Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 5: The Green Room
The green room in Philadelphia had been beige and fluorescent. The green room in Boston was beige and fluorescent and also had a framed poster of Bon Jovi that someone had hung crooked in 1994 and nobody had ever bothered to fix.
Maya was sitting in front of it, eating a banana and reviewing the Boston setlist on her phone, when the door opened and Dash Wilde leaned in.
She looked at him. He looked at her. He came in and closed the door behind him and she had the specific sensation of the room becoming a different kind of space than it had been a moment ago, which she noted without doing anything about.
“You moved ‘Signal Fire,'” he said.
She put her phone down. “You looked at my setlist?”
“It was on the production sheet. I look at all the setlists.”
“Okay,” she said. “Yes. I moved it to the second slot.”
“Stronger choice.” He didn’t sit down. He stayed near the door, which she’d noticed was his default position in rooms — he always seemed to locate the exit. “The Philadelphia run had some pacing issues in the first half.”
“I know. I fixed them.”
“I know you did.” He paused. “I was wondering if you’d be interested in working on something together.”
She looked at him for a moment. “What kind of something?”
“A song. Just one. You’ve got a gift for the vulnerable verse — the kind of lyric that sounds like a confession but is actually just the truth stated plainly. I haven’t done anything like that in a while.”
“Why not?”
“Because the label wants something different and I’ve been giving them something different.”
She considered this. He was standing against the door frame in his pre-show state — jeans, boots, t-shirt, the tattoos visible from his forearms up, his hair pushed back in a way that looked like he’d run a hand through it once and forgotten about it. He looked like someone who had been doing this long enough that the performance parts of it had become neutral, and the only thing with any charge left in it was whatever he was doing right now.
She said: “No.”
He blinked. Just slightly — the kind of microexpression you had to be watching for. “Okay.”
“You want to know why?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“Because I know how that story ends.” She put the banana peel in the empty water bottle beside her. “I’ve seen it before. Not with someone like you specifically, but with a version of that dynamic. Two people on the road, a creative project, proximity. It starts as a collaboration and then it becomes something else and then when the tour ends it ends messy or it ends abruptly and someone — usually the person with less to lose — loses something they can’t get back.”
“I’m not suggesting anything except a song,” he said. “No pressure.”
“I know you’re not. That’s why I told you why instead of just saying no.” She picked up her phone again. “I need this tour more than I need a story, even if the story sounds interesting from the outside.”
He was quiet for a moment. She expected him to press — to say something about how it wouldn’t have to become anything, or that she was overthinking it, or that he wasn’t that kind of person. She had all those responses ready.
He said: “Fair.”
She looked up.
He was already turning toward the door. “See you on stage.”
“See you on stage,” she said.
He left.
She sat with her phone in her hand and looked at the crooked Bon Jovi poster for a while.
She’d expected the push. She’d been certain there would be a push — she’d laid out her reasoning like a set of reasonable, adult facts and fully anticipated having to defend them, which was fine, she was prepared, she had the arguments organized. He hadn’t pushed. He’d listened to her explanation and said fair and walked out, and she was sitting here now feeling a thing she didn’t particularly want to examine, which was mild, specific irritation.
Not because he hadn’t pushed — the not-pushing was what she’d wanted.
Because she’d meant every word of what she said, and she still had the shape of the collaboration somewhere in the back of her mind, a sketch of what it might have been, and she was annoyed at herself for that.
Petra knocked and came in with a water bottle and a look. “Was that Dash Wilde leaving the green room?”
“Yes.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to co-write something.”
Petra’s expression went through three phases in about two seconds. “And you said?”
“No.”
The three phases resolved into something more complex. “Okay.”
“I was right to say no.”
“Yes.”
“I told him I knew how the story ended and I needed the tour more than I needed the story.”
“That’s very mature.”
“Petra.”
“I’m agreeing with you.”
“You’re agreeing with me in a tone.”
Petra sat down across from her. “I’m agreeing with you because you’re right. And I’m also sitting here watching you be annoyed that he didn’t argue, which is information.”
“It’s not information.”
“It’s a little bit information.”
Maya picked up her setlist again. “I’m focusing on the show.”
“Good plan,” Petra said.
She did focus on the show. She played well, possibly the best she’d played so far on the tour, and she didn’t look at the wings once during her set.
She didn’t need to look to know he wasn’t there.
She noticed the not-noticing him on the way off stage and catalogued it efficiently in the part of her brain that handled things she wasn’t going to think about.
Then she showered and ate and got back on the bus, and she slept fine.
She slept completely fine.
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