Page 9 of Flames and Flowers
I gravitated to the two of them like a lost planet orbiting the sun, seeking warmth, light, life.
* * *
By the time they were about to leave the tour in March, I was lingering wherever Ash and Danica were, every chance I got, just trying to soak up every errant ray of heat they exuded together.
Spoiler alert: I’d gone ahead and fallen in love with both of them.
I didn’t tell them that, though.
I really didn’t expect it to happen, as stupid as that seemed in retrospect. I didn’t think any of us expected to become so damn indispensable, so essential to one another; them to me, and me to them.
But we did.
Maybe I fell in love with Ash first, because I got out of the gate with him much sooner. I’d been thinking about that kiss for months. By the end of those almost three months of touring together, though, it was hard to remember how it all went down.
But I definitely fell in love with Danica the same way I fell in love with her husband—without meaning to.
How do you fall in love with someone, anyway?
However it happens, no matter how fast or slow, how sweet or how painful, how much you want it or don’t, you end up in the same place. A place where every little thing about the person—or people—you love fascinates you. You think about them more than you probably should. And you’d do anything for them—almost.
I could feel everything in me—my head, my heart, my center of gravity and the beat of my pulse—syncing to their rhythm with a kind of frantic force, with the desperation of knowing that they were leaving soon.
If they were going somewhere for lunch and invited me, I’d drop anything to go with them. If Ash needed a guitar string, I’d fetch it faster than anyone on the crew. If Danica was going shopping for a new dress or fucking dental floss, fuck yes, I was there.
And onstage? I’d never been so happy on a stage as I was when I was sharing it with Ashley Player.
Sure, Zane Traynor was Dirty’s frontman, and whenever he was onstage he owned the entire room, made it his bitch, had the crowd eating out of his fist as he rammed rock ’n’ roll down their throats and they begged for more. But I was all about Ashley. I watched him play his guitar, I watched him sing, I shared his mic, I followed his lead, I worshipped at his feet. The two of us had mad chemistry, and everyone felt it. Every time we came off stage, someone said some version of, “You guys are gonna kill it in your own band.”
The Players were already gaining a fan base, and we weren’t even together yet.
When my birthday came around, the whole band surprised me when Ash’s former bassist, Andy Cooper, ran onto the stage and stole my bass right out of my hands. They ripped into a cover of Velvet Revolver’s “Dirty Little Thing,” which they’d been rehearsing without me like a bunch of sneaky bastards. They played itfor me, because Ash had told them that it was the first song on my vortex playlist. Zane and Ash sang the hell out of it, together, like the crazy-ass motherfuckers they were, and Ash serenaded me with the guitar solo on his beat-to-hell Fender, on his knees, atmyfeet.
And for a few minutes after it was over, as the crowd roared and the song echoed in my ears and the band piled onto me for happy birthday hugs, I was pretty sure I’d expired and gone to rock ’n’ roll heaven. But the bottle of ice-cold beer Ash dumped over my head brought me back to reality.
From that night on, “Dirty Little Thing” stayed in the setlist, and every show, Ash dedicated it to me before we rocked it out.
The magic moments didn’t end when we came off stage, either.
And they weren’t only between Ash and me.
Mere days before they left the tour, Danica sat me and Ash down in their hotel room and played “Leaving On a Jet Plane” for me, while strumming it out on one of Ash’s acoustics, all by herself. She wasn’t a great singer or even a good singer but she had a soft, pretty voice and she tried. I didn’t even know she could play a single chord. I mean, she could barely play a chord, but she played it with such determination and concentration, I could tell she’d been working on it, hard. I knew Ash and Seth had been giving her lessons, casually, but I had no idea she’d managed to learn a whole song.
When I asked her why she’d done it—clearly she had no future in music or anything—she just said, “I wanted to play a song for you before we left.”
Then she gave me a hug that lasted for about half an hour while we curled up on the couch together. I had my leg wrapped around her and Ash just sat in a chair facing us, sipping a beer, with a faint smile on his face as we talked.
At that point, I would’ve leapt into bed with them in a heartbeat, if they’d asked me to. Because fuck policies about not messing around with bandmates or married couples. I’d never wanted a bandmate or a married couple like I wanted these two people.
I wasin love.
I’d never fallen in love with a married couple before, and I’d definitely never fallen in love with a couplebeforeI fucked them.
But. They didn’t ask.
* * *
Two days later, Ash woke me up mid-morning and said we were going to a tattoo parlor.
