Page 62 of Crimson Desires
“It is.”
Kane did his set. Then, he relinquished the bar to me. We adjusted the weight, and I crawled onto the bench, shimmying down until the bar was squarely above my chest.
“I think Aster’s changed you,” Kane said. “Before you met her, you were the kind of dickhead who believed that you could pay a tip with your phone number. And now, you’re doing all kinds of things. Paying for the crew’s breakfasts. Worrying about Ava. Writing songs.”
I grunted as I took the bar off the rack. I did my reps.
“Is that even possible?” I asked, still a bit dubious. “Do you really think a guy can change in less than two weeks just because of some girl?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never done it,” Kane admitted.
In the past year that I’d known him, Kane had not kept a steady girlfriend. I’d assumed that this was a choice that he’d made deliberately. But the somber expression on his face suddenly had me thinking differently.
“Anyways, I had an idea for our encore at the Charlotte show,” Kane said. “If you’re willing to potentially invoke Ava’s wrath.”
I raised my eyebrows. My interest was piqued. “What were you thinking?”
Kane smiled broadly. He began explaining his idea to me. With every word he spoke, I found myself growing more and more excited.
“What do you think?” Kane asked after he’d finished.
“I think Ava’s going to break her foot off in my ass if we do that,” I said. “That said, I’m in.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jack
The Charlotte performance was a blur.
I never needed to drink before shows. I’d been performing all my life, after all. At this point, singing on stage was no more novel to me than doing the daily crossword. Actually, scratch that—it was less novel than the fucking crossword.
But I won’t lie. I took a shot of whiskey before we hit the stage.
Performing for Dad tended to psych me out. Here’s a secret of the music industry: very seldom are shows ever perfect. There’s always some little thing that gets messed up—whether it’s on behalf of the performers or the tech crew. Sometimes a quick change takes longer than planned. Occasionally, a guitarist will start a song in the wrong tuning and stop everything midway so that they can re-adjust their pegs.
Little mistakes like that usually didn’t bug me. I tried to see them as artifacts of the performance—something to differentiate one show from the next.
But knowing that Dad was in the audience, I became hypercritical. As we played through our setlist, I noticed every minor imperfection.
Damien hit a cymbal two measures before he was supposed to. Kane struck the wrong note in the middle of one of our song’s bridges. Zephyr and Axel’s guitars weren’t leveled right at the start of the show and battled for attention throughout the first half of our opening song. Most egregious of all, I was flat on the chorus of our final song.
Nobody in the audience seemed to notice these infractions. But I did.
And if I noticed them, there was a near certain chance that Dad noticed them, too.
By the end of the show, I was sweating like a dog under the hot stage lights. My voice was tired, and my body was spent.
The lights cut out.
But Wicked Crimson wasn’t done yet. Before the sound engineer could cut my microphone, I shouted into it: “Charlotte, you guys were fucking awesome. As a thank-you, we’d like to do one more special encore.”
The crowd roared its approval. Hundreds of excited voices shook the stage.
Ava’s voice crackled over my in-ear: “Jack, what the hell are you doing?”
I ignored her. Slowly, the lights came back on. They seemed twice as bright as before. Twice as blinding.
I turned to Damien, cueing him. He set a rhythm with his hi-hat as I continued to talk. “As you may know, we’ve been hard at work on our second studio album.” More cheers. “Well, yesterday, we finished writing a song that might just make the cut.”