Page 17 of Tattoos and Heartbreak
And fucking hell was I going to have trouble protecting my heart if this was the way he was going to go about it all.
RIVERS
Ifigured out within the first two days that the only way either of us was going to survive this was if I stayed as far away from her as I could.
Sure, I had to make public appearances with her. I had to make sure we were walking together on the sidewalk at times when the paparazzi were around, and that she was part of my entourage whenever I went anywhere. I found her in the crowd whenever I sang and did my best to make it look like every single song might actually be about her.
Despite the fact that I’d written all those songs before I even met her.
And most of that was easy. I had no problem taking her hand and walking with her like we were a cute couple out for a stroll. Leaning into her and saying something to make her laugh right when the cameras arrived. Looking at her like she was the most important and beautiful thing I’d ever laid eyes on, and like being with her filled me up to the top with something many people had never even felt before.
Putting on a show like that was easy. Hell, I’d spent most of my life performing and I’d practically perfected pretending I felt something I’d never felt. I was a walking mask, giving the people what they wanted and protecting myself as best I could while I played their bad boy, in love with nothing but whiskey and rock and roll. I lost myself in a string of girls whose names I couldn’t remember and towns I wouldn’t recognize if I saw them again, and I drowned all the loneliness with an act that everyone thought was the truth.
I knew how to pretend.
The problem was, I wasn’t pretending with Lila. When I leaned into her it was to press my nose against her skin and smell the sunshine on her. When I took her hand it was because I didn’t think I could stand one more moment of not touching her. I looked for opportunities to take her out, even started tipping the photographers off just so I could tell her we had to go take pictures.
Making her smile quickly became the best part of my day.
I was literally pretending to feel something I actually felt, and that was so fucked up that I could hardly wrap my mind around it.
Even worse was the fact that I knew I shouldn’t be feeling any of it. Lila Potter was the best person I thought I’d ever met. She was literally sunshine and rainbows, her smiles lighting up the room and her laugh drawing everyone around her. It had taken her about five seconds to get to know every single one of my crew by name, and even less time to worm her way into the hearts of the guys in my band. Hudson, our rhythm guitarist, was so soft on her that he practically worshiped the ground she walked on, and Matt had taken to spending some of his free time teaching her how to play bass. Even Noah, our designated badass, grinned every time he saw her.
It was infuriating.
Mostly because I knew I didn’t have any right to her. Not really. I was damaged goods, the baggage I was carrying around with me so heavy that I couldn’t stand it myself most days. I’d never had anything I didn’t break, and I knew enough to know that it was because of who I was. My parents had deserted me when I was just a baby and I’d spent my entire childhood realizing that it was because I hadn’t been enough for them.
Lila was soft and gentle and sweet... and way too perfect for me to touch. I’d break her like I’d broken everything else in my life, and I didn’t think I’d be able to stand it when I did.
Sure, I’d jumped at the chance to spend more time with her on that first night, when we’d had so much to drink we could hardly walk straight on the way to my room. I’d held onto her like she was a life jacket and I was drowning, and I hadn’t given my reputation two thoughts. I’d been too caught up in how good I felt with her.
But that had been one night, and I hadn’t thought I’d ever see her again.
This was weeks of pretending we were a couple. Weeks in which I could screw everything up. I’d seen the way she looked at me that first morning in front of the cameras. Her eyes had been full of her heart, those bottle-green orbs telling me exactly how much she was feeling in the moment, and that hadn’t changed. When she looked at me I could see a girl on the edge of falling in love.
I wasn’t going to let it happen.
Because I wasn’t the guy who fell in love back, and I would be damned if I was going to let her get hurt that way. This was a fake relationship that I’d agreed to only because it would save our spot on the tour. She was only doing it for the promise of a contract. It was a business deal, and nothing more.
Nothing less, either. But still. We didn’t mean anything to each other.
Period.
The answer was simple. I avoided her like the plague unless we were making an appearance together. Getting our photographs taken. If I could, I kept my distance, and if we had to be together I made sure someone else was around to pad us.
Unless I didn’t have a choice in the matter.
On our third night on the road, I was backstage, hurrying through our preparations because we’d been late getting into town. The audience was already in the house by the time we rolled in and though The Leathers had performed first and had at least warmed the stage up for us, we used different equipment and had to change everything out before we could go on. Our roadies were good but weren’t capable of doing it all on their own, so Matt, Noah, Hudson, and I were running around like chickens with our heads cut off, getting amps and speakers onto the stage and ferrying out guitars, microphones, and the drum set.
We should have slowed down. We should have been more careful. But you get on the road and you get into this place where all you can think about is getting in front of the audience, and I think we all knew that the sooner we got everything set up, the sooner we’d be up there playing.
We had several speakers still stacked backstage and I was reaching up to grab one of them when someone hit me from behind. I stumbled into the stack, swearing, and felt the bottom speaker give... then start to tip.
Oh God.
I looked up at the stack, everything caught in slow motion, and realized that the whole thing was about to go. My eyes tracked slowly—too slowly—to what was on the other side, trying to figure out whether anything was in the way.
Because this stack of speakers was on its way down.
