The Rock Star Wrote Every Song About the Size 22 Girl at the Merch Table novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Fourteen Months

In the empty green room Jude plays six seconds of a wrong-number voicemail that became his album, Maggie is furious, then kisses him against the door, and the label arrives.

He took me to the green room because it was the only door in the building that locked.

It had a couch the color of old mustard, a bowl of melting ice, and a mirror with bulbs around it.

Jude shut the door and leaned against it, breathing.

"Last August," he said. "The ninth. Two-fourteen in the morning."

"Okay."

"I had just changed my phone number because someone leaked the old one. Six people had the new one."

"Okay."

"Then my phone rang with no name on the screen, and I let it go to voicemail, because it was two in the morning."

He pulled his phone from his back pocket.

"A woman talked for four minutes. She wasn't talking to me. She was talking to someone named Stevie."

My stomach dropped through the floor.

"I don't remember calling you," I said.

"Listen."

He tapped the screen.

There was a hiss, and then a voice came out of the little speaker.

It was mine.

It was raw and wet.

"...and I take up the whole couch, Stevie, and I'm not sorry, I'm just so tired of being sorry..."

Then came a laugh, short and cracked and a little ridiculous, because I'd laughed at myself in the middle of crying.

He stopped it there.

I stood in the middle of the green room with my arm still wet from his marker.

I had been listening to that laugh for a year.

It was the first sound on track nine of Wrong Number, the song called "Whole Couch."

I had played it so many times that I'd once told Stevie the session singer sounded like me.

"That's my laugh," I whispered.

"Yes."

"That's on your album."

"Yes."

"You played a stranger's private voicemail on a record."

"I played it for fifteen thousand people a night, and I have never once told them whose it is. I didn't know." His voice cracked on the last word. "Your number was hidden, so I had nothing to call back. You were a voice, Maggie, and I played you in my headphones until I wrote eleven songs."

I wanted to be angry.

I was angry.

The hot, ugly part of me rose up and said, You listened to me cry about my couch for a year?

"You had no right," I said.

"I know."

"I was at a wedding. A groomsman told me I'd be so pretty if I only tried. I was full of cheap cake and humiliation, and I called my best friend to cry at her. That was for her."

"I know."

"And you put it in a song."

"It was the best thing anybody ever said to me."

That stopped me.

His green eyes were wet.

"You said you were sorry for everything," he said, "and then you laughed, like you'd decided to stop. I heard that and I wrote my whole life's best work in nine weeks. I've been trying to find you since. And tonight you said Tees are thirty from forty feet away, and I swear my heart quit."

I crossed the room.

I didn't decide to do it.

I grabbed the front of his wet shirt in both fists and kissed him, hard, angry, with all my teeth.

He made a sound I felt in my knees.

His hands went into my hair, and my bun came apart and my hair fell down my back.

He turned us around so my back hit the door.

"I'm not stopping," he said against my mouth. "Not now."

"Don't you dare."

He kissed my jaw, my throat, the spot under my ear.

"You have no idea what you do to me," he said. "I've been hard since you opened your mouth."

I pushed my hips against him, and there it was, thick and hot against my belly through his jeans.

"Show me," I said.

His hands slid down my sides and stopped at my waist, spread wide, gripping the soft curve of me.

"God, look at this," he said. "Look at you."

"Jude."

"You're so soft. You're so fucking soft, and it's all for me to hold."

He pushed my shirt up.

My bra was plain and black, and my breasts were spilling out the top of it, heavy and freckled.

He stared.

Then he put his mouth on the top swell of one, and I banged my head back against the door and said a word my mother wouldn't like.

"That's it," he said. "Say it again."

His thumb dragged over my nipple through the cotton, and then he pulled the cup down and took it in his mouth, and I grabbed his hair.

"Jude, please."

"Tell me what you want."

"Your hand," I said. "I want your hand in my jeans."

He undid the button with one flick.

The zipper went down.

His fingers slid under my underwear and found me, and I was so wet it embarrassed me for half a second.

"Fuck," he breathed. "Maggie. You're soaked."

"It's your fault."

"Good. Say it's my fault."

"It's your fault."

He stroked me, slow, once, from my entrance up to my clit, and my knees went.

He caught me around the waist and held me against the door with his whole body.

"I've got you," he said. "Hold on to me."

He circled my clit with two fingers, firm and unhurried, while he watched my face.

"That's perfect," he said. "That's so pretty. Look how you move."

I wasn't used to being watched.

I tried to close my eyes, and he said, "No. Look at me."

So I did.

His eyes were dark green and hungry.

"You're gorgeous when you want something," he said. "You have no idea. Your face, your mouth, your thighs shaking. I could do this all night."

He slid one finger inside me, then two, curling them against the place that made my vision go white.

"Oh my God," I said.

"There. There she is."

His thumb pressed my clit while his fingers worked, and the sound of it was wet and filthy in the little room.

I rode his hand without shame.

I couldn't help it.

The pleasure wound tight low in my belly, and I heard myself saying his name over and over, high and desperate.

"Come for me," he said. "Come on my hand, Maggie. Let me feel it."

"I'm going to."

"I know. You're so good. You're so fucking good."

It broke through me.

I cried out against his shoulder, and my whole body clenched around his fingers in long hard waves while he held me up and kept stroking, murmuring, "That's it, that's it, God, you're beautiful."

When it was over, I was shaking and boneless, with my forehead against his chest.

He slid his hand out of my jeans, and he looked at me, and then he put two fingers in his mouth and tasted me.

"I'm going to do that every day," he said, "for the rest of the tour."

I laughed.

It came out shaky, and it was the same laugh as on track nine.

His face broke open when he heard it.

He pulled me against him and kissed the top of my head.

"There it is," he whispered.

Someone pounded on the door.

"Jude." The voice was gravel and cigarettes. "Bus rolls in ten."

"Give me a minute, Hank."

"I would, but your label's up from Nashville and standing at the bus door in a cream suit." A pause. "She asked who the merch girl with the marker on her arm was."

Jude's arms tightened around me.

"Deirdre," he said, very quietly.

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