Page 16 of Forgotten

“Dallas,” I said. “After Oklahoma City tomorrow, we’re supposed to hit Dallas on Friday.”

“Oh, so no Tulsa show again?”

“'Fraid not,” I said.

“Shoot,” Mark said. “Well, just know you have at least one fan working the bar up here who wants you guys back.”

“Duly noted,” Flynn said. “Tulsa is on the list for the next southwest tour.”

“Great,” Mark said, then noticed someone coming from the kitchen with our food and another person bellying up to the bar.“Well, it looks like I’ve got company and you have food. Y’all enjoy.”

A plate with a gorgeous steak was placed in front of me, another plate of fries to one side, and a similar though smaller steak was placed in front of Flynn. I dug in quickly, ordering a beer, which Mark delivered not long after.

“So,” Flynn said after I had demolished a good half my steak and a third of my fries, “who is this April girl again?”

I wiped my mouth with my napkin and took a long sip of my beer, contemplating just how much I was going to tell him.

“Well, her name is actually Charlotte April, and I know her as Charlotte. But she is an old friend of mine from back in Foley. I ran into her at the hotel too. She was the manager at the time.”

“Ahh,” he said, then waggled his eyebrows. “So youmetup with her here then?”

I ignored the embarrassingly on-point insinuation.

“I just haven’t seen her since, and I figured if I was in town, in her hotel again, we could meet up again. But she apparently moved to Dallas, so…”

“So you’ll see her then,” Flynn said. “We will be there in less than a week. You’ve got to introduce me. I never hear you actually mention a girl by name. It’s always, ‘the blonde from so and so,’ or ‘the brunette from such and such.”

“Yeah, well, Charlotte is a bit different. She’s a very good friend,” I said. “I’m just curious as to how her life is going, that’s all.”

“Well, I’ll make sure we stay in a Bethel then,” he said, bringing his laptop back to life despite our food being on the table. “There’s only one down there. She has to be there. Want the big suite again?”

I shook my head no. “Not for this trip,” I said. “It feels like such a waste.”

“It’s not,” Flynn said, suddenly very serious. “You are a superstar in the making, Jesse. You belong in penthouse suites with runway models. It’s going to be part of what sells the band. Hard rocking country bad boy named Jesse James. Come on. I need photos of you with models, Jesse, and that can’t happen if you don’t throw parties like you used to.”

“I guess,” I said.

How little he knew that if Charlotte was there and available, those days would be long, long behind me.

Chapter Eight

Charlotte

Working in a corporate atmosphere was a little different than being on the floor at a hotel most of the time. For one, it meant wearing what I would have considered ‘impress them’ clothes every single day. The morning routine on its own was pretty heavy.

My mornings would start off with a six a.m. shower, an hour to do makeup and get my hair the way I wanted it, usually in a tight bun on the top of my head, get dressed, and get in the car. Depending on where I was, of course. If I was in Tulsa, I was home in my tiny apartment rather than back with Dad, where my things were the same as when I’d been there every day. I just kept a lot less groceries in the house now.

That’s because often, I was elsewhere. Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma City, and occasionally in areas where we were thinking of expanding, which included New Mexico and Arizona. California would come later. My job was to get us to the border with some big openings before then. I was even eying a possible hotel in Utah.

If I was in one of those cities, I had a suite usually. Sometimes, the suites would be booked and I would schlep it with a regular room, but the company wrote off my stay no matter what room I used, so if a suite was open, I took it. A tiny bit of comfort for me in consideration of the travel.

Today, I was in Houston, but I needed to get out of town pretty soon. I wasn’t heading to one of the hotels, though. No, my sister and her best friend, Amber, had other plans for me.

“Then, we’re going to go do this big expo thing out in Odessa. They do it once a year for prospective brides where they show off all kinds of services and stuff. They even have giveaways, and you know Amber loves a good giveaway. I swear, that girl. She’s marrying Luke Galloway. She’s never going to hurt for money again. And yet she acts like if she doesn’t at least hunt for a deal in the weeklies then she is being wasteful. Not me. I want to live my best life, and that doesn’t involve scouring websites and newspapers for the best deal on Pepsi, you know?”

It had been like this, non-stop, for a good ten minutes. Tamara was going on and on, and I only punctuated the pauses with the bare minimum effort words.

“Yup,” I said, rotating that one in from the cast of characters that also included ‘mm-hmm’, ‘wow’, and ‘no kidding.’

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