Because he knows that the phone call had at least something to do with him, he holds my face between his hands. “Do you need my help?”
A bubble of hysterical laughter rises in my chest. “No. Absolutely . . . no. I don’t want to give my mother anything.”
Yanking me to him, he holds me against his chest for a long time until my breathing has calmed down. By the time he lets me go, and I sink down on the couch, I’ve managed to regain some semblance of control.
Lucas kneels down in front of me, massaging his thumbs against the backs of my calves. “I’ve got an errand I need to run with David, but if I need to—”
I shake my head quickly. “No, you do what you need to do. If I shut down every time my mom ripped into me, I’d still be twitching on the floor.”
As he gets dressed, I pace the bus, anxious for him to leave. The moment he’s gone, I grab my phone and go outside the bus so Sin won’t hear me. As I wait for Gram to pick up my call, I wrap my arms tightly around myself, afraid that if I let go, I’ll fall apart.
“This is early for you,” Gran answers warmly.
Pulling in a harsh breath, I cut to the chase. “Have you gotten anything strange about me?”
“Sienna, what’s this—?”
“Have you? Any letters or anything since I came out here on this tour?”
Gram’s silence seems deafening, and it tells me everything I want to know. I feel like the breath has been ripped out of my chest. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because it just came yesterday,” she says, her voice defensive. She takes a tremulous breath before continuing. “I ripped that cruel trash up a moment after I read the first line. Do you think I’m going to tell you when someone sends a nasty note to tell me what they think of you, just because they don’t like whom you’re dating?”
“I—” I look down at the asphalt, glaring at a piece of broken glass a few inches away from my feet. “Gram, I’m so sorry someone send something like that to you.”
Not just someone. Samantha. I am almost one hundred percent sure that she is behind the note both Gram and my mother received.
As my grandmother tries to assure me that everything will be fine, I come to a conclusion that makes my nauseous.
Now that my family has been dragged into this mess with Sam, my plan to keep Lucas in the dark just flew out the window.
Because Lucas is gone right up to just before the band’s late afternoon sound check, I decide to wait until after his show tonight to say anything. I can hardly focus on the concert—I spend most of my time nervously looking my phone, checking to see if Sam’s sent me another message and wondering if Gram will call to say she’s received another note.
I haven’t been this nervous—this sick to my stomach—in a long time.
I’ve seen how Lucas reacts whenever his ex-wife is mentioned—hell, I’ve stressed over that reaction. Asking questions about Samantha makes him automatically clam up.
This will result in the same or maybe he’ll finally hit the roof, like he had in our hotel room in Atlanta several months ago.
It’s close to 1AM when everything is said and done backstage. When Tyler lets the band know that we’re facing a slight postponement due to a mechanical issue with a crew bus, Wyatt suggests we take the party back to the bus he shares with Cal.
Which puts yet another delay on my talk with Lucas.
As we walk toward the other YTS bus, Lucas turns around. Walking backwards, he says, “I’ve got to run talk to Tyler for a few minutes.” His lips curl into a relaxed smile. “Can you go on ahead?”
Pushing my hair away from my face, I bob my head. “But Lucas?” He stops walking and faces me, his thick eyebrow cocked as he waits for me to say something. I turn toward him, wringing my hands together. “I’ve really got to talk to you before I leave to go home tomorrow, okay?”
He brushes his soft lips over mine, raking his teeth over my bottom lip before backing away. “Good. There are a few things I need to say to you, too.”
I watch him as he sprints to the crew bus that’s still functioning. As soon as he goes inside, I climb the steps leading up to the bus right in front of me. I’m immediately greeted by the sound of Theory of a Deadman blasting loudly over the sound system.
This is the first time I’ve ever stepped foot inside Cal and Wyatt’s bus, but it has a similar layout to ours.
“Hope you’re ready to take that shot,” Cal says from the kitchen, his dark brown eyes shining in amusement. He holds up two bottles—one of them vodka, the other rum—and dips his head to the hem of my shirt. “You taking it off now or are we doing this later?”
“In your dreams, Calvin.”
I walk down the aisle, passing through the small kitchen until I’m standing in the lounge area. When he spots me standing near the kitchen table with my nose wrinkled at the piles of laundry covering the couch, Cal downs his shot. “You can sit down. I swear the piles of junk won’t bite you,” he says sarcastically.
Knocking a lacy purple bra aside, I plop down on the couch. “I never took you for a D-cup, Cal” I say. To my surprise, he flushes beneath his darkly tanned skin.
“The infamous Heidi was here last week.” I look up to see Wyatt coming out of the other section of the bus. Heidi. That name sounds familiar. When I twist my lips, trying to figure out where I’ve heard it, he says, “She went with Kylie to New Orleans earlier this year.”
“Ah, I see.” I can easily remember a conversation I had with Kylie on the front porch of my grandmother’s house back in February. She had come to visit me to bring a peace offering after she helped Lucas trick me into having dinner with him and had mentioned Heidi. “Will she be coming along with Kylie this weekend in Atlanta?” I ask, and Wyatt mouths a dramatic “no.”
“I can only handle being around Heidi in small doses,” he explains, sitting down at the table across the aisle from me. “As of right now, I’ve overdosed on her this year.”
The bus door swings open, but instead of Lucas, it’s Sinjin who steps inside. When he catches the look on my face, he stops in the middle of the aisle. “Yeah, happy to see your ass too.” Grabbing a beer from the fridge, he takes a seat beside of me, propping his feet up on the table that Wyatt’s sitting at.
“You’ve looked like a damn deer in the headlights all night,” Sin points out, and I tilt my head at him.
That’s because your leader’s ex is playing games with my family.
To Sinjin, I say, “It creeps me out that you’ve been staring at me.” He mutters something, but then I realize he’s shifted his focus on Wyatt, whom he’s now arguing loudly with.
Sliding a little further away from Sin, I pull my phone out of my pocket. There’s a 5% battery warning up on the screen, and I groan. When I get up, I turn to Wyatt. “If Lucas comes in, can you tell him I went over to the other bus?”
After Wyatt promises that he will, I go outside. It’s chilly tonight, and by the time I get inside of our bus, I’m shivering and hugging myself. Leaving my phone to charge, I go through my luggage until I find the only jacket that I brought with me—an Echo Falls hoodie I’d been given by my old boss at Christmas last year.
As I leave our bedroom and walk through Sinjin’s section of bunks, the sound of rustling bedspreads stops me in my tracks. Turning around, I flip on the light by the door. When I see a body beneath the covers in Sinjin’s bunk, I let out a snort. “Did you give up on Cal and Wyatt already?” I tease.
When the body rolls over, though, long black hair tumbles over the side of the bed and blue-green eyes stare up at me.
“Is that where he is?” Cilla asks. She bats her eyes innocently. “Then you should go get him for me, Pepper. He and I need to talk.”