It wasn’t so much that he was considering his own ass—how this might play out for him if he let me into that bar. More likely he was considering how badly my ass was gonna get kicked.
“You want me to dance for you, too?” I challenged, allowing a little sarcasm into my tone.
Jude remained silent until I ran out of song. Then he said, “So this is how it’s gonna be, huh?”
“Looks like it.”
“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 recognize me.
I knew the auditions were blind. But it’s not like I was hiding who I was. Other than the assumed name, I was still me.
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 cape later.
This was just me.
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 stopped wearing.
They’d see me a mile away and know who I was.
Seth Brothers.
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 Twitter account.
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 the door.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. I’d never expected Jude to be my problem.
“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 time came.”
“I say a lot of shit,” he admitted. “Not all of it smart.”
“Then we have that in common.”
He grunted again. “Tell you what. You play Metallica for me, you’ve got your audition.”
“Great,” I said.
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 metal band.
Clearly, that wasn’t Jude’s problem. He turned his back on me, a non-verbal dismissal, and headed back toward the bar.
I blew out a breath; kinda felt like I’d been holding it all fucking week.
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 behind Jude.
It wasn’t exactly a red carpet, but it would do.
CHAPTER TWO
Seth
Metallica?
What the fuck was I gonna do?
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. And because 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 Jimi Hendrix.
So much for that fucking plan.
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 but unhurried.
I found myself looking for familiar faces. Wondering who I’d run into first—and how pissed they’d be at me.
Though not everyone in the Dirty universe was pissed at me.
Jude wasn’t the only one who might have my back, when it came down to it. I knew that, and yet, as I looked around… I had to wonder. The truth was, I really had no idea who might be cool with me and who might tear me a new one. In part, this was because, as far as I knew, most people didn’t really know why I was fired from the band this last time. It wasn’t exactly made public.
But mostly it was because I had trouble remembering, even on the best of days, how things had ended the first time I was fired, with most of the people I’d once loved like family.
It was embarrassing—fucking shameful, actually—to have to admit that to myself, but right now, I couldn’t hide from it.
I’d been clean and sober for almost four-and-a-half years now, since finally getting rehab to stick, but my recovery was definitely ongoing. My feet were on the ground, but my head still wasn’t right. Most of my memories from the years when I’d been
