Rock Star Romance Ultimate Volume 2

by Mankin, Michelle

  She still refused to stay in one place longer than a month.

  She still refused to come home.

  The only thing I was totally sure of was that I had no idea how to talk to her, about any of it. She just kept pretending that everything was fine, and when I pressed, she pulled away.

  It was fucking impossible.

  I was still going over it in the shower and afterward, over breakfast with Katie. At least she seemed to be doing better than she was yesterday when she showed up at the restaurant, but she still looked tired and on edge, like she hadn’t gotten a good sleep in a week. Which would make two of us.

  She was her usual sweet self, but kind of preoccupied, texting with Devi. She tried to bring up what we talked about last night, asking if there was anything she could do to help, but by now I was so wrung out over all of it I just downplayed the whole thing.

  “It’s probably not as bad as I made it sound,” I said. “I’ve just always felt responsible for her, you know?”

  “But you don’t think she’s happy.” She studied me with her keen blue-greens, her brows pinched together and her pink mouth in a thoughtful pout.

  I shrugged and stuffed my mouth with eggs, and when she tried to press the issue, to gently get me to open up, I mumbled something about my imagination and started pretending to read the paper. Like a dick.

  She gave me a long, unsure look, then went back to her phone.

  “Shit. Have you seen this?”

  She handed the phone to me. Her browser was open to an article on some trashy entertainment news website, “news” being a loose term.

  There were two images side-by-side at the top of the page, one of Elle and I at the show last night, and one of Katie and I, also from last night. The headline above the images read Bizarre Love Triangle. A larger photo below the first two showed Katie and—

  I looked up at her and her eyes went huge. “It’s not what it looks like.”

  What it looked like was Katie and her ex-fiancé tongue battling. They were pressed together and he was gripping her by her arms. Their mouths were locked together, eyes closed, but I recognized the red lace dress she’d worn to the VIP party in Vancouver and I knew the image was from that night. It was taken from a high angle in the corner of the otherwise empty hallway where I found them, obviously from a security cam. Which meant that either the douche himself or one of his staff had given the image to the media.

  “I know it’s not,” I told her.

  “He kissed me,” she insisted. “I pulled away like a millisecond after that was taken.”

  I scrolled down through the brief, insubstantial article, which was more images than actual reporting, never mind that most of it was total bullshit. I didn’t even bother reading all of it. The piece pitted Katie and Elle against one another in some non-existent tug-of-war over me, and included more photos of each of them at the club last night, including one of Katie in Zane’s arms, his hand planted on her ass. I knew I had Zane to thank for that shitty move, and I would, but it didn’t make Katie look like a saint. Especially when juxtaposed with the other images.

  While I was shown outside the restaurant with my sister, Katie was shown at various clubs the last few nights, partying with my band and even Jack, her brother-in-law. In every picture she was in the arms of another guy. I happened to know all the guys and know the hugs were innocent, but the article made Katie look like some trashy party girl.

  The only image that didn’t paint Katie as the town slut was one of her with her brother-in-law and her niece and nephew out walking in the city during their visit. But her sister was conveniently cropped out of the photo, which was right next to another one of Katie and Jack looking cozy as they did shots together in a bar.

  When I looked up again, tears were shining in Katie’s eyes. I understood why it would upset her, because this was all new to her. There had been plenty of tabloid stories about Elle and I during our relationship; there still were, even though we weren’t together and I’d barely seen her since the last tour ended. We were together, we weren’t, we were cheating, we were fighting, we were making up. It was all bullshit meant to sell magazines or web clicks for advertisers. But Katie was new at this, and this was probably the first time she’d seen a nasty article putting a vindictive spin on her actions.

  “Don’t sweat it, babe.” I handed the phone back to her. “They’ll be onto something else tomorrow. Don’t let it get to you. You know it’s all bullshit.”

  She scrolled through the article again. “What the fuck,” she whispered. She turned the phone to me, flashing the image of herself with her family. “My niece and nephew? They’re just little kids. And some creeper put their picture on the internet? With pictures of their auntie looking like the slutbag from hell?”

  “That’s what they do.”

  She went scrolling through the article, pausing to shake her head at each image. “Fuck. What the fuck. I can’t believe I did all this shit.”

  “Come on, Katie. You didn’t do anything—”

  “Yeah, obviously I did.” She flashed me the image of her doing shots with her brother-in-law, her hand on his back.

  “Well, when you’re not expecting anyone to take your picture—”

  “But I should have, right? I should’ve known better by now. A lot better.” She tossed the phone down on the table. “Jack is like my brother. I’ve known him since I was seven.” She put her face in her hands.

  “Babe, it’s cool. You’re just taking it hard because it’s been an emotional twenty-four hours.”

  She peered up at me, her eyes pink-rimmed, but at least no tears were falling. “Try five weeks,” she whispered.

  Ouch. That fucking hurt, but I didn’t know what to say. I was so emotionally tapped out from dealing with Jessa. And the tour. And whatever the fuck was happening with Katie that had my guts in a vice when she looked at me that way.

  “This is totally my fault,” she said. “Owen and Sadie are in the press and it’s my fault. This pretty much says I’m fucking their dad. Owen is four. Sadie’s six.” She stood. “Which is fucking worse, because she might see this and ask questions.” She started pacing. “Oh my God. I have to call them. What if my sister’s seen this? Of course she has. Devi sent it to me. She probably copied my sister.” She grabbed up the phone and started tapping around. “Fuck.”

  Okay. She was freaking out.

  I went over to her. “Katie. Look at me. This isn’t as big a deal as you think. Really. This shit happens all the time. You need to grow a thicker skin is all. You’ll get used to it.” She didn’t seem to be listening, still fussing with her phone, but I kept going. “It hurts at first, right? But you’ll see, you get used to it. It’ll just roll off. Don’t let it bring you down.”

  She looked up at me, blinking, like she’d just realized I was still here. “I don’t want to get used to this, Jesse.”

  “I know. I get that. But… what are you doing?”

  She was tapping furiously on her phone. “I’m sending Devi on a diplomatic mission to my sister’s place to tell her, in person, that I didn’t fuck her husband.”

  “You really think your sister is going to think that? From a stupid tabloid article?”

  “No,” she said. “But it couldn’t hurt to—oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “What?”

  She sighed. “Devi’s saying the same thing you are.”

  I followed her to the bedroom where she started throwing her things in her suitcase, which made my guts clench in a really fucking awful way.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Was it Elle?” she asked, voice shuddering as she fought back tears. “Did Elle tell them all those things about me?”

  “None of that shit was even true, Katie,” I said in my best soothing voice. I was shit at soothing women, case in point, my sister, who I had no fucking clue how to get through to. I just started pulling things back out of the suitcase.

  “No, it wasn’t true, was it?” she said
, taking her clothes from my hands and stuffing them back in. “Except for one thing. You know, that thing about our relationship being fake. Oh, and that other thing about you hiring me.” She pulled off the flip-flops she was wearing and crammed them into the suitcase too. “Someone must have told them about that.”

  Damn. The article said all that? Maybe I should’ve actually read it.

  Katie started tossing pillows and looking behind furniture.

  “It wasn’t Elle,” I said.

  “She knows about us. Someone must’ve told her. She said our relationship was fake.”

  I watched her search beneath the table we ate our breakfast on. “Katie—”

  “It is fake,” she said. “It is fucking fake and none of this is worth it. None of it is worth this.” She jabbed at the screen of her phone, then turned it to me, showing the photo of Zane’s hand on her ass.

  “Did something happen last night? With Zane? Did you talk to Elle? What am I missing here?”

  She got down on her hands and knees and started crawling around, looking under the beds.

  “If someone told her about us, I don’t know who it was… What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Where the hell is my sketchbook?” she cried, digging under the sheets.

  “It’s over here.” I plucked it from the desk where she’d left it and handed it to her. I had no fucking idea why I did that, since the next thing she did was pack it, and that was the last thing I wanted her to do. But I couldn’t handle seeing her lose her shit.

  She went into the bathroom and started grabbing up all her cherry-vanilla-cream-smelling lotions and whatever and I just about lost it.

  “Katie. Calm the fuck down.” I followed her back to the bed where she smushed all her toiletries in with her clothes and jammed the suitcase shut. I’d never seen her so irrational. This was the girl who usually sealed all her little bottles of shampoo and whatever in separate Ziploc bags in case they leaked.

  “Look,” I said, but she wouldn’t even look at me as she zipped up the suitcase. “Since I took off on your birthday to deal with Jessa and made you worry, everything’s been fucked up. Things haven’t been right between us.”

  “Things were never right between us, Jesse.”

  “I rattled your trust in me, and for that, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not that. It’s not you.” She looked at me with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen. “I’m truly sorry for whatever is going on with your sister, Jesse. She’s so lovely. And what the two of you have been through makes my heart hurt.” She rubbed her nose, still fighting back tears. I almost wished she’d just go ahead and cry; maybe then she’d sit down and stop trying to get the hell out of here. “It’s not that I don’t care. Really. The problem is I won’t have anything left to give, to deal with anything, if I go down this road. Did you know I haven’t been drawing all this week? I’m not even eating much.”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “I feel like I’m totally losing myself, Jesse. Just like I did when I was with Josh. I tried to be what he wanted and I ended up totally forgetting who I am.”

  “That’s not what’s happening,” I said, though I had no idea if that was true. I’d been so consumed with worrying about Jessa the last while I hadn’t even noticed if Katie wasn’t eating or feeling right about things. “You’re just using this as an excuse to run away,” I said, though I didn’t know if that was true either.

  “This is my family,” she said, finally turning to face me. “I would never use them for anything. These are children, being photographed by some creep with a telephoto lens while we didn’t even know they were there. This is the people I love being affected by what I’m doing.”

  “That’s what happens when you’re in the spotlight, Katie. Sometimes it bleeds over onto people you care about. That’s the life.”

  “Then it’s not a life for me.” She yanked her suitcase off the bed and put it on the floor at her feet. “I can’t hack it, Jesse. You said if I couldn’t hack it, you’d let me go.”

  “That was before.”

  “Before what?”

  She stared up at me and I knew I had a chance, right now. She was giving me that chance. To say something meaningful. Before I got to know you. Before I started to care.

  Before I figured out that I couldn’t stand to lose you.

  I didn’t say any of those things. I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, the words all clogged up in my throat.

  She swallowed and nodded, seeming to file my silence away as further evidence of my stone-cold heart. “I can’t be famous for fucking a rock star,” she said, calmly, “and all those other guys too.”

  “You didn’t fuck any of them, and I know that.”

  “But no one else does. This is out there. My family is out there. And who knows what it will be next.”

  “This hurt you. I know. But we can talk about it.”

  “I can’t,” she said, much quieter, and she wouldn’t even look me in the eye as she said it. “I can’t be your fake girlfriend anymore. It’s just… kind of killing me.”

  “I don’t want you to be my fake girlfriend,” I managed to say, even quieter. I wasn’t even sure she heard me. I wasn’t even sure what I was saying, but I didn’t fucking want her to go.

  “I just need to figure out what the fuck I’m doing with my life and I can’t do it like this.” She turned and put on the shoes that were sitting beside the door.

  I didn’t even want to ask her what “like this” meant. My heart was freefalling into my guts.

  “Katie, I don’t care what the fuck you’re doing. Just do it here.” She looked over at me. “I can take care of you,” I added lamely. I knew it was lame as soon as it was out of my mouth.

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to be taken care of, Jesse. I want something of my own. I can’t just be the girl who’s famous for being photographed making out with the famous guy. Don’t you get that?”

  “Then don’t be that.”

  “Fine.” She gathered up her little pink sweater and her purse.

  Shit. Not what I meant.

  “I’ll make arrangements with Jude,” she said. “Flynn can take me to the airport. Jude or Maggie or someone can help me get a flight. You don’t need to worry about it. I’ll be okay.”

  “Fuck that.” I grabbed her hand to stop her as she reached for her suitcase. “What do you want? You want to draw? You want to bake? Whatever it is…”

  But she was shaking her head again. Her blue-green eyes settled on me, and I knew I’d lost her. “I just want someone who cares about me,” she said, so quietly.

  My chest felt tight; it was getting harder to breathe by the second. Did she really not get it?

  “I care about you.”

  “No, Jesse,” she said. “You care about record sales.”

  I let her hand fall from mine. And maybe it wasn’t fucking fair of me to be hurt by that, but those words cut me to the bone. “Is that what you think?”

  “That was the deal, right? Six weeks to help your record sales and sell tickets? Well, the tour is sold out and you’ve said yourself that the album has outdone everyone’s expectations. Your six weeks are almost up anyway. I’ll pay you back what I owe you for the last week.” She picked up her suitcase and stood there, looking small and so fucking unsure. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “This isn’t your fault. I should never have agreed to this. I can’t just follow you around while you work and follow your dream—”

  “Katie—”

  “No. It’s not who I am. I’m not a groupie. I’m not your wife. I’m not even your girlfriend. This is just a job. And I quit.”

  She headed for the door and I just stood there like an asshole. The asshole who’d gotten the bright idea to hire her in the first place. The asshole who’d promised her this was only a business deal.

  And now a business deal was all I was ever going to get.

  “Katie—”

  “Look.” She turned on me, prac
tically pleading. “I know I’ve been a coward before but please understand, I just can’t do this again.”

  “Do what again?”

  She sighed and her shoulders sagged, like everything was just too fucking heavy. “What I did with Josh. I didn’t know how to say goodbye. I didn’t know how to end it, even though it was over. And look at it. It’s still dragging around behind me wherever I go.” She stepped closer. “So I’m saying goodbye.”

  She kissed me on the cheek. Then she looked at me, her big blue-greens bright with unshed tears.

  “Goodbye, Jesse Mayes.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  * * *

  Jesse

  “I can’t do it, man. I’ve gotta fly back and make this right.”

  I was so fucking tired I was practically slurring. It was an ungodly early hour and I was standing in my hotel room in San Francisco in my underwear gripping my phone like a lifeline. It was seventeen hours since Katie walked out and I was falling apart. I’d barely eaten. I hadn’t even slept.

  At the other end of the line I heard a very tired Brody sigh. “Not today, brother,” he said. “There’s not enough time.”

  “I can fly up there and make it back for the show. There’s gotta be a way.”

  “And then what? Even if we could make the flights work, what are you gonna do? Talk to her for an hour, turn around and fly back out to do another show? Risk getting held up at Customs and fucking over your fans? What’s the point of that?”

  I paced the length of the hotel room feeling like a fucking caged lion, all the things I should’ve said to Katie while she was here broiling in my head.

  “The point is I need to see her. Right fucking now.”

  “We’ll take care of Katie on our end. Flynn got her back safe, and he won’t let her out of his sight. You do what you’ve gotta do out there, finish the tour, then you come home.”

  I held a sharp breath.

  “Flynn’s got this, brother. No worries.”

  I sat on the bed and punched my thigh. Hard. I’d never been so pissed off at myself as I was for letting Katie get on that plane.