Random on Tour: Los Angeles (Random Series #7) (23 page)

“Sold!” I replied, turning away.

“Maggie,” Tyler said softly, his hand unyielding, holding me in place.

“Piano! Setting up stage! It’s 8:01, people!” someone shouted.

“Tyler, I can’t. I really can’t.”

He swallowed, looked down, then pinned me in place with excited, blazing eyes. “This is the last thing I am going to ask you to give to me.”

Oh.

He started to breathe hard, like he was running. “There are twenty thousand people out there, and Liam, Sam and Trevor are on their way. We need to kill about twenty minutes. I know how beautifully you play and sing. You know I suck at singing but I can manage a guitar. Together we make a sound that is better than either of us apart. And right now, you’re my only hope.”

Oh,
God
.

He squeezed my hand. “I know this is insane. Trust me. But there’s the kind of insanity that comes from pain, and there’s the kind of insanity that comes from the absurd. Embrace this. Go with it. Take a leap and see where you land. I promise I won’t let you fall. I promise you that, Maggie. I won’t fail you.”

“MAVIS! MAVIS!” the crowd started to chant, my ears ringing with a thousand gongs that I knew weren’t there.

“That fucking chicken,” Tyler muttered.

As if on cue, Darla walked by with a cat carrier containing a chicken wearing a sweater that said “Mavis for President.” And the chicken was on a...leash?

“See? Absurd,” Tyler said, pointing to Mavis.

“You think this is absurd?” Darla cracked as she walked past. “Try being in love with her campaign manager.”

I didn’t laugh.

Tyler gently guided me to the stage, where a huge grand piano was being set up under bright lights. The sound of the crowd was like a pressure wave, as if thousands of people were inches away and about to angrily rush the stage. I could feel their noise coming through the curtain, like palpable fingers all trying to scratch my skin and take a piece of me until I disappeared.

“You want an awful lot, Tyler,” I said, tears filling my eyes. “Do you have any idea how hard it’s been these past few years to become as nondescript as possible? To fade into the background and go invisible?” 

His face twisted with confusion. “What? The words
Maggie
and
nondescript
don’t go together.” He reached up and ran a lock of my hair between his fingers.

I cried, then sniffled. “I don’t mean like that. I mean on social media. In the news. Aside from the fact that twenty thousand people are out there chanting for anyone but me to be on that stage, if you go out there and announce my name, people will notice. Maybe only a handful, but a handful is all it takes nowadays. And tomorrow my rape case will be splashed all over the internet and...” I let the sob that rested in my throat come out.

He got it. His face fell, but he got it.

“Forget it,” Tyler said, squeezing my hands and searching the area for Darla. “I’ll figure something out.”

I should have felt relief.

I should have let it go.

I should have—

“No,” I choked out, wiping my face as ten thousand thoughts whipped through my mind, all of them focused on him. An image of poor Tyler out there, alone, on stage with just a guitar made me feel for him. A piano and a guitar could fumble through something. He needed me.

He needed
me
.

“I heard your
no
, Maggie. And I’m respecting it,” he said, letting go of me to find Darla. I chased after him, the stage literally shaking with the force of the crowd’s chant.

Mavis, Mavis...

“Wait!’ I said, catching up to him at the very edge of the stage. I saw the grand piano, the way the lights shone on its bench and the lonely chair next to it, how the stage was set up for a quiet, intimate song. The rock band set up was off to the right, but the lights were being focused on where Tyler and I would play. 

My mind lost all its words then. Something else took over.

“No, Tyler. My
no
isn’t to you. It’s to the part of me that’s afraid of what performing will open up out there. Out in the world. I can’t let that be the reason to disappoint you.”

“You’ve never disappointed me!”

“And I’m not starting now.”

“You don’t have to do this,” he said as his mic was adjusted and he began to bounce in place on the balls of his feet, nerves getting the better of him.

“Yes, I do.” I motioned to Darla, who got a mic person to outfit me, too. Someone shoved something in my ear. My body morphed into something connected only to Tyler. Anchored to him.

Integrated with him.

“No.”

“Which song is first?”

“No, Maggie. No.”

“Just introduce me as Maggie. Not Margaret Stevenson.”

“No.”

Darla watched us as a guy in a suit stood behind her, red-faced and furious. I heard something about ticket refunds and debts and all kinds of shit while her eyes flickered between her phone and us.

“Fifteen minutes,” she gasped. “Two songs.”

“I can do that,” I assured her. 

“No, you won’t!” Tyler shouted.

“Yes. We did two songs. We can do it again.”

“I refuse. You stay here.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Darla asked Tyler. “Let Maggie do this!”

“I can’t keep taking and taking from her when I have nothing to give back!” he screamed, his face exploding.

“We’re on in ten seconds!” someone shouted.

“You already gave me what I needed,” I said softly. 

“I failed you,” he choked out.

“You saved me.”

“I—what?”

“You know, this is a really bad time to do the kissy-face drama thing,” Darla declared as the curtain rustled and an announcer’s voice quelled the crowd. I couldn’t hear what he said, but the atmosphere changed.

Tyler’s eyes were all I saw, though, filled with pain and determination.

I’d imagine his were a mirror for mine.

A cold clarity wrapped my body like a blanket, a wave of serenity. I took three steps and closed the gap between me and Tyler, looking at his sweaty face, his skin pink with anger and nervousness, confusion and fear, determination and a maybe hint of terror.

And then I pulled him to the edge of everything and kissed him on the cheek, my fingers intertwining with his.

“We’re going on together. Just have them call me Maggie,” I told Darla. 

“Already done. And you guys are singing—what?”

“Whatever we remember to sing,” I said.

“No,” Tyler declared.

“Wrong word,” I countered.

“Wrong—”

And the curtain parted.

Showtime
.

Tyler

I rarely get nervous for concerts. The whole fucking point of playing bass is to go on stage and get paid to jam and have a good time with my fingers, my instrument and my mind.

But as Maggie held my hand and smiled at me from a thousand miles away, I walked on stage with legs that turned into cold rubber bands.

The announcer introduced us, and we walked on stage to polite catcalls and applause. Darla came on stage, too, carrying a leash with Mavis attached to it. That got some laughs, and as Maggie and I took our places, me to the left side of the piano so I could look at her, the set-up perfect for us, I knew Darla was saying words. I have no idea to this day what those words were.

I don’t remember a single thing that happened to me over the next fifteen minutes. I don’t remember what I did. Not one note, not one word, not one measure, not one rest. 

All I remember is
her
.

Maggie’s fingers opened “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer” with chords that sounded so ethereal I almost forgot to come in, the sound enchanting and captivating. Just like her. When I play, music brain kicks in. It’s like there’s this frequency I can only access when I’m playing my bass, or in this case a guitar. Time disappears and everything physical turns into a finer version of itself. 

Like when I’m with Maggie. I become a better Tyler. I become a better
me
.

The crowd jeered at first, clearly upset they weren’t getting Random Acts of Crazy, and while my blood pounded against my bones like a fucking hammer on a rail road track, it became a beat. An undercurrent in the music that Maggie spun from those gorgeous hands. From that mind and soul that worked with her body—and me—to go places we could never go alone.

But we did. Together. In front of twenty thousand people.

I joined and it was just like the pleasure between us last night. My fingers weren’t playing some random guitar I’d been handed; they were stroking her cheekbones. My mouth wasn’t open and singing the lyrics; it was kissing a trail of healing and connection from her belly to her neck. The beat became that pulse at the base of her throat, where my mouth could make her gasp.

Her voice became the sound of a language where all the words came so easily. Where I understood everything and could say it right back. Perfectly. Every single word.

We sang the song with a brutal honesty that made my heart go raw with the ache of saying so many of the right words in such a short stretch of time. Like stretching a sore, cramped muscle. I finally got the divine ache that comes from the agony of waiting, the rush of rightness, the push to take the one true space in the world where you’re rightfully allowed to just be.

And as the chorus rang out, the crowd began to clap in time. They began to cheer. They liked us. 

They
loved
us.

Our voices rose together in alto and baritone, in sweetness and grit, in the sublime and the heartfelt. My nerves pushed forward and her eyes stayed closed until in one moment they flickered open and she sang to
me
. Twenty thousand people in front of us were an afterthought. 

She sang to the me that she uncovered, that I exposed to her by giving until I broke.

Her eyes became a portal between us, our words like ecstasy and eternity, and then the song wound down, tempered only by the fact that the words had a finite end. 

Thunder rained down.

The crowd
roared
.

Millions of flashes filled my eyes and the reverberation of twenty thousand bodies pounding turned me into a conduit for energy. Tyler stopped existing. I was nothing but whatever I saw in Maggie’s face.

She just stared at me like I was the only one there.

The thunder went on. And on. And
on
.

The second song felt like we were bragging. The slow, sultry tones of Trevor’s love song to Darla was filled with beginnings and imaginings. Teases and questions. Declarations and
fait accompli
.

Random Acts of Crazy wasn’t just the name of the song, and it wasn’t just the name of the band. It encompassed everything about falling for someone when you least expect it, whether you’re high and naked and hitchhiking six hundred miles from home, or you wake up after your junkie brother robs you clean and you have to show up at the house of the woman you turned down for sex and beg her to—

Ah. Hell. You know the story.

Maggie played her soul out. Sang like she was a lounge singer in a dive bar, like she was a Broadway understudy singing for fun on her night off. There was an abandon, a carefree tone with a mournful, knowing blend of something in her voice that slammed into my chest, making it hard to get my own words out. 

When a naked soul finds you

You don’t have a choice

No kidding.

She had the face of an angel and the voice of a poet. The heart of a lion and the body of a goddess. She was, in those mesmerizing notes, the center of everything holy and right. I finished my part and Maggie took it, using a hollow echo to add a lingering sense of the sublime to the final measures, the piano’s sound like smoke and light, like dawn and eclipse, like the end of the world and the forged iron of a new beginning.

The air hummed and then the place exploded. It was like sound itself turned inside out. The audience became a single force, a kind of energy that merged into something distinct. The world changed. It just....tipped.

I didn’t know who took the first step. I didn’t care. All I knew was that I found myself in her arms, she in mine, and we were kissing, the connection of our bodies transporting us. The crowd howled and screamed, video’d and chanted, and it didn’t matter. Noting mattered.

Only her.

A loud voice cut through everything.

“You like
that
?”

Maggie and I pulled away from each other, breathless.

“Because we can get Trevor to kiss a chicken on stage if what you all want is more kissing!”

Liam strutted on stage carrying a guitar, hair wet with sweat, eyes wild and eating up the crowd.

They ate him right back as Trevor and Sam stormed the stage, arms waving, breathless.

Holy fuck.

Liam came over to us and gave us a big hug, my face smashed into Maggie’s shoulder, the stage shaking with the volume of sound and movement as the techs quickly put the set into place. Liam took the mic and did his banter with the crowd.

“You did it,” Trevor shouted over the rushing madness of the crowd. “Thank fuck you did it. We’re here now. Maggie, you can go. Darla and Charlotte are there.” He pointed backstage.

I started walking off stage with Maggie, who looked like she was three seconds from fainting. Trev grabbed my arm.

“Not so fast, Frown,” he said, grinning. “We’ve got a set to finish.” He handed me a bass and a techie took the acoustic guitar off me.

Oh.

Maggie turned back, each hand held by Darla and Charlotte, and gave me a hard, searching look.

I didn’t have to say a word.

Chapter Fifteen

Maggie

“That was amazing!” Charlotte squealed, hauling me off the stage and hugging me so hard she lifted me off my feet. Darla gave me a thumbs up and muttered into her mouthpiece, talking with a techie and glaring at some guy in a suit.