—the ever-considerate Miranda would be brushing her teeth now, Harper figured. Gargling mouthwash. And then, right on cue, tiptoeing back to bed.

“You okay?” Harper whispered, rolling toward the edge of the narrow bed to give her friend more room to stretch out.

Miranda smiled ruefully. “Just too much to drink. Sorry for the gross-out factor. Go back to sleep.”

But she knew very well that Miranda never threw up when she drank. Harper was self-absorbed, but she wasn’t blind. And what she saw was Miranda stuffing her face last night—and unstuffing it in the morning. She didn’t do it all the time, not as far as Harper knew, at least. She didn’t even do it often—though more often than she had in the fall, before their nightmare year had really begun.

Harper could say something. Miranda always did whatever she said; it formed the basis of their friendship.

But this weekend was supposed to be about making things up to Miranda, celebrating her, not bashing her and her stupid choices. Not driving her away again. Besides, who was she to force Miranda to face reality, when she was doing everything she could to avoid it herself?

Harper took a deep breath and reached out an arm, fully intending to shake her best friend awake. But then her arm dropped to her side, and, feeling suddenly groggy and overwhelmed, she closed her eyes, hoping for sleep.

This …
thing
, this problem that Miranda had, it wasn’t an emergency, she told herself. She decided to wait until the time was right.

More to the point: She chickened out.

She chose the same no-risk, no-gain approach she took to all her problems these days: ignored it, and hoped it would go away.

Beth was nearly asleep on her feet. They’d crawled out of bed at 7 a.m., hoping to beat the inevitable crowds at the All-American Band Battle registration area. But that was wishful thinking. Judging from the way they looked—and smelled—some of these bands must have camped out in the auditorium all night; Beth and the Blind Monkeys were at least fifty people back in line, which so far had translated into a painful hour of scoping out the competition.

When they finally made it to the small metal folding table at the head of the room, a sullen girl with thick purple eyeliner and matching purple dreads handed Beth a stack of forms without looking up. “Band name?” she asked, sounding almost too bored to bother taking another breath.

Beth looked around at the guys, waiting for one of them to speak, but none of them did. Apparently, she was now groupie, roadie, and form-filler-outer. So much the better. The more responsibilities she had, the more they would need her. “Blind Monkeys,” she said, half proud to be a part of something and half embarrassed by the knowledge that, in fact, she wasn’t.

The girl scanned her clipboard, then sighed in irritation. “Not on here. Did you send in your preregistration forms?”

“Of course—” Beth started to say. Then she caught the glance exchanged between Fish and Hale. “Guys?”

Fish twirled a strand of his long, blond hair; Hale just stared at her blankly. “Did you mail it in?” She’d filled out the forms, signed their names, bought the stamps, put it all together—all they’d had to do was take it to the post office to send it off. She and Reed would have done it themselves, but the guys had volunteered.

“We may have …” Fish scuffed his toe against the shiny hardwood floor. “There was this girl …”