Rhythm of Love

Nora’s Point of View

“Crazy American chick say what?!”

If the situation wasn’t so perplexing, I would have probably laughed at Nicolette’s statement. When I’d returned home from being at the park with Alex, I snuck up to my room to work on some of the college work I was supposed to be doing when Nicolette sent me a message via Skype that she had to talk to me that very minute. Even after I explained that I should really be working on my courses – I was quickly falling behind – she insisted that it was important and needed to be discussed right then and there. Before I knew it, we were in a video chat talking about how her ex-boyfriend Clément was dumped by the girl he cheated on her with, named Adele. She chuckled darkly through-out the story, saying how he deserved it and how she hoped Adele would rot in hell and all that. Then she had asked me about how I was doing, and I ended up telling her about what had happened last night. Which, at this moment, I was regretting. With a grimace and a finger to my lips, I whispered, “Shut up, loud mouth!”

“It’s just…!” she commented, not lowering her voice at all. “Oh my god you did it!” My face flushed about a thousand shades of red and I was about to tell her to shut up again when there was another voice behind me. This time, it was a male’s.

“You did what?” he said and I froze. Please don’t be Dad… Please don’t be Dad! However, when I turned around Damien was standing at the door. I mentally sighed in relief.

Before Nicolette could say anything she’d regret, I stated, “Eli and I kissed, do you have a problem with that Dad?” He wrinkled the nose at the nickname and before I even had to ask him to leave, he was gone down the stairs and probably to the fridge. When I was sure he was out of hearing range, I let out an exasperated sigh. “Oh my gosh, Eli… What the hell am I going to do?” Up until right then, I’d totally forgotten that I was technically in a relationship with Eli at that point. And then there I go, kissing and doing the deed with his older brother. Just thinking about that made my head hurt and I felt guiltier than anything. Nicolette send me a sideward stare.

“And who,” she asked, curiosity dripping from her voice, “is Eli?”

I explained to her everything about Eli, from when I met him to our date to a few days ago when Damien and Alex were fighting. She listened intently, but I could tell she was going to yell at me, especially because of her own issues with cheaters. When I concluded my story, she sighed and rubbed her temples as I waited for the judgment. However, when she answered she stated, “Honey, you are screwed. What are you going to do?”

But I wasn’t sure. I’d liked Alex my whole life, but there was a part of me that was drawn to the joking and fun Eli. I let out a groan and through my head in my hands. Before I was able to answer, a few pairs of feet tapped against my hardwood flooring and soon five males were on my bed with me, Noah and Damien on either side of me, Dylan behind me, and Troy and Mitchell on either side of him. Nicolette squealed and waved at my band mates as frustration grew inside of me. There was no way I was going to be able to work on my college courses now; they were prepared to get working on preparing for the Battle of the Bands competition.

Noah spoke for everyone, “Hello Nicolette, I’m sorry we’re going to have to steal Nora away for awhile. We have some important business to attend to.” Nicolette nodded to him and waved goodbye as I glared at his smiling face. When she ended the video chat, he turned to look at me while pointing an accusing finger. “No more slacking!”

“I wasn’t!” I retorted, moving away from them. “I was doing my courses!”

“Clearly.” Dylan spoke with a grin. I pursed my lips before shutting down my laptop and placing it on the floor. He continued, “So we need to get a whole bunch of songs down. There’s a lot of teams, thus a lot of parts in the competition.”

“How many days is this one?” I asked, eyeing them all. When they answered that it would be a three day competition, I grimaced. “Okay, five at night to midnight over the course of three days… I can deal with that I guess. Are we taking your trailer, Mitch?” He nodded and I continued, “Alright, so I watched a few of the passed competitions and they always do a few duets over the course of the competition. To eliminate the hassle of having to learn new songs quickly, I say we take a few from every genre so if we get a pop band, we know pop; if we get a rock band, we know a ton of rock; and you get the point. How’s that sound?”

We all agreed on the plan and I whipped out my iPod to scan through the songs. Seeing as we were already a rock and alternative band, I skipped over those songs and instead focused on pop and country. The first song I put on was probably my favorite country song but by the looks of the guys faces I could tell they didn’t like it. I glared at them, “Well, we need at least one country song guys! And what’s wrong with Leann Rimes? I love this song!”

Damien wrinkled his nose. “Well, I can’t really see our band doing this song… I mean, it’s good for you to sing, it’s in your range and all, but do we look like guys who would play music like this? I mean seriously.”

“Oh suck it up!” I growled. “We need at least a few country music and I don’t have much as is!” They weren’t happy about it, that was noticeable, but they also knew that I was right so they didn’t press the issue anymore.

After about an hour, we had a lot of every music genre we could think of. Not only that, but we had singles for Damien, singles for me, duets for the two of us, and duets for when there are group competitions. Of all the songs that were chosen, the guys were most interested in doing Gives You Hell by the All-American Rejects. “We’ll all get to sing, technically,” Noah stated when I questioned this. “Like when they have the hundred of people sing in the music video. We can all sing and have the audience join in, you know? It’ll be so fun.” It had absolutely nothing to do with the constant swearing. Of course not. I on the other hand would be excited to get a rapper for one of the group competitions, so that we could do On The Floor by Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull. Since Damien couldn’t rap to save his life, we never were able to do any Eminem songs or B.O.B so just the thought of being put with a rapper was exciting.

After running through the singing portion of the songs, Noah asked, “We’ve been working for awhile so how about we all go out and do something fun?” All of the guys excluding Mitchell who hadn’t been with us yesterday grinned at me and I yelled in frustration a definite no. They laughed and ruffled my hair, jumped off my bed, and escorted me to Noah’s red BMW convertible. I nabbed the passenger seat to avoid being crushed in the back seats between four guys. Of course, they avoided this by sitting up on the car itself with their feet on the seats. I laughed at them and Noah, deciding this time to be true to his word, ended up driving us the an ice cream parlor.

The ice cream was delicious as always but the feeling of guilt never left me. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, because a part of me liked both of them. A hand was placed on my head and ruffled my hair and I peered up at Damien’s serious face. He bent down, his lips at my ear, and said, “You’ll know what to do at some point. You’ll figure it out, I’m sure. So stop stressing out about it and instead worry about Battle of the Bands.” I chuckled at him and he sent me a smile before adding to his statement.

“I believe in you.”