Rhythm, Chord & Malykhin (15 page)

Sacha snorted as he took his seat. "Fuck, no."

My gray-eyed friend settled the container of popcorn right smack in the middle of his lap. I didn't even think twice before dipping my hand into the bucket and grabbing as much as I could. Sacha smirked at me before taking his own handful and cramming all of it into his mouth.

"Are you having fun?" he asked.

I nodded. "I sure am. Are you?"

"Yeah." He smiled. "I am."

The game started up again and things got intense. It was one close goal after another, run, run, run, and a mess of screaming insanity. During a lull in the game, the two huge screens on opposite ends of the stadium lit up with footage on the field before the camera panned out and KISS CAM came up in huge pink, glittery letters on the screen. I smiled to myself when I saw it because I'd always gotten a kick out of the Kiss Cam at any sporting event I went to. The older couples were my favorites.

But when the screen zoomed in and focused on two people in the audience, it wasn't an old couple.

It was Julian and me.

My face flamed up like the guy in
Fantastic Four
had gotten ahold of it. I looked in the direction where I figured the camera was and started laughing, shaking my hands and head in denial. The camera moved up and down in refusal of my gestures.

Yeah, my face turned even redder.

"Ah shit," Julian laughed right next to me.

I turned to look at him out of the corner of my eye and groaned when I saw the angle on the screen move up and down again while people in the crowd cheered us on. We looked at each other with dumb expressions on our faces, and I let the burn of embarrassment filter down to my chest.

“Gaby,” I heard Sacha behind me, but I couldn’t turn around. The camera was still on me. On Julian and I. I was frozen in place.

The crowd roared as the camera zoomed in again, a pink heart circling Julian’s face and mine.

The guitar player in the shot next to me shrugged those big shoulders with a wide, careless grin on his face. “Fuck it?”

“Gaby,” Sacha repeated my name, but I continued fighting the urge to turn around, I really did. The last thing I needed was to turn in his direction and make the camera focus on him and I for us to kiss. That kind of humiliation wasn’t something I wanted to sign up for.

“Fuck it,” I said to Julian with a rough, embarrassed laugh as my face got unbelievably hot.

He smiled and I smiled back at him nervously. Julian grabbed me by both ears, tugged my face closer to his and kissed both my cheeks twice as I burst out in what could only be described as giggles. The laughter in the stands was undeniable.

I choked a little and forced a cheesy grin onto my face as my heart kicked into a quick gallop at the unexpected and unwanted attention. It could have been a lot worse, right? They could have zoomed in on the object of my unrequited attraction to the left. I was still grinning as I patted Julian’s shoulder for being a good sport, but I wasn’t smiling for long.

When I turned to face Sacha immediately afterward…

He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t smiling at all.

"
S
it
next to me on the plane."

I was in the middle of toeing off my shoes to place them on the plastic trays at the security checkpoint when Sacha nudged me with his elbow. All of the rest of my stuff was already on the long metal table heading to the x-ray. A few feet ahead, Gordo was getting screened. One side of my cheek came up when I caught Sassy’s gray eyes. He’d been acting so weird since the day before at the soccer game, I wasn’t sure what was going on with him.

But, I’d take him the way he was being right then, normal and playful.

"You want me to?" I asked just to be sure.

He nodded, smiling that huge grin that took up his face while simultaneously making me think of unicorns, before he glanced down to undo his belt. I swear I tried not to look in the general direction of his crotch, but I failed. Miserably. Maybe I should look at someone else’s crotch? You know, to even it out so that I wasn’t just eyeing his.

"I have movies on my laptop," he tried to bribe me, as if that was necessary.

I peeked down the line to see that Gordo was far enough away so that he couldn’t overhear us. Glancing back at the perfect specimen of a man, I made a face. "What movies?" Like that really freaking mattered. I'd probably watch
Barney
with him if he wanted.

"You don't have any faith in my taste?" he scoffed.

“Eh.”

"Next!" the TSA employee called out.

I groaned and went on to pass through the screening machine. A few seconds later, the woman waved me forward. Sacha went next. I waited to collect my things and kept an eye on him as he stood on the other side of the metal detector, talking to the employee there before being directed to someone else down the line.

Sacha pulled out two small black bags from his backpack to show the TSA worker. He presented the man a few small boxes with colorful lettering on them and presented a piece of paper. I was putting on my shoes while Sacha nodded at whatever the guy was telling him, stuffing his things one more time into his backpack.

“Ma’am, can you move down?” one of the airport employees asked me as soon as I had all my things together.

I moved out of the way and went to stand off to the side. Sacha walked up to me just a minute or two later, still shuffling things around in his bag when he stopped.

"They find your stash of dildos?" I chuckled.

"Nah, just my anal beads," he laughed, pulling out a box that said something about lancets. When I furrowed my eyebrows in confusion, he shoved the box down his bag again. “They like to check everything sometimes," he explained, but I was still confused.

"Lancets?" I asked him, thinking of what they could be for, and then it hit me. I remembered my aunt Dora used to carry around boxes of lancets in her car in case of some freak emergency that she ran out. "You're diabetic?" The way I asked made it seem like it was some deep, dark secret he was sharing. Then again, I guess I sort of felt like an idiot. We’d been sharing a bus for an entire leg of a tour. How hadn’t I known he had diabetes?

"Yeah." He finished zipping his bag before glancing up. "I never told you?"

Sacha hadn't told me a lot of stuff because we seemed to just joke around the majority of the time. We talked about some things like our families and our likes and dislikes, but he was still a stranger to me in certain ways. That seemed abundantly clear now.

"No." I tried to think if he'd done anything to give it away, but I couldn't. He was picky about what he ate most of the time and he didn’t drink, but that wasn’t unprecedented or unheard of.

He touched my arm to lead me in the direction of our gate. "I always test myself in the back room; that's probably why you haven't seen me check my glucose.”

That wasn’t surprising. He woke up after I did and went to bed after me. "Do you have to take insulin?" I asked because if he did, I'd be the worst friend in the world. How the hell do I miss these things? We'd spent a month together, not counting the week I was being a PMSing bitch and ignored him.

He shook his head. "Nah, I have Type 2. I've had it since I was a kid, so I've learned how to control it without medicine."

I remembered how my aunt would get sick pretty often. She'd have days where she felt like crap, but I knew she had to take insulin. "So…I won't have to stab you with a needle?"

Sacha bumped his shoulder to mine as we kept going to our gate. "Nope. Sorry, Princess."

"Damn it," I sighed in disappointment, earning me a chuckle in response. "You brought enough of everything, though?"

He bumped me again. "I did, don't worry."

“Does it run in your family?"

"Yeah. My grandma, my mom, my oldest sister and I are all diabetic.” He hit my hand with the back of his. "I'm gonna use the bathroom; meet you at the gate?"

"All right." He shot me a little smile before turning to go toward the restroom. I stood there and watched his butt for possibly ten seconds. He was wearing sweat pants—like most of us were in preparation of our two-day travel itinerary—and his just happened to magnify his butt perfectly. Ha-lle-lu-jah.

Stop.
Stop it, Gaby.

The clearing of a throat had me turning in a different direction. My brother and Mason were walking toward me, both of them smirking like they knew something I didn't. Damn it.

"What?" I asked after joining the two of them.

"I saw you." Eli waggled his eyebrows.

I tried to control my face so that I wouldn't give myself away completely, but then again, this was my brother. Not just my brother, my damn twin. We pretty much had ESP. But… "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh no? You weren’t just standing there checking out his ass?”

I blinked and I scoffed but couldn’t hide the stupid grin on my face.
Busted.
“No. I just thought he had a stain on his pants.”

Even Mason snickered as Eli pushed at my shoulder. “What? Kissing Julian wasn’t enough?”

“What?” I croaked out, knowing I hadn’t told him about what happened because I hadn’t spoken to him since before the game. Once we’d gotten back to the hotel, I’d gone straight to my room.

“Yeah, you were all over TCC’s fan page. Somebody posted a picture of y’all on the Jumbotron at the game yesterday." He laughed from deep in his big barrel chest.

The blood drained from my face. If being on the Jumbotron period wasn’t bad enough, being on The Cloud Collision’s media page was so much worse. They weren’t exactly a new band. "Seriously?" I choked.

Familiar green eyes glittered at me in amusement. "Oh yeah. Their fan totally posted that shit for all four hundred thousand of their followers to see."

The idea of so many people seeing and judging me… no thanks. Once, a couple years ago, Eli posted a picture of him and me on their Ghost Orchid page. Needless to say, the comments had flattered and insulted me at the same time. Since then, I’d tried to stay away from having my face plastered on the Internet for everyone to see. Some people were cut out for criticism from strangers. I wasn’t. "He just kissed my cheek, Jesus Christ. He didn’t stick his tongue down my throat,” I argued.

Eli made kissing noises as he pursed his lips together like the baboon he was. "Flabby and Julian, sitting in a tree—"

"Shut your mouth," I groaned, knowing he was just trying to be a pain in the ass. While Julian was attractive, I felt nothing toward him except friendship or something close to it.

It was Mason who threw an arm over my shoulder, leaning almost too much weight onto me considering he was almost a foot taller. “You should look at the pictures.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why?”

He squeezed my shoulder. “Just do it.”

“But why?” I asked again, knowing he didn’t have it in him to be cryptic longer than a second.

The breath he blew out of his mouth told me I was right. “
Somebody
didn’t look exactly happy.”

My eyebrows went up on their own, remembering the exact face he was referring to. Sacha
had
looked disturbed, maybe even angry, and that was a surprise. In a month and a half, I hadn’t seen him more than marginally frustrated. He was incredibly even-tempered and almost always had a smile on his face. With last night being the exception.

But Mase was right.

When I’d turned around after the Kiss Cam and seen the expression on Sacha’s face, I’d frozen and taken a second to absorb it. In the blink of an eye, he’d wiped the look off and smiled tightly. He’d kept smiling tightly the rest of the game. From that moment, all the way up to him getting in line behind me to go through security minutes before, he’d acted a little strangely.

I didn’t let myself think about it. What was the point? Maybe he thought I was a floozy for letting his friend kiss my cheeks. As soon as the thought entered my brain, I pushed it away. That wasn’t like him. It was dumb.

“Who knows what he was thinking. It doesn’t really matter,” I said to him with a shrug.

My friend squeezed my shoulder in return as we made it to the gate and went to a vacant seating section where we plopped down.

I glanced at my ticket before slipping it into my backpack’s zipper. “Is one of you sitting next to me on the flight?”

“Why?” Eli asked.

“Because…”

He leaned back and eyed me. "Let me guess, you’re going to sit someplace else?"

When I nodded, Eliza started howling and thrust his hand out in Mason’s direction. "You owe me twenty, bitch."

"Damn it, Gaby," Mase grunted, already reaching into his pocket for his wallet.

"You assholes bet?"

They both nodded in agreement, exchanging money. "Duh."

“You failed me, Flabs. Come on. I thought for fucking sure you’d tap into those marbles you call balls and not ditch us,” Mase huffed.

For one second I felt a little guilty for wanting to go sit with Sacha despite how reckless for my heart it was, but then I remembered. “Oh, right. Like that time you guys left me at that party to go mess around with those girls, and I had to walk home with Gordo in the middle of the night?”

Yeah, that had them shutting up.

"I hope you both get Ebola," I added with a laugh. It really wasn't that surprising that they'd made bets or that one of them was upset they’d lost. I used to make bets with Eli over the most random stuff. Like how Mom react to certain things. With our mom there were certain levels of anger: she'd rub her forehead if she was only a little mad, next she'd start slamming drawers, then she'd scream our full names out, or finally, if she was really mad—and this was only with Eli—she'd start crying, asking God out loud what she had done to deserve to get treated “like this.”

Sacha appeared a second later, sitting down in the empty seat next to mine and began talking to my brother about some band they really liked that had released an album that day. An hour passed by quickly. The next thing I knew, we were waiting in line to board the plane, and Sassy was asking Miles if he’d mind sitting with Eli and Gordo on the plane so I could take his seat. Miles was extremely laid-back, and he didn't seem to care about the change in seating arrangements.

Once onboard, the plane was the biggest one I'd ever seen. There were three sections with four seats in the middle and three seats on each other side. I just followed Sacha as he slipped into a window seat in the middle of the aircraft with me taking the middle. Carter waved before sitting with Mateo and Julian on the opposite side of the plane. I saw everyone else scatter into different rows.

A lady came and sat in the seat next to mine, telling Sacha and I hi.

Folding my hands into my lap, I turned my head to look at my seat buddy, who had his attention focused on me. “Is there anything else I should know about before the plane takes off?”

One smoky-colored eye went a little squinty. “Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Do you get nauseous on flights? Is little baby Sassy scared of flying and you’re going to need me to hold your hand or something?” I asked.

That beautiful mouth with its plumper bottom lip, pursed. He blinked. “Do you emasculate every man in your life?”

“Just the ones I like.”

He cracked a grin before reaching over to tug on the seat belt across my thighs. “All right, then.”

I opened to say something but before I could, the prerecorded flight attendant came over the speakers with emergency procedural information. She went on and on.

"I'm probably going to pass out soon," he warned me when the speech was over. He was already settling the little pillow into the space between his head and the paneling.

I nodded in agreement. I'd gotten up early to go buy last-minute things with Carter that morning and we'd walked around a lot. A nap was in demand. "If I snore, wake me up, okay?"

"No promises.” He smiled.

Sacha began telling me about how loud Julian could snore, and then I told him about how my dad used to keep us up all night because he sounded like a dirt bike. The plane took off at some point and sure enough, my eyelids started to droop in no time. The little pillow the airline had provided was smashed behind my head, and I remember giving Sacha a sleepy smile.

I passed out.

Who knows how long later, my legs started to feel a little weird and uncomfortable, so I opened my eyes to find that I wasn't sitting up. My upper body was draped over Sacha's lap; the only thing keeping me from being face-to-crotch with his human
kolbasa
was the pillow. My fingers were wedged underneath one of his thighs and something warm was resting on my neck. I wiggled one hand out to feel that his fingers were cupping my throat. He wasn't moving, which meant he was probably asleep too.

I wasn't going to overanalyze it. I would have done the same with my baboons. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

"
W
ould you like anything else
, sir?"

I had to slap a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. The flight attendant was bent at the waist and leaning over the lady in the seat next to mine. Hell, I could have poked her forehead if I wanted to. But she didn't care about us; I don't even think she really saw the other passenger or me sitting there.