Crimson Desires: An Enemies to Lovers Rockstar Romance (Wicked Crimson Book 1) by Jamie Kade

Author:Jamie Kade [Kade, Jamie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Jack

The Charlotte performance was a blur.

I never needed to drink before shows. I’d been performing all my life, after all. At this point, singing on stage was no more novel to me than doing the daily crossword. Actually, scratch that—it was less novel than the fucking crossword.

But I won’t lie. I took a shot of whiskey before we hit the stage.

Performing for Dad tended to psych me out. Here’s a secret of the music industry: very seldom are shows ever perfect. There’s always some little thing that gets messed up—whether it’s on behalf of the performers or the tech crew. Sometimes a quick change takes longer than planned. Occasionally, a guitarist will start a song in the wrong tuning and stop everything midway so that they can re-adjust their pegs.

Little mistakes like that usually didn’t bug me. I tried to see them as artifacts of the performance—something to differentiate one show from the next.

But knowing that Dad was in the audience, I became hypercritical. As we played through our setlist, I noticed every minor imperfection.

Damien hit a cymbal two measures before he was supposed to. Kane struck the wrong note in the middle of one of our song’s bridges. Zephyr and Axel’s guitars weren’t leveled right at the start of the show and battled for attention throughout the first half of our opening song. Most egregious of all, I was flat on the chorus of our final song.

Nobody in the audience seemed to notice these infractions. But I did.

And if I noticed them, there was a near certain chance that Dad noticed them, too.

By the end of the show, I was sweating like a dog under the hot stage lights. My voice was tired, and my body was spent.

The lights cut out.

But Wicked Crimson wasn’t done yet. Before the sound engineer could cut my microphone, I shouted into it: “Charlotte, you guys were fucking awesome. As a thank-you, we’d like to do one more special encore.”

The crowd roared its approval. Hundreds of excited voices shook the stage.

Ava’s voice crackled over my in-ear: “Jack, what the hell are you doing?”

I ignored her. Slowly, the lights came back on. They seemed twice as bright as before. Twice as blinding.

I turned to Damien, cueing him. He set a rhythm with his hi-hat as I continued to talk. “As you may know, we’ve been hard at work on our second studio album.” More cheers. “Well, yesterday, we finished writing a song that might just make the cut.”

“Jack, I swear to god-,” before Ava could curse me out further, I removed my in-ear and tucked it into my pocket.

“You want to hear it? Make some noise if you do!” I shouted.

The screams were rapturous. I tossed a glance at Kane. He gave me a satisfied nod in return.

“I can’t fucking hear you!” I goaded.

The audience screamed even louder. I grinned like a madman, surveying the crowd of hungry fans. It was almost ironic—with Aster working the merch table, she was going to be one of the only people at the concert who wouldn’t hear the song that I’d written for her.

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