“Seriously?” Laila replies sharply to Malik. She whisper-shouts, “I couldn’t say no. Reed’s the head of my label! And Alessandra is a brand-new artist who’s really sweet. And her boyfriend, Fish, is a good friend of mine. You think, despite all that, I should have said no, so we could ‘hang out’ tomorrow?”
Malik snaps, “Don’t get all pissy with me. You should be happy I wanted you to spend your free day with me.”
“Keep your voice down,” Laila says, before leaning in and whisper-shouting something I can’t make out. Whatever it is, Malik doesn’t like it.
“Thank you, Baby Jesus, there’s finally trouble in paradise,” Kendrick whispers to me.
“Sure looks like it,” I say. “What did Reed ask Laila to do tomorrow? I couldn’t hear.”
“You know Fish’s girlfriend, Alessandra?”
He motions to the end of the table, but I nod without looking. Everyone here knows Fish’s girlfriend, Alessandra, at this point. Not only is she the same girl who looked so smitten with Fish at Reed’s party two months ago, not only is she sitting next to Fish at the table now, Fish gave that girl a whopper of a kiss in the middle of the greenroom earlier, in front of everyone, and then proceeded to sing to her onstage during the concert. So, yeah, to put it mildly, I know Fish’s girlfriend, Alessandra. In fact, so does everyone in the world by now.
Kendrick continues, “Alessandra has a one-song deal with River Records and her music video is shooting tomorrow in Brooklyn. From what I’ve gathered, it sounds like Reed and the director down there . . . That woman there.” He points to a cute brunette who’s sitting next to Reed. “Reed and the director came up with some complicated new storyline for the music video, just now, and Reed asked Laila to play a big part in it. Which means she’ll be busy shooting all day tomorrow.” Kendrick smiles wickedly. “Rather than hanging out with Malik.”
I snicker. “What a cry baby.”
Kendrick nods. “Hopefully, he’ll keep crying until she’s pissed enough to dump his ass tonight.” He smiles. “And when she needs a shoulder to cry on tomorrow night, I’ll be Johnny on the Spot.”
Our server, Desiree, arrives with our new drinks and shots—plus, a flirtatious smile for me—and we dig in. We watch Reed making his way around the table, talking to every band, one by one, until, finally, reaching our band. After greeting all five of us, Reed tell us everything Kendrick has already told me about Alessandra’s video shoot tomorrow. Except Reed doesn’t ask us to come down for the whole day, as he asked Laila to do. He requests we drop by, at any convenient time, to shoot quick cameos. “I know it’s your free day tomorrow,” Reed says. “But I’ll owe you guys a favor if you stop by. The cameos will take no more than fifteen minutes to shoot. You’d sit at a table in a coffeehouse and pretend to watch Alessandra playing her guitar onstage. We’ll stitch it all together later in post-production.”
Everyone in my band, other than me, says they’ll try but can’t promise anything. They’re not trying to be jerks. It’s just that everyone looks forward to those rare days off on the schedule, when we can crash and burn and not have a single obligation.
Reed looks at me, clearly most interested in securing my face, above all others, for the video. “I’d consider it a personal favor to me if you’d come tomorrow, Savage,” he says. “It’s important to me, for personal reasons, to make this song a huge hit for Alessandra. As big as I can make it.” He pauses and it’s clear it’s going to pain him to say whatever’s on his tongue. But he says it, anyway. “Please.”
Whoa. That was as close to groveling as I’ve ever heard from Reed. Even so, I don’t care about making Reed happy, or having him owe me a favor. What I do care about, however, is that Laila has already committed to being there tomorrow, all day—and, apparently, without Malik. Also, that she’s looking at me right now, awaiting my response with bated breath.
“Yeah, I’m down,” I say. “As long as I don’t need to get there until the afternoon.” I look at Laila and smirk. “It sounds like I’m gonna be pretty busy tonight and into the first part of the morning.”
Laila snarls before looking away and I can’t help smiling broadly at her reaction. God, she’s fun. Wind her up and watch her go.
Reed claps my shoulder and thanks me effusively, before moving along to the next band at the table, the guys from Watch Party.
Biting back my smile, I return my attention to Laila across the table and discover she’s gotten up and is talking to Fish and Alessandra and Georgina. But guess who’s looking straight at me right now? Malik. With eyes like laser beams.
I rise, flip him off, and stride to the bathroom on the far side of the restaurant. After taking a piss, I wash my hands and face and stare at myself in the mirror for a moment. “Pull yourself together,” I whisper. “If you had her, you wouldn’t even want her. You only want what you can’t have.” Satisfied with my pep talk, I open the door to the bathroom and enter the short hallway, and immediately get slammed, rather forcefully, into a wall.
“Are you fucking her?” Malik whisper-shouts, his large body pinning mine into the wall.
“Fuck off,” I say, pushing against his hulking frame. But it’s no use. As fit as I am, his body is a brick wall.
He grabs my shirt. “Are you the reason she never answers my calls?”
“Let go of me unless you want to hear from my lawyers, Malik.”
He exhales a warm breath on my face and lets me go. Which is a damned good thing because, now that I’m here, I’m realizing my fantasy about strangling him was a pipe dream.
I lean into Malik’s angry face. “If I were fucking Laila, trust me, you wouldn’t be here tonight to ask me about it. One taste of me, and she’d ditch your ass in a heartbeat.”
Without warning, he shoves me again, crashing my back into the wall—although, thankfully, I’m way too drunk to feel it. Immediately, a nearby waiter appears in the hallway and frantically orders Malik to leave the area.
As Malik walks back to the table, I yell to his back, “If you can’t keep your woman satisfied, don’t blame me!”
“Mr. Savage, please,” the waiter says. “Cool off outside. Please.”
“Gladly.”
My veins flooded with adrenaline and my breathing ragged and hot, I stalk across the restaurant and straight outside into the crisp night, mustering every drop of willpower along the way not to punch a hole in a fucking wall.
Twelve
Savage
Once outside in front of the restaurant, I bum a cigarette off one of the valet parkers and then pace back and forth, inhaling on it like a lifeline, until, a moment later, Laila bursts outside and marches up to me.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she shouts. “Malik said you attacked him outside the bathrooms?”
I roll my eyes. “Wow, you’ve got yourself a real gem there, Laila. What are you doing with a psychopath like him?”
Her nostrils flare. “What’s it to you?”