Page 15 of The Heartstrings of Harry
“Astrid! You just fired someone for trying to do that!”
“Yes, butthisphoto’s onyourphone, not on some random assistant’s devilish device, soyoucan do with it what you will. Maybe you’ll decide to share it with this Harry chap, because that birthday message you never sent was rather steamy.” Suddenly a thought dawned on her. “Oh shit, it’s not Harry Styles, is it? Have you secretly been dating Harry Styles and didn’t tell me?! Oh. My. Fucking—”
“It’s not Harry Styles!” I thrashed my legs, furiously trying to get the pants off. “Oh my God, who was the masochist that designed leather pants! For the love of God, someone get these pants off me!”
“Dean, calm down, darling!” Astrid set my phone aside, brushed back her fiery red hair, hitched up her skirt, and knelt beside me. “Now, do you want the pants up… or down? I can get them off you if you want, but please keep in mind we have an award-winning photographer in the next room who’s keen to take a snap of you inthesered leather pants for the cover ofRolling Stone. So the choice is yours. Pants come down and we call the whole shoot off… pants go up and you sell a million more downloads on Spotify. It’s up to you. Oh, and a friendly reminder, the magazine has had their entire print -run in a holding pattern for a week waiting for your schedule to sync up with the photographer’s. Keep in mind this month’s issue comes out next week. No pressure.” She leaned down and pecked me on the forehead with a kiss that was at once caring and patronizing. “So, my darling, what’ll it be?”
Astrid Aldridge was the toughest, sexiest, most ambitious talent agent in the Los Angeles music industry. A bloodthirsty early-thirty-something from Shoreditch, London, Astrid had moved to the West Coast three years earlier, bringing with her an ear for the freshest new music and an eye for the next big thing. Astrid was the one who found me on the internet, that stupid nineteen-year-old kid singing his original tracks on his own private YouTube channel, hungry to be heard, just like the billion other kids posting their songs on social media. Except when Astrid sniffed me out like a bloodhound on my trail, she was ready to push aside every other dreamer with a guitar to bet the whole farm on me.
Me.
She was the one who snatched me from Mulligan’s Mill within three days of me posting my video of “Hammer of my Heart” online, swooping in with a bottle of champagne, a one-way ticket to LA, and a contract with Constellation Records, the music subsidiary of Constellation Media, the fastest-growing entertainment distributor in the world.
With her bombshell looks, business savvy, and the fearsomeness of an entire Spartan army, Astrid took me in her arms and parted the seas of the recording industry so effortlessly that, well, I couldn’t help but fall in love with her.
And she fell in love with me too.
How much? I’ll never really know.
But when she was ready for a fresh young shooting star to launch her career into the stratosphere, I was happy to be her comet.
She was not only my manager; she was my adviser, my stylist, my legal counsel, my sounding board, my emotional anchor, my mentor in a world I knew nothing about. She chose which clothes I wore, which parties to attend, which haircut would spark a new trend in Hollywood, which salads to order off the menu, which lunch meetings to say yes to, which conversations to walk away from, which people to trust and who was sure to kill my career, even if only by mere association.
“It doesn’t matter if you like them,” she would tell me. “It doesn’t matter if you think the bloody sun shines out of their arse. If I tell you to avoid them, it means their star is about to come crashing down. The last thing you want is to be dragged down with them. In this game, comebacks take a long time and a lot of hard work. People will sooner move on to the next big thing than give you another chance.”
Sometimes the pressure became all too much.
There were nights when I found myself on the doorstep of Astrid’s penthouse apartment with a half-finished bottle of tequila in my fist.
She nursed me through my drunken moments, overwhelmed by the burden of my rising star. She also nursed me through my many hangovers the next day. And sometimes, when I needed to be held, when I needed to be loved, she nursed me in her arms.
I lost my virginity to Astrid, but I never lost my trust or faith in her, even when I lost faith in myself.
We were never exactly a couple.
We were never public with our affections.
She simply did what she had to do to make me a star.
Yet, in all those times I found myself in her bed, in her protection, there was always someone else’s arms I wanted around me.
Harry.
Then again, what would Harry know about the lightning-paced, ego-fueled, money-hungry, celebrity-obsessed, fame-addicted world of Los Angeles? He’d hate it here. He’d be like a tiger in a cage, pacing back and forth, constantly looking for his chance to escape. Hell, there were times I wanted out too; to simply vanish, to give it all up, to just write the music I loved so much instead of playing the game for the sake of the cameras and the fans, performing to screaming audiences night after night, all the while pretending it was okay to be clawed and kissed and grabbed and fondled by hordes of complete strangers.
Yes, sometimes I wanted nothing more than to go back to Mulligan’s Mill where I knew I was safe.
Especially now that the letters had started arriving.
There had been three of them so far, all looking like stalker mail from a 1970’s slasher movie, their threatening messages made from different newspaper and magazine headlines, letters cut and glued in creepy, helter-skelter fashion.
The first one I found taped to the front door of the Malibu beach house I was renting. Astrid was with me when I opened the envelope and saw—The world doesn’t need another wannabe star. Quit now or you’ll live to regret it!
The second letter was found by a janitor who was cleaning up backstage after one of my shows—End your career, before I end it for you!
The third letter I found on the back seat of my limousine—Sing one more song and it’ll be your last!
The driver had insisted he hadn’t seen anyone come or go while he was waiting to pick me up, let alone notice anyone opening and closing the back passenger door to the limo.
