A Beautiful Melody (7 page)

My breathing becomes deeper as I slowly lean towards him, feeling drawn to him. And just like in high school, he pulls back, leaving me wanting – just like he always has.

My eyes prick, but I fight my emotion with a smile. “Yeah, I’m sure
you have,” I attempt to joke as I step away, moving toward the bathroom. “Listen, you go back. I’ll meet you in there when I’m done.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mind.”

“It’s fine. Go, I’ll be fine.”

He nods and disappears quickly around the corner. I roll my eyes at myself for letting myself show any sort of interest in him. If this
band was going to work, I can’t let myself get caught up in Marcus Bailey again. No woman survives Marcus, I’m not going to let myself endure the ‘Let’s Just Be Friends’ speech. I avoided it last time. I wasn’t willing to risk running a repeat performance.

After visiting the bathroom and sorting myself out, I make my way back to the others.
As I round the corner, I see Theo heading towards me from the opposite direction, so I nod and smile politely, even though I would rather run and hide somewhere so I don’t have to be subjected to another one of his hooded looks.

“Everything worked really well tonight, don’t you think?” I ask him,
feeling trapped and trying to make small talk.

“Yeah it was fine. I’m not going to fight them on letting you stay if that’s what you’re asking,” he tells me curtly.

“Oh… I wasn’t, I was just…” I splutter, completely taken off guard by his abruptness. I expected a grunt, and maybe a nod. Then I thought he’d just move on into the room with the others. Even more surprisingly, he continues.

“Listen, I don’t want you getting the wrong idea here. I didn’t want you in the band. I’d still prefer it if you weren’t in the band. But the guys like you and the fans seem to like you
too. Just don’t mistake my acceptance for want. I’d still prefer it if we found another cute girl to play the fiddle and sing for us,” he explains, his eyes dark and unfriendly. “Someone who has no interest in sleeping with my brother.”

“What? No… that’s not what I…” I struggle to find my words as m
y eyes prick for the second time tonight. I stop trying to speak and instead search his face for some sort of reason as to why he’s behaving like this towards me. “Why are you being like this?” I whisper finally.

“Look at my face Naomi. Look at me very carefully.
Tell me who I am.”

“I…” I frown, shaking my head slightly and looking over his features. His eyes are dark – almost black. It’s really hard to see where the pupil ends and the iris
begins. His hair is also dark, but in a brown chocolaty way, and is slightly long on top, but clipped close to his scalp on the bottom half. He has very definite features. Compared to Marcus, Theo is all hard lines and angles. But he’s still beautiful, despite the anger he seems to direct towards me.

Seemingly of it
s own accord, my hand reaches up, and I lightly touch my fingertips to his dark stubbled jaw.

The moment my fingers connect with his ski
n, a shock flies up my arm. He flinches his head back, confusion flashing over his face, briefly dissipating the hard set of his features before he regains his composure almost immediately.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper
.

“So am I,” he says, pushing his way past me and into the room with everyone else.

Slightly rattled from the interactions I just had with the Bailey brothers, I stay just outside the door and peer inside. There are plenty of faces in there I don’t know, and in true Marcus fashion, he has a random girl hanging off his arm already.

I just stand and stare, my emotions rolling around inside of me. I’m not really sure what I should be doing right now.

“Naomi,” a voice calls to me from inside the room. I turn my attention towards it and see Stephanie and Gary smiling and waving at me.

I can’t help but grin back and head over to them, wrapping my arms around them both as they congratulate me on my performance.

“It was so wonderful Nomes. We loved it,” Stephanie gushes.

“Yeah, you were great kiddo,” Gary tells me, his balding head showing small beads of sweat from the heat of the room. Gary is a few years older than Stephanie and I. She met him at a nightclub almos
t as soon as we finished school. He must have a thing for curvaceous redheads, because they haven’t been separate since then. But his thinning hair makes him look much older than his twenty-eight years, as well as the fact that he has a habit of calling anyone younger than him ‘kiddo’.

“Naomi! Well done tonight.
” Both Amy and Erica call out together as they bounce over to me.

“We’re so glad you decided to play with them. How great is it that you’re all together again?” Erica rambles.

My brow creases slightly. What does she mean ‘all together again’? I’m just about to ask them when they bounce off again, and I’m pulled into a conversation with Lachlan and Jack as they introduce me to some other friends of theirs.

I mingle for maybe an hour, before I decide I need to go home. I’m struggling with the fact that Marcus is having his ear cleaned by th
e tongue of some random girl, coupled with Theo’s animosity towards me – it’s like I can feel it radiating out of him from across the room.

“Do you mind if we go?” I ask Stephanie and Gary
, who are standing quietly in the corner talking to a man with spikey black hair.

“Thought you’d never ask,” Gary tells me, leaning close to my ear before he speaks again. “To be honest with you, this scene is making me feel really old. I don’t think I have it in me to party anymore,” he laughs. “Not when we have a one year old to wake up to in the morning.”

I mention to Jack that I’m going home, and he gives me a big hug and once again tells me how great the show was tonight. I simply nod and smile, then collect my things and follow Gary and Stephanie outside.

“What’s wrong?” Stephani
e asks, once we’ve stepped out onto the quiet of the street. “You seem really down for someone who just put on such a fantastic show.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I reply, shaking my head. “It’s just… I don’t know if I can do this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know if I can watch Marcus with a new girl every night. And
then there’s Theo,” I explain.

“What about him?”

“I just...I don’t know if I can handle working with someone who hates me as much as he seems to. I don’t know if it’s worth it,” I admit.

“I don’t hate you,” a deep voice says from behind us.

Gasping, I spin around to find Theo only a few steps back from us. “Are you following me? Haven’t you made me feel shitty enough tonight?”

He moves
forward so I’m forced to look up at him. “I’m not following you. I’m simply heading home myself, and I overheard you,” he states calmly, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans as he stares down at me.

I feel tiny having him this close to me,
not to mention I don’t trust my hand not to try and touch him again. So I take a small step away, just to gain some distance. “It’s rude to eavesdrop.”

“I’m not going to apologise for overhearing you bag me out
,” he states. I notice a slight pull at the corner of his mouth – he finds this amusing!

“I wasn’t bagging you out,
” I object, placing my hands on my hips as I stand my ground.

“
Listen, if you can’t handle being around me, then that’s fine. Leave the band. It’s no skin off my nose. But don’t do it because you think I hate you. Because I don’t. You’ve got me all wrong.”

“Well what am I to think Theo? You’re always glaring at me, and telling me you don’t want me around. Is that how you like someone?”

“If I hated you, I wouldn’t bother speaking to you. I wouldn’t bother wasting my energy on you.”

“Jesus Christ! Just tell me what I did to you so we can deal with it and move on!”

He opens his mouth, and I think that he’s actually about to tell me. But he looks over my shoulder to where Stephanie and Gary are standing, pretending they aren’t listening in, and clamps his lips shut.

“Well?!” I prompt, holding my hands out at my
sides. This mystery of how we’re supposed to know each other is really driving me nuts.

“Listen, it’s not important. It’s
obviously my shit to deal with. Just… just be at my place for a jam on Tuesday, alright? We need to work up a new set for next weekend,” he informs me, side stepping me and striding ahead of us. “Unless you’re too scared of course,” he calls over his shoulder, before nodding once at Stephanie and Gary as he walks past.

“What the hell was that about?” Stephanie asks me
, as we stand there watching him walk away.

“I don’t have a friggin clue,” I tell her.

“Are you still going to quit the band?” she asks, linking her arm in mine as we start to walk with Gary to the car.

“No. I’m not going to quit the band.”

***

The next couple of months is a blur of rehearsals, gigs and gatherings. We are booked out every weekend, and I’m starting to wonder if I should quit my bar job. At the rate I’m going, I’m never going to get my Kindle back off Kylie. She seems to be forever covering my shifts.

I’
m exhausted, working as much as I can at the bar and playing with the band. On top of that, I’m still negotiating my relationships with the guys in the band – although, I should really just say my relationship with the Bailey brothers.

Jack and Lachlan are easy, they show up to rehearsals and recording sessions, they play the music and do whatever work is needed
. I can talk to them, and they treat me like a member of the band – like a friend.

Marcus however, treats me like a girl. More pointedly, like a girl he’s interested in. Admittedly, I like the attention. It’s nice to have a man like Marcus flirt with me, and it’s fun to flirt back. But I’m smart enough to realise that it doesn’t really mean anything. I don’t think that Marcus is actually capable of any sort of real feelings towards a girl – except the want to sleep with them of course.

Theo, well… he’s still difficult, but he has toned it down. As long as we keep our interactions specifically about band business then we’re all good. Thankfully, we’ve been too busy for anything else.

We’ve been working to get an album ready to sell at our gigs and online. There’s barely been a minute spent not working.
So after this Friday’s performance, I’m dead on my feet and sitting quietly in the back room, waiting for it to be time for us to finish up.

As per usual, I sit here and
watch the men, as women fawn over them. I find it highly amusing, that you can take a sweaty, smelly guy, put a guitar in his hands, and women just line up, flinging their panties at them. The only one who doesn’t seem to fall for it is Theo, but he’s off talking to somebody else about something or other – he doesn’t tend to waste his time with me.

I sit and sip from my bottle of beer, smiling and exchanging platitudes
occasionally when someone comes up to me, but mostly I’m in my head, thinking about the contrast of the Bailey brothers. It’s as if they’re the yin and yang symbol.

To look at them, at first they se
em like polar opposites. One light haired and light eyed, while the other is dark featured. But when they stand next to each other you can easily see the family resemblance, they have the same shaped face, the same jawline, the same Roman nose, the same full mouth…

Absentmindedly
, I touch my own lips, drawing my fingertips lightly across them. Deep in thought, I drown out the noise of the room, not realising that I’m staring at Marcus and his chosen floozy for the night.

“I wonder what number that is,” Theo says from beside me. I didn’t even notice him
sit down.

“What?”

“The girl. I wonder if he keeps score.”

“I don’t know. Maybe,
” I shrug, shifting slightly in my seat, not really feeling comfortable with this line of conversation.

“
Maybe you should let her know how it feels,” he suggests, leaning in, his voice low in my ear.

“How what feels?”
I murmur, now purposely watching Marcus and his current girl.

“To be used and passed over
by my brother,” he states.

I flinch away from him, turning my head quickly in
his direction, my brow creases slightly as I meet his intense glare.

“Go and tell her. Save her from the humiliation that made you run
.”

Without any forethought from me
, my hand flies out and slaps him in the face. The loud clap of my palm against his skin causes quite a few curious glances from those around us.

Wincing slightly, he nods his head and has the audacity to be grinning.

“How dare you,” I growl accusingly, my blood boiling to the surface, heating my skin from the inside.

“I’m only speaking the truth,” he states calmly
, as he pushes up through his strong thighs to standing. “He flirts with you now. But you know it’s all a game right? He’s just stringing you along, the same way he always did.” Without giving me the chance to respond, he turns and walks away. Leaving me staring after him with my mouth slightly agape.