Exclusive Access (Rock Arrangement, #3) Read online

  Exclusive Access (Rock Arrangement, #3)

  by Ava Lore

  Published by Brittle Divinity Press, 2013.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  EXCLUSIVE ACCESS (ROCK ARRANGEMENT, #3)

  First edition. April 28, 2013.

  Copyright © 2013 Ava Lore.

  Written by Ava Lore.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Eight

  I'm going to kill him.

  The thought floated across my brain, sweet and serene, and it wasn't the first time it had happened today. One month after getting hired to babysit Carter Hudson and I was starting to have homicidal ideations. I tried to push the thought away as soon as it came to me, but it was kind of hard when Carter was sitting right next to me with a shit-eating grin on his face and taking nips from a bottle beneath the table.

  We were sitting at one of LAs nicer sushi restaurants, and while I appreciated a good volcano roll, Carter was trying my patience.

  He turned again and took a nip of the bottle and I finally figured out what kind of bottle it was.

  “Is that... are you drinking cough syrup?” I hissed behind my menu.

  Slipping the bottle back under the table, he turned and grinned at me. “Sizzurp, Mrs. Girlfriend. I am drinking sizzurp. You need to get the lingo right.”

  “You need to stop drinking cough syrup!” I was trying to keep my voice down but it was hard when all I could think about was grabbing my chopsticks and stabbing them into his eyes.

  This was par for the course with Carter. Get him out, doing something nice and normal and not full of drugs or drinking, and his first reaction was to undermine it. It had been going on for a month and I was starting to see why my own mother had gone considerably grayer during our teenage years.

  “Sizzurp,” he corrected. “I need to stop drinking sizzurp.” Carter gave me a lazy smile.

  I'm going to kill him, I thought again.

  Sizzurp. That was cough syrup with codeine, right? Wasn't there some rapper who'd been sipping the sizzurp recently and ended up in the hospital with seizures? That was no bueno. No bueno at all.

  I snapped my menu down and pretended to peruse it, but I watched Carter from the corner of my eye. Codeine. That meant he'd be getting a little lazy. Any second now...

  The moment he reached for his glass of water, my hand darted under the table and snatched the bottle out of his hand.

  “Hey!”

  “Shut up,” I said. “The last thing I need is for you to end up in the hospital.”

  He slumped in his chair and glowered at me. I knew someone was probably taking pictures of us right now and they'd go running to the tabloids telling the world that we were having lover's problems. Well good. I hoped they did. Maybe the death threats would stop.

  Not real death threats, but you know. The crazy fangirl death threats that certain people seemed to think were appropriate to post on the internet. I'd had to shut my Facebook down the second day the news was out that Carter Hudson had a girlfriend, and my email was still getting spammed by girls who hated me for getting between them and their precious Carter. Ha! If only they knew. Being Carter's girlfriend was the worst job I had ever had. I pride myself on sticking to jobs as long as I can, but right now I was thinking of quitting. Killing Carter counted as quitting, right?

  I stuffed the cough syrup into my purse and made a mental note to figure out where he had gotten it. I mean... come on. I was with him practically twenty four-seven, and still he managed to somehow undermine my every attempt to help him. Shape up! I wanted to scream, but even though he irritated me to no end, I knew it wouldn't do any good. I couldn't yell at him for the same reason I couldn't yell at a toddler. He honestly just didn't seem to know any better.

  The waitress came by and took our orders, and within a minute there was food sitting in front of us. That, at least, was a perk of babysitting a celebrity. No one ignored me now.

  Then Carter reached out and plucked a piece of sushi from the plate with his fingers and popped it into his mouth.

  Oh. My. God.

  “Were you born in a barn?” I hissed.

  “You mean like Jesus?” he asked.

  Kill. Kill. Kill.

  “You're not Jesus. And you'd better not say you're bigger than Jesus.”

  Carter laughed. “Well duh,” he said. “I don't want to get shot.”

  “Just eat,” I told him.

  But he had that sly little grin on his face again, and I knew he was going to do something that I was going to regret.

  Picking up another piece of sushi in his fingers, he held it out to me. “Now sweetie,” he said, “would you like a piece?”

  I clenched my teeth but managed a smile. I should be the one getting acting roles. “Of course, darling.”

  Dutifully I opened my mouth and he placed the roll on my tongue. I pulled back and closed my lips around it.

  “Aww,” he said. “Not even a little finger-suck for the paparazzi?” Sucking fingers was his new thing he kept trying to get me to do. He said it was sexy and that a real girlfriend would be all over his guitarist fingers.

  Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. “Nope,” I said. “One make-out session a week is the agreement, remember?”

  “A little tongue on my fingers doesn't count.” His grin was huge and his eyes twinkled at me. He loved to tease me like this, acting as if I were just like every other girl who wanted to get into his pants. Judging by how many girls I'd found out he'd been with in the past year since their first album shot up the charts, he was a walking STD. That wasn't sexy. Neither was his teasing. He was like a little brother, and just like a little brother I wanted to tattle on him to dad so badly.

  “Stop trying to get me to suck on your fingers or I'll tell Kent,” I said.

  “God, you are no fun,” Carter said. He pulled a face and grabbed another piece of sushi, the largest of the bunch, and shoving it into his mouth. I hoped he choked on it, and then felt bad.

  Sullenly I wielded my chopsticks at our motley assortment of dead fish and in short order we had demolished the whole array.

  “I'm still hungry,” Carter said as he swallowed the last piece of sushi.

  “We're going to be late for rehearsal. Sweetie.”

  “Right. Of course. Darling.”

  Carter was going to make a good actor, I could tell, because while he smiled at me and kept his voice loving, his eyes broadcasted murder.

  Made two of us.

  I paid the bill with the credit card Kent had given me—Carter was no longer allowed to have unlimited access to his bank account, and he also had no car and no license. Kent had locked his license away somewhere and I had the only keys to the car. Carter had tried seducing them out of me, but it had been a no go. It almost seemed like I was the first woman he'd never been able to manipulate into giving him whatever he wanted.

  And while I had to admit the measures Kent had taken seemed like they were what was needed, I could tell they weren't working. All they did was make Carter chafe even further, and he acted out in ways that were quite frankly dangerous. Sipping sizzurp was definitely not a healthy response to being forced to get up at a decent hour and eating more than a Bloody Mary for breakfast.

  I sighed as I signed a large tip to our waitress, and Carter and I both stood. He helped me out of my chair, and I gave him a dazzling smile for the cameras, but the tension underneath our interaction was palpable.

  Holding hands, we left the restaurant and
got into the car, helpfully brought to us by a valet. The moment we were inside it, behind the safety of the tinted windows, Carter's smiling facade dropped.

  “This is driving me crazy, Rebecca,” he said. He said the same thing every day, sometimes more than once, and like always I had no idea what to tell him.

  “Kent calls the shots,” I said. “That's all I can tell you.”

  Carter made a frustrated noise and threw himself back into the car seat and crossed his arms, fuming. I felt bad for him. I really did. In between fantasies of killing him, that is.

  Something was going to have to give, soon, and I hoped it wasn't me. I'd barely earned two paychecks—incredible, jaw-dropping paychecks—but like Mom always said, no job was worth your health.

  I should call her, I thought. Since my explosion across the LA music scene I'd spoken with her several times—after she got the full update from Rose, of course—and her only reaction was to compliment the new hair color Kent had forced me to get: a rich chestnut brown in lieu of my previous purple and blonde. I didn't want to complain to her about my new job, but her advice would have been invaluable.

  Thinking about Mom made me think about home, and thinking about home made me homesick. Absently I gunned the car through LA traffic. It wasn't as nice as Kent's car, but it had enough torque for me to drive like an asshole to let off some steam. Try to cut me off? Take this, shithead.

  We arrived at the rehearsal studio in fine form, which meant on time, in one piece, and mostly sober. It was happening more and more lately and the progress should have felt good, but given how miserable Carter clearly was, the victory was hollow.

  We entered the rehearsal room to find Kent and Manny already there. For a pothead, Manny was surprisingly punctual. Kent, for his part, seemed to spend all his spare time at the studio practicing, so his presence wasn't a surprise. Sonya hadn't arrived yet, which was also not a surprise—since Carter had been forcefully pried out of his wild-child role, she had happily taken up the mantel, skipping around LA with her entourage in a state of perpetual tipsiness. She was usually late.

  As we walked through the door, Manny looked up from his drum sticks—idly twirling them around like batons in his fingers—and gave us a smile and nod. Kent didn't bother to look up at all.

  Well. Fine with me. Since that first night on the job, I could count the number of times he'd spoken to me outside of a business context on one knee.

  That didn't mean he didn't eye-fuck me every time no one was looking.

  Unfortunately there were too many people in the rehearsal room, so he kept his gaze fixed on his bass as he fiddled with the pegs.

  Carter turned to me and flashed me a fake smile. “Time for rehearsal, babe,” he said, then leaned in and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.

  I will say this for Carter: at least he never acted like I was beneath him. Another prima donna would have thrown a fit being paired up with me, but Carter seemed not to have realized that just because we were fake girlfriend and boyfriend he didn't have to treat me any nicer than a post-show groupie. He took the Mrs. Girlfriend thing pretty seriously, in fact, especially given that he hated my reason for hanging around him. He was very sweet, in his own way.

  I turned toward the ladder that led up to the loft and hiked my messenger bag up my shoulder, preparing to climb, when Kent's voice cut through the air.

  “Rebecca. Stay down here. I have an announcement to make.”

  Oh. That...didn't sound good? Or did it? It was impossible to tell because Kent was still scowling at his bass, and given his recent range of emotion went from 'moody' all the way to 'grumpy' it was sometimes hard to gauge where he was coming from.

  Glancing at Carter, who shrugged, I sighed. “Okay.” I let my messenger bag drop and leaned against the wall, waiting for Sonya to arrive.

  Thankfully she came waltzing in just a few minutes later. “Sorry I'm late,” she said breezily. “I was clear across town when I realized it was almost one o'clock and I was drinking so I had to—”

  “And now it is one thirty,” Kent said, cutting her off with a glare.

  Her mouth snapped shut and she gave him a rival glare, but she was just too lovely to pull it off. Admitting defeat, she stomped off to her keyboard and flopped down in her chair.

  “I have an announcement,” Kent said again, “so don't put your headphones on yet.

  Sonya paused in the middle of raising her headphones to her ears and turned and glared at him again, but Kent ignored her. Setting down his bass, he stood, turned and faced the rest of the room, and crossed his arms. His eyes met mine for a brief moment and I had to clench my teeth to keep from sighing.

  My god, he's hot, I thought. One month later and I still lusted after him, even though he wouldn't speak to me. It was the eyefucking. He kept stringing me along with it. It was like middle school all over again.

  Then his eyes left mine and I could breathe again. Somewhat.

  He swept his gaze over the rest of the band. “I'm happy to announce that the label is giving us another video.” He didn't look happy about it, but he never looked happy about anything. What tipped me off was the rest of the rehearsal room giving up a huge groan in unison.

  “Nooooo,” Sonya said, as though she'd just been stabbed with an ice pick.

  “We just did one last month,” Manny said, which surprised me. Manny never complained about anything.

  Carter just threw himself into his chair and sagged, looking as though he was about to be dragged through a pool of boiling oil.

  Kent didn't look any happier about it. “Yes, one last video shoot,” he said, “and you are all going to work hard on it, no slacking off like last time. This is for publicity, because we need to be working on our next album. We needed to be working on it last month, but someone—” He shot Carter a glare. “—couldn't be assed to make an effort and get to writing.”

  “I wasn't inspired,” Carter said.

  “That's bullshit,” Kent told him. “There's no such thing. There's only hard work and laziness, and you were being lazy. You seem in a better place now, so I want six new songs by the end of shooting.”

  Carter's head snapped up. “Six?” he said incredulously.

  Kent gave him a smile without humor. “Six,” he said. “We need at least ten, preferably twelve, by the end of the month. We have to be in the recording studio soon, and then we have the tour over the summer. It's going to be jam-packed so you'd better come up with some good shit.”

  Carter looked a little green at the thought, and I didn't blame him. Kent was basically putting the onus of the band's continued success all on his shoulders.

  I bit my lip, thinking hard, and almost missed when Kent turned to me. “Rebecca, I expect you to keep Carter in line while he writes something new.”

  I swallowed. “Carter's a genius at songwriting,” I said. Everyone said so, so it had to be true. “I'm sure he'll have some good stuff for you guys in no time.”

  Sonya snickered at that and even Manny looked dubious.

  That worried me. I glanced at Carter and saw him staring at the ground, and if I hadn't known better, I would have sworn that his chin trembled just a little, as though he were about to cry.

  I frowned, but I didn't want to draw attention to his clear distress. I still didn't understand the dynamics of the band very well because our only time together was in the rehearsal room. Sonya barely spoke to me and Manny was usually too laid back to give half a shit about whatever was going on around him.

  Kent and Carter, however, I had quite a few insights into. At home they barely talked, despite my attempts to coax Carter out of his bedroom, and Kent spent the majority of his time working at the kitchen table. They were possibly the most boring rock brothers anyone could have ever imagined. I spent quite a bit of time surfing the net, trying to figure out ways to help Carter out of his drug and alcohol rut, but a lot of the time curiosity got the best of me and I went searching for information on Kent instead. I'd found some quite distur
bing things on the net—not anything Kent had done, because despite looking like a bad boy he was quite well-behaved—but mostly fanfiction about him. Sometimes about him and Carter. Sometimes about him and Carter and me. That was disturbing, and I usually wished I could bleach my brain afterward.

  But it was strange. Kent had acted like a stereotypical rocker with me, but now that he had cut off that avenue he seemed to have receded into himself. Or perhaps he had always been that way and I brought out the bad boy in him.

  Either way, I had to figure out some way to whip Carter into shape. Without nagging him, that is. Which was going to be hard because I was hardly anymore with it than he was.

  “Are we all clear?” Kent said finally. “We'll be heading to San Diego next week to shoot on location, so I expect everyone to have looked over the script by that point. Try to make an effort this time, people!”

  More grumbles, but I was suddenly feeling very ill.

  San Diego?

  I hadn't spoken to anyone since I'd left. They'd all made it abundantly clear what they'd thought of me, abundantly clear that they believed Jason's version of events over mine, and once I'd started showing up on gossip blogs and in tabloids my email had lit up with former friends trying to get in touch with me. I tried not to open them, but from what I'd seen in the subject lines, they seemed to fall into two camps. One camp wanted to know if I thought I could get them a leg up in the industry. The other camp wanted to let me know they still thought I was a liar and a slut and a thief.

  I was none of those things. It was messed up. It was Jason who was the liar. It was Jason who was the slut. It was Jason who was the thief, who ran up debts in my name and left me to pay for them.

  My only crime was being young and stupid. That was, like, zero dollars in fines and zero days in jail. And yet I was the one who had to become a fugitive.

  Kent knew I'd fled from San Diego. He didn't know what had happened there, but whatever. Heading back to San Diego made me squirm and want to crawl into a hole and I finally found the courage to stare at Kent, my eyes boring into his skull and willing him to acknowledge my distress, but he didn't even look at me.