1 Chapter 1

Adam Blue sits in his bean bag chair, kicked back, guitar in hand and strumming through a few new riffs on his guitar when the phone rings. He doesn’t look up from his hands and his fingers don’t fumble on the strings.

The phone rings again.

He hums under his breath along with the guitar. He doesn’t think this little ditty is destined to become a song but he’s been picking at it for the past hour now. He has nothing else to do.

The phone rings a third time. He’s just about to holler if anyone’s going to pick the damn thing up when it stops. Finally,he thinks, nodding his head with the rhythm he coaxes from the instrument in his hands. Two seconds later, his mom calls up the stairs. “Adam!”

He scowls and doesn’t answer.

“Adam!” she calls again.

“What?” he yells. Doesn’t she know he’s busy?

“Telephone!”

It’s probably Janie. Adam isn’t in the mood to talk to her right now. She’ll want to know when they’re practicing next so she can show up at the session and flip her hair and dance around the garage in time with Trace’s drums. Between songs she’ll wink at Adam and drop hints that she wants him to take her to a rave later. She’ll ask him what he’s writing now…anything new? Because she loves all his songs and she just knows he’s going to be big one day, and she’ll see him in the magazines and sigh and say she knew him when. She’s their first groupie. How scary.

So he doesn’t pick up the phone. Let his mom tell her he’s busy. “I’m busy,” he says, but he doesn’t raise his voice so he’s sure no one’s heard it but himself.

His mother didn’t. “Adam,” she warns.

“Who isit?” he yells. Damnit. He’s sick of this shit. How old is he? Twenty-three, and still stuck in this house. He can’t wait until he gets out on his own. He has to get a job first though, and he can’t find anything he wants to do because everything takes away from his music. No one understands how important that is to him. No one. “If it’s Jane…”

His mom talks right over him the way she’s always done. “It’s Trace. He says he’s at the deli so pick up already or he’ll get in trouble for being on the phone at work.” She waits a beat. “Did you hear me? I said it’s—”

“I got it, Mom.” Adam jerks his hand across the guitar strings with a discordant sound as he snags the phone. He waits until he hears the other end hang up in his ear. “Trace, what the fuck do you want?”

“What has you so pissed?” Trace Dixon wants to know.

Adam flops back into the bean bag with another sigh, this one overly dramatic. “This fucking place,” he mutters.

“Your dad on your back again?” Trace asks.

Adam laughs. “My stepdad.”

Tim Bluefield hates him. He’s always saying Adam needs a job, needs to make money, needs to move out on his own…like Adam doesn’t knowthis. And he hates Adam’s music—he calls it garbage, and is always making snide remarks about how Adam fills the garage with trash whenever the band is over to practice. Adam can’t waitto leave the asshole behind. What his mother ever saw in that man, Adam will never know.

At the moment Tim is out of the house, thank God. If he had heard Adam’s mother holler up those stairs just now for Adam to answer the phone, it would have caused a scene. Propping the phone between his chin and shoulder, Adam strums at the guitar strings to elicit a mournful sound from the instrument. “He isn’t here. What do you want, man? You just call to shoot the shit? ‘Cause I’m practicing…”

“I’m at work,” Trace reminds him, as if that’s somehow more important. “I had to give up my first born child to use this phone, you know? And I can’t tie it up for long—”

“Then tellme already.” Adam has those chords running through his mind and he’s beginning to think maybe he can get a decent tune from them if he works at it long enough. If Trace will just get off the damn phone already.

Trace laughs. “You sitting down?”

“What?” Adam isn’t in the mood for games. “Just tell me—”

“What would you say if I told you I got us a gig?” Trace asks, interrupting him.

Adam’s heart quickens in his chest, but he warns himself not to get tooexcited. Trace has done this before. “If this is one of your brother’s lame frat parties…”

Trace’s brother Robb sometimes hires their act when he wants live music at his keg parties, and without fail always forgets to pay them. And if Adam has to stand in front of a room full of college-aged drunks flicking their Bics and calling for one more round of “Stairway to Heaven,” he’s going to hurt someone. He has a feeling it’s going to be one of the Dixon brothers. He isn’t picky which.

avataravatar
Next chapter