The first concert in the city will be happening later tonight. We’ve spent the past two days heading from appearance to appearance. The boys performed on Letterman, visited radio stations, met with an interviewer from Rolling Stone. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I fell right back into my old role. I would go with them and, along with Levi, help do whatever needed doing: from tying Reed’s tie at a photo shoot to running out to get sandwiches when they got held over at an interview and didn’t have time to eat. I was starting to feel like part of the team again, so comfortable it was scary. I had no idea how long it would last. The tour had to end sometime, and college awaited me in the fall.
“I want to move here,” I tell Daltrey.
“I could see you here.” He narrows his eyes a little as he takes me in. “Maybe in a little apartment in the Village. Or something really cool and trendy in Brooklyn.”
“What’s the Village?”
“You would have seen it on Sex and the City. The blond chick lived there. It’s actually crazy expensive.”
“We can count that one out then.”
“It’s still worth seeing. We’ll go tomorrow.”
I scrunch up my eyebrows. I haven’t seen the itinerary for tomorrow yet, but I assume it’s every bit as full as the last two days have been. “What’s tomorrow?”
A huge grin takes over his face, and I get the impression he’s been waiting for me to ask that question for a while now.
“Tomorrow is our day.”
“What do you mean, our day?”
“I mean, no work, no brothers, nothing. Just me and you running around the city.”
I stare at him. “Are you kidding me?”
“Nope. I have the entire day off. Seriously. Not a single obligation.”
My grin is now probably as big as his. “That’s awesome! What are we going to do?”
“I have a few things planned. Any special requests? I know you and the girls did a bit of sightseeing while we were running around with band stuff.”
“We haven’t seen much,” I say. “Oh, man, I want to do everything! Can we go to the park? And see the Empire State Building? Oh, my gosh! I’m so excited!”
“We’ll do all of that,” he promised, his voice low and just husky enough to put goose bumps on my arms. “It’s going to be great.”
After we separate in the lobby, I head up to my room, hoping the girls are there. We have about an hour until we’re supposed to leave for the venue, and I really want to tell them about tomorrow without a ton of people around. My excitement hasn’t wavered in the slightest, but it is colored a little bit by a weird sense of expectation. Is something going to happen tomorrow between me and Daltrey? Do I want it to?
“Hey, Daisy,” Paige says when I open the door. “How was the shoot?”
“Good. A little boring. What’d you guys get up to?”
Karen is lying flat on the bed, an arm over her face. “Levi had us loading boxes at the venue for hours. It sucked big time.” She moves her arm and grins at me. “I mean, totally worth it for this extended fantasy we’re on, of course.”
I laugh and flop onto my bed. “So something kind of interesting just happened.”
Paige sits up straighter in her chair and sets aside the bottle of hot-pink nail polish she was using on her toes. “Yeah?”
“Daltrey has the entire day off tomorrow. All the guys do. And apparently, he’s taking me out to see the city. Just the two of us.”
“It’s about time,” Karen says, propping herself up on her elbow.
“What does that mean?”
She smirks. “It means we’ve been waiting for him to make his move since Boston.”
A trickle of fear pierces my excitement. “You think that’s what this is? No, it can’t be. Can it? Oh, my God.”
“It’s okay,” Paige says. “Everything will be fine.”
“You’ve never actually told us, you know,” Karen says, one eyebrow raised. “How you feel about him, I mean. We’ve danced around it a few times. Do you like him?”
“Of course I like him. He’s my best—”
“Your best friend, yeah, yeah, we know,” she interrupts, waving her hands. “But is that all he is? Is it all you want him to be?”
I look down at my feet. For as long as I can remember, people in my life have assumed I’m romantic with Daltrey. I don’t blame them, not really. The two of us have always been much closer than most boys and girls would be without dating. But in all those years, nothing’s ever happened, minus a couple of innocent kissing experiments when we were kids.