Playing the Pauses Read online

  Playing the Pauses

  Book 2 of the Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll Series

  By

  Michelle Hazen

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  All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

  Copyright © 2018 by Michelle Hazen

  Cover design by Michelle Fairbanks, Fresh Design

  Edited by Katie Golding, Goldnox Editing

  Copy editing by Keyanna Butler, Indie Author’s Apprentice

  Beta Reading by Andrea Contos

  Dedicated to Sandra

  For loving Danny (almost) as much as I do. And for loving me as much as you love Danny. Almost.

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Let the Games Begin

  Chapter 2: With the Band

  Chapter 3: Raw

  Chapter 4: Unconditional

  Chapter 5: Communication

  Chapter 6: Good

  Chapter 7: You

  Chapter 8: Close Calls

  Chapter 9: Switch

  Chapter 10: Mercy

  Chapter 11: To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

  Chapter 12: Crossing Lines

  Chapter 13: Playing

  Chapter 14: Girl Talk

  Chapter 15: It’s a Sign

  Chapter 16: Stay

  Chapter 17: The Best Part of Waking Up

  Chapter 18: Meet the Parents

  Chapter 19: Draw Me A Picture

  Chapter 20: The Ring

  Chapter 21: 3 A.M. in Munich

  Chapter 22: Your Answer

  Chapter 23: Happy Birthday

  Chapter 24: My So-Called Home

  Chapter 25: For Better or For Worse

  Chapter 26: Playing the Pauses

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1: Let the Games Begin

  Today I find out what kind of person I’m going to be.

  Mommy, dominatrix, pharmacist, or even servant, bowing and scraping at fashionably booted feet. Whatever it takes over the next six weeks, that’s what I’ll become, because I’m not just a tour manager—I’m a walking life support system for rock bands.

  I turn away from the check-in desk and hit the tile of the airport lobby at full stride, the worn wheels of my carry-on squeaking as they try to keep up. Waiting for me in Terminal 2 are The Red Letters, a band teetering on the vomit-slicked gate to true fame. Their heads are bigger than their record sales, their dreams are bigger than the moon, and their every personal failing is about to be mine to manage.

  Concert tours are evil bitches. The performers get put through the wringer, rocketing from the euphoria of the shows straight to the boredom of mundane travel. They’re one in a million on that stage and they are the million again the next day: getting herded barefoot and beltless through airport security, raising their arms to show their pit stains to the body scanners.

  Yes, stressed-out musicians can be a pain to deal with. But then comes the moment when the lights come up, the bass hits me straight in the chest, and I see a thousand people start to dance. To me, that is God. And I will never abandon my religion.

  I blow a kiss to the TSA guards as I fast-track it through the pre-screened lane and stride past shops offering kitschy sweatshirts, tiny packets of peanuts, and Stephen King’s latest.

  I recognize my targets before I even make it to the gate. The lead singer is a long stretch of pretty shoulders, Italian shoes, and dark blond hair. He’s leaning against a wall of windows, talking to a girl who can’t keep her eyes off his biceps. The petite drummer is curled up against a pillar, texting away. Above her, the bassist slouches at the end of a row of chairs, his black beanie pulled low over stray chunks of hair the same color.

  I throw a quick wave at the crew arrayed throughout the waiting area. I’ll catch up with them later, but they all understand the talent pays the bills, so the band gets my attention first. I start forward with a professional smile and the drummer bounces up off the floor to greet me. The bassist closes his eyes and leans his head back against the chair, uninterested. Great. That’s not going to be a pain in the ass or anything.

  The drummer is cute, short, and curvy as all hell. That teacup-sized Marilyn Monroe body is topped off with country-singer curls and a punk-rock wardrobe: a combination the fans are going to love.

  She sticks out a hand with a big smile. “You’re the new tour manager, right? You only kind of look like your picture.”

  Normally, by the time we’ve made it to an airport, I’m besties with everyone from the lead singer’s mom to the light tech’s third nipple. But this tour isn’t mine. It’s inherited from a fellow road wrangler who is currently in a hospital bed, drugged up to his toupee to help his body forget that until this morning, it had an appendix.

  That also means I’ve got to cram four months of prep work into the eighteen hours before the first show. No sweat. The problem, as always, will be convincing the band to go along with changes proposed by a twenty-five-year-old tour manager.

  “It’s so great to meet you.” I shake her hand. “I’m Kate Madsen.”

  “Not sure how much Bill told you about us, so...I’m Jera McKnight.”

  Weird name but interesting. I remember the story behind it from talking to the band manager, who just so happens to be her daddy. It’s a music-lover’s acronym made from the four great namesakes Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Roger Waters, and Art Garfunkel.

  “How is Bill?” Jera asks, sounding genuinely concerned for the previous tour manager she probably only met once.

  “He’s resting comfortably, but the surgery recovery is going to put him out of commission for a while.” I give her a sympathetic smile. “Tours aren’t a great place to regain your strength, so he probably won’t be able to join you guys on this run. But he had a friend send me all the info so we should have a nice smooth transition, even if it’s last minute.” Okay, that statement was so optimistic it should have come out spangled with fairy dust. I figure as long as I don’t sleep until I have everything in order, Jera will never know what a mess it actually is to swap out tour managers on the first day.

  “Of course. So what can I do to help you get up to speed? Our first show is tomorrow night, and the next one is in...” She reaches for her phone.

  “No worries.” I flash her a smile. “I’ve got the logistics handled.” The show tomorrow is in San Diego. We’re meeting up in San Francisco, where their record label is based and also where I live when I’m off work, but these guys just flew down from their home in Portland, Oregon. I’m well-used to keeping up with the geographic musical chairs of a concert tour, but it gets confusing for the musicians, who are already overloaded with performance and publicity. It’s why I try to simplify for them whenever I can.

  “We’ve got some, ah, details we need to discuss. But that can wait.” Their last tour manager left me a cleanup job more on the scale of a HAZMAT team than a Swiffer, but if I don’t build rapport before I break out the bad news, they’ll probably give me the boot in favor of someone with a decade-longer resume. “Right now, I’d just like to get to know you guys.”

  I especially need the scoop since this band is two guys to a girl. Chances are, she’ll fall into bed with one or both of them when the pressure gets to be too much and I’ll have to talk everyone out of their Jerry Springer moment before they cancel their show dates and flee for home.

  “Oh, okay. Well, this is Danny...” Jera gestures at her motionless bandmate. He’s
thin, with the slouched posture of a pre-teen and apparently the manners of one too, because he doesn’t open his eyes even after she says his name. Maybe he can’t hear through his noise-cancelling headphones, but I doubt it. He’s sharply handsome, dressed in worn jeans and a black discount-store hoodie, and the only interesting part about him is his hands.

  Long, agile fingers sprawled on his knees, with a man’s thick knuckles and an artist’s delicate bones. On the widest joint of his index finger is a tattoo of a bass clef and that finger taps restlessly while the rest of him is quiet. I’ve always been a sucker for hands and those ones I can picture in action all too clearly: deft on the frets of a guitar, or sliding into a pair of panties. Awareness trickles beneath the cups of my bra.

  I pull my gaze back to Jera, letting her make the unnecessary introductions because I can never manage to say, “I know who you are” without feeling like the star-struck autograph hound I used to be.

  She tips her chin toward the window. “That’s Jax. Guitar and vocals.”

  I follow her gaze in spite of myself. A lot of celebrities look like shit in person. Take away the Photoshop and the photogenic and you realize that the camera loves some people the naked eye would never look twice at.

  Jackson Sterling is not one of those people.

  Jera doesn’t look impressed, though, rolling her eyes as Jax shakes his chin-length hair back and laughs at something a girl is saying. There are three now, not just the one that was there when I arrived. “If you want to meet him, I can distract his groupies,” she says.

  “No worries. So what about you? What can I do to make your life easier while we’re on the road?”

  “Me? Ah, I’m easy. Give me my drums, my band, and my boyfriend and I don’t give a shit about anything else.” Her hazel eyes brighten. “Want to see a picture of him?”

  “Sure, I’d love that!” I brace myself for a photo tour into the very foreign dimension of domesticity. In a good year, I spend three hundred plus days on the venue circuit. No relationship could keep up with that, even if it could compete with the thrill of living and breathing music.

  Jera lifts her phone just as a woman with a fedora and a baby passes us. The stroller’s handle bumps my purse, sending it swinging. The bag drops from my shoulder to my elbow, ricochets off the stroller hood and bursts onto the floor in an explosion of this-is-not-fucking-happening. I hit my knees to rake up the mess, the Fedora Mom’s apologies disappearing into eyebrow-raised silence when she glimpses everything that’s spilled out of my purse onto the floor.

  There’s no good way to explain that it’s not mine, because only addicts and felons ever try that excuse.

  In my case, though, it’s true. A tour is a war, every venue is a battlefield, and my purse acts as my primary weapon. Forty-five calibers of drug-dealing nanny, dispensing Valium and wet wipes, vitamin-boosted energy drinks, three shades of foundation and two of eyeliner to save face before the paparazzi ambushes. Condoms. So many condoms. And lube, because really? We all know that one-night-stand sex is a little dry and more than a little disappointing, and the last thing I need is my lead singer wince-dancing because he has groupie-burn on his johnson.

  Jera dumps a double-handful back into my purse: tampons and miniature pliers, plus a tube of Super Glue that’s stuck to a chain of Trojan Magnums. I give her a little half shrug and a smile, because it could be worse. On the bus tours, I carry whiskey to cure bouts of stage fright, and I’ve got a secret pocket to hide the harder stuff, but I don’t take that shit through airports.

  All appearances aside, I have morals. I just apply them to myself, not to the musicians I work for. I don’t touch drugs but I can produce just about anything, on cue and under the radar, thanks to the second piece in my personal arsenal that should be safely velcro-ed into a side compartment right over—

  My heart tries to climb up into my throat when I see the empty pocket. “Oh God, where is my phone?” I duck my head to peer under Fedora Mom’s stroller, glance behind Jera to the possibly-sleeping bassist, and dump my purse out all over again. My fingers frantically mine the pile.

  My iPhone is pistol and bullet, trebuchet and tommy gun. It’s the whole damn armory and it is more valuable than the GDP of most developing nations. It holds contacts for everyone from record label execs to call girls, sound techs, diplomats, and cocaine slingers from sea to shining sea. It video chats to the family back home for when I find the backup singer from Kansas in the ladies’ room, clicking her heels together and sobbing into the single-ply. It’s even got a microphone to record the brilliant song idea somebody had in the alley of a club on Day Sixty of the tour. The idea that becomes the anchoring single for their next album and without my intervention, would have been lost to the haze of the next morning’s hangover.

  I finally spot my phone under the chair next to Jera, and lean past her to snatch it up. No bedazzled rubber case for me, thankyouverymuch. Otter Box. Waterproof, mosh-pit-proof, blood, sweat and tears proof—and fully tested on all five claims. I’d chain it to my spleen if I could.

  I start to breathe again. Give me a smartphone and an overstuffed Kate Spade purse and I can make live music history without ever playing a note.

  “I’m so sorry,” Fedora Mommy apologizes again. “I love this stroller but it’s so wide it’s terrible to try to get through an airport.”

  “No problem.” I climb to my feet and smooth back my hair, tossing her a smile. “Hey, I needed to clean my purse out anyway.”

  Jera coos over the baby, I check our flight boarding time—we’ve still got an hour—and then we claim a couple of seats next to her dozing bandmate. I lean in to watch while she shows me a series of pictures of a little blond kindergartener and a guy with a Calvin Klein body and Mr. Roger’s gentle eyes.

  “So this is my boyfriend, Jacob, and this is our daughter, Maya.” She laughs self-consciously. “Well, I mean, she’s not really. I never know what to call her. She’s Jacob’s little sister but we share custody of her with his older sister.”

  I already had a whole symphony of appreciative coos queued up, but actually, I could look at pictures of this guy all day, and the kid’s not half bad either. “Your boyfriend is a little bit gorgeous, isn’t he?”

  “I know, right? It’s kind of ridiculous.” Jera beams, blushing.

  I just shrug. It’s actually kind of nice that she doesn’t consider his magazine-worthy looks to be her due as an up-and-coming celebrity. Then again, if I spent all my time around guys as good-looking as the two in her band, I might be a little insecure, too.

  “It’s going to be really hard not to see him for so long, but we’re prepared this time. When the band did the last tour, opening for Abyss, it was just...” She sucks in a breath and shakes her head. “But we’re ready this time. We’ve been preparing Maya for months, and we’re going to have a visit halfway through, so...”

  I smile back, mentally scheduling her for a breakdown, circa Week Three, and probably another during Week Five. I make a silent note to check the budget for airline ticket money for Jacob.

  Just then, her phone rings and another picture of Jacob pops up. This time he’s holding up Maya, who wears a bright red pea coat and a reindeer antler headband. Both siblings are flipping devil’s horns at the camera, tongues out in full KISS style. Jera’s face lights up like somebody just plugged her in.

  “Sorry, I gotta take this.” She jumps up and slaps the headphones back off Danny’s ears. His head comes up—finally, signs of life—and she hisses, “Warn her about Jax.”

  I brace myself. Off his meds? On his heroin? Stage fright? Brand-new herpes diagnosis? I try to remember if I packed any Valtrex in my luggage. If not, it’s gonna be a bitch for everybody when Jera falls into bed with his soulful smile and bimbo-worn dick.

  But then Danny opens his eyes and I freeze as their intensity crackles down my body and nails me straight in the panties. He is pure, dark sex appeal, full-strength delicious kink.

  He’ll be the man Jer
a breaks for. Week Three, Week Five, and possibly tonight as well, cute boyfriend and de-facto stepdaughter be damned.

  Danny shrugs himself straight in the chair and everything that looked wiry before transforms itself into a lean pull of muscle with that single, lazy movement. The edge of his hoodie rucks up to reveal a languid hipbone and in its stillness, I sense the tension that gathers right before the thrust.

  I cross my legs. Mental note: Get laid. Preferably before we go wheels up in the next city.

  “And you are?” Danny asks without inflection.

  Another artist who couldn’t give a shit about his support staff. What a surprise. Unfortunately, I kind of need him to listen to my professional opinion and that might be a hard sell with this guy, even though he is—for once—even younger than I am.

  “Your new tour manager.” I hold out a friendly hand. “Kate Madsen.”

  He ignores my hand. Only his eyes move, flicking dismissively over my face and only bothering with the most cursory of circuits below that. My lips tighten. Even if I could sing, I know I’d never make it to the glamour of the big time, for one simple reason. I’m nightclub pretty: good enough that with low light and a push up bra, my dark brown hair and gray eyes can rank a seven, even though under the fluorescents I’m more like a five and a half.

  I’ve made my peace with that math. But no girl likes a look that judges her and records a “no score.” I drop my hand.

  “Your job seems very complicated and intensely boring,” he says.

  Keeping my smile in place costs enough energy that my blood-latte levels are starting to register in the critical levels. “I believe people have said the same to Stephen Hawking.”

  His lips quirk.

  I straighten up and dig deep for my customer service voice. “Besides, a tour’s a monster with a lot of moving parts. Somebody’s got to keep them all cranking along.”

  “Yeah, so that’s the problem with Jax. He just quit UPS and he’s jonesing for something to organize. To him, the world looks like one big algorithm of moving packages and we’re all just glorified cardboard boxes.”