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She lifted the bottle from the ice and read the label. “This is nice. I’m warning you, I’ll probably drink most of it.”
“Then I’ll order another one.”
She popped the cork. “I guess there are perks to hanging out with a rich asshole.”
I dropped into a chair and watched her. She was wearing a plain gray T-shirt tucked into jeans that fit her like a glove. Her hair was down, the ends falling at her shoulders. She’d put some makeup on—mascara, shadow, probably other kinds I couldn’t see. Onstage with the Road Kings, she’d worn black eyeliner in dark cat’s-eye strokes at the corners. She’d also worn a stretchy black knee-length dress, black tights, and the same black boots she’d just kicked off in my hotel room. Juliet didn’t have to show skin to look like a rock n’ roll wet dream.
“Done staring?” she asked without turning around.
“Fair is fair,” I said. “You have a nice ass.” She’d said it to me, so I figured I could say it back.
Juliet put down the wine bottle, cocked a hip, and pointed at her perfect ass. “I do. And this is all you’re going to see of it, so look your fill.”
I scratched my chin. “For a woman who knocked on my door, you seem awfully fixated on not sleeping with me.”
“You’re convenient,” she said, handing me a glass of wine. “And I’m tired of hanging out with normal women all day. There’s only so much of that I can take.”
She was tense, which was why she was throwing her defenses in my face. I waited a moment for her to sit down and take a sip of wine. Getting Juliet into a relaxed state of mind took patience and skill, and I planned on achieving it. “Admit it,” I said. “The mean girls aren’t as mean as you thought they’d be.”
She sank down on the sofa, her shoulders sagging, and took another sip. “They’re annoying, but they’re all right,” she admitted. “It isn’t them, it’s me. Like always.”
We were getting to the heart of it already. I drank my wine and gave her a raised-eyebrow look. “Go on.”
“They’re decent people,” she said, “including Vicki and Mom. I just don’t know what to say to them, and I never have. And I don’t mean that in an I’m so special, I’m not like other girls way. I mean that I’m a literal fucking alien. In The Muffins, we used to talk about deep shit—history, politics, music, art. We’d stay up all night in the tour van, arguing about something for hours on end until our voices went hoarse. Then we’d go onstage and scream our frustrations out.” She looked down at her glass. “I don’t do that anymore, obviously. We were teenagers. But how do you grow up from that? I haven’t figured it out. And other women my age have everything figured out.”
I was holding my breath as she spoke. I didn’t want her to stop talking, because I had been longing to know what thoughts swirled through her mind, and now she was finally telling me. I waited a moment, then said, “Maybe you should call up your old bandmates.”
Juliet shook her head, still staring down into her glass. “Two of them are addicts now. Stacey is in rehab after overdosing, and Nicole lives with her parents as part of her recovery program. The last thing they need is to talk about the music business. Lena is the only one still playing—she makes weird-ass solo albums, where she shouts poetry over a single out-of-tune guitar. I think she lives in a commune.” She lifted her gaze to mine. “That’s what happens to women in this business. We either burn out or we get really fucked up. There doesn’t seem to be an in-between.”
I thought of Travis, lying sick on a stranger’s sofa after being in one of the biggest bands in the world, and of me, hiding away in my house for years, putting songs on my hard drive because I couldn’t face the business again. “It happens to all of us,” I said. “It’s the hardest business there is. Failure is hard, but success is hard, too. Maybe even harder.”
Our gazes locked, and I knew she was remembering that nineteen-year-old kid with the world on his shoulders, eating lean chicken in the middle of the night in a house he owned but never lived in, stealing a few minutes before getting back on a plane.
“I can’t quit,” Juliet said. “I can’t think of anything else to do.”
I laughed softly, without much humor. “Yeah, I know how that feels.”
“What did you do?” she asked. Her voice had softened, and she wasn’t as keyed up as when she’d walked through my door. “After I met you that night, after you shut everything down. You stopped making music. What did you do?”
“You really want to know?”
She nodded.
I took a swig of wine. This was getting deep. The price of learning what was in Juliet’s head was to tell her what was in mine. “After it was all over, I went to Paris. I picked it because in the times I’d played Paris, I’d never had even an hour free to see it, so it was still on my bucket list. I rented a tiny apartment and lived there for over a year.”
“Do you know any French?” Juliet asked.
I smiled. “No. I tried, and I picked up enough to get by, but my accent was always atrocious, and I did a lot of miming. I got used to being the stupid American.”
She blinked, her glass forgotten. “What did you do?”
“I slept late. I walked around the city. Everyone had forgotten about me, and the French are hard to impress anyway, so no one cared who I was. I spent days in the Louvre. I lay on the grass in the Luxembourg Gardens and looked at the sky. I ate bread and Brie. I forgot about who I was, what I’d thought I wanted. It was a sad and lonely time, but it was also good for me, in a way. It was a time to be myself, whoever that was. Then Travis came to stay with me.”
It took her a second. “Travis White?”
I nodded. “He had a few months off between tours. I think he was avoiding an ex-girlfriend. He seems to like being homeless. Anyway, he moved into my apartment. Travis doesn’t lie in parks and eat cheese, in case you don’t know. He took over my life and gave me a whole new experience.”
Juliet’s eyes sparkled. “Let me guess. The teen pop star got a taste of rock n’ roll?”
