Page 4 of Dirty Like Seth
“Looks likeit.”
“Looks like an idiot playing guitar in a parking lot,” he said. But then he uncrossed his arms with a small, inaudible sigh. He was looking me over again, top to bottom, seeming to contemplate how quickly the band was gonna recognizeme.
I knew the auditions were blind. But it’s not like I was hiding who I was. Other than the assumed name, I was stillme.
I’d cut off my hair as soon as I arrived in L.A.; it was fucking hot, but the truth was, I was hungry for a change. A fresh start, maybe. No one had seen me with shortish hair since I was twelve, so that was different. I also had a short beard, but I’d been rocking a beard, on and off, for the past few years, and Dirty had seen me bearded. I had aviators on, but this wasn’t exactly a glasses on / glasses off Superman trick. I wasn’t masquerading as Clark Kent and planning to whip out my capelater.
This was justme.
Faded Cream T-shirt, worn jeans, snakeskin boots, bandana in my back pocket. Metal bracelet with the word BADASS stamped into it, which Elle had given me when I first joined Dirty and I’d never stoppedwearing.
They’d see me a mile away and know who Iwas.
SethBrothers.
Former rhythm guitarist and songwriter with Dirty. Fallen star. Pariah. And still, whether Dirty liked it or not, fan favorite. No guitarist who’d come after me was loved as much as I was. No one wanted me back in this band more than the fans. I knew that much from the messages I still received on a daily basis. It was the only reason I kept a Twitteraccount.
It was a big part of what was keeping me here, in the face of increasingly-bad odds. I was starting to feel how bad those odds were, given Jude’s hesitation to even let me in thedoor.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. I’d never expected Jude to be myproblem.
“You sure you want this?” he asked me, his dark eyes locked steady on mine. “Now?”
“You once said you’d have my back, when the timecame.”
“I say a lot of shit,” he admitted. “Not all of itsmart.”
“Then we have that incommon.”
He grunted again. “Tell you what. You play Metallica for me, you’ve got youraudition.”
“Great,” Isaid.
Not great. The only Metallica song I knew well enough to impress anyone—maybe—was “Master of Puppets,” and that did not feel like the way to go with a Dirty audition. Dirty was not a metalband.
Clearly, that wasn’t Jude’s problem. He turned his back on me, a non-verbal dismissal, and headed back toward thebar.
I blew out a breath; kinda felt like I’d been holding it all fuckingweek.
I stuffed my acoustic into its case and picked it up, along with the other case, the one that held my electric guitar—my favorite Gibson. Then I fell in behindJude.
It wasn’t exactly a red carpet, but it woulddo.
Chapter Two
Seth
Metallica?
What the fuck was I gonnado?
As I followed Jude through the red door, I tried to work it out. I’d planned to play “Voodoo Child,” a song that not just any fool with a guitar could pull off, because I knew I could kill it.Andbecause I knew Zane would be impressed with the ego it took to kill it, Jesse would be impressed with the guitar work, Dylan would be cool with pretty much anything Zane and Jesse were cool with, and Elle fucking worshipped JimiHendrix.
So much for that fuckingplan.
But I didn’t have much time to put together another one. The mood of backstage hit me immediately, familiar and unsettling, as I shadowed Jude. The backside of the building was a network of hallways, offices, and storage rooms that snaked behind the main room of the bar. Between the auditions and the filming of the auditions there were a lot people, security, crew, and others who worked for the band or the bar, all bouncing around in a very tight space, kinda like pinballs. Hurried butunhurried.
I found myself looking for familiar faces. Wondering who I’d run into first—and how pissed they’d be atme.
