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“I don’t have anything to prove,” I reply evenly.
“Come on. Johnny?” He smirks at the stage manager, who looks away from the act on stage and crosses to the stairs. “You made it if you haven’t played La Mer?”
“Fuck no.” The guy chuckles before returning to his work.
A hand on my arm has me looking over. It’s Eldon.
“Don’t listen to him,” he chides. “He’s jealous.”
“Of my tits?” I demand, and Eldon laughs silently. “Because it’s not of my career. Asshole makes seven figures a gig.”
He shrugs. “After a while, the gigs can blur together. It’s the curse of humanity. The price we pay for having the best fucking job in the world—after a while, it starts to feel like a job.”
The words reverberate through me. I know what he means.
I glance at Maxx, who’s cutting a line of the white powder he bought from the blond guy on the speaker in front of him.
“I was glad to land higher up the list,” I admit under my breath. “But how do I even know if I’m better? I stay clean and work my ass off while some of these guys spend more on coke than I do on rent, and they still make a killing.”
“You have some good gigs lined up this year.”
I’ll be performing in LA, New York, London… Plus, I just squeezed in a month at new club in Ibiza called Bliss. “I saved some time for producing.”
But I can’t kick that thought of La Mer, and Eldon sees the look in my eye.
“If you go chasing after the next club high,” he warns, “you’re no different from him.”
I shake my head, turning to face the older DJ. “Easy for you to say. You’ve played La Mer.”
His lips twitch. “Once or twice.”
I shove a hand through my hair to shake it out after hours beneath the wig. “When we’re even, then we’ll talk.”
Tonight was good, but the high of a job well done is getting shallow and short-lived. Beneath it, I feel empty.
I turn away, but he calls after me. “You ever even visited this Olympus of yours? How do you know La Mer’s all that?”
Because I danced under the stars and fell in love with a man who would never stay mine—a man who smelled like the sea and tasted like desperation—and I wanted them both.
“I just know,” I murmur.
The man I hated held me as if I was the only thing he needed.
The only thing better was having the man I loved hold me the same way.
But that’s over and it’s never happening again.
The phone ringing in my hip pocket jars me out of my head.
When I see who it is, I nearly drop the phone.
“Rae.” The familiar voice is flat, the British lilt making my gut tighten. “I didn’t know who else to call… I need you.”
