Page 29 of Stuck with a Billionaire Rockstar

I wish I felt sick at the idea of a photo of Julia and me kissing being leaked, but I don’t. If anything, I want to see more pictures of us plastered everywhere, and that only adds to the fact that my feelings are increasing to heights they shouldn’t be.

15

Julia

I’ve just gotten out of the shower and am pulling the large comforter from my bed when Mallory bursts through the door with her eyes narrowed at me. She stomps toward me and asks, “What are you even thinking?”

I blink in surprise, look down at the bed, which looks glorious right about now, and then look back at her with my eyebrows scrunched together. “Uh, taking a nap?”

“Long day, huh?” She mutters.

“I guess I just didn’t sleep well last night.” Does she know something? She’s still staring at me as if I ruined her favorite lipstick, and it has me fidgeting on my feet. “Everything okay?”

“Great,” she says with a fake smile plastered on her face. It’s the one where her teeth clench together unnaturally, and the corners of her mouth don’t reach toward her eyes like they normally do. “Have you checked Instagram lately, Jules?”

I roll my eyes at her and sigh while sinking onto the bed, relieved that this isn’t going the way I thought it would. “Mal, you know how I feel about social media.”

She’s the only reason I ever made an Instagram account. She thought every guy in the city would want to see my hot teacher look, which is what she called it. I never got into it, though. I made one post and another every few months when Mallory reminded me that I hadn’t posted in a while.

“There were some very interesting things on there,” she says sweetly as she sits at the edge of her bed and crosses her ankles. “People really love disrespecting one’s privacy, you know?”

“Mal,” I groan. “Get on with it already. What’s got you so mad?”

I’m nervous as she reaches for her phone, unlocking the screen with a quick swipe, and holds it out to me with that smile dropped from her face. “Oh, you know, just seeing my brother smacking lips with my best friend and all that.”

I choke on the air I’m inhaling and look down at her phone, the picture of us kissing shining brightly on the screen, and I shove back into her hand while coughing my lungs up. Once I’m done hacking up a lung, I wave my hand in the air with a frown and shake my head. “It’s not what you think, Mal.”

After I say that, I quickly pull my phone up and go to my practically nonexistent Instagram account. As soon as the app loads, I look at the bottom of my screen and note the one-hundred plus notifications I have on it. Each one is from eager or curious fans who want to know who I am and why Brent’s with me.

My mistake is clicking on one notification, which takes me to the entire comment section, and I glance over different ones that range from super sweet to unnecessarily disrespectful. They don’t even know me. How could they possibly talk like this about a stranger?

There’s a tag on the image, so I click it and find it’s a link to Brent’s Instagram account. My blood runs cold when I see that he shared the same photo, his caption stating that vacation is good with the right woman by his side.

“Isn’t it, though?” I snap my gaze from my phone and look up at Mallory, who’s got her head cocked to the side, before opening my mouth to respond. She holds a hand up to keep me from speaking and continues. “You looked pretty cozy together.”

“If you’d let me explain, you would know why.”

“Brent is not the type of guy you need to be going for, Jules,” she hisses. “That’s not you.”

Here we go again.

I chuckle and shake my head. “Seriously? That’s all you have to say to me? Maybe that is me, did you ever think of that?”

She blinks. “You’re confusing yourself, Jules. He’s changing you.”

“Maybe you’re the one who’s changing me,” I spit out. “Why can’t you ever just let me do my own thing instead of constantly having an opinion on it?”

Mallory’s eyes water, tears threatening to escape, but she throws her head back and they are gone when she stares at me again. It’s as though it was a figment of my imagination. “I wouldn’t need an opinion if you didn’t make stupid decisions like this.”

“Oh yeah? Well, Mal, it might be surprising to you, but this is the best decision I’ve made in a while.” I clear my throat and lean forward. “If you would let me explain, like I tried to do in the beginning, you would know that this thing we have going on means nothing.”

“Nothing?”

I nod. “Yep. It’s not real, and he’s… helping me, I guess you can say.”

“That makes no sense, Jules.” Mallory rubs her temples as if everything I’m saying is giving her a migraine.

“He saw me utterly fail with a guy when we got here, okay?” I run my fingers through my hair and chuckle. “It was a mess, honestly. I brought up serial killers or something like that, and your brother witnessed the entire thing.”

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