“Is this okay?” he said, moving his attentions back to my neck: long, slow kisses with occasional tiny nibbles closer to the earlobe. “Mmm,” I managed to say, mind flicking wildly, unable to calm down and process the moment. What was happening? This was my friend Alex. We had flirted, yes. We had been moving toward this. But it all seemed to be happening too fast. The bed gave a little creak as we shifted on it, slowly sliding up toward the headboard so that our legs were no longer hanging off the side.

I listened for any noise outside the door, wondering if Merry would return and interrupt this so that I could have a moment to think about it, but heard only the muffled roar of the hot water in the tub. I pushed him away and sat up. “The water!”

“Hmm?” The lights were still blazing in the room, but the look on Alex’s face was of someone waking from a deep sleep.

“The water in the tub . . . it’ll overflow . . .” I was on my feet, hurrying to the bathroom, robe clutched tightly closed at the neck—he hadn’t touched the knot. I sat on the closed toilet seat and turned off the tap, but made no move to return to the bed.

Alex had followed me to the bathroom but didn’t enter. He leaned in the doorway and my next thought was that he was going to invite himself into a sexy soak. “You’ve had a long day,” he said, giving me a lazy grin. “I’ll leave you to your bath.”

Relieved, I stood up and walked him to the door. “Thank you,” I said. He gave me a soft kiss on the mouth and left with a wink, bumping into Merry, who was returning. I let her in and then closed and locked the door.

“What was that all about?” She wiggled her eyebrows and grinned. “I go out for one cigarette and you get all frisky in our room! Bad girl! Bad Sassy!”

I turned to the bathroom and said over my shoulder, “You shouldn’t smoke.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said dismissively to my back.

“I’m going to take a long bath.”

“Not too long, ’kay? I want to shower off some of this glitter before I ruin this hotel’s good sheets.”

While in the hot water, I let my mind unspool. Thoughts of New York, the energy we helped to carry over for Illuminated Eyes before their show, our burgeoning popularity, Alex’s reconnection with me ever since The Sunrise Show . . . The way he stepped into the hotel room—not insistently, not frighteningly, and not like he was entitled, but in the gentle familiarity of a friend going out on a limb—except everything after that was so close, so intimate. I wasn’t sure how to feel.

He had been a gentleman, though, I thought, turning the hot water tap on again to heat up the cooled bath. Hadn’t we been dancing around for the past couple of weeks in our new situation, getting closer to this moment? I had to know that he liked me, to volunteer as a bodyguard. And I liked Alex. I liked him with me. I liked that he was going to be close when we returned to L.A. I would know somebody who knew me before I was Sassy Gloss. And as far as make-outs go, this had been chaste too: all clothes had stayed on and he hadn’t even tried to put his hands anywhere besides my waist. We were still firmly on first base. The logic was sound, but then again, I was very tired.

I wondered if Alex thought that this brief, passionate exploration of each other’s mouths was supposed to inspire something in me; that he left me with a wink because he assumed I was so riled up that I’d touch myself in the bath. But I was bone-weary. I popped the drain with my foot and listened to the gargle of water down the pipe, toweled off, and went to bed with wet hair splayed out over the hotel pillow.

12.

June 2001

Midwest Leg of the Tour

Cassidy

Coming off the stage, you’re aware of only a few things before the rest of the world starts returning. The bright lights have blinded you, and as the green cast fades from your vision, you see the ropes and pulleys, the unevenness in the floors, the crew members hiding in all-black outfits as they do their jobs. Moreover, your body feels as though it’s been infused with starlight, and the light leaks from your limbs and hands and eyes and mouth in little pinpricks, so if someone were looking directly at you, they’d see a constellation coming out of a silhouette. Slowly, you realize that the heat emanating from your body is the heat of the stage lights that has been absorbed into your hair and the dampness between your skin and your polyester outfit; the sharp pain in your pinky toes as your feet pitch downward in those uncomfortable stage shoes. Scent returns last; the air suddenly, inexplicably, creates a singed taste in the back of your throat, and everything smells a little bit like cardboard and melted plastic. You become aware of your face, contorted in a giant smile, so tense that it’s not just your mouth that is spread wide, but your eyebrows and ears are tensed too.

This was the state I was in when we discovered Stephen St. James outside our dressing room door in Chicago. Giggling, we whooped down the corridor, our shoes clacking on the linoleum. The gangling figure was not a surprise, since crew members were always on the move, but his stillness was. The hat was. The person was. Our new security detail had let him through.

“Hi there,” said Stephen St. James, and we slowed, wondering who he was addressing.

“Hi,” Merry said after a beat.

“I hope this is all right,” he said, waving his backstage pass. “Grant gave it to me.” Grant was the drummer of Illuminated Eyes.

“Yeah, sure,” Yumi said. “I need to get out of these shoes.” She hobbled forward, pushing the door open.

“Want to hang with us?” Merry added. He didn’t say anything, just followed her in. We took seats at a long set of mirrors and in unison slipped off our heavy stage boots with a collective sigh. Our gym bags of supplies were where we’d left them on the floor, strewn with plastic bags of ponytail holders, extra socks, makeup brushes, nylon shorts. Flip-flops and laceless sneakers were aligned next to the base of each of our vanity mirrors, even though we’d kicked them off before the show. It was always a little unsettling when you knew someone had been in to clean up after you, make the edges neater.

I hadn’t seen Stephen since the launch party, when that enviously skeletal brunette was hanging off his arm. I began removing bobby pins from my hair, all the while glancing at his reflection in the mirror. He was seated on a spare stool by the door, slightly out of range of the bulbs glowing from our mirrors.

Stephen St. James looked the same—but not. His face was a little more angular, his cheekbones in high relief. His teeth looked bigger and whiter, possibly veneers. And though he was dressed in his signature paisley collared shirt and a pair of blue jeans, they were fitted so closely to his body that they had to be tailored.

The other girls were conversing lightly, easy stuff that Stephen could jump into if he wanted. My silence could have been interpreted as fatigue, but it was possible to be seen as rude.

“So Cassy, what were you doing earlier?” Merry asked, fluffing her hair out in a halo.

“Nothing really,” I said, my voice sounding unnaturally loud. I was punishing my thumb with a bobby pin, the little bubble at the end dragging repeatedly under the nail. “Just a little sightseeing.”

Since the hotel in Cincinnati a week ago, Alex and I couldn’t find time to be alone, so we just held hands. More often than not, we were on the road at night, in our respective buses, and I was silently thankful that Ian didn’t let Alex spend the night on our bus. I wondered if maybe the boundary between friendship and relationship was just too hard to cross. Alex’s role had always been friend, protector; boyfriend was proving difficult to understand. When I was able to reach Joanna a few days after Ohio and tell her about the kiss, she sounded happy for me.