Boy Shopping by Nia Stephens Read Free Book Online Page A

funnier, the lights a little too bright. It was almost like being drunk, or wired from too little sleep. There was something a bit different, and not just the relief she felt because she and Mark were not fighting anymore.
    â€œSo I said, ‘Franklin, A&R stands for Artists and Repertoire, not Arts and Recreation. He’s supposed to represent us to the label, not plan our vacations!’”
    â€œOh my God!” Kiki almost slid out of the booth, she was laughing so hard. “Bill’s been our A&R guy for three years! What was he thinking?”
    â€œBill? He was probably thinking that Franklin does too many drugs.”
    â€œYou know I meant Franklin,” she said, laughing. “He can’t possibly be as dumb as he acts. He can really play the guitar, for one thing, and that has to take some brains.”
    Mark snorted. “It doesn’t take that much. You remember the lead singer of the Darlings? Leela, or Lulu, or whatever?”
    â€œOh, Layla! She was amazing!” Before RGB had assembled the Darlings, Kiki, Mark, and the pianist from another RGB group had backed Layla up on a few showcase pieces. The Darlings had more or less imploded within a year of signing, and Layla was still in rehab, but Kiki had loved working with her.
    He shook his head in astonishment. “She is about the best stupid guitarist on the planet.”
    â€œHow would you know how smart she is?” Kiki teased. She knew his dating history as well as her own, and she knew that while Layla was in Nashville laying tracks, Mark was half-heartedly going out with a girl from his parents’ church. His parents seemed to think that the girl would keep him from doing anything too terrible with his friends in the music scene. In the end, Kiki thought that Mark had corrupted Sarah Jane a little. Not much, because he was about as conservative as a teenaged punk could be, but Kiki was pretty sure that Sarah Jane didn’t paint her nails black before she went out with Mark. The last time she saw Sarah Jane, three months after the breakup, she was standing in line at the Exit/In, touching up her manicure with a black Sharpie.
    â€œI have my ways.” Mark’s eyes sparkled like a swimming pool at night, one of the old-fashioned baby blue ones. There was something about the way the light danced in his eyes, streaks of blue and black. Sometimes his eyes distracted her so badly she forgot to talk. But not this night. Oh, no. She had a feeling that if it was ever going to happen, it would happen tonight.
    â€œNo, really!”
    â€œWell, we were stuck at the studio one night, redoing the strings for, oh, I don’t know, some song, and we were playing Scrabble between takes. Layla never used a word with more than three letters.”
    â€œCome on! Maybe she had really bad letters.”
    He pointed a fork at her and said, “Kiki Kelvin, anybody who uses the word ‘cat’ in Scrabble needs to go back to school.”
    â€œRemember when Franklin discovered Boggle, and we had to play all the way from Chattanooga to Orlando?”
    He laughed so hard he knocked over his coffee cup, and was still laughing as he apologized to their waitress, Junie, while she mopped it up.
    They wrote a little song about Franklin on a Waffle Hut napkin, one they felt sure RGB would never let them record. The alarm on Kiki’s cell phone beeped while they worked on the break, reminding them that her curfew was thirty minutes away.
    â€œOkay. Let’s roll.” Mark was, of course, used to Kiki’s parents’ rules.
    The ride back to Kiki’s was quiet—all the giggles had somehow dissolved into a silent tension. Kiki knew that Mark was gearing up to ask her something. She recognized all the usual signs: the way he fidgeted with his left hand, tugging on his too-long hair. She could tell by the way his face went still, like someone with lockjaw.
    She thought he was going to let the moment pass