Revelry (Taint #1) (9 page)

The others laugh, and Levi plants a sloppy wet kiss on my cheek as I shove him away from me. “Do not put your mouth on me. I don’t know where you’ve been.”

“You didn’t know you were coming on tour with us?” Zed asks, “You have a passport, right?”

“A passport?” I stare at him as if he’s fucking crazy. “There’s been a mistake. I don’t work for you, I work for Harbour Records, and yeah, they contracted me to be your little lackey, but I’m not going on tour with you. Surely they’d have mentioned that to me by now?” Though I’m pretty sure Vanessa hates me and is looking for any excuse to fire my arse. What if she hasn’t told me because she wants to give Taint a reason to complain about my performance? “I can’t go on tour. Overseas. For weeks at a time.”

“Try months,” Coop says. “Three of them.”

My eyes widen. “Three months. I can’t go on tour for three months.”

“Why the fuck not?”

Good question. “Because I have … a cat.”

“A cat that you hate,” Cooper challenges.

“Yeah, a cat that I hate, but she still belongs to me,” I snap. “And I have things like rent and … stuff.”

“You live in your car, Ali.”

“I do not live in my car.”

“So you just carry all of your worldly possessions around with you? Just in case?”

“Look, this is beside the point. I can’t go on tour with you.”

He leans forward, his elbows on the table-top, his gaze penetrating and firmly fixed on my face, as if he’s studying me for a chink in my armour. “Why the hell not?”

“Yeah come on Red, it’ll be fun. We can share a bunk,” Levi says.

I turn to Levi, thankful for the reprieve from Cooper’s intensely shrewd gaze. “You disgust me.”

“I can live with that.”

“Tell me you guys are kidding?” I look at Zed, and then Ash—hoping he’ll talk some sense into them—but then in the few days that I’ve known him I’ve heard him speak all of three times. Ash doesn’t cause friction or make waves, so appealing to him for amnesty is more than likely a waste of time.

“So you have a passport?” Cooper asks again.

“Of course I have a passport, everyone has a passport, but—”

“I didn’t,” Zed refutes.

“That’s because you’re a man-child, Zed,” I say, dismissing him altogether because there are way more important tasks at hand, like telling these lunatics that I’m not traveling to a foreign country with them. “Look I appreciate you guys taking me under your wing, even if it was a dick move on your part, Coop, but I can’t go on tour with you.”

“Ali, you don’t have a choice.”

“Yes, yes I do. I’ll just talk to Vanessa. She can’t make me go overseas. That’s ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous is you not seizing this opportunity while you have it,” Cooper says through clenched teeth. His eyes are narrowed and ... angry?
Why is he so adamant that I go with them?

“What opportunity? To hang out with a bunch of rock stars and watch them circle jerk while we travel Stateside?”

“We don’t circle jerk,” Zed says.

“Yeah, we have groupies that do that shit for us.” Levi waggles his fingers in front of my face. “Gotta keep our hands rested up for our instruments.”

“Look at your life, Ali. Look at the way it’s going now,” Cooper says. “Now, five years’ time, where are you?”

“I don’t know, Coop, where are you?”

“In the studio, on a tour bus, playing to a crowd of thousands.”

“So exactly where you are now then?”

He nods. “Only bigger. You want to manage the world’s top bands? How the hell are you going to do that if you can’t survive one tour?”

“Not all managers go on the road. In fact, I don’t know of any that do.”

“Exactly. Think of the knowledge you’ll have. You’ll understand when your artist wants to throw in the towel, cancel the tour and come home, because you’ll have been there.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“It isn’t an option,” he counters.

“Excuse me?”

“I already talked to Vanessa. If you don’t come on the tour, you’ll no longer have a position with Harbour Records.”

“Dude, what the fuck?” Zed asks. Clearly he’s as blindsided by this information as I am.

I grit my teeth, take a deep breath and say, “That’s extortion.”

Coop leans back in his seat, cool and unruffled, but his dark gaze never leaves mine. “No, it’s an opportunity.”

“Levi, move,” I say, and I must sound like I mean business because both he and Ash vacate the booth to let me out.

Levi grabs my arm as I pass and jerks me back to him, producing my keys that he’d confiscated earlier from his pocket. He dangles them before me. “Just think about it, Red.”

“Fuck you.”

“Or you could think about that, too,” Levi says, wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue. I snatch the keys from his hand and turn back to the table.

“You know what? Fuck all of you. I didn’t sign up for this.” I turn, walking briskly through the bar and out into the temperate May night. For a moment I just stare up at the stars and breathe, and then the door opens behind me and Cooper is on the phone, giving what I assume is the street address of the bar to someone. I have no patience left for this man tonight, so I begin walking away from him. I’m pretty sure I can find my way back to the studio from here.
I hope.

“I called a taxi.”

“I’m fine walking.”

He laughs, but there’s no humour to it. “Jesus, are you always this stubborn?”

“Pretty much, yeah.” I fold my arms over my chest and turn to face him. He pulls a pack of cigarettes from the inside of his jacket, sticks one in his mouth and lights up.
Good God. What is it about this man?
It’s like he just oozes sex, from his tense yet oddly cool posture, the full lips pursing around his cigarette, to those blue-grey eyes that seem to read me entirely too well. Everything about him makes me want to take my clothes off. He’s cunning and smart, and I don’t trust a man who can make me wet with a single smirk.
No good can ever come of that
.

I’m staring too long. Coop flashes his stupid, sexy smirk again, as if he knows what I’m thinking.
Damn it.

He surprises me by saying, “I want you on this tour, Ali.”

“Why?”

“Because I think I want you in my debt,” he says. “I think you’re going to make one hell of a manager one day, and I want to be able to come to you and ask you to manage us.”

“Why would you want me in that position? You know nothing about me.”

“I know enough,” he whispers. “Surely the concept isn’t that unbelievable to you?”

“I just … I’m not like Deb or Vanessa. I worked hard to get here, but I’m a blip on the radar. I’m a fucking coffee girl, Cooper.” I shake my head and exhale deeply. “Shouldn’t you want someone more experienced than me?”

“You’ll have experience.” He grins, sensing my hesitation. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I open my mouth, but the words fall short, because he’s right. What is the worst that could happen? It’s just a tour. I mean, anything has to be better than where I am right now. And it would be an invaluable experience to see how it all works from the inside.

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

“Where is the angry girl that called me a rock wannabe? The one who stood up to Guidelli?”

“She learnt to appreciate the idea of a paying job.”

He tilts his head to the side, studying me as if I’m a damn science project. “Can she learn to appreciate the idea of someone giving her a break?”

“You think that’s what you’re doing? Giving me a break?” I study him with the same level of curiosity.

Headlights roll over us from the approaching taxi and Cooper squints, bringing his arm up to shield his eyes. He takes another long pull of his cigarette and drops it to the ground, stubbing it out with his boot. The driver pulls up alongside us and Coop pulls his wallet from his jeans and leans through the window, handing the cabbie a fifty-dollar note. “Take her anywhere she wants to go.”

“As long as I’m not driving all the way to Timbuktu, you got it, mate.” He smiles and tucks the money in his change pouch.

Coop straightens and turns to me, practically wedging me between him and the cab door and I’m finding it incredibly difficult to breathe all of a sudden. “I think we could learn a lot from one another.”

“And just what do you think I can teach you, Coop?”

“To forget,” he whispers, so close I can feel the breath on my face. His hand brushes my waist as he walks away and I practically have to tame my vagina with a whip and chair to keep her back.

“Good night, Ali-Cat,” he calls over his shoulder.

“Cooper,” I shout, and he stops in his tracks, his arms shoved in his pockets. He doesn’t turn to face me. “If I agree to go on tour, I won’t be your distraction.”

“We’ll see,” he says, and then he wanders inside. I climb into the cab and shut the door, maybe a little too forcefully.

Could I survive a tour with Taint? Never mind the tour—could I survive the night without running back in there to have sex with him?

Arrogant son-of-a-bitch
.

“Where are we headed?” the driver asks.

“Brewster Street, Decker’s Studios.”

A few minutes later we pull up in the studio lot. The taxi driver clicks a button on the metre and fiddles with his money before reaching towards the back of the cab with his hand outstretched. “Here’s your change.”

“Keep it. I’m not going anywhere.”
And I might be destitute, but I don’t want the rock star’s money
.

I climb out of the cab and walk back to my car, preparing to spend another night with only the bastard cat to keep me company.

In the morning, I take Cat to a nearby shelter. The woman looks at me as if I’m a heartless bitch, and I don’t blame her. I am. Embarrassed and a little sad that my Grams’ cat is more than likely going to be put down—because I don’t know anyone who would take her—I give the woman my sob story. I think she takes pity on me because she says she’ll try her best to rehouse her.

When I get back to the car, I cry my eyes out because that stupid cat was one of the only things I had left that belonged to my Grams. I still haven’t made a decision as to what I’m going to do, but I know either way I can’t keep her. I’m pretty sure she’s the spawn of Satan, so you’d be excused for thinking that I don’t want to keep her—and it’s true, I don’t—but that doesn’t mean that giving her away was easy.

I sit on a bench at a park and watch a couple of kids kick a football around the field. Gradually, more and more families arrive and soon there’s a soccer match in full swing. Normally, that many children would make me want to stick pins in my ears. I hate children, almost as much as I hate moths, and I really, really hate moths, what with their freaky powdery wings and those creepy red eyes. I shudder, glancing up at the tree above me, expecting an entire flock of them to descend and attack, because we all know those scary little fuckers are telepathic. Just as I’m preparing to be eaten alive, my phone dings in my pocket. I pull it out and see I have a text from Cooper.

Coop: Here kitty, kitty, where are you?

Um, is he psychic?

Ali: Just left the pound. Surrendered my Grams’ cat today, so that’s kind of appropriate, actually
.

My phone rings immediately. I stare at the number on the screen and after a second I hit the answer button.

“Ali?” Coop says. “I’m so fucking sorry. I feel like an arsehole.”

“You are an arsehole.” I chuckle half-heartedly.

“Why did you surrender her?”

“Because I’m living out of my car.” For some reason admitting this to him is sort of freeing. “Keeping her in there was cruel.”

“Where did you take her?”

“Renbury Farm,” I say. “It’s fine. You know I hated that cat.”

“Yeah, I figured that, what with you calling her the bitch cat and all.”

“Right, I just … She’s probably going to be euthanised and it just, it sucks that the last thing I have of my grandmother is about to be as dead as she is.”