Hammers, Strings, and Beautiful Things Read online

  “Oh my God! Wow!” Reagan said. The door opened, and light shone down on me in my bra and underwear on top of a half-naked stranger.

  I sprang off Becky, who remained casually on the couch, making no attempt to cover her red lace bra. Both of their eyes widened.

  “Oh, shit! Oh my God, I’m sorry,” she said so quickly I barely made out the words until she was already running off the bus.

  Becky’s face lit up in the shadows as if this was the greatest surprise that ever happened to her. “Oh my God, that was Reagan Moore? Holy shit!”

  I rolled my eyes and recovered my shirt and leather pants. Becky finally got off the couch, and her foot stomped on my pants to prevent them from covering my legs like the modest woman I really wanted to be at that moment.

  “Nuh-uh. It’s my turn,” she said in a flirtatious tone.

  “No, we’re calling it a night,” I said. While she kept my pants trapped, I put my shirt back on. “Sorry.”

  “But we just got started…”

  I yanked on my pants to no avail. “And the show is over, and we have to head out. Sorry, Becky.”

  Her foot released after I gave one last tug and stumbled backward until the wall caught me.

  “Seriously?” she said with a glare that cut through the darkness. “My name is Brittany.”

  Oops.

  “Cool. Time to go, Brittany.”

  She snatched her stuff off the ground and made sure I heard her huffs of displeasure. “Fucking musicians,” she muttered as she stomped down the bus steps and onto the asphalt.

  Since those pants were too difficult to put back on, I found my pj shorts, threw them over my legs, and went to Reagan’s bus. Luckily, Beck—I mean Brittany—and her friend were long gone, so I had a clear path to find out what the hell Reagan was doing on my bus. Her bus was our home base. She’d never even been in mine. Not once. So, I needed to find out why the hell she stormed onto my bus without warning.

  Her bus driver, Martin, let me in after I knocked. When I slid open the door to her room, I found her on her bed in her pj’s, knees tucked into her chest, and her forehead resting against her knees.

  “Hey, you all right?”

  She lifted her head. Her eyes hung in tiredness, and her face was cleared from that usual jovial smirk she always had on. It was the first time on tour she stared at me with the most maudlin expression. It killed me. Whatever reason forced her to come on my bus was bad enough to erode her beautiful smile.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt—”

  “Eh, it’s fine. She needed to go anyways. Are you okay? You look upset.”

  She studied me for a second as I took a seat by her feet. “I’m fine.”

  “Really? Because you’ve never been on my bus before.”

  She shook her head slowly, and I sensed her hesitation in telling me whatever was bugging her. Maybe Jessie? I wiggled her knee in an attempt to shake a little smile out of her, but I got nothing. Not even eye contact.

  Something was seriously wrong with her. The most serious I’d ever seen her was that one moment while we were building our sandcastle on South Beach when she told me how she wished she was normal just for one day.

  “Hey, talk to me,” I said. “Is it about Jessie?”

  She drew out a long sigh that sounded as if it came from the pit of her stomach. “She showed up to my show unannounced,” she said, her tone annoyed, angry, and hurt. “Like, she doesn’t get to do that when she broke up with me for no reason. What in her right mind made her think she could just stroll into my green room so she could ask me out for drinks after the show to ‘clear the air.’ It’s a game. She’s playing a game. Clearly, she had nothing else to do tonight and wanted to watch me squirm.”

  “Well…did you squirm?”

  She shot me a glare. “I’m not in the mood for jokes.”

  Damn, her tone was sharp. She really wasn’t in the mood for the usual sass we gave each other. I could tell she needed something to loosen up her mood. So, the speakeasy light bulb went off in my head.

  “Wanna drink? I could grab some wine from my bus.”

  “I don’t know what I want. She hurt me so much, and she’s acting so casual about it. Still. Just like when she broke up with me.”

  “Well, she’s an idiot for breaking up with you,” I said. My sincere comment got her to look at me with wondering eyes. “Really.”

  As much as it pissed me off that Jessie Byrd stole all her thoughts and I didn’t, I knew she needed someone to be there for her. So, I would be that person. Us girls had to stick by each other, no matter how much our stomachs twisted from hearing the juicy details of the lives we weren’t a part of.

  “I have a bottle of Chardonnay in my fridge,” I said. “How about I go get it, and we can have a glass before we roll out of here, all right?”

  As I got off her bed and headed out of the room, I heard a soft, “Blair,” coming from her.

  I turned around, and Reagan’s eyes rounded at me like a whimpering puppy. It was the same eye look she gave me in her green room with Jessie Byrd behind me, begging me to stay. A sad Reagan Moore was really contagious, and if she wasn’t her bubbly, annoying, yet extremely adorable self, then life was a real bummer.

  “What?”

  “Can you, um, would it be weird if I asked you, uh, to spend the night? Here? I really don’t want to be alone tonight.”

  Was I dreaming, or did she really ask me to spend the night? Even after having a long moment of deep eye staring with Jessie that I hoped to God was not deep eye fucking. I’d take it. She didn’t have to ask me twice.

  “Will that make you feel better?” I asked, and she replied with a nod. My stomach did a celebratory backflip at the knowledge that my presence was the very thing to make her feel better. “Then let me grab that bottle of wine and my toothbrush. I can do an amazing job of taking your mind off her.” I stopped when I noticed her raising a suspicious eyebrow. “I mean—wow—that really didn’t sound right at all. I just meant that I’ve got wine and ears, and that makes a great combination of forgetting ex-girlfriends.”

  Then her mouth curled upward, and my rambling that wasn’t supposed to be cute or funny instantly died at the sight of the smallest trace of a smirk. “I know what you meant, Blair. Do what you need to do. I’ll be here, processing the night.”

  Out of the bus I ran. A pretty girl wanted me to sleep in her bed and keep her company. I would most certainly do that at record speed.

  “I’m spending the night with Reagan,” I said as I took a quick hit from a joint.

  “What?” Miles shouted as he threw his body forward on his bed, banging his head against the top of the bunk. He whelped and rubbed the pain out.

  “Don’t get a concussion,” I said and inhaled another puff.

  “You’re spending the night with Reagan? What does that mean? Are you guys gonna hook up?”

  “I wish.” I snatched the toothbrush out of my bathroom bag to find him lying back down on his pillow, still rubbing out the pain on his forehead.

  “Wait a minute…so you do want to hook up with her?”

  “Dude, have you seen her? She’s hot.”

  “Yeah, but…” He made a face, the kind of face that said I should know exactly what he was implying without saying the words.

  “But what?”

  “But should you? What happens if it gets weird on tour?”

  “Blair,” Corbin said and poked his head out of his bunk, pulling out an earbud from his ear. “Are you seriously going to hook up with Reagan?”

  “There’s not gonna be any hooking up tonight. Calm down, dudes. She’s upset that her ex-girlfriend came to her show tonight, and she’s distraught.”

  “Because I don’t know if hooking up with her is wise—”

  Miles’s eyebrows scrunched. “Her ex-girlfriend? She has an ex-girlfr—” Then it finally hit him, and his eyes lit up the same way they did when I told him I was gay all the way back in
high school. It was exciting to know when someone was a part of our cool kids club. “Oh my God! Did she date Jessie Byrd?” He sprang back up and bashed his head yet again. “Jesus! Fu—”

  “Gotta go. Snore as loud as you want tonight.”

  By the time I got back to Reagan, she was curled up in the fetal position on the left side of her bed, staring out the tinted window. I had a feeling she’d decided no on the wine, which was fine with me. The Ritalin I popped a few hours before was still working, which benefited her because I was really all ears, ready to focus on whatever she had to tell me. I poured myself a large glass of Chardonnay, took a few gulps, topped off the glass, and then sat on the empty space that dominated her king bed, not going under the comforter because I wasn’t sure where the lines were drawn. We both liked women, we both found each other attractive, but allowing myself to fully sink into her bed could be a little too presumptuous. Maybe she’d think that I was trying to hit on her or something.

  I didn’t need covers anyway.

  “You can have some covers,” she said with a laugh. “I don’t bite.”

  And then I felt stupid.

  I crawled underneath, and as I positioned myself, my right leg brushed up against Reagan’s smooth, warm leg in her pj shorts; the touch of her ignited those butterflies inside me that didn’t come out once when kissing Becky—fuck, I mean Briana? It was a mere accident, and as much as I loved that my leg brushed against hers, I was the opener on her tour. It could be complicated. She was confused about her ex-girlfriend. My sole purpose for being here was to be a friend to her and listen to whatever she needed to say to feel just a little bit better. So, I retrieved my leg. Now wasn’t the time to acknowledge that buzzing between us—that always seemed to be between us. Now was the time to listen.

  “You smell like weed,” she said and flung her body in a one eighty turn so she could face me instead of the window.

  “Shit, I’m sorry. Do you want me to go grab some gum?”

  She gave me a thin smile and shook her head. “No, you’re fine. I’m just going to use it against you.”

  “Oh, great.” I let out a sigh. “It helps me relax. Especially now. My mind seems to wander a lot. So, it’s weed that helps me forget.”

  “Your mind wandering because of your grandpa?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Being in Nashville is bringing up all these old memories of us around the city. That and the fact that my mom sold the house in Irvine and downsized, so I feel like I lost even more of him, you know?”

  She placed her hand on my arm. I sucked in my lips to hold in that relieved sigh that was desperate to leak out of me. And then when her thumb started rubbing my arm, I almost disappeared into her bed.

  Just listening was going to be pure torture.

  “I’m sorry, Blair.”

  “My dad abandoned my mom when she was pregnant with me, so my grandpa was much more than a grandpa. He was my dad and my best friend. It’s just…well…the past two days have been kind of hard, hence the smell of weed.”

  “This is the first time you’ve said anything about him.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what to say. He’s dead and never coming back.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never lost someone close to me, but I’m here if you want to talk about it. Don’t feel like you only need weed and alcohol to make you feel better.”

  “I know, and thank you, but the weed helps me sleep and calm the fuck down in general. My mind gets crazy sometimes with thoughts and anxiety.”

  She retrieved her hand and her rubbing thumb, but as that sigh seeped out of me, I could already feel an immense absence where her hand used to be.

  “I mean, I get it,” Reagan continued. “Maybe not on a generalized anxiety level, but my job and trying to keep my life as normal and private as I can constantly takes up a lot of head space.”

  “That must be really hard. Having such a successful job and loving it but hating that you can’t just enjoy going to the beach.”

  “It is. Or if I wanna date someone, I freak out that it’s all going to go down like it did with Zeke. It was awful, Blair. Being stalked by adults, having to run away from them on the street; they have no respect for personal space, and they would literally get up in my face with a camera. Sometimes, I was afraid of getting hurt. God, I was so miserable. In a way, I was glad that relationship ended.”

  “And that’s why you hid Jessie Byrd from everyone?”

  “One hundred percent. The media would flip their shit if they knew I was dating a girl because that’s what they do, so the amount of stalking would skyrocket, you know? I don’t care if people know I’m dating a woman. It’s not the nineties anymore, but I do care that I’d lose even more privacy.”

  Martin started up the bus, and the floodlights in the hallway flicked off. The only light illuminating the back of the bus was the small table lamp on the nightstand right next to Reagan. As the bus pulled out of the venue, beginning its journey to Atlanta, her eyebrows furrowed as if she was trying to solve the puzzle that was me.

  “So…you hook up with fans a lot?” she asked with bold confidence.

  Well, I knew that question was coming.

  I rolled my eyes thinking about Bethany. Her assertiveness wasn’t sexy anymore. It was borderline creepy. “Not usually,” I said. “But every girl has needs.”

  She laughed. “With fans?”

  “Don’t slut shame me.”

  “I’m not! I’m genuinely curious. We just talked about my dating life, and I never got the chance to put you in the hot seat. We have all the time now since I’m holding you hostage tonight. So, spill.”

  “What do you want to know? I’m an open book.”

  “Oh, well, this is gonna get good.” She lifted up to get comfortable for all the questions I could tell she crafted on the spot, tapping her fingers against her chin. It was pretty adorable, actually. I shouldn’t have smiled right before a hot seat questionnaire, but I did. “How many fans have you slept with?”

  I sucked in my lips so my smile didn’t show. I loved how much she wanted to know about my sex life because the more she wanted to know, the more I knew she was interested in me, and the more my body floated up to the clouds with swelling happiness.

  My goal was to be as vague as possible to make her squirm.

  “Wow. A super personal question off the get-go. A few.”

  Her face scrunched in a judgmental frown. “A few? Really?”

  “The more you judge, the less I say.”

  “Okay, okay. How many is a few?”

  “Under ten. Next question.”

  “Under ten! God—”

  “Hey! No judging. This is a judge-free zone.”

  She threw her hands up to surrender. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Not judging, just impressed…and slightly jealous?”

  I laughed. “I’m well aware of the jealousy. Next question?”

  A blush hit her cheeks, and she paused for a moment. “How long were you with your ex-girlfriend?”

  “A year.”

  “Why did you guys break up?”

  “Because I wasn’t really into it. My life is kind of a mess right now, and I was going on this tour. It wouldn’t have worked out.”

  “Okay, Jessie,” she said with an eye roll.

  I opened my mouth to defend myself and then closed it. She was completely right. Jessie Byrd needed to focus on herself, and so did I. There was nothing wrong with that, and I think Reagan would have agreed if it wasn’t for the freshness of the wound Jessie gave her.

  “And how was the girl tonight?”

  I shrugged. “Okay. I got what I wanted. But you barged in just in time so I didn’t have to reciprocate.”

  “You didn’t reciprocate? God, you’re an awful lay!”

  I playfully hit her arm. “Whoa, I’m not an awful lay. If you’re gonna hook up with a touring musician, you gotta know there’s an itinerary they follow, so there might not be enough time.”

  She let out a
bellowing laugh. “You’re so full of shit. You just didn’t want to reciprocate.”

  I thought about it for a hot second. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “Wow, never thought Blair Bennett was a pillow princess.”

  “Whoa, not usually, okay? Tonight was different. I’m definitely not a pillow princess if I’m actually into the girl. This girl was someone to pass the time with.”

  “You’re an asshole,” she said but still had a smile on her. She then lay back against the pillows. “Well, at least someone’s getting laid on this tour. I’ve already accepted the fact that I’m gonna die alone.”

  “Have you looked in the mirror lately? I find it really hard to believe that you’ll die alone. You’re gorgeous as hell.”

  Her eyes drifted to the liberal space between us. Through the dim lighting, I noticed her cheeks reaching peak pink levels, and my stomach did another twist. I guess even after running into her ex-girlfriend, I could still make her smile and blush, and I hoped that meant something.

  “Oh, thanks,” she said and bashfully tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Still doesn’t shake the feeling off me though. Like, running into Jessie tonight—or I should say, Jessie hunting me down in my dressing room. That’s doing a really good number on me, making me think I’m incapable of finding someone good for me.”

  “You looked at her like she was everything.”

  “She’s not everything,” she said defensively. “I wasn’t even in love with her. I guess I was really infatuated. I think it was mostly physical.”

  “She is pretty hot.”

  “Yeah, I’m well aware. So, if I looked at her like she was everything, then it must be because I’m probably sexually frustrated, and I need to get laid.” That warmth on my cheeks radiated down my whole body. For a split second, that cliffhanger thickened in the room. And then when the moment fizzled, she looked at me with curious eyes. “So, you really think I’m gorgeous as hell?”

  Her tone subtly begged for a compliment that was so easy to give, and she seemed genuinely shocked that I’d said that to her. I was genuinely shocked that she was really oblivious to it all. How did she have no idea how beautiful she was? Anytime that girl walked into the room, my body was overcome with so much warmth, I was shocked no one noticed.