Adam
My throat was raw.I was all out of words. Three hours of doing radio interviews at the ass crack of dawn, giving the same canned answers, cracking the same jokes, had sucked the cheer right out of me. I tossed the headphones down on the console and leaned back in my swivel chair, groaning and scanning the rest of the members of The Seasons Change.
Callum Rose, bass player and silent motherfucker, tapped on his phone, probably texting his girl, Wren.
Rodrigo Chavez, drummer and sweetest guy I’d ever met, rubbed his eyes like he was just waking up from a long nap.
Iris Adler, lead singer and my best girl friend, was fresh as a fucking daisy in her pink sweats, no makeup, ink crawling up her neck.
“I’m done,” I croaked.
Rodrigo yawned beside me. “Fuck, man, I’m going back to bed.”
Roddy was high energy ninety-nine percent of the time—he had to be to play the drums—but he needed his beauty rest. It probably didn’t help that his girl, Hope, was waiting between his sheets for him. Yeah, he was dying to get back to bed.
Iris scoffed, laid her headphones down a lot more carefully than I had, then pulled her hoodie over her head. “I think you could have napped through those interviews. You and Cally. Adam and I carried.”
Iris carried TSC. It hadn’t started out that way—not when she’d been twenty and had shoved me out of my spot as lead singer to take it as her own. Back then, Roddy, Callum, and I had been so shell-shocked by everything that was Iris fucking Adler, we went along for her ride. Sometimes, that shit got bumpy. Over time, though, Iris had come into her own, and I guessed, so had the band as a whole. Eventually, our roles had solidified. Iris had become our pretty, kind, badass, tattooed planet, and we were her willing moons, hanging out in her orbit.
These days, Iris was all loved up to her ex-bodyguard, Ronan—the dude wore suits on the daily—Roddy and Hope were practically married, and Callumwasgetting married next month to his little bird, Wren. I was still Lone Ranger-ing it, but what else was new?
Roddy shrugged. “I’m better in person.”
The ever-implacable Callum barely reacted. “I showed,” he drawled.
That made me snort a laugh. “Yeah, dude, and while that’s grand, we were doingradiointerviews. No one could see you showed up. The key is to talk.”
He blinked at me. “I talk when I have somethin’ to say.”
I flipped him off. He laughed at me. He used to just stare. It was clear being in love had improved his disposition tenfold.
Iris cracked her neck. “Who wants to have breakfast with me? I need something fried and eggy.”
I ended up being the only one who was in—no surprise. Roddy had been a walking zombie, and Callum wasn’t exactly the social type. So, it was just Iris and me in a two-seater booth at her favorite diner. Except, Iris never went anywhere alone anymore. Her bodyguard, Matt, was perched on a stool at the counter across the aisle from us. He blended as well as a pile of shit on fine china, but oh well. I’d seen firsthand the crazies Iris attracted, so I welcomed the Hulk in a suit looming over us.
Iris wagged her bacon at me. “I keep expecting you to have grown a gut, Wainwright.”
I rubbed my stomach. “What? Why?”
“You haven’t been running with me.” She eyed what she could see of me up and down. “I assumed you’ve been slacking.”
“We don’t always run together.”
That was a stretch of the truth. When we weren’t on tour, Iris and I usually met up in the park for a run once or twice a week. I’d been neglecting our habit lately and hadn’t even realized it.
“We haven’t been out for a run in two months. ‘Not always’ turned to never.” Her blue eyes narrowed. “What gives?”
“Uh…” I stuffed a chunk of bagel into my mouth, “I’ve been running with someone else.”
Her eyes went from narrowed to bugged out in a split second. “Who?”
“My neighbor.”
Her matte-black nails tapped on the laminate table. “Elaborate, sir.”
“She’s—”
She held her hand up. “Enough said. You’re ditching me for your new piece.”