Page 137 of Dirty Rock

What does he even see in her? He could do so much better.

The crap coming back to me was never-ending, and as hard as I tried to brush it off, I’d contemplated setting up several social media accounts in the last few days, just to combat all the gossip. Tessa had asked me if we wanted her to comment on her channels, but we’d said no. She’d fought her fights—she still did every day thanks to the damn media cretins out there—and this was our battle to win.

“Stay patient. They’ll get bored with our silence,” Julia said as we made our way to the recording studios for the first day of putting our new album together.

We were only laying down one track today, and I was fidgeting in the back of the car that was taking all of us to where we needed to go in central London.

“I’m fine,” I lied. Truth was, I was fucking tired. Exhausted, actually, and we had a long road of work ahead of us. All I wanted to do was head back to Julia’s place, where we’d spent the last few days laughing freely while making the occasional trip to look at The Blue Money Pit I’d invested in, only to laugh harder every time we saw the absolute state it was in.

Jules unclipped her seatbelt and slid across the seat to press herself to me, and I turned my head to take her in.

“You’re tired,” she stated. “You’re grumpy. If you were a woman, and I were a guy, I’d be making some really shitty joke about it being your time of the month. Want to talk about it?”

“It’s pretty self-explanatory. You keep me awake more hours than you let me sleep, hence the exhaustion.”

Her cheeks blushed my favourite shade of pink, and she ran a single finger over the exposed area of my chest where my T-shirt didn’t quite reach.

“I’d say I’m sorry, but that would be a lie,” she whispered.

“I’m not complaining.”

I breathed her in because that’s what you did when you loved someone. You tried to fucking inhale them. Close was never close enough, and too much was never enough. That empty feeling of searching for ‘something’ had disappeared with her in my life, in my bed, in my damn ink-stained heart. There was no question of whether or not this was right, whether I’d come to regret it later, or if this was just a union of circumstance.

She was my girl. My Miss Meant-To-Be.

“You ready for today?” she asked, her eyes focused on the movement of my finger.

“I’m always ready.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Something’s wrong.”

“With…?”

“You.” Her eyes shot up to mine.

I tried to hold her gaze, but it wasn’t long before I was looking away and staring out of the window to say what I had to say. “It just fucks me off.”

“What does?”

My head spun in her direction. “How a person even needs a publicist.”

Julia frowned like I’d slapped her across the cheek.

“What I mean is, I fucking hate this side of the media, Jules. I know, I know. Without them, Youth Gone Wild wouldn’t exist. I’m not saying I hate the messages they put out completely. I’m not saying I hate the fact that they have the power, even. What I am saying is I hate that ninety percent of it is fucking bullshit. It’s not right that supposed journalists can sit there in the stuffy tweed suits, lording their superiority over everyone, and they can just write what the hell they want. If they decide they don’t like a shirt I’m wearing, they can report I stole it. If they see me scratching my nose, they can assume I’m high as a fucking kite off of some drug. These people are allowed to go out there and speculate, manipulate, and abuse their positions, while thinking it’s okay to build someone up to tear them down. I’m over it.”

“We have to take the bad with the good,” she said softly.

“We have to play the game. I know.”

“They haven’t been that scathing about us so far.”

“Yeah, and how long until they are?”

“What are you worried about, Rhett?” Her brows softened, her gaze turning sad.

“You,” I said simply. “Just you. I don’t give a fuck about me. Before you, I didn’t care who wrote what or what lies were told. It was all part of the game. But now thereisa you, Jules. There’s someone I care about. They can drag my name through the mud, and no doubt they will. There’s plenty out there for them to find and smear across every printed page in the world. And what happens on the days when you have to pick up the pieces of my past and put them together, huh? You just act like it doesn’t matter if JJ Jones slanders me again? It’s not going to be that easy, is it? Someone like her feels no shame in going into graphic detail about what went on. So, yeah, I worry. For the first time in my life, I’m worrying about someone besides myself, and the weight of that is the kind of weight I don’t want to lose, but also don’t know how to carry.”

“You share the load… with me.”

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