CHAPTER ONE

Someone rapped on the hotel room door.

Gloria squealed, laughing. "He's still there, Phee."

"Shhhhh. It's not funny." Phoenix wasn't in the mood for fan bullshit. If this was the same boy, he'd been outside their hotel suite two solid hours, knocking softly every half hour to let them know he hadn't gone anywhere. What had been amusing at ten wasn't at midnight.

Phoenix pulled a velvet throw pillow from her cousin's bed across her eyes. Before the last knock, Gloria had been flipping through The Source, fantasizing about which men she'd like to hook up with when they had the chance to shop backstage at the Grammys or the MTV Music Awards—It's a tough choice between Tyrese and 50 Cent, huh?

Phoenix's only fantasy right then was to have the strength to walk to her master bedroom across the hall, brush her teeth and go to bed. The OutKast CD sounded tinny and awful from the cheap CD player that doubled as a clock radio, and Phoenix knew she had to be tired, if OutKast couldn't wake her up. She couldn't remember being this trashed on the road before, even when she still had a band hauling instruments and amps.

The knock on their door came again, bolder.

"What's your name?" Gloria called toward her open doorway, and she might as well have been calling down the street. This was the biggest room of Phoenix's tour so far, an elegant suite with two bedrooms, a living room with a dining room table for six, phones and televisions in each bathroom, and Phoenix's master bedroom, with a canopied bed so high off the ground that it came with its own steps. Welcome to the future, Gloria had said when they arrived last night. The room was comped, or Sarge would have put them up at the Budget Inn as usual. At least at Budget Inn, she didn't have to walk so far to go to bed. Everything has a price, she thought.

"Don't encourage that boy," Phoenix said, slapping Gloria's thigh. "I'm not kidding."

"I'm Kendrick," a voice came back, full of false confidence. He sounded young, a kid.

"How'd he find my room? I'm calling Sarge," Phoenix said. Sarge wasn't in for the night yet—he was surely out at one of the clubs schmoozing the radio folks and music writers—but Sarge's cell was always strapped to his belt, fully juiced.

"Don't call Sarge. Damn. Just talk to the man. You haven't been laid in a month."

True enough. Ronn was busy, and so was she. Ronn was in L.A. recording a CD and trying to get his film production company going, and she was in the middle of her radio tour to promote her first CD on Ronn's label, Rising. Three Strikes Records was better known for gangsta rap than R&B, but Ronn had put a lot of labor into Rising, and not just because he sometimes shared his massive four-poster bed with his new artist. With a hit-maker like D'Real producing her tracks, Ronn had told Phoenix she'd better get used to people knowing who she was, the good and the bad.

Was this stranger outside the door part of the good, or part of the bad?

"I rode the bus from New York to see you, Phoenix," said the young man's muffled voice. "I'm prelaw at NYU, not a stalker. I'm only asking for one night, and I won't be bragging to my boys in the morning. I want to be a gentleman and treat you like a lady."

"Phee, boyfriend is smooth. Ask him if he brought a partner," Gloria whispered, and Phoenix pinched her cousins's arm to shut her up. Gloria was crazy if she thought they were going to tag-team groupies tonight, Gloria's favorite fantasy.

But the man had come from New York to St. Louis on a bus just to lay this rap on her? How did he know where she'd be staying, much less where her room was? This boy better hope her father wouldn't stop by the suite and find him standing there. After a month straight on the road, Sarge would not be in the mood for a stranger who didn't understand boundaries.

Phoenix stood up. She was still wearing the tattered jeans and white T-shirt from rehearsal for Friday night's show at Le Beat, her peanut-butter-colored makeup smudging her collar and shoulders. She lifted her underarm, and her tart scent assailed her nose. Gloria was a M.A.C. girl who kept herself glam day and night—streaked hair moussed to perfection, face painted to glorify all the right angles, blouses cut low across her cleavage—and compared to her cousin, Phoenix knew she looked like one funky mess. Funky and tired.

So why was she wasting the energy she'd saved for brushing her teeth to walk to the suite's white double doors? Phoenix put her face close to the doors. She could smell cologne in the cool air through the crack, one she knew. Calvin, maybe. Not Kenzo, but not bad.

"How'd you find my room?" she said to the crack and the cologne.

"Oh, Father Jesus," she heard him say, surprised. His smoothness had evaporated.

"You know you're not supposed to be standing outside my room, right?" Gentle but firm.

His voice came closer to the crack, and she saw a blur of dark skin. "Miss Smalls, I love your music. I have your CD from back in the day, those cuts with the mad keyboard riffs, that first one you put out. You're a straight-up genius."

Phoeinx's first CD had been born and buried four years ago, so this was a hard-core fan. Phoenix and her band in Miami had poured their souls into two CDs, and their old label hadn't sold enough copies to pay for them. That had hurt so much, she'd come within a breath of telling Sarge she was ready to quit, except that she knew how disappointed he would be. At Three Strikes, Ronn and D'Real had laid down the law: Her original music was too this, too that, not urban enough, not enough like D'Real's vibe, and D'Real is the producer and the producer is God. Hell, D'Real's the real star, let's be real. Sarge had warned her things would be different at a major label, and he'd been right. As different as different could be.

"One of my cousins works here, and she told me where you'd be," the boy said through the door. "Please don't try to make me say who. I promised not to get her in trouble."

Copyright © 2005 by Tananarive Due