Record, Rewind by Ava Lore Page B

to be talking to him for fear that he’d recognize me.
    I threw him a shrug. “I guess,” I said, and turned back to my phone.
    “What’s he say?” Damien asked.
    Goddamn, I thought. Mind your own business, son!
    But he was staring at me, his green eyes dancing with humor. He was like a dog with a bone. He had something, and he wasn’t letting it go. Why he wanted to talk to me of all people, someone he only vaguely recognized, was blowing my mind. I wasn’t a fan, I hadn’t asked him to give me his autograph, nothing at all like that, so why...?
    Oh .
    Okay, fine. Maybe that was why he wanted to talk. He probably wanted to be a normal human being for two minutes. The Hollow Men were hot, on every newsstand and in every video, on every talk show, playing on every radio, spreading across the internet like wildfire every time they so much deigned as to string three notes together in public, and remixed into every club hit. Everyone under the age of twenty-nine knew their faces and music whether they wanted to or not. They were so pervasive I was certain that even homeschooled kids in Utah had somehow absorbed knowledge of their existence by osmosis.
    And here I was, trying to pretend like I didn’t know him. Maybe he wanted me to recognize him, or maybe he just liked the novelty of a woman who hadn’t asked him to autograph her tits.
    Well, I wouldn’t have said no to the tits part. But at least I wasn’t acting like it.
    I gave up. He wasn’t studying me anymore as though trying to place my features, so it was probably safe to talk to him. With a sigh, I dropped my phone back in my purse just as the elevator reached the roof. Well, floor 53. I had to climb the stairs to the roof from here.
    The doors hissed open and I held my purse close to me as I passed Damien. I turned as he exited the elevator and started walking backwards towards the stairs. “I guess it is kind of funny,” I admitted. “He says he thinks he might get our supervisor to give him head in the kitchen.”
    “That sounds unsanitary,” Damien said. And he started to follow me.
    ...All right. Now I was kind of freaked out. I stopped walking.
    He stopped as well. We stood there staring at each other for a long, awkward moment.
    “Well,” I said, “I’m headed to the roof. Where’s your room?”
    “I was hoping to bum a cigarette,” he said, suddenly sheepish and totally innocent. “I used to smoke and had to quit...but like I said, drama. I could really use a cigarette right now.”
    Any other man and I would have told him to fuck off and gone back down to the lobby—getting raped and stabbed on a roof in Manhattan was not how I had envisioned dying—but, well...this was Damien Colton. Famous rock star. Not incredibly likely to be the murdering type.
    And besides. I knew him. Or I had known him, once upon a time, and the boy I’d known back then was chivalrous and respectful of women, despite the privilege of his god-given gifts. He hadn’t smoked, but I supposed that the music world could have changed that.
    I huffed. “Fine,” I said. “I smoke menthols, though.”
    “I’m down.”
    I turned my back on him, wondering if I could break into a run and somehow escape, although since escape would necessitate either falling down eighty-three flights of stairs or waiting for the elevator again I was probably shit out of luck. The longer we spent time together, the more likely it would be that he would recognize me. Maybe. Or maybe I really was completely unmemorable.
    ...Now I really needed a cigarette.
    “Is this allowed?” Damien asked as I pushed through the door leading to the stairs.
    “Not really,” I said. I suppressed a shiver at the coldness of the stairwell. “It’s more like an employee perk.”
    “You work here?”
    Shit . “Yeah. I clean the rooms. Housekeeping!”
    “Wow! That sounds interesting. Got any good stories?”
    I stopped and looked down at him. His voice had been completely sincere, but no one, and I