drew starkey ☀︎ nice to meet you.
pairing – drew starkey x pop star!reader summary – drew goes to a pop concert expecting a good show and leaves with a considerably more inconvenient opinion about the woman performing it. warnings – strong language, recent breakup and infidelity references, ex-partner discussion, alcohol, physical exhaustion following a concert, mild injury/blister and joint-pain references, mutual attraction, flirtation and suggestive humour notes from me – our official introduction to drew x pop star!reader !! i am so so excited to write more for them eeeeekkkk word count – 8.3k
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The first thing Drew noticed, besides the fact that the Kia Forum was loud enough to make his chest feel like it had been temporarily rented out to the bass, was that he had severely underestimated what kind of night he had agreed to.
He knew who she was, obviously. You couldn’t exist on the internet, or near a woman under thirty, or in the general radius of his sisters’ text threads without knowing who she was.
Mackayla had sent him one of her music videos a few months ago with three separate messages underneath it, each one more aggressive than the last, and Brooke had once tried to explain an entire album rollout to him while he was making coffee and only operating at about forty percent human capacity.
He had nodded through it like he understood the emotional significance of a black-and-white Instagram story posted at eleven forty-three at night, because he loved his sisters and because sometimes being a good older brother meant accepting that the phrase this is not random, Drew was evidence in a cultural trial he hadn’t known he was attending.
But knowing who someone was and being in the pit while twenty thousand people screamed her name were two very different pieces of information.
He was in the little barricaded-off VIP section just off the main pit, close enough to the runway that he could see the quick little signals the dancers gave each other between counts and the way the stage lights made the haze move in silver sheets over the floor.
It was the sort of place he was still not entirely comfortable occupying, not because he was above it, but because VIP sections always made him feel like someone was eventually going to appear with a clipboard and explain there had been a mistake.
He’d come with Maddie and Madison and JD, Lukas somewhere nearby in sunglasses despite the fact that they were inside and it was fully night, plus a handful of people Drew only half-knew well enough to hug but not well enough to remember whether they were actors, stylists, friends, or all three.
Drew had mostly come because Maddie had asked, and because he was in town, and because the alternative had been sitting at home pretending he wasn’t going to scroll through the same four apps until his eyes dried out.
Also because Mackayla and Brooke loved her, and there was a specific, very dangerous kind of older-brother guilt that came from being invited to the show of someone your sisters would happily commit light fraud to see.
When he’d told them he might go, Brooke had sent back, MIGHT? in all caps, followed by a voice note he still hadn’t listened to because he valued his hearing and his peace.
So, yeah. Why the hell not?
He had expected a good show. He hadn’t expected to be standing there forty minutes in, one hand curled around the top rail of the barricade, watching her move across the stage with the kind of fixed, mildly alarmed attention usually reserved for magic tricks and car accidents.
The concert had been great from the beginning, in the way pop concerts were engineered to be great, all immaculate lighting and screens and transitions so smooth you forgot several hundred people had probably had meetings about every second of them.
A couple of the songs he vaguely recognised because they were stupidly everywhere, the sort of things playing in coffee shops, Ubers, trailers, people’s kitchens in TikToks where someone was chopping cucumbers too fast.
He wasn’t a big pop guy, he just didn’t reach for it on his own. He liked guitars and weird little songs that sounded like they’d been recorded inside somebody’s haunted apartment. Pop often made him feel like he’d walked into a room after the joke had already been explained and everyone else was dancing.
This, though, was not that. This was a woman running an arena with her bare hands and a mic and a level of stamina Drew found, frankly, disrespectful. She sang live. Properly sang, not the little half-sung, half-assisted thing he had unfairly assumed might happen during the heavier dance numbers.
Her voice had a clean bright edge that cut straight through all the bass and drums and screaming, and even when the choreography went sharp enough that Drew’s own knees started feeling sympathetic, the sound never collapsed. The dancers were unbelievable too, all power and precision, bodies hitting together like a machine that had somehow learned how to flirt, and she was right in the middle of them, somehow smaller and bigger than everyone around her depending on what the light was doing.
There had been one point, maybe four songs in, where she’d come down the runway in some tiny glittering thing, hair loose over her shoulders, face shining under the lights, and grinned out at the crowd before lifting the mic to her mouth and giving this slow, sultry little, “Hiiii, LA,” like she had walked into a house party and not an arena full of people who immediately lost every single thought they had ever possessed.
The sound that came back hit so hard Drew felt it in his teeth. Madison grabbed Maddie by both arms and screamed something he couldn’t hear, JD threw his head back laughing, and Drew just stood there with the strangest grin pulling at his mouth because, okay, sure, that was something a person could do. Say two syllables and temporarily dismantle the nervous systems of Inglewood.
“See?” Maddie had shouted at him earlier, leaning close so he could hear her over the noise, her eyes bright with the satisfaction of being proven correct. “I told you she’s insane.”
Drew had nodded because she was, objectively, insane. Insane as in the whole thing seemed physically unreasonable. Insane as in she had crossed the stage in heels, dropped into choreography clean enough to make every dancer around her look like they were all breathing from the same set of lungs, then come up laughing into the next lyric like it cost her nothing.
Maddie had spent part of the car ride trying to explain the breakup situation to him with the righteous speed of a woman who had clearly been waiting for a man to ask the wrong innocent question so she could unload a full dossier. Drew knew Tucker a little, or knew of him, more accurately, in the way people in overlapping circles knew each other without ever having to decide if they were friends.
Role Model. Music guy. Funny online. Looked like he knew his way around a thrifted jacket. They had dated, apparently, from last fall until a couple weeks ago. Then there had been cheating, Maddie had been extremely firm on that part, it was cheating, Drew, don’t do that vague man thing, and then he had dropped a song about still caring and being some kind of noble wounded protector from a distance, which had made Maddie’s voice go flat in a way that suggested she wanted to drive to his house and confiscate his microphone.
“She texted me last night,” Maddie had said, leaning between the front seats with her phone in her hand even though no one had asked to see proof. “She’s doing the new one tonight.”
“The diss track?” JD had asked, delighted already.
“Not the diss track,” Maddie said, lowering her voice to imitate him, then paused. “Okay, yes, the diss track. But it’s not like lame. It’s good. It’s really good. It came out two days ago and everyone’s freaking out.”
Drew had huffed a laugh from the back seat, watching L.A. slide by outside the window in all its flat glowing sprawl. “Cool,” he’d said. “I can get behind that.”
And he could. On principle, at least. He understood a song as a knife if the situation called for one. He understood getting mad enough to make something instead of just pacing a room and being annoying about it.
He understood, maybe more than he wanted to, the strange power of having people think they knew the soft little centre of your life because they had seen the public edges of it.
Still, when the lights dimmed halfway through the concert and the arena dropped into that expectant blue-black pause between songs, Drew wasn’t thinking about Tucker Pillsbury or cheating or narrative control or whatever corner of pop-culture court he had accidentally wandered into.
He was thinking his ears were ringing, his beer had gone warm, and the show had already been worth whatever humiliating voice note Brooke was going to send him when she found out how good his seats were. Then Maddie made a sound beside him that was less a word and more a small animal being stepped on.
Madison grabbed her immediately. “No fucking way.”
Drew looked over, laughing before he could help it because both of them had started shaking each other by the forearms with the kind of panic usually reserved for emergency landings. “What?” he said, leaning in because the crowd had begun to murmur and swell without anything even happening yet. “What’s happening?”
Maddie turned to him with eyes huge enough to look professionally lit. “It’s her new song.”
“Oh,” Drew said, because that seemed like the appropriate level of response for a man who hadn’t yet emotionally bonded with a surprise setlist change.
Madison shoved lightly at his chest. “You don’t understand.”
He nodded. “No, I’m getting that.”
The stage stayed dark for another second, just long enough for the room to wind itself tight, and then a strip of cold blue light snapped on across the back platform. Her dancers were lined up shoulder to shoulder, bodies held still in silhouettes that looked almost severe after all the movement before.
The camera moved along them slowly, each face catching on the giant screens as they mouthed the opening words straight into it, sharp and controlled, the kind of theatrical little taunt that made the audience start screaming before the beat had even fully settled.
Drew didn’t know the words yet, but he caught enough of the sentiment in the shape of their mouths and the roar around him: thought I might love you, now I never will, last night sealed the deal. It moved across the dancers one by one like gossip becoming evidence.
Then the camera found her. She was standing at the centre of the stage in black, one hand loose at her side, the mic near her mouth, the whole arena blue around her. The outfit was ridiculous in the way good stage clothes were ridiculous, cut close and high and asymmetrical, a black top slicing around her ribs with a side cutout, glossy high-waisted shorts catching the light whenever she shifted, black knee-high boots grounding the whole thing into something meaner than pretty.
Her hair was down, long and loose and already a little wild from the show, and she stared directly into the camera with her chin tipped slightly forward, like she’d found the exact person she was singing to and was giving him one last chance to develop a survival instinct.
The arena went so loud Drew actually blinked.
She cocked her head, slow, almost bored, and sang the first line she gave herself into the mic with a little smirk starting at the corner of her mouth, the kind of expression that made it clear she was not even pretending to be above the drama. The line was short, dismissive, brutal in its simplicity, and everyone around Drew screamed it back so hard it felt less like a lyric and more like a verdict.
“Oh, shit,” JD said beside him, already lifting his phone.
Drew didn’t answer. He had planned to. Some normal thing, probably, something like yeah or damn or your camera’s in my face, man. But she started walking down the runway then, and the words went somewhere else.
Strutting wasn’t even the right word, though that was technically what she was doing. It was too clean for that, too trained. Every step looked careless until you noticed how exactly placed it was, how the hips, shoulders, head, hair, mic hand, free hand all seemed to arrive at their own decisions separately and still land on the same count.
Her dancers broke apart behind her, white outfits flashing in the blue, and she moved through them like she knew the whole place belonged to her because, inconveniently, it did. The choreography was sexy as hell, no delicate way around that, but not in a sloppy look-at-me way. It was sharp. Controlled.
A hand over her stomach, a roll through her hips, shoulders cutting hard, hair whipping forward and back in a clean arc that sent the crowd up another octave. She looked pissed in the very specific way of someone who had turned humiliation into rehearsal time and come back with eight counts, lighting cues and flames.
Drew felt his hand tighten around the barricade and immediately became too aware of himself doing it. Great. Cool. Normal.
He looked away for half a second because that seemed polite, or at least self-preserving, and found Maddie and Madison screaming along. Maddie’s hair was sticking to her lip gloss, Madison had both hands over her mouth between lyrics, Lukas had appeared from somewhere behind them to yell, “Oh, she’s mad mad,” directly into nobody’s ear in particular, and JD was filming the stage with the beautiful concentration of a man witnessing sports history.
Drew looked back. Bad idea, obviously. Or good one. Hard to say.
The song had been out for two fucking days, according to Maddie, and the arena was already screaming pieces of it back at her like scripture with better drums. She grinned at that, visibly, her face breaking out of the cold little performance mask for half a second as she lifted the mic away from her mouth and shouted, “Sing it, LA!”
The response was immediate and enormous. She laughed into it with her whole chest, head tipping back as the lights blew white for a beat and the chorus hit under her like the floor dropping out of an elevator.
Then the flames went off. Drew felt the heat hit the front of his face a second after the burst shot up from the stage, orange ripping through all that blue, and JD yelled, “Fuck, man, this is sick!” right beside him, eyes bright, phone still up. Drew nodded, laughing because there was nothing else to do with the sudden dumb adrenaline of it. “I know,” he shouted back, and meant it more than he expected.
The dancers crashed into a dance break at the centre of the runway, and she was right there with them, hitting every beat. It should have looked exhausting. It probably was exhausting. Drew had done enough physical work on sets to know the kind of lie bodies told under lights, the way a person could make effort disappear from the face while every muscle underneath was negotiating terms.
But she made it look like fun. That was the dangerous part. The whole end of the stage filled with bodies bouncing, whipping hair, boots striking clean against the floor, hands sliding through air and over ribs and up into hair while the lights strobed hard enough that Drew kept catching her in fragments: smirk, shoulder, throat, thigh, hair, teeth, mic, black fabric, bare skin, blue light.
A tiny, practical part of his brain offered, with stunning uselessness, that his sisters were going to ask him for every detail and he was going to have to find a way to say, she’s very talented, without sounding like a man who had just spent three minutes discovering religion through choreography.
She ended up at the far end of the runway as the dancers started moving back up toward the main stage, all of them in white around her black like she was the bad decision at the centre of a very expensive dream sequence. She sang the last bit alone there, grinning out at the crowd, loose now in the aftermath of the hardest movement, sweat shining at her collarbone and along the side of her face under the lights. She blew a kiss into the arena, big and theatrical, and the crowd screamed like she’d thrown very expensive jewellery.
Drew was smiling before he noticed he was doing it. Then she turned and started walking back up the runway.
Look, he was a decent person. He tried to be. He said please and thank you, he held doors, he called his mom back, he made a genuine effort not to be a creep in public even when the public had smoke machines and knee-high boots. But she was in tiny black shorts walking away from him under blue lights after performing a song that had just set fire to an ex-boyfriend’s entire week, and Drew was, regrettably, alive.
So, no. He wasn’t not looking. It was a good ass.
That was just information. A neutral observation. If anything, the lighting designer was also complicit, because there was no reason to put that much dramatic backlight on a person strutting away from an arena unless everyone involved understood the effect.
She sang another little part over her shoulder as she reached centre stage, the repeated hook turning into something almost playful now, less furious than victorious, and then she spun back toward the crowd on the final phrase, face lit up, hair flying out behind her, one hand lifted like she was conducting the last scream herself. The stage lights dropped out hard on the final beat.
For half a second, she disappeared. The arena lost its fucking mind.
Drew joined in because at that point pretending not to would have been more embarrassing than surrender. He clapped hard, whistled between two fingers, grinning toward the stage even though she was gone in the dark and the sound in the room had become less applause than physical weather.
JD had turned his phone on them now, yelling, “Fire! Fire!” into the camera, and Drew leaned in without thinking, laughing and shouting something incoherent that was probably just noise but felt appropriate. Madison was jumping with Maddie, Lukas had both hands in the air, and the whole VIP section had shifted into that post-song chaos where everyone looked sweaty and stupid and younger than they were.
Maddie fell back against Drew with a dramatic sigh, her shoulders hitting his chest like she had been shot with emotion and chosen him as the nearest furniture. “God,” she said, tilting her head back to look up at him, still breathless and grinning. “I’m so excited to see her after this. This is insane.”
Drew’s clapping slowed by maybe half a beat. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Unfortunately, he lived inside his own body and did notice, which was rude of him. “You’re seein’ her after this?” he asked, trying to keep the question casual and largely succeeding if the judge was generous and did not have access to his internal organs.
Maddie nodded like this was normal information that did not immediately rearrange the next hour of his life. “Yeah, she invited us backstage. She’s a fan of the show, wanted to say hey and thank us for coming. A couple other people too, I think. Hailey and Kylie maybe? I don’t know, it’ll be chill.”
Drew nodded, his mouth doing something that was probably fine. “Oh. Cool.”
Cool. Great word. Very versatile. Covered a lot of ground. Could mean that sounds nice or I’ve just remembered I am wearing a shirt selected before I knew I might meet the woman currently making this arena behave like a controlled demolition.
He glanced back toward the stage, where the lights were already shifting for whatever came next, the band moving in shadow, the crowd still screaming her name in uneven waves like they weren’t ready to let the moment go.
Maddie twisted enough to look at him properly, eyes narrowing with the immediate suspicion of a woman who had known him too long and enjoyed inconvenience too much. “What?”
“What?”
She pointed at his face. “You’re being weird.”
“I’m not being weird.” Drew looked down at her, then over at JD, who still had the camera too close and was grinning like an idiot. “Am I being weird?”
JD didn’t even pretend to consider it. “Little bit.”
“Thank you. Super helpful.”
Madison leaned in from Maddie’s other side, still flushed from screaming, and looked at Drew with a slow smile spreading over her face. “Oh my God. You liked her.”
Drew huffed, feeling heat start at the back of his neck for reasons that were, frankly, none of the Kia Forum’s business. “It’s a concert. Liking the performer is kinda the point.”
“No,” Maddie said, delighted now, the previous emotional collapse instantly replaced by investigative violence. “Not like that.”
Drew looked back at the stage again because it was safer than the three faces currently arranging themselves around his humiliation. The lights flashed blue, then black, then soft gold. Somewhere in the dark, she was probably drinking water, changing a mic pack, getting a towel pressed into her hand, being the centre of thirty different moving parts with five seconds to breathe before she came back out and did it all again.
He tried to picture meeting her after seeing that, after all that fury and heat and control, some little backstage hallway with cables on the floor and people pretending not to stare. He had met famous people before. He had been around enough sets and premieres and rooms full of unusual faces to know how to act normal. Usually.
Still, something low in his stomach shifted in a way he did not appreciate.
“Oh, fuck off,” he said, but he was smiling when he said it, which ruined the whole thing.
Maddie laughed so hard she had to grab his arm to stay upright, and Drew let her, still looking toward the stage with the bass starting up again beneath his shoes and the afterimage of black boots, blue light and that little cocked-head smirk living behind his eyes like a problem he had absolutely not planned for.
The dressing room smelled like hairspray, sweat, cold towels, watermelon electrolytes and the particular burnt-plastic ghost of a thousand things being plugged into power boards they probably shouldn’t have been plugged into.
She was sitting on the couch in the middle of all of it with one foot tucked beneath her bare thigh, the other planted on the floor, a bottle of water sweating in her hand and absolutely no interest in behaving like a woman whose body had just spent the last hour and a half being asked to sing, sprint, bend, strut, drop, roll, kick, smile, flirt, rage and hit choreography.
“Oh my God,” she said for maybe the tenth time, though nobody in the room looked even a little surprised by the return of the phrase because she had come offstage saying it and had not meaningfully stopped since. “Oh my God, the way they screamed for Tit For Tat? Mia. Mia, did you hear that? Like, obviously you heard it, you were there, but did you hear it? Because I heard it in my ribs. I think they moved an organ.”
Mia was standing near the vanity with her headset still around her neck and two phones in her hand, one personal, one work, both of them doing something that looked either extremely important or like several group chats had collectively caught fire.
“I heard it,” she said, not looking up, but her mouth was pulling despite herself. “The arena heard it. I’m pretty sure Manhattan Beach heard it.”
“Good.” She took one frantic swallow of water, missed slightly because her hand was still doing that post-show tremor where the adrenaline hadn’t yet received the cancellation notice, and wiped her chin with the back of her wrist. “Tell Stef I want the video on YouTube within the next week. I want the proper footage. Cameras, cuts, dancers, flames, the whole thing. That shit was insane. I’m not being dramatic, that was–” She stopped because there were about seventeen words standing in the doorway of her mouth trying to get through at once and none of them seemed big enough, so she just kicked both feet lightly against the carpet and made a sound that wasn’t speech at all. “I am on such a high.”
Amber, who had been with her long enough to find this version of her more endearing than concerning, was crouched in front of the mini fridge, digging through protein drinks and ginger shots with the grim focus of a woman trying to trick a pop star into responsible nutrition before the pop star remembered tequila existed. “High on adrenaline and zero real dinner.”
“I had two bites of chicken.”
“You licked sauce off a fork and called it dinner.”
She tipped her head back against the couch and laughed at the ceiling, hair sticking damply to the side of her throat. Her final outfit was still on, the little black thing she had closed the show in. Black performance fabric, hot skin, sweat cooling between her shoulder blades, mic tape still slightly tacky near her ribs, no shoes because the second she hit the dressing room door the boots had come off with the emotional violence of a breakup.
No socks either. Fuck socks. Fuck shoes. Fuck anything with a heel, zip, buckle, lace or expectation.
Marcus appeared near the couch with the enormous black compression boots draped over one arm like a man presenting a dead animal to a queen.
She saw him coming and lifted one hand at once. “Marcus, no. Do not come near me with my boots. Baby, no way. There are people coming. I want a drink. I want to be upright. I want to be fun and slutty for approximately twelve more minutes before my body becomes public property”
Amber shut the fridge with her hip. “No drink.”
“Amber.”
“No way, babe.” Amber held out a coconut water like a peace offering nobody had requested. “You’ve got a show tomorrow too.”
“I’m aware. I scheduled it, tragically.” She took the coconut water anyway, because Amber had the kind of face that made rebellion feel both possible and not worth the admin. “One drink would not kill me.”
“No, but Mia might.”
Mia lifted one finger without looking away from her phone. “Correct.”
“Cruel,” she said, though she was smiling too hard for it to land.
Everything in her face hurt from smiling. Everything in her body hurt from dancing. Her calves were singing in a language nobody had taught them, her hip flexors felt like they had been offended by the deep lunge in the second chorus, and the thin skin at the back of her ankle was going to become an issue by morning if Patrick didn’t win whatever quiet war he had been waging with kinesiology tape since Lisbon.
Still, beneath all of that, under the ache and sweat and the scratch of dried glitter near her collarbone, there was a bright electric thing running laps inside her body, refusing to come down. Two days. The song had been out for two days and they had screamed it at her like they’d been born knowing it.
Mia’s work phone buzzed again, and this time she glanced up. “Incoming. OBX cast is coming back now.”
The whole inside of her seemed to lift another inch. “Oh!” She sat up so fast the water sloshed again. “Oh, I’m so excited to see Mads. And Maddie. Who else was on the list?”
Mia scanned the screen. “Madelyn, Madison, Jonathan Daviss. Drew Starkey. Lukas Gage is with them too, I think. A couple of others floating. Hailey and Kylie are still in the other green room, they might stop by after.”
“Okay,” she said, and the word came out normal enough, probably, for a woman who had just had the name Drew Starkey placed into the room like a tiny lit match.
She wasn’t going to be weird about Drew Starkey. Obviously. She had met attractive men before. She had dated attractive men, occasionally to the detriment of her nervous system and reputation.
She worked in an industry where half the people you passed in a hallway looked like they had been carved from expensive insecurity and handed a stylist.
Drew Starkey being hot wasn’t news. It was barely even opinion. It was, unfortunately, information available to anyone with eyes and an internet connection, and she had both. She had watched all three seasons of Outer Banks. She had seen the buzz cut. Everyone had seen the buzz cut. There had been a cultural shift. It was fine to acknowledge history.
But she was also not that girl. She wasn’t going to stand backstage, only weeks out from having her heart ripped open and used as songwriting material by a man who cheated on her then tried to act like some long-distance saint with a guitar, and start making stupid little eyes at an actor because he had shoulders and a North Carolina face and whatever else.
Absolutely not. She was healing. She was busy. She had a tour, a second LA night tomorrow, joints held together by tape and prayer, and a diss track currently doing numbers because her ex had forgotten she also knew how to use a microphone.
Still. Drew Starkey was hot.
She bit the inside of her lip before anyone could see the grin trying to happen and reached for the towel Amber threw at her. “Everyone act normal.”
Amber looked at her. “You act normal.”
The door opened before anyone could answer. Madelyn came in first, already yelling her name in that bright, affectionate, fully unembarrassed way that made half the people in the hall turn their heads.
Madison was right behind her, both hands up like she was still in the pit, cheeks flushed, curls a little wild, and then they were all colliding in the middle of the dressing room in a messy, sweaty, jumping hug that made her water bottle vanish somewhere into the couch cushions.
“Bitch!” Mads shouted directly into her shoulder, squeezing her hard enough to make her ribs remind everyone they had been working all night. “That was insane. You’re insane. Are you fucking kidding me?”
She laughed so hard it came out breathless, clutching at Mads with one arm and Madison with the other, the three of them bouncing in place like teenage girls in a bathroom and not adult women with publicists, security badges and at least one Loewe partnership between them. “Oh, bitch, are you kidding? Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. Did you lose your mind? I lost mine. I think I left it on the runway.”
Madison pulled back to grab her face in both hands, eyes shining. “That was genuinely insane. Like, I adore you. I’m obsessed with you. I’m going to be annoying about this forever.”
“Thank you, baby, I fucking adore you,” she said, kissing the air near Madison’s cheek because she was too sweaty for full contact and polite enough, barely, to know it.
JD came in laughing behind them, phone still in his hand, grinning so hard he looked like he had been plugged into the stage lights. “Dude,” he said, pointing at her because language had abandoned him too. “Dude. You were insane.”
She turned toward him at once, still breathless, still buzzing, one hand pressed flat to her chest like she could keep her heart from trying to exit. “Hi! Oh my God, so nice to meet you,” she said, and hugged him before either of them could overthink it because post-show her body tended to believe everyone was a cousin at a wedding. “Thank you for coming.”
“Are you kidding?” JD hugged her back with the easy warmth of someone who had never met a room he couldn’t make friendlier. “That shit was fire.”
“Thank you,” she said again, and then there were people everywhere, Maddie and Madison shrieking over the mini fridge as Amber gave permission for drinks with the solemnity of a kindergarten teacher allowing controlled scissors, Lukas saying something about the flames nearly taking his eyebrows, Mia greeting everyone with the organised hospitality of a woman who had memorised the fire code and the guest list in equal measure.
And behind all of them, half a step quieter, was Drew. White t-shirt, black pants, heavy dark boots, a watch catching faintly under the dressing room lights. Buzzed hair. Broad shoulders. Tall in a way that made the doorway seem slightly under-informed.
He wasn’t doing the actor thing some men did in rooms where everyone knew who they were, the subtle little expansion, the soft demand that space should rearrange itself around their bone structure.
He was just there, hands low, mouth curved like he was amused by everybody else’s chaos and not entirely sure he had been issued the right backstage pass for it.
Her stomach did something warm and extremely annoying.
She smiled anyway. “Hi,” she said, softer than she’d meant to because her voice had been living at arena volume. “Thank you so much for coming.”
His eyes moved over her face first. Not her body, or not obviously, which was somehow worse because she suddenly remembered the state of herself: sweat at her hairline, stage makeup still sharp but beginning to soften at the edges, black outfit stuck to her skin, bare feet on carpet that thousands of crew shoes had probably insulted all day.
Then he smiled, small and warm and a little crooked, and stuck one hand out like they were meeting in a normal room at a normal time and not while she was half naked, dehydrated, and running on diss-track fumes.
“I’m Drew,” he said. His voice was lower than she expected, easy and rough around the edges, a little Southern without being performative about it. “Nice to meet you.”
She took his hand. She had manners. His hand was warm and dry around hers, his fingers long, grip firm without doing the awful man thing where a handshake became a personality test.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, giving him her name even though he obviously knew it, because there was something strangely nice about pretending the whole world didn’t.
“Incredible show,” he said, and he looked like he meant it in a way that had nothing to do with being polite backstage. His gaze flicked briefly toward the main room, like the sound of the arena was still living somewhere behind his eyes. “Really. It was insane bein’ in the crowd.”
The compliment landed differently from the others, which was unfair because everyone had been lovely and loud and exactly what she needed, but his voice did something quieter with it. Like he’d been surprised. Like he’d arrived expecting one version of her and had been forced, under duress and excellent lighting, to update the file.
Her grin widened before she could stop it. “Thank you,” she said, and for one very brief, very stupid second she wanted to ask what part he liked best, which wasn’t a normal thing to ask a man you had known for seven seconds unless you were trying to flirt so obviously your PA started drafting a crisis plan.
Mia saved her from herself by appearing at her shoulder with the sort of gentle force that could move governments. “Couch. Water. Now.”
“I’m socialising,” she huffed.
“You’re dripping on guests.”
“Fine, fine. Okay.” She let Mia steer her backwards with one hand at her elbow, throwing Drew one last amused little look before she dropped onto the couch because if she stayed standing in front of him any longer she was going to start making choices designed by hormones and bad timing.
Mia put a bottle of water into her hand like loading a weapon into a soldier’s palm, and Marcus crouched near her feet immediately with the expression of a man who had been waiting all night to be disappointed by her ankles.
“Can I look at your ankles, please?” he asked, already reaching with two careful fingers toward the inside of her right foot. “And can we please get ice packs onto your joints if you won’t use the boots? Come on.”
She groaned and tipped sideways into the back of the couch, throwing one arm over her eyes. “You’re obsessed with me.”
“I’m obsessed with you being able to walk tomorrow.”
“Boring obsession.” She peeked out from under her forearm, found Drew across the room by accident and immediately forgot whatever dramatic complaint had been forming.
He was standing near JD now, drink in one hand, listening while Lukas said something that made Madison laugh with her whole body. But Drew’s eyes had drifted back toward the couch. Toward her.
The look lasted half a second. It moved through her body with a slow, warm drag that made her toes curl slightly against the carpet before Marcus caught her ankle and said, “Don’t do that.”
She snapped her gaze down to him. “Do what?”
“Flex like that. You’ll cramp.”
“Right.” She swallowed, then laughed at herself because, Jesus Christ. “Sorry.”
Patrick came over with ice packs wrapped in thin towels and started arranging them around her knees with the careful efficiency of someone used to treating dancers who believed pain was an interesting suggestion rather than a warning.
More people filtered in, dancers first, still in pieces of stage costume, faces scrubbed shiny with sweat, all of them loud and starving and vibrating with the same disbelief she felt. Someone shouted, “We ate that!” from the doorway, and the whole room answered like a church congregation.
“We fucking ate,” she said, sitting up again despite Marcus’s hand still around her ankle, because there was no possible way to stay calm when her dancers were looking at her like that, all wild eyes and open mouths and the kind of laughter that only came from shared exhaustion and getting away with something. “Are you kidding? The first live Tit For Tat and you all looked so hot. Like, I need everyone to understand, when the camera hit you on the opener? I almost forgot to come in because I was watching the screen like a fan.”
“You did not,” one of the girls said, dropping onto the arm of the couch.
“I did. I was like, oh, she’s famous.”
“You are literally you.”
The room kept swelling around her, voices over voices, cans opening, ice shifting, people replaying favourite bits with their hands because dancers couldn’t describe choreography without accidentally doing it again.
Maddie was telling one of the dancers about the pit losing its mind. Madison had stolen a sparkling water and was perched by the vanity, asking about the quick change before the encore. JD kept showing people the video on his phone, yelling, “Look at this part,” as if the part had happened years ago and not twenty minutes earlier.
It was warm and messy and bright with everyone’s attention, and she sat in the middle of it with ice packs on her knees, Marcus inspecting a blister forming near her heel, and her whole body soaking in the noise like it could replace sleep.
Every now and then, she looked up and found Drew already looking.
Or maybe he looked because she did. Maybe they kept catching each other by accident because the room was crowded and eyes needed somewhere to go. Maybe there was a completely reasonable explanation for the little hit of heat low in her stomach every time his gaze met hers and held a second too long before one of them got sensible and looked away.
She had built an entire career out of being stared at. She could handle being looked at. She’d had cameras inches from her face while she sang about being cheated on in tiny black shorts.
This shouldn’t have been the thing that made her feel suddenly aware of the bare line of her thigh under the ice pack, the damp hair at the back of her neck, the fact that she had no shoes on and he was standing there in boots and that dumb plain white t-shirt like somebody had asked the universe to prove minimalism could be slutty.
It was very rude.
At one point he lifted his drink slightly when he caught her watching, a quiet little caught you, and she bit the inside of her cheek so she wouldn’t grin like an idiot in front of her entire team. She looked away first, which annoyed her, then immediately looked back, which annoyed her more. He was smiling into his cup.
Fuck.
Fun, but not good. She had been crying over Tucker, screaming over Tucker, writing songs sharp enough to take paint off walls because of Tucker. She wasn’t about to let one very tall actor with a buzz cut and quiet eyes make her forget she had promised herself not to do anything stupid.
Although, technically, looking wasn’t doing. Looking was just research.
Amber appeared beside the couch after another ten minutes, her expression softening in the way it did when she had decided fun had reached the responsible edge of itself. “Okay, babe,” she said, touching her shoulder. “Time to get back to the hotel. We’ve gotta do it all again tomorrow.”
She made a wounded sound at once. “No. I just got interesting.”
“You were interesting for two hours onstage. Now you need to become horizontal.”
“Everyone keeps trying to make me boring.”
Amber stared at her.
She sighed. “Okay, okay, okay.”
The departure became its own small production, because everything did. Marcus released her ankle from his clinical custody with a warning about icing again at the hotel. Patrick handed Amber notes that sounded like instructions for preserving a museum piece.
Mia passed her a smoothie the exact colour of something purchased by a woman who said things like gut health without irony. Amber knelt with the UGG boots, and she allowed herself to be fussed into them because she had reached the stage of post-show where independence sounded philosophically admirable and physically unrealistic.
“Oh my God,” she sighed as her foot slid into the first boot, plush warmth swallowing her toes. “I forgive everyone. I love footwear again.”
“You love slippers,” Amber said.
Adrian was waiting near the door, tall and broad and immovable in the calm way that made crowds part before they realised they were doing it. Mid-thirties, black t-shirt, earpiece, eyes always moving.
He had been with her long enough to know that she liked to say goodbye to everyone and also that if allowed complete freedom she would say goodbye to every single crew member, piece of furniture and possibly a lighting truss before leaving a venue.
“Let’s go,” he said, not unkindly, but with the tone of a man who had prevented at least six chaotic side quests this week and didn’t intend to lose to a seventh in Los Angeles.
“Bossy,” she said, accepting the smoothie from Mia and standing carefully because the ice had numbed her knees into someone else’s. “Thank you, Marcus. Thank you, Patrick. Nobody look at me walk.”
She hugged the girls first, Mads squeezing her again and saying, “I love you, call me tomorrow,” into her hair, Madison holding her by the arms and promising she was going to be even louder night two, JD giving her another warm hug and telling her his ears were still ringing in the best way. Lukas made her laugh by bowing like she had knighted him with a microphone.
The room turned into a chorus of bye babe, goodnight, you killed it, see you tomorrow, text me, drink water, love you, obsessed with you, and she waved with one hand around the smoothie straw like some exhausted little pageant queen who had survived battle and been handed blended fruit as tribute.
Then she reached Drew. He had stayed slightly back again, which she appreciated and found annoying in equal measure. Standing near the door in that white t-shirt, hands low, mouth softening when she looked at him.
Up close, the buzz cut made his face look sharper, cheekbones and jaw doing unfair work under the dressing room light, but there was something gentle around his eyes that kept the whole thing from tipping into too much. Or maybe that was the problem. Hot was easy to ignore when it knew it was hot. Hot with manners was a fucking issue.
She slowed just enough that Adrian glanced back and then away again, pretending not to notice because Adrian had discretion down to an art form.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, looking up at Drew through her lashes because she was tired and sweaty and newly unwise and if she was going to be sensible later, she could afford one tiny crime now.
Drew’s mouth parted like he had been ready to answer normally and then had to recover from the exact way she looked at him.
His teeth caught briefly at his bottom lip before he nodded once, slow and almost amused, eyes staying on hers. “Yeah,” he said. “You too.”
It was nothing. Three words. A nod. A stupid lip bite she had no business cataloguing like evidence.
Her stomach still went warm all over again. She turned before it could show too much, because she had an audience and an ego and a PA who absolutely saw everything, and let Adrian guide her into the corridor.
The backstage hallway was cooler than the dressing room, all concrete, black curtains, rolling cases, radio chatter and crew moving around with that quiet after-show exhaustion that made every person look like they had aged six months in three hours.
She slipped instantly into the little trail of goodnights, waving with the smoothie hand, blowing kisses to the wardrobe girls, touching one lighting tech briefly on the arm as she passed and saying, “Thank you for tonight, the blue cue was fucking perfect, mwah, see you tomorrow,” then calling, “Goodnight, angels, thank you!” to a cluster of dancers disappearing the other way in sweats and stage makeup.
Every few steps, someone answered her. Night, babe. Killer show. See you tomorrow. Rest your voice. Drink water. Don’t drink tequila. That last one came from Mia behind her and she turned just enough to give a scandalised look over her shoulder.
“I’m being slandered in my workplace.”
Amber laughed beside her, one hand hovering near the small of her back without quite touching, ready in case the post-show high suddenly dropped out and left her dizzy.
Adrian pushed the exit door open ahead of them, and the warm L.A. night rushed in, thick with exhaust, distant fan noise, security radios, and the strange hollow feeling of leaving a building that had just held an entire world inside it.
The car was waiting close. Black, tinted, cold inside when Adrian opened the door. She folded herself into the back seat with a groan that came from somewhere deep and unglamorous, UGGs first, smoothie clutched to her chest, body collapsing sideways against the leather like someone had cut her strings.
“Phew,” she said as Amber slid in after her and the door shut, sealing out the venue noise until it became a muffled roar behind glass. “What a fucking show, dude.”
Amber grinned at her in the dim back seat, face lit blue-white for a second by her phone. “You killed it, babe.”
“I know,” she said, then laughed because it sounded awful and true and exactly how she felt.
She let her head fall back, eyes closing as the car began to move, the adrenaline still glittering under her skin but finally, finally starting to loosen its grip. Her knees ached. Her throat was tired. Her scalp hurt from fifty different hair flips. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a crowd was still screaming the lyric she had thrown at them like a match.
Then another image slipped in, quiet as a hand through a curtain. White t-shirt. Buzz cut. Warm voice. His bottom lip catching under his teeth for half a second before he said, Yeah. You too.
Her eyes opened. Amber was already looking at her.
She lasted maybe three seconds before she said, very carefully, “Do we have Drew’s number?”
Amber’s expression did something wonderful, the tiny, satisfied click of a woman who had been waiting for a delayed explosion and was pleased to see the timing come in on beat. “No,” she said slowly. “We don’t.”
“Right.”
“But that energy was crazy.”
Her mouth curved before she could pretend otherwise. She turned her head against the seat to look out at the passing venue lights, LA smearing soft and gold through the tinted window, and felt the grin get worse. “Bed chem?”
Amber’s laugh came out bright and immediate, one hand flying to her mouth. “Bed chem,” she nodded.
They both dissolved then, trying and failing to keep it quiet in the back of the car while Adrian sat in the front pretending, heroically, that he had heard absolutely nothing.
She tucked the smoothie between her knees, pressed both hands over her face, and laughed into her palms until her ribs hurt for a better reason, the night still humming in her bloodstream, the show behind her, the hotel ahead, and Drew Starkey’s stupid white t-shirt now living in her head with no confirmed departure date.
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