Follow Me Back Page 17

  He blew into his hands again and stamped his feet against the cold.

  Cold feet.

  The words came to his mind unbidden, and he frowned as he stamped again. She should have been here by now. It must be after six.

  “Come on, Tessa,” he whispered. “Don’t back out on me now.”

  He’d spent all day planning how this meet-and-greet would go, but he hadn’t seriously considered that she might not show. Not after the talk they’d had last night.

  He hadn’t meant to tell her just how much he felt over DM. He wanted to say it in person, standing face-to-face, but he couldn’t hold back in the end. He simply didn’t have the strength to keep the words inside for a second longer. It must have been the song request that did him in.

  As long as he does “Snowflake,” I’ll be happy.

  A thrill coursed through him when she’d said that—a trail of icy heat that prickled from the nape of his neck to the tips of his toes. She had no idea how much it meant to hear her say she liked the song. And not just that she liked it. I wish someone would write a song like that about me.

  A lopsided grin sprang onto Eric’s face as he remembered.

  Tessa, I DID write that song about you.

  He’d entered those words into his message bar, and then he’d sat there staring at them for a long moment with his finger over the Send button. So tempting to come clean and get it off his chest.

  Maybe he should have sent that message after all.

  Maybe then she would be here now.

  He hadn’t gone through with it though. He’d settled for telling her how he felt instead—and that confession had been terrifying enough, until she said the word back to him: L-O-V-E.

  God, he would have given anything to be with her at that moment. He would have given every single cent he had, and every last breath in his body, and every drop of blood running through his veins just to be there, wherever she was. Just to put his arms around her and cry with her, instead of what they had to settle for: two solitary souls crying in the artificial glimmer of their phones.

  She’d talked to him for hours afterward. They both stayed up half the night. He’d finally found the magic words to make her trust him, and then the real breakthrough had happened. The whole story had come pouring out of her. That awful story. It made him want to wrap her in his arms even more and take that ugly memory away so she never had to think of it again. He’d felt so powerless, sitting there in silence, watching as she sent him DM after DM. Every sordid detail of her four weeks in New Orleans.

  Now he finally understood. It all made sense. The phobia, and all those triggers that she’d mentioned over the months…

  Crowds.

  Being followed.

  Eyes watching her while she slept.

  He realized, at that point, that the concert might not be such a good idea. It might be more than she could handle. He’d brought it up before they both signed off, and the memory of those final messages swam inside his head.

  Taylor: Tessa, are you sure you want to do this? We could skip the concert. I could come to your house instead.

  Tessa H: But you don’t know where I live.

  Taylor: That could be rectified.

  Tessa H: No.

  Taylor: Really? After everything you just told me, you still won’t trust me with your address?

  Tessa H: No, no, it isn’t that. I just need to do this for myself. It’s my New Year’s resolution. I need to leave my house.

  Taylor: But it doesn’t have to happen tomorrow. Small steps, right?

  Tessa H: Small steps aren’t getting me anywhere. If I can’t leave my house for something as big as this, then I don’t know that I’ll ever get out of here.

  She’d seemed so certain—so bound and determined to come. But now here he was, all alone again. Just a pathetic, lonely guy with a girl who said she loved him, but not enough to let him see her face.

  With a sigh, Eric turned to go inside. He reached out toward the double doors of the club, but he paused at what he saw reflected in the glass. A sudden flicker of movement.

  Was someone out there after all? A fan?

  Eric squinted into the darkness, but he couldn’t see much from this distance. He could barely make out the silhouette of a human form. Medium height. Skinny. Downright spindly, in fact, with the arms and legs of a spider or a praying mantis. There was something odd about the head. No hair? Eric shielded his eyes with his hand and leaned forward into the wind to get a better look. No neck either, at second glance. Maybe that was a hood. A hoodie sweatshirt… Male or female? Facing toward him or away? Eric couldn’t tell. Just a solitary figure, standing still, with one foot in the parking lot and one foot in the shoulder of the road.

  There was no way it could be Tessa, right?

  No. Definitely not. Tessa wouldn’t be standing out there all alone. She was supposed to be with her therapist. And when she did show up, she wouldn’t be on foot. She’d told him this morning that she would be riding in Dr. Regan’s silver SUV.

  So where the hell were they?

  The fan started moving, but she still didn’t turn to face the club. She made her way over to the far corner of the lot, and then she started walking down the side of the road.

  Eric craned his neck to watch her, unsure if he should do something. It couldn’t be safe. She’d be nearly invisible to any passing cars, dressed as she was in dark clothing. Did she need some kind of help? Should he call out to her? He hesitated, watching the figure’s slow progress, until her shadow disappeared around the bend.

  Not a fan after all, apparently. No gate-crashers at all tonight? Not that he was complaining. Eric jammed his hands into his pockets and kicked his foot at a loosened stone, sending it skittering across the pavement of the parking lot.

  The empty parking lot…

  Or mostly empty, at any rate. The handful of cars scattered before him belonged to the club’s staff, plus the rental car that Maury had driven there from Dallas. Eric’s own car didn’t occupy a space. When he arrived a few hours ago, he’d pulled around to the service entrance at the side of the building and ditched his Ferrari back there. He didn’t want to draw too much attention to its presence, just in case some aggressive fan decided to stake it out and follow him after the show.

  Follow him. What a joke. There were no fans here tonight. He could’ve ditched his car on the side of the road with a big, red “For Sale” sign in the window, for all it would’ve mattered. No passersby at all, except for that one weirdo.

  Eric turned his head to look in the direction she had gone. Or he had gone? Was it a man after all? Some kind of drifter, perhaps, trying to hitch a ride into town? Eric didn’t have much time to speculate. His ears perked up again, detecting the faint but unmistakable hum of a car engine.

  “Here we go.” He took his hands out of his pockets and stood up tall, straightening the rabbit’s foot that hung around his neck.

  Two beams of light came into view. Eric leaned forward expectantly, waiting for the SUV to emerge from the shadows, but he only saw the headlights peeping out from around the bend. He watched, holding his breath, until finally the two lights moved again. They still didn’t come closer. Instead, they seemed to swing around in a wide arc. For a moment, the white beams were replaced by the faint red flicker of taillights. And then the total darkness fell again.

  That wasn’t Tessa either. Eric’s face fell with disappointment as he listened to the fading sound of the engine. That guy out there must’ve gotten a ride. Someone just picked him up and did a U-turn.

  “Dammit, Tessa,” he said.

  This was getting downright irritating now. Suspense was one thing, but the warm glow of anticipation had all but faded as Eric resigned himself to the truth. Nothing was going to happen. Not tonight. After all that, she wasn’t even coming. After he’d spent this whole long day imagining the moment—imagining what she would do and say, and the way her face would look.

  And now here he was, standing alone
in an empty parking lot, freezing his ass off.

  Eric wrapped his arms around himself as another powerful gust of wind buffeted him. Maybe if he DM’ed her, he could still wheedle her address out of her. He had to try, right? Tomorrow night he had another tour stop in Santa Fe, and then Denver the night after that. Whatever happened tonight, he would have no choice but to leave town in the morning. He only had one chance to meet her. He only had tonight.

  He pulled out his phone and hung his head at the sight of his Twitter home screen. No little blue flag to indicate an unread message. She hadn’t DM’ed. Twenty minutes late now, and not one word of explanation.

  He flicked onto his messages and began to compose a text.

  Taylor: What happened? Are you—

  But he broke off in midsentence. His eyes registered the last message on the thread, and he squinted at it in confusion. Wait a minute. Not just one DM, he saw as he scrolled up. A whole back-and-forth exchange.

  Which could only mean—

  His brows drew together slowly as he struggled to make sense of the words:

  Taylor: Tessa, there’s a million other fans here. Wayyyy too crowded. Pull over and pick me up.

  Tessa H: Hold on. Pulling over. Where are you?

  Taylor: Look up, dummy. I’m the one with the rabbit’s foot walking toward the car.

  23

  OTHER FISH IN THE SEA

  Eric reread the DMs, his mind spinning. Messages to Tessa. From him. But not from him. It could only mean one thing…

  Username: @EricThornSucks

  Password:

  A coldness clenched around his chest, squeezing the breath out of his lungs. How had he not seen it coming? All this time, he’d focused on what happened to Dorian Cromwell. How many times had he looked back over his shoulder to see if someone was following him? And someone had been! Not walking down the street perhaps, but following him just the same. Some hacker stalking his Twitter from afar…

  Or had he laid eyes on her before? Could it be the same one who jumped onstage in Seattle? Green eyes. Dark hair. Maybe five foot nine…The memory of her shrill voice still echoed in his mind: Wait! He knows me! I’m telling you—he follows me on Twitter! He’s followed me for years!

  Delusional. Convinced of some secret relationship that only existed in her own imagination. How many times had he tried to warn his record label? He knew it was only a matter of time.

  What had happened to Dorian was horrifying enough. But this…this was unimaginable. This fangirl hadn’t gone after him. She’d gone after the one he loved. She’d gone after Tessa.

  And Tessa had no idea.

  Eric’s hand leaped to his throat. Would Tessa go with her? Would she fall into the trap? Would Tessa think…

  His mind raced back over old conversations, hopelessly jumbled inside his head.

  Maybe I’ve seen Catfish too many times, she’d told him, not so long ago. Pretty much the same plot twist every time. Are you secretly a girl?

  Tessa. No!

  That damned pink rabbit’s foot. There were only two pink ones left on the little hook next to the gas station cash register. Eric had purchased one this morning and left the other one hanging.

  He should have bought them both. Hell, he should have bought all the other colors too. Cleaned out the whole rack. He should have bought every last rabbit’s foot in the entire state of Texas. He’d just left it there, dangling on the end of the hook. And someone else had bought it. Someone else had held it out to her. And Tessa must have fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

  The seemingly innocuous events of the past twenty minutes took on new significance. The spindly-legged figure in the parking lot… The pair of headlights that stopped just before the final bend in the road…

  That must have been her. Eric had stood right there and watched the whole bait and switch go down. The car had idled briefly, just long enough for introductions. Then it swung around in a U-turn and went—went where, exactly?

  They could be anywhere.

  Did they go back to Tessa’s house? But where was that? She’d never given him the address. And now she was out there somewhere with…with…

  Eric felt the bile rise in his throat, and he swallowed hard. He couldn’t lose it. Not now. He needed to think.

  He only had one hope—one way to reach her. He double-tapped the Caps Lock and began firing off DMs:

  Taylor: STOP!

  Taylor: TESSA, THAT WASN’T ME!

  Taylor: I’M STILL AT THE CLUB!

  Taylor: TESSA, GET OUT OF THE CAR!

  She would see the notifications. She had to. She always did. How many times had he messaged her at some random hour of the day or night only to be rewarded with an instantaneous reply?

  “Come on, Tessa,” he whispered hoarsely. “Answer me, goddammit!”

  • • •

  Tessa’s fingers itched to check her phone, but she didn’t want to be rude. It was just a nervous tic—not like she would have any messages worth reading. She was already sitting next to the only person whose DMs mattered, right here on her living room couch.

  The conversation had once again faltered into silence. Tessa chewed her nails, racking her mind for something else to say. She hadn’t expected her first meeting with Taylor to turn into such a horror show. How could it be this painful? They always had so much to talk about over Twitter. They could go on and on for hours. But here, in real life, it was almost like sitting face-to-face with a completely different person.

  Tessa didn’t know why she felt so awkward, exactly. Taylor seemed nice enough. Or Blair, Tessa mentally corrected. That pretty much summed up the entire conversation on the ride back to her house.

  “Are you Taylor?” Tessa had asked, despite the rabbit’s foot held out in confirmation.

  She hadn’t caught the answer. She’d locked eyes with the stranger who approached the car, and she’d felt the weirdest sensation. Not a panic attack, but even more disturbing in a way. It was almost as if her whole brain shut down for a moment. She didn’t pass out, but her mind went kind of numb—like when your hand falls asleep, and you know it’s still attached to the end of your arm, but you’ve lost all ability to control it. Could that happen to a person’s brain?

  She only spaced out for thirty seconds, and then the sight of the rabbit’s foot brought her back. Blair must have handed it to her. They were seated side by side in the backseat of the car at that point. Tessa had clutched the lucky talisman in her lap, struggling to catch up on the missing fragments of conversation.

  “Wait. So, Taylor—”

  “No, I’m Blair. Blair Duncan. You know who I am, Tessa.” The rabbit’s foot glowed pink, as if for emphasis, in the light of a passing streetlamp.

  “Yeah,” Tessa had stammered in reply. “Obviously. Sorry, I’m kind of nervous.”

  Blair had merely shrugged. “So is this…OK? Do you still want to talk and stuff?”

  “Sure.” Tessa had tried for a friendly smile. She’d worked out that Blair must’ve lied about the name, but big deal. Tessa could live with that. And that picture of man feet attached to a pair of well-muscled calves? Oh well. She wasn’t all that surprised. Maybe Blair wasn’t exactly what Tessa had pictured all those lonely nights falling asleep by her phone, but Tessa had promised herself to keep an open mind. If all she got out of this was a friend, that wouldn’t be the worst thing—still a lot more than she had going in.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t go to the concert?” she’d asked.

  “Definitely not. It’s a total circus back there. There’s got to be somewhere quieter we could go.”

  Tessa had cast her eyes uncertainly in her therapist’s direction.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you to consider Tessa’s feelings, Blair,” Dr. Regan had said from behind the steering wheel. “My advice would be to go where Tessa feels most comfortable. Your own house would make sense, Tessa.”

  “Home?”

  A part of her had wanted to protest. She’d gone to
so much trouble to avoid telling some online stranger where she lived. She’d left her house for the first time in months just so the two of them could meet in a public place. But Tessa held her tongue. If her therapist thought it was safe, then her fears must be irrational. And she’d already left her house. She’d shown herself that she could do it. What else did she have to prove?

  Now she and Blair sat alone together in her living room. Dr. Regan had left them a few minutes ago to wait outside in the car, in spite of Tessa’s whispered protestations. “What if I start to panic?”

  “Do you have your pills with you?”

  Tessa had set them on the coffee table, and Dr. Regan nodded in approval, issuing her final instructions to Blair on her way out the front door. “If she starts to hyperventilate, give her two pills with a glass of water. You can text me for help from Tessa’s phone.”

  “But why don’t you just stay?” Tessa had argued.

  Her therapist murmured something about giving them space to get acquainted. No doubt Dr. Regan found the awkward silence too unbearable to withstand for more than a few minutes. Tessa couldn’t blame her.

  Blair shifted restlessly on the couch, and Tessa fought the urge to cover her nose. With every movement Blair made, Tessa caught another whiff of the overwhelming scent: some kind of flowery fragrance, so intense that it stung the inside of her nostrils.

  Tessa snuck a sidelong glance. Blair was leaning to adjust the oversize duffel bag, still slung over one shoulder.

  “Do you want to put that somewhere?” Tessa asked.

  “No. It’s OK. I’ll just keep it—”

  “Here,” Tessa said, helping to ease the bag onto the floor. “Wow, that’s ridiculously heavy. What do you have in there?”

  Blair’s eyes darted away for a brief instant. “Just…stuff. Maybe it’s my Eric Thorn CD collection.”

  “CDs? But he only has three albums.”

  “Right. Well, I brought along my CD player too. You can never be too prepared.”

  Tessa’s forehead furrowed as she eyed the bag. Who traveled with a CD player? Who even owned a CD player nowadays? “Don’t you have iTunes?”