Page 18 of Hold Me Closer
She glances at me, her expression cool. "Pity," she mutters. "I was looking forward to drowning you in your own bed today. No one would even blame me for it, Teo. Not after they see the pictures that hit my email this morning."
"So…we're not getting breakfast?"
"You were making out with Nadia Mikhail in a freaking parking lot last night!" she practically shouts at me, sloshing water over the brim of the pitcher. "After you beat up three people in a bar."
"Nightclub. And in my defense, they deserved it."
"You always say that."
"Yeah, well, anyone who sexually harasses and threatens women deserves a beating. Who am I to deny them what they deserve?"
She actually growls at me like a pissed-off grizzly.
Jesus Christ. I need to learn to shut my mouth.
"I'll be quiet now," I mutter, snagging a t-shirt off the back of the chair in the corner. "Continue berating me."
"We aren't getting breakfast," she mutters, marching back into the bathroom. "You'll be lucky if you're able to leave your house anytime soon. You have an entire army of paparazzi camped out there."
Fucking hell.
I stomp to the window and flick the curtains back to check for myself. She wasn't lying. There are cars lined up three deep outside the gates. Goddammit. This is the last thing I wanted.
"How bad are the pictures?" I shout to her.
"You and pop star Nadia Mikhail are making out in a parking lot," she says, popping her head out of the bathroom to glare at me. "How bad do you think they are?"
Nadia is going to kill me.
I sink down onto the edge of the bed with my head in my hands. It pounds like a motherfucker. Getting wasted when I got home probably wasn't a good idea. But fuck. Didn't know what else to do to get her out of my head. It was either drink or drive myself crazy thinking.
Turns out, I still managed to do that drunk.
"She's the girl you're messed up about, isn't she?" Emelia asks, her voice softer. She may be a terror, but she has a heart. A big one, actually. It's why I chose her to represent me. She manages to humanize me even when I fuck up. She privately gives me nine kinds of hell, but she's always publicly on my side. And she makes the people who count want to root for me, too. When I've given them as many reasons to wash their hands of me as I have…well, that shit isn't easy. But she manages to do it.
"Yeah," I rasp, not lying to her.
"Thought so," she says quietly. "Are you two back together?"
A humorless laugh escapes my lips. "If you handed her a match, she'd use it to set me on fire without even hesitating, Emelia. So no, we aren't back together. That won't ever happen. Not after what I did."
"What did you do?"
I swallow hard, staring at the floor. "Broke a promise."
"I'm going to need more than that if I'm going to fix it, Teo."
"This can't be fixed. She hates me."
"Um, have you met me?" She eyes me like I've lost my mind. "Trust me, no one kisses a guy like that if it can't be fixed. And no one sings that many love songs about someone they hate."
I glance up at her sharply. "She doesn't sing about me."
Emelia throws her head back, laughing. "Have you ever listened to her music, Teo? Every single song is about you. Honestly, I'm surprised no one else has put it together.You're a dream I can't hold. You chose the game, so I chose the road," she says, reciting lines from one of Nadia's songs. "You're chasing victory, but you're leaving me behind.I'm standing in the shadows, feeling so small, while you run for glory, giving it your all."
"What song is that?" I growl, my heart clamped in a vise.
"The first lines are fromGetaway. The second verse is fromBlue," she says and then nods at me. "They're both about a boy with blue eyes who plays football. There have been rumors over the years about a boy she went to school with, but no one would ever confirm who he was. People back home are still impressively loyal to her. They keep her secrets."
