My Rock #2 (The Rock Star Romance Series - Book #2) Read online

  MY ROCK #2

  THE ROCK STAR ROMANCE SERIES

  By Alycia Taylor

  Copyright 2014. All rights reserved.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  TRISTAN

  I alternated between loving and hating L.A. Today, I fucking hated it. I was stripped down to nothing but my jeans and I was still sweating like a fucking pig on a spigot. Supposedly you didn’t need air-conditioners in the City of Angels. Apparently the guy who came up with that idea was from out of town. It was hard to think when it was this damned hot. I had to be back on stage for the next “elimination round” for Fresh Voices in a couple of days and I wanted to knock their socks off. I had kind of thought I didn’t really care about that shit anymore. As long as I had a place to play my music a couple times a week and they paid me enough to pay my bills and have a little left over for recreation purposes, I was good. Then all of a sudden I was back on a real stage with the hot lights in my face and real equipment that didn’t fucking screech in the middle of your set….it was like I was suddenly back home. I ate up the applause, and knowing people were sitting at home watching me on television was addictive.

  I reached for my blunt…this was the fantastic thing about living here in Southern Cali. Being so close to the border meant that I didn’t have to buy shit that some crack head grew in his kitchen or in his granny’s garden out back. This stuff was grown and cut by professionals in Mexico where it should be. They know what they’re doing over there. I didn’t smoke anything but Acapulco Red and it was some good shit. Sprinkle it with some high-grade coke and wrap it in a cigar and you got yourself one mother-fucking good blunt.

  Damn! I really need to stop getting distracted with the heat and my smoke and write this damned song. I want to win this shit. I want a million fucking dollars. I’d never even seen that kind of money. I was sixteen when I started playing music so of course my parents decided to become “managers” like every other fucking child star’s parents in this shitty town. They did okay…for a while. Somewhere along the way the old man got me to agree to sign some paperwork that said he’d be my manager and the trustee for my assets and income until I was twenty-one. I was probably high at the time…and it was probably from something that mother fucker had given me.

  I did my first stint in rehab at seventeen…before Uptown Boyz had even gotten famous. The record producer said if I didn’t clean up my act he would take steps to terminate the contract. The old man panicked at the thought of losing all that cash and he took me to some hide-away cult in the Santa Ana hills that called themselves a rehabilitation facility. I stayed there for a month with a few other “child stars” and I learned a lot. Most of it had nothing to do with staying clean, but when I got out, I kept that part to myself. For a while, I kept it together and acted like a good boy…I loved performing and losing that option was the only threat that worked on me. I didn’t have any real friends, what I had were followers…audiences…fans…I was lost without them. Those other shitheads in the band were straight-arrows. They all had mommies that followed them around and made sure they weren’t letting the over-night fame go to their heads. My mommy was busy doing other things….like the record producer and a couple of the daddies and God only knows who else.

  While she was doing them and I was touring and earning fucking millions of dollars, the old man was “investing” my money. By the time I was twenty-one and the band broke up and I went to him and told him I wanted control back of my money there was about fifty grand left. My parents both partied like wild ass teenagers and by the time I relieved them of the paltry sum they’d saved for my future, Mommy was a crack-head and Daddy had gotten a taste for brown sugar in a syringe. Big fucking waste of oxygen, both of them.

  I took another hit off the blunt and wrote a few more notes. My mind wouldn’t be still. I crushed out the blunt and picked up the bong. I needed to lay off the powder for now and calm my thoughts down so I could write.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ELLY

  The first thing I did when I got to work on Monday morning was look at the schedule and breathe a sigh of relief. Tristan wasn’t due up again until Thursday. After that the show would go live and if he made the first cuts he’d be in the studio twice a week. I would need to make sure and stay far away from him. I was lucky that Molly was the one who’d seen him kiss me. I had a few days before he came back in at least to either do damage control with Molly, or she had a few days to forget about seeing that kiss. Either way it needed to be forgotten and it needed to not happen again. Molly and I had started becoming pretty good friends. Good enough that I hoped and even prayed a little that she hadn’t gone to Clint with what she’d witnessed already. I had obsessed about it all weekend.

  “Hi Elly,” It was Molly. I guess this was the moment of truth.

  “Hey Molly, how was your weekend?”

  “It was good. My boyfriend and I took his nephew to Disneyland. It was fun, but the kid wore me out.”

  I smiled, sometimes when I heard Molly or some of my other friends talking about the things they did with their boyfriends…just normal, everyday things, I felt a little envious. I imagined what it would be like to have a relationship like that, one that was about normal everyday life and not where the next party was at…or the sex….

  “Hey Elly, can we talk for a minute before we get started?” Molly was looking around to make sure no one else in the room was listening. Everyone was bustling to get things set up. It was what Molly and I should be doing, and I’d rather be doing…but I guess I’d better get this over with before I let it gnaw an ulcer through the lining of my stomach.

  “Sure Molly, what’s up?”

  I almost laughed as she looked around again and then took me by the arm and led me over into the corner. Her suspicious demeanor was likely to draw attention by itself.

  When we got as far away from everyone else as we could she said, “I’m not usually nosy. Some things are just not my business and I’m okay with that. But I like you, Elly and I know how important this internship is for you. I love working with you too. You pull your weight and you make it fun. With all that being said, I have to ask what’s up with you and that Rogers guy?”

  I took a deep breath and for a second, I thought about lying. I couldn’t do that though. She’d come to me with her genuine concern and she’d been honest and direct, I owed her at least that much.

  “Do you remember the band Uptown Boyz?”

  “Yeah sure,” Molly said. “I danced my first dance to one of their songs.”

  I smiled because I had too. “That guy, Tristan Rogers was part of the band. As far as I was concerned at twelve years old, he was the band. At fifteen I still had the crush, but it had waned a bit. After a while the crush faded and I was over it. But then I saw him performing at a bar not too long ago. It was before we had started production and before I had any clue he would be a contestant. We kind of…hooked up that night.”

  “That’s why he looked so familiar! I knew I’d seen him somewhere but I just couldn’t place him. It’s been…what…six or seven years since they quit putting out albums.” She looked like she was thinking about that then suddenly she grinned broadly and said, “You got hot and nasty with an Uptown Boy! Go girl!”

  “Shh!” I told her with a laugh.

  “Seriously though,
” she said, “I’m just afraid someone else will figure it out and talk to Clint or Jake about it. You don’t have to worry about me. I won’t say anything….if you really like him you should go for it. Just be careful.”

  “I don’t,” I said, too quickly. “I don’t really like him. It was something that I never do…just sex. I can’t even explain it, it was like being a teenager again and unable to control my hormones.”

  “He’s pretty hot…when he cleans up,” she said.

  “I know, huh?” I said with a giggle like a little girl. Where the hell did that come from? “I think the grunge thing is part of his whole persona now.” I really didn’t. From the looks of his apartment, he was just a little bit lazy, I think. Maybe too busy partying, but I didn’t want to think about that. The real question is why I feel the need to defend him. He’s hardly been nice to me. I had no idea where that compulsion came from, but it was there.

  “So, did he tell you the real reason the band broke up?”

  We had spoken so little that I was probably lucky he even told me his name, but I wasn’t close enough to Molly yet to share that with her. Said out loud it translates into me being some kind of desperate slut who’s willing to have sex with a guy who has nothing to say to her. I’d let poor Susie be my dumpee there for now. Instead I just said,

  “No, he doesn’t really talk about it.”

  “I heard it was because he had to keep going back to rehab. If I remember right, he was in rehab four or five times. I saw an article once where he talked about it. He said that his parents started giving him uppers and downers when he was just a kid.”

  “Seriously?” I’d like to find that article now. It might give me a little insight into the enigma that he was. “That sucks. I can’t imagine having parents like that.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to work on a show that promotes child stars. I think maybe fame is just too much on a kid’s psyche. They always seem to turn out so messed up. Or maybe the parents who are drawn to put their kids in show business are the messed up ones. I’ll stick to working with adults who act like children,” she said with a giggle. Then she said, “Have you been to his place?”

  I almost visibly shuddered at the memory, but I suppressed it and said,

  “Yeah, once.”

  She looked excited again and said, “Is it really nice?” I remember seeing a magazine spread in Teen Beat one time of where he lived. I was about thirteen at the time and the house was a sprawling mansion in Orange County. I thought about how hard his life must have been to go from that to where he is now.

  “No…he actually lives,” how to put this delicately? “He just lives like a normal person.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t have any money left. I hear that happens to a lot of them too.” Molly was a walking gossip column.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that too, it’s sad.”

  “I shouldn’t speculate since I don’t know him,” she said, “But he has to be at least close to broke, right? I mean, he’s auditioning for a reality show that promotes new talent when he was already part of a band that traveled the world and sold out concerts…He’s got to be doing it for the money, right?”

  I didn’t really know. I barely knew anything about him except that he was great in bed. I looked up at the clock and realized that it was after eight already and we needed to get to work. I also still felt like I wanted to protect him and I felt bad, like we were talking behind his back.

  “All boy bands must come to an end, right?” I said.

  Molly smiled and said, “Yes, but then they should all go on to become Mark and Donny Wahlberg. They don’t need a boy band to be sexy.”

  I laughed and said, “In a perfect world.” In my mind, I was thinking, that neither did Tristan. I didn’t say that to Molly though. I was already trying to get her to forget about that kiss. “I’m going to start lining these contestants up, but Molly…thank you. I can’t tell you how much it means to me that I can trust you not to say anything.”

  “Ah, it’s no more than you would do for me. What are friends for?” she said. “Just be careful, girl.”

  “You can bet on it,” I told her. As I walked away, ready to get this day moving I felt like the weight that was on my chest all weekend had been removed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TRISTAN

  Wednesday morning I had to drag my ass out of bed at the crack of dawn. It wasn’t easy. I tossed back two Rockstar energy drinks and did a quick line, trying to wake myself up. About half an hour later when I got out of the shower, I realized that was a mistake. I was so amped up then that I couldn’t sit still. Fuck! I had to be at the studio to meet with the musicians by nine. It was already ten after eight. I rolled a quick joint and took a few hits off of it. I hoped that would calm my ass down enough that I might be able to concentrate. I think it helped.

  Once I got on the road I remembered that another thing I hated about L.A. was the traffic. Besides the fact that I just loved the feeling that being on the bike gave me, I kept it because it was a hell of a lot easier to weave in and out of traffic than it was to beat the shit out of the morons who were constantly getting in your way. I don’t have a good grip on my temper sometimes and I do suffer from road rage. I blame it on the fact that California is populated by idiots, but since I don’t want to go to jail, I do things to try and avoid it. Sometimes I took a taxi around town if it was too cold or too far to go on the bike. Those drivers are bad-ass. They don’t have to worry about road rage….or even simple laws for driving. If someone gets in their way, they’ll just drive up on the fucking sidewalk. It’s a beautiful thing, as was my driving today on the bike….

  I made it to the studio with ten minutes to spare. I parked the bike up front, which was another benefit of riding it and I hurried in. As I made it down the long hall towards the music room I heard her voice. Elly, the hot brunette that I couldn’t get off my mind. She was herding the contestants in and I had an almost overwhelming desire to sneak in and see if she had time for a quickie in the men’s room. It had been a long time since I’d had sex with a girl and then actually wanted to do it again and again….I’ve hardly gone an hour since the first time she and I hooked up that I didn’t think about doing it again….unless I was high and then that’s all I thought about.

  I looked at the clock on the wall and told myself that I didn’t have time today. She probably couldn’t get away right now either. I’d check in with her later.

  There were four guys in the music room when I got there, a pianist, a bassist a drummer and a banjo player. It was just what I’d ordered, so we were starting out on the right foot.

  The pianist seemed to take charge and make the introductions and the guy on the drums who was about my age stared at me for a long time before finally saying, “Uptown Boyz?”

  “Yeah,” I said, hoping he’d leave it at that.

  “Cool,” he said. That was it, I liked this guy. I gave my music to the pianist and he looked at it and then did a double take.

  “Wow, this is a lot different from the original score,” he said.

  “Yep, I changed it. Is it going to be a problem?”

  He scrutinized it again and then he said, “Nah, I can work with it. Let me make these guys a copy and we’ll get started.”

  He left and the drummer said, “You wanna go out back for a smoke with me while we wait.”

  “Sure.”

  I followed him out and to my surprise and delight he lit up a fat joint, took a long drag and handed it to me. I was all over that. We stood outside just smokin’ no talking until the bass player called us back in. The piano guy made copies of the music for everyone and passed it around. After a few minutes they all agreed they could do it and we got started. I had to stop them a few times and make adjustments once I actually heard the lyrics along with it, but all in all it went well and within a few hours we had it down and ready for the set on stage tomorrow.

  I felt stoked when we finished. This was a good song
for me and a great music arrangement…I felt like I was already on my way to the next round. I thanked them all and headed back out. When I got to the audition room I paused outside the door. I was craving Elly. It was quiet in there and I wondered if they’d wrapped up for the day. I also wondered about myself a little. I could usually give two shits about a girl that required any more effort on my part than slipping on a condom. There was just something about this girl’s pussy I couldn’t get enough of.

  The door pushed open then, nearly knocking me on my ass and Elly came out. She looked startled at first, but then I smiled at her and she actually turned her head to the side to keep from looking at me. She headed down the hall like she was on a mission. I started following after her wondering what was up. I saw her grab a door knob and she opened the door a crack and slipped inside. I stopped outside the door she’d gone into. It was clearly marked, “Janitorial closet.” What the fuck? Did she want to avoid me that badly that she was hiding in a closet? I opened it, intending on asking her what the hell was going on.

  “Close the door! Jeez, it took you long enough to come in. Were you having trouble reading the sign on the door?”

  “Harsh,” I said. “No, I’m just wondering why the hell we’re in a closet? Do you double as the janitor?” I could tell by the look on her face that she knew I was just being sarcastic.

  “First, I was trying to get away from you, but when I realized you were following me I slipped in here so we could talk.”

  “It sounds like you don’t want to be seen with me.” Did she think she was too good for me or what? That didn’t make sense. She was the one who said she had a crush on me, and when we were having sex she sure as hell acted like she liked it.

  “I don’t want to be seen with you Tristan.”

  “Again, harsh.” I said. I had to wonder if it was her time of the month. I know women get pissed when men say that, but she was awfully fucking mean all of a sudden.