Encore

Chapter 1

Encore

By J.M. Snyder

Adrenaline pulsed through his veins; his ears still rang with the roar of the crowd. Whenever he closed his eyes, the darkness behind them burst into the after-flash of the evening’s laser show. Even as Corey Evans strolled down the empty hall of his hotel floor, he still felt like a superstar.

At twenty, Corey was arguably the most popular guy his age. Everyone knew his name—his face graced the covers of all the hottest magazines, from People to Teen Beat to GQ. One half of the pop duo 2ICE, Corey sometimes felt like a cowboy riding the bucking bronco of fame. He had handlers and bodyguards who got him safely through the throngs of screaming girls; he had a cell phone someone else answered for him, an e-mail address someone else checked, a f******k page he’d never seen, and a Twitter feed he’d never even posted to. Their manager Dean Summers took care of the social aspect of his career, Dean and his wife Kate. Together the two of them created and maintained the public face of 2ICE, from Corey’s carefree, boyish charm to his band mate Ian Coltraine’s brooding, moody allure.

But here, alone, in the silence of a hallway in a hotel whose name he didn’t know, in a city he couldn’t remember, there was nothing to remind him of who he was. Of who the world thought him to be.

That used to scare him.

There’d been a time—not long ago, if Corey were honest—when he’d needed a fan on his arm to remind him of who he had to be. When he needed a starry-eyed smile and glossy grin of a dazed fan girl to assure him he existed. He’d tried so hard to find that boy, the one everyone else thought they knew, the one lost somewhere along the way, that he never even realized he’d been looking in all the wrong places.

It’d been Ian Corey had needed all along. Ian, Corey’s best friend before the whirlwind of their careers overshadowed their friendship. Ian, in whose loving arms Corey finally managed to find himself.