I meet him halfway. “Yes?” I ask.
He rubs his hand across his shoulder, pulling my attention to the intense bluebird tattoo that runs to the center of his chest. “Can you stick around for a few minutes?”
“Do you need me to come back for something?” I start to return to the band’s dressing room, but he stops me.
“No, trust me, we’re good. But Sin and me thought it would be a good idea to get someone to escort you to the stage?”
I fold my arms over my stomach. “I know how to find it.”
“I bet you do, but you’re on a lot of women’s shit list because you’re with Lucas. Believe me, I would do the same thing if Kylie was here.” When I try to get a word in, he continues, “And she wouldn’t give me shit over something like this. Give David ten minutes, okay?”
“He’s walking with me?”
Wyatt rolls his blue eyes, obviously irritated with all of my questions, but his voice is patient when he answers, “No, but he’s calling someone on the radio to do it for him.”
David ends up taking less than five minutes to find me an escort. He introduces himself as Aaron, but after that, he’s silent as he walks me with me out of the backstage building toward the direction of Cilla Craig yelling into a microphone. Aaron doesn’t leave until the security crew near the stage has cleared me to enter the pit and I’m immersed in the crowd that’s rocking out and screaming along with Cilla.
Even though it’s jam-packed out here, with sweaty bodies rubbing against me at every angle, I turn my face up to the stage and watch as Cilla struts around and goes through the chorus of one of Wicked Lambs’ more popular songs.
No matter how much I want to head-butt that woman 95% of the time, there’s no way in hell I could deny how talented she is, or how amazing she looks on stage in a lace-up corset top, tiny black shorts, purple fishnets stockings, and black leather boots. She doesn’t seem to notice the groupies pressing themselves against the stage, shrieking her name at the top of their lungs, or how all around there are cameras flaring as they snap photo after photo of her.
Toward the end of the song, as she scans the crowd, her blue-green eyes lower into the pit and lock with mine. At first, shock registers in her expression—this is the first time I’ve come out to see Wicked Lambs—but then a grin sweeps across her face. She winks at me before flipping her shock of black hair back and crooning the last line of “Let’s Get Messy.”
The crowd goes crazy. As she catches her breath, Cilla seems to soak it all in, reveling in the worship. Once the thunderous applause dies down somewhat, she brings the mic up to her lips. “Wow,” she sighs, her deep voice sounding full of surprise. It sounds so genuine that I almost believe she is. “Can I just say that Dallas makes me so stupidly happy.”
“I f**king love you, Cilla,” a girl screeches from nearby, and Cilla blows a kiss down to the pit before pulling in another long breath.
“Here’s what’s going on.” Eyeing the crowd carefully, she begins to pace the width of the stage. “My manager is going to have my head for this shit, but I wanted to give you beautiful people an exclusive listen to something that hasn’t quite made its way onto one of our albums.”
Once again the audience erupts. A bulky guy standing nearby pitches into me, knocking me forward into two skinny blondes who cast me withering glares before refocusing on what Cilla has to say.
“Me and Brady sat down to write this back in—”She spins around for just a moment to face Brady, her lead guitarist, who mouths “March.” “Back in March. I’d just broke up with my cheating motherfucker of a boyfriend.”
Somehow hearing those words come from a woman who’s been slinking around with her lip poked out because of a man who’s involved with another woman is ironic.
“So, let’s go out with a bang.” Cilla widens her stance. “This one’s called “Second Best.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I listen as Brady plays the opening. The melody falls in line with most of Wicked Lambs’ ballads, but the lyrics are just as punchy and cutting as the last song.
Other woman who needs to f**k off, check.
A man that the heroine scorns and absolutely adores, check.
An entire verse dedicated to how, eventually, he’s going to crawl back to her?
Yeah, that crap’s there, too.
I know the song is about Lucas—I would be a fool not to figure that out—but it’s not until she croons the final line that my slight irritation takes a giant leap over the line into pissed off. Her shimmery-lined eyes locate my blue eyes in the crowd again, and she leans into the microphone almost seductively. “I f**ked him first,” Cilla sings.
She holds my gaze for so long that the big guy next to me stares over at me and draws back, as if seeing me in a new light—a light that also turns Cilla into a victim. My skin feels like it’s crawling as I watch her take a dramatic bow.
Then, she puckers her red-painted lips at her fans. “Thank you, Dallas.”
Chapter 13
I feel like I’m on fire during the brief transition from Wicked Lambs to Your Toxic Sequel, and I barely hear a word the MC says.
Rather than leave and go backstage to wear I’ll most definitely see Cilla, I stick around in the pit for Lucas’s show, but I don’t feel an ounce of that under-the-stars magic I was so excited about earlier this evening. Instead, I notice the bad, the ugly. Like when a drunk, red and black bikini-clad girl gets knocked into the stage. I flinch when she finally manages to pick herself up, and the entire lower portion of her face is covered in blood. Or when two men get into a shoving match over god knows what or who and security has to intervene and drag them away as they scream at each other.