“How does me telling you I love you make you cry?” I asked in confusion.
“Because…I never thought anyone would. Not like this. Not like what we have.”
“Then stop crying and talk to me, baby.” I used the pads of my thumbs to wipe away her tears. “You bottle everything up and relationships don’t work that way.”
“I never had one this serious before,” she sniffled, burrowing deeper into my chest. “I love you too, Declan, and it scares me. I want to be this cool, modern, independent woman who can fall in love and grab life by the balls, but that’s not me. I’m scared and insecure and worry about everything. My parents, my brother, my job, college, our future…”
“That sounds exhausting,” I said gently, stroking her hair. “But the other part of being in a relationship is taking care of each other. You were there for me when I was having my band-related midlife crisis, so let me be here for you now that we’re moving on to the next part of our relationship.”
“The next part?”
“The I love you and living together part.”
“Oh.” She paused. “We’re already living together, aren’t we?”
“You have one foot out the door, still clinging to your old apartment. As if I’m going to wake up one day and send you packing.”
“You could,” she insisted, though it sounded half-hearted.
“Sure, but is that who you think I am? If it wasn’t working out, I’d make sure you were settled somewhere, either back with Kiki or in a new place. Unless you tried to kill me or something totally off-the-wall and extreme, I would never just kick you out.”
She giggled. “Do you worry about me trying to kill you?”
I laughed. “Not usually, but you know, it could happen.”
She lifted her head and met my gaze as something flickered in her eyes. “I’m being ridiculous,” she said after a second or so.
“Kinda.” I kissed her. “Don’t get me wrong; being apart will be hard. There’s going to be a lot of sexual frustration and missing each other and long days where you’re working when I’m off and vice versa, so we won’t even be able to squeeze in a phone call, but I love you. If you love me too, we can make this work.”
“I’ve always been a worrier, and there’s so much to worry about.”
“Okay, if we take cheating out of the equation, what is there to worry about?”
“Noah.”
He nodded. “I get it. If we’re being honest, he didn’t need to hang out with musicians to get hooked on drugs initially, so his history speaks for itself. But he’s doing great, and I’m going to keep an eye on him. He’s going to be rooming with our tour manager, Lance, who won’t mess around with drugs or anything like that. He’ll be busier than the band will because he’ll be part of setup, work during the shows to make sure Stu has everything he needs, and then he’ll be doing teardown too. It’s a lot. By the time he’s done, he’ll be ready for bed.”
“You can’t tell me no one is going to have drugs.”
“In our organization? Yeah, I can. I can’t control who’s backstage, who we might be playing with, people who work at the venues, but within our group? No one. Ford used to smoke a little now and then, but he no longer keeps any at the house in deference to you and agreed not to do anything like that on the road for Noah’s sake.”
“You guys have been so good to him. It means the world to me. I’m still scared for him because he’s not truly sober, but I keep reminding myself it’s not meth or heroin.”
“Exactly. And at some point, we might be able to wean him off the alcohol too.”
“How will all this work with us apart for months at a time?” she asked after a soft sigh.
“It won’t be months. At least once a month, I’ll fly you out for a long weekend or weekdays or whatever you want. I can afford it and we do need to spend time together. It’ll give us something to look forward to when we’re not together.”
“Do you have dates yet?” she asked finally.
“Not yet. Casey’s working on finalizing the details. It looks like we’ll be back on the road with Onyx Knight for three months, probably from September to early December.”
“Didn’t you just get off tour with them?” she asked.
“Yeah. They were going to Europe for the summer and already had a European band booked, but they extended the tour and are back in North America, so when they called, Casey said yes. We’re renegotiating a few terms of the contract, so we’ll have a little bit more power, but the goal is to just play in front of as many faces as possible. If the new single does well, it might be the break we need to start headlining again.”
She nodded. I could tell she didn’t completely understand how it all worked, but we had time for her to figure it out.
“But I’m not leaving yet,” I told her, sliding down into the sheets. “Can you think of anything we can do to pass the time?”
She got to her knees and then moved so she was straddling me. “Did you just tell me you loved me, Mr. James?”
“A little bit ago, I did.” I gave her a lazy smile.
“Now I want you to show me.”
As the details of the upcoming tour were finalized and we got our schedule, we spent every day rehearsing. The new album was in production, something Casey was overseeing, so all we had to do was work on our live show. I still had to use my smaller drum kit, which annoyed me, but we had a goal now so that was my focus. By January, we hoped to be headlining, even if it was a smaller tour, but there was no way to know until the album came out. The first single, “Going Back to Tomorrow,” would be debuting on Simon’s radio show the first week of September, so today we were shooting the album cover.
It was late in the game, since it should have been done weeks ago, but we’d hemmed and hawed over what we wanted. Ford was still refusing to cut his hair and the rest of us were a little reluctant to have full makeovers, so everything had come to a standstill. Casey had finally relented, saying we could wear what we wanted as long as it included denim and leather. That was pretty broad, and worked for all of us, so I’d put on black jeans and my favorite leather jacket, with no shirt on beneath. Stu wore nothing but leather pants and black boots, his torso completely bare, and Tyler had on leather pants and a leather jacket, also without a shirt. Ford wasn’t here yet and Lexi was in the makeup chair with whatever she was wearing beneath her robe.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” Avon came in, a mischievous smile on her face as she threw up her arms dramatically. “May I present to you, the one and only, Dustin Ford Malone.” She turned and motioned with her hand and Ford came in.
The only way I could describe our reactions was shock. He looked badass as hell in jeans and a denim jacket with the sleeves rolled up to reveal his forearms, but it was the hair that mostly blew us away. His long, curly locks were gone, replaced with a cut I wouldn’t have expected him to agree to. It was short in the back, but long in the front so part of it stuck up and part of it flopped over one eye. The cowboy hat and scruffy facial hair were gone too, and this Ford was pure rock and roll.