Page 35 of Dirty Rock

“I’m doing great. Cheers. Thanks. Bye.”

She raised a brow and gave me an unimpressed glare. It reminded me of something Julia would have done. “You’re not fooling anyone.”

“Didn’t realise I was trying to.”

“It’s okay to feel like you’ve had enough. You’re not the only one to burnout on tour.”

“I haven’t burnt out.”

Tessa’s eyes searched mine, and it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to escape her anytime soon. As my mother always said, sometimes you can't avoid the storm. You just have to go straight through it.

“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told you before,” she began, whether I wanted to hear it or not. “The first time I saw you talking on The Graham Norton Show, eighteen months ago, after you’d finished singing that cover of The Rolling Stones’ acoustic version ofWild Horses, do you know what I thought to myself? I thought… there’s a guy who was born to do what he does. Of course, I was mainly pining for Presley at the time, because, you know…”

“Desperate, horny, and bathing in self-loathing because you let him get away?”

“Something like that.” She smirked. “Butyouwere unmissable, Rhett. You had this spark in your eyes—more than any of the other guys, actually. The minute you sat on that sofa and Graham started asking you questions, you shone. There wasn’t anything about you that made me thinkthat guy is going to struggle with this life.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that since I came along, I haven’t really seen that spark from you.”

“That’s quite the coincidence.” I smirked back. When in doubt, aim for humour. That old deflection tactic usually worked, but this was Tessa, and she’d gotten quite good at seeing through the masks of rock stars like me.

“You can pretend to hate me all you want. I know you don’t. You just don’t know how to handle being close to a woman without expecting to see them on all fours in front of you at the end of it.”

“I haven’t closed the door to the idea of that happening with you yet, Tess.”

“I would.” She chuckled back. “Presley would kill us both with his bare hands.”

“Sometimes you’ve got to go out in style, baby.”

Her smile was there, but the weighty breath she released told me she was getting frustrated. I was about to open my mouth to speak again when she delivered her ultimate strike in this battle of wits.

“Julia told me what she almost let happen between the two of you.”

All trace of humour fell from my face, leaving my jaw to tighten and my nostrils to flare.

“What did she say?” I forced out through gritted teeth.

“She said enough. Despite her running away from all this, she’s grateful you didn’t let it happen.”

“Grateful?” I frowned. Fucking grateful. Like she thought I would have been a mistake.

“You didn’t want anything to happen between the two of you, right?”

“Fuck, no.” I shuffled in my seat and sat up straighter, gripping the armrests tightly as I glanced out of the small window that looked out onto nothing but clouds. “Not a damn thing. Julia is… she’s…”

“Your publicist?”

“And,like, what? Thirty-five?”

“Thirty-two,” Tessa answered in a whisper.

“Right.” I scratched my eyebrow. “Anyway, it’s Julia, you know. Fucking Julia. She’s… she’s nothing to me. Good for her for being grateful I put an end to it before it started. Good for her for being glad nothing happened. She was lucky I wasn’t pissed up or high enough to not care who she was. She was lucky I gave a shit and thought enough of her to say no. Good for her. Yeah. Good.”

A long, lingering silence floated between the two of us as Tessa held my gaze.

I couldn’t look away now—couldn’t fidget or move in case she saw things in me I hadn’t even seen for myself yet—so I sat there, my chest bouncing high and hard as I struggled for breath while images of Julia sitting over me floated through my mind.

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