Page 49 of Guarded Hearts
The only thing left was tonight’sMending Heartsgoodbye party for the staff. If it was anything like all the others I’d been to during my time as a dancer, things might get a little wild.
Everyone was drunk. The clock had struck midnight almost half an hour ago, which meant many people’s contracts were finished. There was a good chance someone in the room would never be hired again for a Mia Malone tour, or possibly any tour ever again. People talked—famous people seemed to have a secret network for determining who was worth their time. Drinking and—we might as well face it—the number of drugs in the ballroom wouldn’t lead to good decisions.
I wasn’t worried about myself. I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs.Make it to Bellerive—that was my mantra. Pasha was working anyway.
“I think,” Amy said, sipping her drink beside me, “my favorite part of the end-of-tour parties is the number of people who can no longer maintain a basic level of decency.”
I laughed and followed Amy’s gaze to the dance floor. Maria was topless and grinding with a female stagehand who we’d nicknamed Red River because she talked about her period so much.
“Being sober on a night like this has its perks,” I said.
“I’m so jealous that you get to spend two weeks on a magical island with Mia Malone and her family.”
“And she’ll be at every dance practice, perfecting my choreography. Which seems really great, but…”
“She’s still your boss.” Amy arched an eyebrow. “I get that. She’s nice, but yeah, you can’t ever forget the fact she could make or break the rest of your career.” Amy tipped back her drink. “Then when people like Jazz get fired and start acting like assholes, they make it worse for the rest of us.”
“I meant to check, actually,” I said, digging in my clutch for my phone, “to see whether she’d posted anything today. We all know she was high on stage.”
“Maria told me the other day that Jazz says it was a combination of Xanax for her anxiety and cold medicine that led her to be so out of it on stage. Nothing illegal. All prescription. So Jazz claims she didn’t violate the contract, and Mia was being petty by firing her.” Amy scoffed.
“The tour is done now. Didn’t they drug test her, anyway? What could she possibly hope to gain by continuing to go after Mia on social media?” I found my phone, and a frown marred my forehead. On my home screen was a stream of notifications, so many they’d bunched together in groups so I couldn’t get a sense of what was going on.
“That’s weird,” I whispered.
“What?” Amy asked, peering around my shoulder. “What’s going on?”
I let out an unsteady laugh and opened my phone. “My notifications have gone crazy.” A sweat broke out under my arms. What the hell had happened? Had someone died? My body flashed hot and cold as I clicked through my social media.
“Are you okay?” Amy asked. “You’ve gone really pale.”
“It’s Jazz.” I scrolled through all the notifications. Fortunately, they were all from the initial post. A rant about Mia firing Jazz because of her contract, followed by accusations that I’d been sleeping with Pasha for the whole tour without consequence. She’d posted pieces of the contract, photos of Pasha and me, and the first paragraph of the letter Mia had sent Jazz to say she’d been fired for breaching her contract.
Amy had her phone out beside me, scrolling, her finger hovering over the post. “Do I dare?”
“It’s just more bullshit.” Except more people were recirculating Jazz’s latest claims, and this was the first time I’d been named along with Pasha as some sort of proof that Mia was a shitty employer.
“Oh, Jesus,” Amy muttered. “She just posted again.”
I refreshed the feed and stared at the latest post. “Photos of us leaving hotels.” My voice didn’t feel like my own. So many of the hotels we’d gone to.
Were we holding hands in that photo?
In another, we were laughing, our gazes locked on one another. The photos were the kind engagement shoots were made of, not the sort colleagues would snap in the middle of a random street. This—this did not look good. Yet I couldn’t tear myself away from the photos.
Did I really lookthathappy when I was with him?
“Gossip outlets are starting to retweet Jazz’s original post.” Amy was clicking on various things on her phone.
“How do you know?”
Amy glanced up, guilt and embarrassment coating her face. “I follow a lot of them?”
Across the ballroom, Pasha pressed a finger to his ear, and then he searched the crowd. When we made eye contact, he grimaced.
As though his security team had been the keepers of the gossip floodgates, the rest of the room erupted into a buzz as people checked their phones. Pasha wasn’t tagged in any of the posts because he didn’t believe in social media, but in my hand, my phone kept up a steady vibration from the notifications.
“Is this bad? It feels bad,” I said.
