Darkness enveloped me, time seemed to stand still as aftershocks seized my boneless body. When I finally opened my eyes, his trunks were back on, and he was standing there gazing down at me. I saw something in his eyes. I’d expected it to be the scorching desire I’d grown accustomed to, but that look was gone, replaced by something wholly different, something grave in nature. I couldn’t recognize it. Remorse? Disgust? All I knew was something had dramatically changed between us.
Without a word, he got out, dried himself off, and left in a hurry.
I remained in the hot tub with bubbles swirling around me. The afterglow of the orgasm wore off quickly—quicker than I ever imagined it could—and I hugged my knees into my chest. I felt confused and vulnerable. Used.
I tried adjusting the dial on the hot tub, but no matter how far I turned it, the water felt cold.
Chapter Fourteen
SHOOTING STAR
The next night I was in the auditorium of The Palms Casino Resort. We’d gotten to Las Vegas, the city referred to as the "Miracle in the Desert". But the only miracle I was thinking about was how one minute Jax and I had been pleasuring ourselves in front of one another, and the next minute he was treating me like a stranger.
I’d woken up completely alone, and Jax had been ignoring me all day, managing to stay out of sight whenever I tried looking for him. It wasn’t my first time being shut out by a guy, but it still stung. I’d been wary of him hurting me, so I wasn’t completely surprised, but still, it hurt more than I thought it would.
Jax probably thought his conquest was over, or maybe he didn’t respect me anymore for touching myself in front of him—I didn’t know. It pissed me off but whatever, I thought. I had to remind myself that I just wanted to get done with this tour, get my bonus, and then peace out to some tropical island.
The concert was already in progress. I was watching Jax from backstage, this time with a faint, jealous gnaw tugging at me every time he reached out to the crowd. I was suddenly renewed in my conviction that we weren’t from the same worlds. For him, my world was boring, and for me, his was unreachable.
The noise from the crowd was deafening, but the applause made my stomach knot with tension. It was possible that Jax was just getting too famous for me to keep his interest.
"Stop thinking like this," I scolded myself, realizing how it hard was to break bad habits.
Just out of view of the audience, I tapped my foot nervously with the Hitchcocks’ greatest hits as they played, hoping for the set to end so I’d finally be able to corner Jax and talk to him about giving me the cold shoulder. I wanted answers, even if the truth hurt.
While the final song’s drum solo crescendoed, Jax walked toward a shrieking brunette in the front row as he took a swig from a water bottle, then poured the rest of the water onto himself.
With a practiced motion, he grabbed his white shirt from the bottom hem and pulled it up over his head, holding it above him with both hands. He twisted it and water streamed from the shirt, drenching the brunette below, who shrieked with orgasmic glee.
My hands tensed into fists. I couldn’t help but feel used. With a sea of gorgeous women at Jax’s beck and call every night, it’d only be a matter of time before I had to see him go backstage with one. Why had he led me on? I found myself looking over the women in the front row. If it happened—correction, when it happened—what would my replacement look like?
The crowd’s roar registered dimly, but it wasn’t until Chewie came backstage, hand up for a high five, that I realized the set was over. "Now that’s what I call a show!" he said, his half-yell jolting me back to reality. "Rye, have you ever seen a crowd so crazy? I guess that’s Vegas, baby!"
Kev followed right behind him, gripping the neck of his guitar, beaming brightly. Sky ran over from behind Kev and gave a big hug to Chewie—and then one to me. "Rileeey!" Sky squealed. "Tell me you saw that last set. Tell me you saw how incredible it was."
Releasing from the hug, I forced a grin. "Yeah," I said. "Pretty incredible." The band walked into the dressing rooms, and I looked back to the auditorium, my fake smile gone.
Jax bowed deeply and walked offstage, catching sight of me and smiling like nothing was wrong. I turned away. It was bad enough to lead me on and ignore me—now he wanted to get on my good side? The whiplash was just too much.
His hand, unexpected but surprisingly gentle, squeezed my shoulder softly. I whirled back around.
"What?!" I asked, my jealousy and anger bubbling to the surface.
Jax’s dark eyes opened wide. He looked surprised, even worried. "Hey, relax," he said. "I just wanted to know if you’re ready for the encore."
"Yeah, sure," I said with a scoff. The audience showed no sign of quieting down—whether or not I was ready, they certainly were. "Ready as I’ll ever be."
Jax reached behind him and grabbed a brown rectangle thing from a shelf. "Good. Because you’re coming with us." He thrust the metal object into my hands, and as I looked down, I realized it was a cowbell. "You said you wondered what it was like to be on stage? Now’s your chance."
I glanced in horror at the cowbell, then back to Jax, my eyebrows raised with disbelief. "You’ve got to be kidding. What am I supposed to do with this?"
His face erupted in a broad grin. "You’re supposed to bang the hell out of it."
I gave a wry grin. "Yeah, right. I’ve been to this show a few times now, remember? There’s no cowbell in the encore."
"There will be tonight. Thanks to you." He looked dead serious.
The thought of getting to play as a rock star for a few minutes was thrilling, but suddenly, the magnitude of the crowd noise struck me, and I felt a wave of dizziness as I thought about making a fool of myself in front of an audience of thousands.
Shaking my head, I held the cowbell at arm’s length, trying to hand it back to Jax. "No. Hell no. I can’t play any instruments."
Jax crossed his arms in front of his chest. "Maybe so, but I’m not going back on stage for the encore—not unless you’re coming with."
"I can’t believe you’re trying to pull a trick like this during a show," I said, gritting my teeth.
Scattered shouts pierced the applause: "ENCORE!" "BRING JAX BACK!"
He lifted his eyebrow at me and tilted his head toward the crowd noise. "What trick? Let’s go. Your public is waiting."
As the crowd’s calls for an encore got louder, Kev, Chewie and Sky emerged from the dressing room, now in their crazy silver-and-gold finale costumes. Sky spotted the cowbell in my hand instantly, and her face lit up. "Oh my god!" she said, her eyes wide. "You’re coming with us?"
"Nope," I said, directing an exaggerated grimace toward the cowbell. "No sense of rhythm. Believe me, you don’t want me out there."
Jax laughed. "It’s a bell, just ring it," he said. "If you fuck it up, who cares? It’s the encore, everyone’s going nuts. No one will notice."
Was this some kind of a trick? "Don't toy with me like this," I said to Jax. "I'm not going to make an ass out of myself on stage in front of thousands of people just so you can have a laugh."
Jax wrinkled his eyebrows. "Toy with you?" He said, shaking his head. "I just wanted to show you a taste of what being a rocker is really like."
I narrowed my eyes at him. Was he telling the truth? Or was he playing another game? Turning to Chewie and Sky for help, I was dismayed to find Chewie already nodding vigorously with Jax.
"It’s just like he says, Rye," Chewie said. "No one cares about the encore. Besides, what happens in Vegas . . ."
In the auditorium, the screams of the audience were becoming heated. Kev said, "I don’t want to be a drag, but we have to get on stage, or people are going to start thinking the show’s over."
I studied Jax’s face again. His eyes looked completely different than they did when he left me in the hot tub last night. I saw no insincerity, no guile—if he was trying to play a game, I had no idea what it could be. I sighed. "Fine, I’ll go. But remember: if th
ey hate it, this was your idea."
He smiled. "Deal." Grabbing my hand, he walked on stage and pulled me along behind. I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew that with my musical incompetence, it was sure to be a disaster. I’d try to stay as invisible as possible—at least then I couldn’t screw it up for the band.
As we walked past the curtain, I could barely see at all.
After spending the entire show in the darkness of backstage, the spotlights were so blindingly bright that they hurt my eyes. How do they do this every night?
Then Sky’s bassline started, funky and deep, and the audience, which I could barely see through the glare, roared in ecstasy. My eyes still adjusting, I tentatively rang the cowbell.
I heard nothing but the noisy crowd.
Just before the first verse started, Jax looked over at me and smirked. When he saw me tapping the cowbell lightly, he just shook his head with a half-smile, then started singing.
My eyes narrowed. If he didn’t like my playing, it was his fault I was out here in the first place. I shook the cowbell again, harder. This time, I could hear the metallic clank over the crowd . . . but barely.
The encore number always got the crowd to sing along. As their voices swelled for the chorus, I realized they probably couldn’t hear the bell, either. The crowd was so excited that they’d have cheered for—and sung along with—a mariachi band, as long as Jax had been out in front.
And if that was the case, it meant I could at least have fun without worrying about making a fool out of myself.
I started pounding on the bell every third beat out of four: one-two-THREE-four, one-two-THREE-four. I didn’t keep time perfectly, but I didn’t need to. I turned toward Jax as I pounded away, and he caught my eye. Instead of avoiding me, he came over and bumped the side of his hip against mine, mid-verse.
My hips started swinging with the beat, tapping against Jax’s rhythmically, and I realized that like the rest of the band, I was jamming with the music. Sky, riffing on her bass, walked closer to me, then knelt down with the bass and played like she was worshipping the cowbell. I laughed.
Bolstered by her strong backing vocals, I started to sing out with the chorus. As the song built to its final climax, Jax went to the front of the stage, high-fiving crowd members. The next time he looked back to me, I was doing exactly what he’d told me: banging the hell out of the cowbell. When he smiled, I smiled back—and I had one more thing I wanted to do.
Following his lead, I walked downstage and reached out a hand to the first audience member I could. I felt first one palm shaking mine, then another, then another. It seemed like the mass of people went on forever, a dark tangle of bodies that went back as far as I could see. No one seemed to care that I wasn’t part of the band. They just wanted to touch a person who was on the stage, to bridge the gap between the show and its stars.
Just for tonight, I was one of those stars. And it was all because of Jax.
The final guitar chord went off, and with it, a pyro blast exploded from both sides of the stage. I felt radiating warmth from the firework against my face for a fraction of a second, and then the audience burst into its biggest round of applause of the night.
"Thank you, Las Vegas, and good night!" Jax shouted into the microphone.
The lights went down—and I realized that for the first time all night, I didn’t want the show to end.
Under the dim lights, I turned to see Sky, Chewie and Kev walking off the stage, probably heading to the green room. As the curtain fell in front of the stage separating us from the audience, I started to follow them toward the wings. I felt exhilarated, but a voice in the back of my head wouldn’t be quiet. Why had Jax given me the chance to play the cowbell? He was being hot and cold in a way I hadn’t seen before, and I couldn’t put my finger on what was going on.
"Stop. Trust me. Don’t step away." The low, sensuous voice was unmistakably Jax’s, his mouth so close that I could feel his breath. A familiar heated feeling of arousal was starting to build in between my legs.
My back stiffened at the unexpected brush of his lips against my ear, and I stopped in my tracks. "What’s going on?" I asked, trying to make my voice loud enough for him to hear me. The noise of the audience leaving the auditorium was just on the other side of the curtain.
"Stand still," he commanded, and I felt his body press up against me from behind. Then I felt a wisp of soft cloth on my face, and my vision went black. "In a minute, when I tell you to, you’re going to hold my hand and follow me."
A blindfold? "Promise me this isn’t turning into a Hitchcock movie," I said, trying to keep both my nervousness and my arousal out of my voice.
"It’s a surprise," he said, each word sending an involuntary thrill through my spine. "A good one. Just trust me. I want to show you some more of the rock star life."
I wanted desperately to look into his eyes, to see whether he was telling the truth or just playing another game. But with the blindfold over my eyes, all I had was his voice. Trust me, he said.
In the blackness, I reached my hand out and felt Jax’s strong fingers clasp around it.
Chapter Fifteen
SURPRISE
My heart beat fast. Blood rushed through my veins. My feet were moving as if they had a mind of their own. Sounds of cards shuffling, chips clanging, women cheering, and men groaning reverberated in my ears. There was the faint smell of cigars and martinis in the air. A small splash hit my arm. A drink? A new sound started. It was a bell ringing as if a woodpecker was attacking it, followed by clanking metal and then an elderly woman screaming like her hair was on fire. Applause broke out.
I briefly wondered what the sight must’ve looked like—me in a blindfold being tugged along by the hottest rocker in the world across what I imagined was a casino floor. It’d be a disaster if the image got back to Hans-Peterson, but it was hard to take that possibility seriously when I was so excited. Besides, I knew how the saying went—what happened in Vegas, stayed in Vegas.
I gripped Jax’s hand tighter as he pulled me forward, carefully guiding my blind self past moving bodies and up steps. I didn’t know what he had planned to show me, but I couldn’t wait.
A ding, then our feet stopped. He stood beside me, hugging me by the waist close to him. I couldn’t be sure but it felt like there were people standing around us. Before I could process the situation, another ding, and we were on the move again.
Moments later, I heard the soft click of a door closing behind me, then felt the velvety cloth slip away from my eyes . . .
. . . And realized that even with the blindfold off, I couldn’t see a thing. Wherever we were, it was pitch black.
"Jax, what is this?"
"That’s the surprise," he responded. "Take a step forward."
Careful to avoid bumping into anything in the darkness, I tentatively put my right foot in front of me.
"WELCOME, JAX TRENTON!" a cold, steely voice suddenly boomed from overhead.
Startled, I jumped. "Fuck!" I gasped.
The voice continued as the lights went up: "WE HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR SKY VILLA STAY."
I began to relax when I realized it was just an automatic voice greeting that they had at high end hotel rooms. We must’ve been in one of the suites.
"Oh my god, Jax, you could’ve at least warned me," I said, feeling suddenly embarrassed.
He smiled and guided me a few steps forward with his hand at my back.
A light turned on, and when my eyes adjusted a few seconds later, I saw that we were in a hallway. At the end of it was a room with a sleek leather couch and a bar. I’d read about giant, sprawling Vegas hotel rooms, but I’d never gotten to see one in person.
"The real perks of being a rock star come after the show is over," Jax said, gesturing toward the end of the hall.
I studied his face. His delighted expression contrasted sharply with the last image I had of him in the hot tub last night. What happened to the stormy, walled-off rock star? A discomforting thought
nagged at the back of my mind when I reflected on the events of last night until now. Had I been wrong about Jax? Maybe I was the one with the problem. Not him. It was possible that I’d been acting crazy and paranoid, seeing bad things in Jax that weren’t actually there.
My brows furrowed slightly. "You’re being really nice tonight," I said, a note of skepticism creeping into my voice.
He raised a brow. "Am I? Let’s just say I’ve got a party planned later tonight, so I’m in a good mood. You’re invited of course." He smiled, and when I gave him a puzzled look in response, he exhaled as if he was weary to spell out something totally obvious. "You mentioned before that you wanted to see what being a rock star is like, so I figured I’d show you."
A finger on my chin, I thought back to when we shared a smoke together on the sundeck. "Actually, I said that I have to live a normal, professional life most of the time, that I can’t live like a rock star."
"But tonight you can." His eyes seemed to twinkle. "Go on," he continued, "check it out. I want to see your reaction, the robot voice was just the beginning."
With a smile to show my appreciation, I set my concerns aside, and let curiosity and excitement take over. I got to the end of the hall and found myself in a huge sunken living room. Each direction I looked made my eyes open wider, as I realized how big the suite really was. At one end of the room was a bar stocked with expensive, imported bottles, while on the other end, a projection TV idly played an image of a live aquarium on the wall. In between there was a huge kitchen, hallways leading off to what looked like a bathroom and two bedrooms, and the rest of the living room was covered in floor-to-ceiling curtained windows. Just the living room was bigger than my entire apartment in New York.
My jaw dropped in wonder. "This is one hell of a hotel room, Jax."
He looked at me curiously. "You’re a success at one of the biggest accounting firms in New York," he said. "I pictured you having a loft a lot like this, all steel and black."