Page 41 of Between the Lines

My father had drilled a lesson in me long ago about personal responsibility—it was always better to focus on whatyoucould have done differently when fucked-up situations arose. That way, at the very least, you can find a lesson in the muck somewhere, so it wasn’t just all messed up for nothing.

Mymistake in all this was getting involved with Stella in the first place.

Sure, she was bad as fuck—no arguing that. She could dance, she could sing, she could act, and she was inarguablyfine.Purely from an image standpoint, being connected to her was absolutely a win.

One that honestly…should have never mattered.

Admiring her from afar, and if a meeting happened to occur, sobeit, should’ve been enough. But I’d mistakenly allowed the need for an adjustment to my public image to get ahead of the way I liked to operate in the first place.

Organically.

But I was trying to break into a new level of stardom, trying to get bigger and better roles, blah blah blah. All through my career, I’d allowed things to happen naturally, never forcing anything, but with the breakup with Ellie being so fresh, I was good and distracted from my path.

I couldn’t reallyblamemy PR team, because they were doing what they were supposed to do. ButIshould’ve held my ground.

There should have never been any “appearance” of something with me and Stella when therewasn’tanything with me and Stella. If I’d just allowed myself to be comfortable with people believing what they wanted about me in the first place—me being a playboy, or gay, or secretly married, who gave a fuck? None of those options were truly anybody’s business except mine and whoever was on the receiving end of my heavily speculated-upon dick.

If I’d just held true to that conviction, there never would have even been an impetus for this whole situation.

But.

Stella’s ass was dead wrong for letting this all rock the way she had.

It was messy.

In any case, despite my discomfort with the entire situation, I had everybody around me who knew about these things offering similar opinions—all publicity was good, and speculation about me being good with my dick certainly wasn’t hurting the whole “heartthrob” thing my PR wanted to push.

“You know whatIwant to know?” Alec asked, straightening up from having taken his shot. “And if I may—I feel like me and you are cool enough now at this point that you can just be straight up with me. I don’t want the PR answer, I want the real deal.”

I groaned. “What is it?”

“Isthere something going on with you and Elodie? Cause y’all been lookingmightycozy lately.”

I was supposed to be taking my own shot, but once he asked that, I planted my pool stick on the ground, leaning into it a bit as I shook my head. “Damn, you’re believing Stella’s bullshit too?” I asked.

“I’m not believing anything, I’m asking you straight up.” He shrugged. “What’s up?”

I grunted a bit, trying to figure out how I wanted to answer the question.

The PR answer was definitely one thing—Elodie and I are coworkers, and it’s actually encouraging to me that we seem to have recreated the chemistry we found on our first project together with these new characters. She’s an amazingly talented actress, and I hate that it seemingly gets overshadowed by the need to have this incorrect narrative around our relationship.

Something like that.

Shame the media into letting the relationship be solely professional.

Therealanswer though…

“I don’t know if we can really…get back what we had,” I admitted, and Alec nodded.

He was one of very few people privy to the fact that Ellie and I had previously dated, so that part wasn’t news to him.

“But…youwantto get it back?”

I chuckled. “This is supposed to be time to de-stress, not an opportunity for you to grill me,” I said, finally picking up my pool stick to take my shot.

Actually, him swinging by was supposed to be about us running lines and shit for an intense scene we had coming up, but we’d got that in the bag so early that we were just kicking it now.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were deflecting.”

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