Page 14 of Wicked Angel
I pulled out my phone, checked the time, and sent a text to Shayla.You auditioning?
When I looked up again, Trey and Yash were exchanging a look at my expense.
“What? I’m listening. I was texting my sister.”
“I need to impress upon you, Johnny,” Trey said, “how important it is that we hit those dates in the studio. We lose Cary and the studio mid-August. That means we need the album—”
“You’ll have your album. I’m fucking here. You know who isn’t here? JC. He wants to walk out on the band, fine. Let him throw his tantrum.” I looked to Yash for agreement, but he just looked sweaty. “We’ve all seen this before.”
“I don’t think this is like before,” he said.
“He’ll come around.”
“Wish we all knew that for sure, brother,” Trey said evenly. “Four guys in the band. You all need to be onboard to make this work.”
“We go into the studio as planned. We can start without him. He’ll come around,” I repeated.
Trey and Yash exchanged another look.
“We need JC, Johnny,” Yash told me. “We need lead vocals.”
“I fucking realize that.” I got to my feet again. “We’ll have lead vocals.” I looked Trey in the eye and he held my gaze. He nodded slightly, like,Let’s make sure we do, then.
I headed for the door and I heard them getting up behind me, to see me out. Yash would probably follow me out and repeat himself like fifty times, as if I didn’t get the fucking message already.
Fuck, JC.
This was definitely about last night. Obviously, I’d fucked up. Read the situation with Brianna wrong? Not the part where she tore off my pants, that part was pretty fucking clear. But the rest of it.
Her and JC…
How he felt about her?
But no matter what I’d done, this was ugly. Unfair. We were a band. We’d made a commitment.
And it wasn’t like JC was pure as the driven snow. The fact that Yash and Trey were looking at me like I was the only one who’d ever fucked up in this band, or fucked around?
Fuck that. I knew the truth.
JC knew the truth.
There were no angels in this band.
I just needed to go talk to him, set this thing straight.
“I’ll take care of it,” I told Trey, as I shook his hand before leaving his office.
And the thing was, I totally believed that I would.
I once heard that if you put a frog in water and turned up the heat slowly enough, the frog would boil alive. It would die. It wouldn’t jump out of the pot before it got too hot.
And I wondered if the same thing would happen to me.
Maybe when you got used to the heat, you failed to read the cues. Maybe, in truth, you just didn’t want to read them.
To recognize that just one more degree could be the one to end you.
ChapterThree
