Read Online On the Road: (Vagabonds Book 2) (New Adult Rock Star Romance) by Jade C. Jamison - Free Book Online Page A

take advantage, because I wanted to wash it all off.  I hated the way I felt after what had seemed almost like sexual abuse.  Barbie wanted to party and so they were going to do just that in one of the bigger rooms.  A lot of times we’d just head back to our hotel, but tonight we were hanging around—why, I didn’t know, because I hated this show more than any other we’d performed thus far.
    So I took a quick shower and then headed over to Barbie’s party.  Maybe if I had enough to drink, I could drown out the bad vibes of this place.
    But there was lecherous Andrew and he was hovering a little too close to me in that small room.  We had the roadies, some extra guys from the other bands who didn’t have anything to do for the time being, a few people with the venue, and some other people I didn’t know about.  For some reason, I remembered Peter telling my parents about having a bodyguard with us at all times.  What a load of horseshit.  Maybe I should have told my parents what a liar he was.  But I knew exactly what would happen.  He would hire one and take it out of our future promised pay.  Or maybe he’d withhold the money now, making our daily “stipends” next to nothing.
    Besides, would a bodyguard protect me from my fucking employers?
    I somehow doubted it.
    But Andrew kept coming up behind me and whispering shit in my ear—I couldn’t even hear what he was saying—and instead of having the desired effect I was sure he was aiming for, it was just creeping me out.
    Liz and I were chatting with someone I thought was a fan—a twenty-something guy who said he played in a local band—and she and I were talking about how we’d grown together musically since hitting the road.  We were able to sense what the other was doing, so even if we changed something on the fly slightly, we were okay.  Kelly seemed to be able to read us too, but she didn’t guide where we were going.  And something that people didn’t seem to understand when the Vagabonds split was that Liz’s guitar was just as important as mine.  Giving us labels—lead guitarist and rhythm guitarist—seemed to diminish what Liz did in everyone’s eyes, but it wasn’t like that at all.  Our sound was both of us— together .  If one of us had been missing from the equation, the band would have sounded quite different…even though Liz did a lot of the writing.  She wrote the lyrics and she wrote the music, but once I got my fingers on the tune, I often changed it.  I almost always changed the tempo, something that pissed Liz off in the beginning but she grew to accept it over time.  Usually, I’d make it faster or feel heavier, but once in a while, I’d even slow it down.  Sometimes, I’d change a note or a chord too.  Like the song “Dirge of the Scourge”—if you’d heard it before I touched it, you probably wouldn’t recognize it.  I did an almost entire rewrite of the melody, because I thought the lyrics would be better served with minor chords.  Liz hated it at first and refused to play it, but when I played it one more time at Peter’s request, she saw how the music moved and haunted our bandmates, and she changed her mind.  But that was for our second album, of course, one we hadn’t written as yet while on the road.
    Well, that’s not entirely true.  Liz was always writing, always creating, and she had several notebooks in her luggage that kept all her notes and ideas.
    What I’m trying to impress upon you is that the Vagabonds were held together by Liz.  She was that band.  The sound, though?  That was both of us.  If I hadn’t been around, the band would have sounded a lot different.  I suspect it would have had more of a pop sound or even soft rock.  Actually, no.  Peter knew what he was looking for, what he wanted, and that was probably why he’d recruited me.  He knew Liz needed someone else for balance, to push us into the rock echelon, somewhere we might not have been if not for my