Page 106 of Dirty Like Dylan

“You can have copies of all the photos I take, if you want,” she was telling Brody. “And do whatever you want with them. Well… except sell them.” She smiled, tentatively.

Brody just kinda glowered at her, crossing his arms over his chest. Damn. He wasn’t making this easy for her. Probably wondering if she was just some opportunist, hanging out with me to get access to Dirty.

“She’s really good, Brody,” I informed him. Kind of an understatement, but I didn’t want to oversell it.

Amber frowned at me. “You haven’t even seen much of my work.”

“You think I haven’t searched you?”

“Like online?”

“Yup.”

“Oh.”

“So you shoot bands?” Brody asked.

“Not specifically, but—”

“What about that epic shot you took of Johnny O at Lollapalooza a few years back?” I put in.

The shot was epic. Kinda made me epically jealous when I saw it, knowing she’d married the guy. Dude was hot. Not that I’d ever really noticed or cared before, but that photo made it pretty hard to miss.

Amber looked at me, her eyes widening a bit. “Yeah… He let me hang out while he did his set and I took a few photos. We’d just started… um… dating.” She shot a nervous glance at Brody, probably wondering what he’d make of that.

His eyes narrowed as he considered that, letting her sweat.

“Don’t be such a bear,” Maggie said, poking Brody’s shoulder. “She’s Dylan’s friend.” There was a definite insinuation on the word friend, as she gave Amber a little girl-to-girl look.

I draped my arm around Amber’s shoulders. “She’s staying. We’ll make the release work. And Elle can veto any pictures that make her look fat.”

“I heard that,” Elle said. “And yes, I can.”

Brody looked less-than-thrilled, but finally relented when he realized no one was standing in Amber’s way but him.

Everyone was still waiting for Jesse to arrive (fine by me; let him be the late one now). So while the rest of the band got warmed up, I showed Amber around the church. I brought her up to speed on what was going on in the life of my band. It was refreshing to me that she knew virtually nothing about Dirty, and frankly, didn’t seem to care, other than for the fact that it was important to me.

Over the years, I’d kinda waffled back and forth between dating groupies and dating women who had nothing to do with my rock star life. Adulation was enjoyable, to a point, especially in the early years, but more and more I’d found myself attracted to women who had their own thing going on, something else to talk about besides my band… and who didn’t go all fangirl over my bandmates.

Especially Zane. The guy would never touch a girl I was into; we’d been friends long enough I knew that for a fact. But he’d definitely eat that shit up.

Despite the fact that Amber hadn’t shown any interest in him, he was still keeping an eye on her now; probably wondering what she was made of.

Honestly, if he brought a woman to rehearsal, I’d be doing the same thing.

I explained to Amber that Dirty had spent the better part of the last year writing songs for the new album, our tenth anniversary album, and at this point we were pretty much just putting the finishing touches on the songs. Taking things as far as we could, creatively, before going into the studio to start recording the album.

She could probably tell I was pretty fucking excited about it, and grinned at me as she listened.

At the beginning of this year, we’d had a song deficit, only a few new songs that were worthy of the album. But since bringing Jesse’s sister, Jessa, back into the fold as a songwriter, and now Seth, we’d ended up with a surplus. We’d only recently managed to figure out which songs were making the cut. As it turned out, about a third of them were written by Jesse and Zane, another third by Jesse, Zane and Jessa, and the rest were written either by Seth or by a combination of Seth, Elle, and the others.

Elle had always contributed to the bass line as the songs came together, elaborating on Jesse’s suggestions, but she and Seth had really clicked creatively, and for the first time, she was co-contributing lyrics and entire melodies. I would always come up with the drum parts on the songs, or embellish the basic beats that Jesse or Zane or whoever laid down. And DJ Summer was even collaborating on a few songs this time. She’d joined Dirty onstage for some special concerts over the past few years, here or there, but this was the first time she’d be playing on a Dirty album.

Everyone was swept up in the new music, and all the plans for the album were finally clicking into place.

“We’re calling the album To Hell & Back, after this killer song Seth wrote. But that’s top secret,” I told Amber with a wink. “Hasn’t been announced yet.”

“Your secrets are safe with me,” she said, lifting her camera to her face and snapping a photo of me and my dumbass grin.

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