Page 4 of Guitars and Mistakes
The night I’d jumped off the stage and virtually fallen at her feet, begging her to give me a chance to prove myself to her.
The press had eaten it up, of course. The music industry’s designated bad boy on his knees in front of a small-town musician, trying to win her back after she saw him with a fan and took it all wrong. Of course the media had already run with the story that I’d met her and fallen in love—as planted by my agent—but had no clue how real that story actually was.
After all, they hadn’t been around for the afternoon spent making love under the clouds. The shared adventure of stealing a car to try to catch up with the tour. The long, hot looks across crowded rooms. Nights spent in a closed-down café writing music.
I assumed they’d probably seen through the whole scheme right from the start, and would have been shocked to hear how deeply I’d fallen for her.
The truth was, we hadn’t seen much of each other since that night when I stopped her from leaving. Taylor—the agent in question—had taken Lila under her wing and was constantly parading her in front of the press for pictures. Every so often she insisted I be there too, and do the whole smiling thing, but that was about the extent of it. Lila was Taylor’s new pet project.
My career—and my ratty reputation—were evidently no longer her priorities.
And while I didn’t much care about whether Taylor was paying attention to me or not—it was a whole lot easier when she wasn’t—seeing Lila for only five minutes at a time was almost killing me. I’d known the girl for a whole three weeks or so and I already knew every inch of her body. Her scent. The feel of her tucked up against me, making me think everything was going to be okay. The way that smile of hers lit up an entire room.
I turned abruptly and made my way to the table where my phone was sitting, suddenly needing to talk to her. Hear her tell me that she was up and could meet me in the hallway. Hear the throaty chuckle she’d give me when she heard I was awake because I’d had a nightmare.
I had the phone in my hand and was in the midst of scrolling for her name when I glanced at the time. It wasn’t 2 in the morning. It was 5. Not that the time changed anything. She’d still be asleep and there was no way she’d want to hear from me, especially if I was calling with some sob story about a nightmare.
She hadn’t made time for me in a week. Why the hell would she make time for me now, when she was probably in the midst of the deepest sleep possible?
I put the phone gently back down on the table, blew out a soft breath of something—despair? resignation?—and then turned and headed for the shower. If it was 5, it meant the restaurants would be opening up soon.
I’d have a shower, then go and get breakfast.
If I was lucky, the restaurant would also have a bottle of whiskey available to go with my eggs and pancakes.
LILA
Iturned over, grabbed my phone, and stared at it for the third time in ten minutes.
Newsflash: It was still only 5 in the morning. The room was still dark. And no one had called me—or texted, or anything else—in the thirty seconds since I’d last looked.
Which wasn’t actually news, considering I would have heard the phone vibrating if they had.
And honestly, I didn’t know what I’d expected. This wasn’t the first morning I’d woken up feeling like someone had reached into my chest and crushed my heart, then left it somehow magically still powering my body in its newly broken state. It wasn’t the first morning I’d jumped into being awake with my thoughts all over the place... and then grabbed for my phone to see if someone had been trying to get in touch with me.
I’d been doing this for a week.
Nothing had changed.
The phone still wasn’t ringing.
I closed my eyes, breathed out, and tried to get a handle on what I knew and didn’t know. Things I knew: Rivers had seen me trying to leave the tour and stopped me. Not just stopped me; he’d jumped off the stage and come running, shoving his way through the crowd to get to me before I could make it to the door and then promising a whole lot of shit to try to get back on my good side.
I’d told him he had a deal, and I’d stayed—for the contract, sure, but also with the secret hope in my heart that Rivers Shine had somehow figured it all out. After a week of him being so hot and cold that it gave me burns of both the scalding and freezing variety, and then a morning where I’d caught him leaning over some girl smiling at her—after having walked out on me—I’d thought that maybe he’d figured it out. Maybe he’d realized that he was throwing off more mixed signals than anyone in the history of man and confusing the hell out of me.
Maybe he’d figured out that he was undermining himself by keeping me at arm’s length, and he was going to stop.
Unfortunately, that hadn’t exactly materialized. I’d agreed to stay on the tour, had a meeting with Taylor James, the agent who was offering me and my best friend a contract, and had agreed to continue masquerading as Rivers Shine’s girlfriend. The girl who was turning him around and making him see the light. Curing all the late-night booze fests and maybe even breaking him of all that brooding. I’d expected Rivers and I to go back to doing what we’d been doing up to that point: smiling for the cameras, holding hands when we knew other people were looking, pretending to be completely in love...
While spending our nights in dark restaurants writing music and our afternoons on insane road trips, making love to each other under cloudy Kentucky skies.
Instead, Rivers had barely said two words to me since I’d agreed to stay. Sure, he smiled and waved at the cameras when Taylor told him he had to, but aside from that? There had been no late-night writing sessions. No chats in fields. No staring up at the clouds telling each other what we saw.
Hell, we hadn’t even stolen another car together.
Put that whole ‘what is he doing’ thing under the heading of Things I Didn’t Know. Not that it was anything new. I’d thought I had a good handle on who he actually was right from the start, but I’d never fooled myself into thinking I knew what he was doing.
Back to things I did know, then. He was drinking more than he had been before. Every time I saw him he was at least a couple drinks in, and since I only saw him during the day, I was guessing that was mild. I had no idea what he got up to at night. He was getting broodier every day and several of his band’s shows had ended early because he hadn’t been able—or willing—to finish the set.
