I guess finding out that the guy you were dating, who’d also asked you to be exclusive and date only him, had gotten drunk and accidentally hooked up with a stripper and let someone videotape it, doesn’t usually go over very well. The worst part was that I couldn’t even defend my actions. I’d done exactly what she’d said, she’d seen the video, and the only excuse I had was that I was an idiot.
She told me I didn’t deserve her, and she was right. Because of that, I knew trying to fight for her wasn’t going to work. I’d let her go. I’d stood there silently as she walked out of my life. She was just a girl after all – or at least that’s what I told myself. Then I went out with Phillip, got drunk and decided I could hook up with whoever I wanted, internally declaring my freewill as I tried to forget the one girl I’d ever had real feelings for.
I didn’t know it at the time, though. I had no idea what kind of a hold Elisa Donovan had over me and how much I refused to feel the day I’d let her go, because the idea of getting upset over a girl seemed insane. I wasn’t that guy. So I hadn’t let myself feel anything, and when asked about it, I never told anyone that Elisa had been more to me than a girl I’d hooked up with from time to time – just one of the many. Because that’s what I’d wholeheartedly believed.
Until five minutes ago.
It was like as soon I saw her again, immense clarity took over, and everything I’d forgotten about being with her came back to me in a rush. As she listened to Katherine speak, I fixed my gaze on her long blond hair that disappeared down her back, mesmerized by the locks that I so distinctly remembered splayed over my bare chest as we’d laid in bed whenever we’d been able to steal time together in between two crazy schedules that were so rarely in sync. But when they were, when we’d been together, it had been so good.
Why hadn’t I remembered that?
Her smile, her laugh, the way her blue eyes would light up when she saw me after a stretch of time when we’d been apart – those were the things that made me happy back then. Those were the things I’d buried deep because I hadn’t wanted to be reminded of them. I’d pretended it was everything with the band and my fame and my ridiculous bank account that afforded me anything I wanted that had made me happy, but in reality it wasn’t any of that. It was Elisa.
When we’d met, Westside was just starting to gain notoriety, and at times it was completely overwhelming to me, a low-key guy from Nevada who wasn’t used to the spotlight and didn’t necessarily understand or enjoy it. Elisa knew that, and she kept me grounded when my world had started to spin. She kept me sane and level, talked me through the times when I felt like I was going to slip off a cliff, and let me know that it would get easier in time and I would one day love the life I’d been thrown into. She’d been right. She’d been so right.
I knew in that moment that regardless of my success and fame, of all the love and adoration I got from our fans, and all the little things I’d come to love about what I got to do each day, in the two years since Elisa and I had ended, I hadn’t felt happiness like I had when I was with her. I’d bypassed the feelings so quickly, channeling them to other parts of my life, knowing that it couldn’t have been a girl bringing me that kind of contentment. But it had been. It was all her.
That revelation felt like a smack in the face. I’d been an idiot to let her go – a goddamn idiot. I should have begged her to forgive me, I should have justified that we weren’t technically exclusive when I’d ‘cheated’ because she’d been afraid to give me a chance – probably with good reason, but still. I should have promised her that I’d never look at another woman again, that I’d be faithful no matter what. I should have promised her the world just to keep her in my life, but I was dumb and immature back then. I hadn’t realized that a girl – that she – was the best part of my life.
Before her I’d never seriously dated. I’d hooked up – a lot – and I’d had girlfriends, but I’d never been in love or even wanted to be. I had my friends, I had snowboarding, and I had Westside. I saw no need for a significant other when I was twenty-one years old. I figured I’d meet someone when I was older and ready to settle down.
And I was still in that mindset, but at the same time, I’d dated enough in the past two years to know that girls like Elisa didn’t come around every day. In fact, I’d never met anyone who even came close to being as amazing as her, which was probably why I’d never gotten serious with anyone else. No one was her, which I knew was partially why I’d asked her to be my girlfriend two years earlier. I thought she was incredible, and I genuinely loved being around her.
But I was also afraid of losing her, which was most likely why I’d blurted out the question with such reckless abandon. That had been my fatal mistake.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth – Be my girlfriend? – I’d wanted to take them back. I knew I’d only said them because I felt her slipping away. I’d taken a drastic step, one I probably wasn’t ready to take, and when she hesitated, I panicked. I knew in that moment that I really was going to lose her. That fear later led to copious amounts of drinking and the stripper and the end of Elisa and me.
But seeing her again and being reminded of just how much I’d lost the day she walked out of my life, I couldn’t help but remember so many of the good things. I wanted her to look at me, to meet my gaze. I wanted to see her smile, to know that she remembered too. We’d had a really good thing back then, and I wasn’t sure either of us had even known it at the time.
I couldn’t stop staring at her, and I was starting to get pissed that she refused to look at me. But at least it gave me the opportunity to study her. She looked different. Maybe it was because she was two years older, but maybe it was something else. She almost had a steeliness to her gaze as she watched Katherine speak, a determination in the way she held her shoulders back, her jaw tight, her lips pressed together. She looked harder. Even her long hair was stick straight and pulled back into a low ponytail, giving her a tough appearance that I knew was meant to be professional, but to me it was so insanely sexy.
She’d never straightened her hair when we’d been dating. Back then she’d let it fall over her shoulders in soft waves that I’d loved to run my fingers through. She’d always had a softness about her, an innocence and a naiveté that I’d secretly loved. She was trusting and kind, sweet and genuine, so different from the girls I’d met in L.A., but at the same time, she was savvy and knew her way around.
She’d grown up in L.A., and her father had been a fairly prominent rock musician while she was growing up, so she’d been around the music industry since she was a kid. It was almost like she knew it from the inside out so well that she could see past all the bullshit. I appreciated how grounded that made her. I needed that when I’d been thrown into the insanity that was my life when I first joined Westside.
Elisa had been the one person I knew I could go to when shit got too crazy. She understood what I was dealing with, she understood me, and she just made everything a little easier to stomach. Of course I eventually adapted to the insanity. It became my new normal. That was when I let my fame and celebrity go to my head. That was when I’d fucked up. That was when I’d lost her.
At the time, I told myself that breaking up with her was for the best, and I made myself forget how much I liked her. But the truth was that I loved being around her, getting lost in her when we had those rare moments together, and I always looked forward to seeing her. It was apparent to me now that what I’d felt for her once upon a time hadn’t gone away in the two years since I’d last seen her. I might have felt like I was over her, but seeing her again brought everything back to the surface, and I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with that information.
For two years I’d screwed around with too many girls to count, and I now knew that it had been in an effort to put Elisa out of my mind. I thought it had worked, but now, seeing her sitting across from me, I knew it had been a wasted effort.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t completely wasted. It wasn’t lik
e I’d struggled through sleeping with models and actresses, but to learn that I hadn’t purged Elisa from my system like I thought I had was like getting a bucket of ice water tossed over my head – shocking and painful.
When she started talking, sharing the plans for how our promotional campaign would be interwoven with the tour, she finally made eye contact with me. But it was just for a moment. Her eyes skimmed over me as she talked, as if I were a stranger, as if we hadn’t shared too many intimate moments to count, and as if she hadn’t felt anything for me.
Her indifference felt like a punch to the gut, but instead of asking her what her deal was, I had to sit there and pretend like I was listening. In reality I wasn’t paying attention to a word she was saying. My gaze was fixed firmly on where she was looking, craving those moments when her crystal blue eyes met mine and feeling deflated when I saw nothing in them.
What was she thinking? Why wouldn’t she look at me? Was it because she was still mad at me? Did she hate me? And if she didn’t, what exactly did I want from her?
I’d woken up that morning in the bed of the girl I’d been seeing pretty regularly since I’d been back in Los Angeles. Her name was Blair, and she was an actress. We’d been set up for a red carpet event, but we’d ended up kind of hitting it off. Her career was just getting started, but she’d lived in L.A. her whole life and had dabbled in modeling before getting the lead role in a movie that had been nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. She was smart and quick-witted and tough. She wasn’t a stranger to the cutthroat nature of the business, and because of that I’d sort of taken to her. We’d been seeing each other for a month.
So was I just going to toss her aside because my sort of ex-girlfriend had popped back up, and I thought I might still have feelings for her? Or was I just confusing the strange emotions coursing through me as something more, when in reality I was feeling sentimental because of the way Elisa and I had left things?
That might have been it. I wasn’t an asshole by nature, but I’d been one to her. Just that idea alone had eaten away at me for far too long after we’d ended things. Maybe my brain was confusing what was most likely a chance to apologize and admit that I really had deserved the ‘fuck-off’ she’d thrown at me, because I really had been a selfish dick. Maybe that was it.
“What do you think, Van?” I suddenly heard, and my gaze shifted to Katherine involuntarily.
“Huh?” I said, sounding every bit the laid back snowboarder that I’d been labeled as early on in Westside.
We all had our own personas that the fans had given us, and sometimes they felt like they were as much of a part of us as our real personalities, even if they weren’t exactly spot-on. Phillip was the preppy bad boy, which was only half true these days. Cam was funny and charming because of his good nature and goofy smile, which was pretty accurate until you realized there were so many more layers to him. Dillon was known as being sexy and flirty, which was funny because he’d had a girlfriend longer than any of us, and I was known as a snowboarding junkie, which was completely true. The laid back part wasn’t always true, though, since I was far from being a slacker.
But the fans only saw what I let them see, and I’d played into the label they’d given me from the beginning. I’d always been quiet and reserved growing up, so the last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to myself. No one needed to know that I’d gotten a near perfect score on my SATs, that I’d gotten a full academic scholarship to Berkley, and that I liked to read the classics. It wasn’t important to who I was in their eyes. It didn’t matter when it came to the job I did.
Which, ironically, was a job I never imagined myself doing. I knew my bandmates had all had dreams of being on-stage their whole lives, and when asked in interviews, I always lied and said I’d had the same dream as a kid. That couldn’t have been farther from the truth. I’d only auditioned for Westside because my cousin Max hadn’t wanted to go alone. So I’d gone with him, and while he got cut after two rounds, I kept getting pushed through until finally I was offered a spot in what we were told was a new boy band.
I almost turned it down. Max was pissed at me, and the last thing I wanted to do was ruin our relationship by taking his dream out from under him. But when I told him that, it only made him angrier. He said I’d be crazy to throw away that kind of opportunity. So I’d casually reminded him of the education waiting for me at Berkley, to which he’d laughed and shook his head.
Then he’d asked me if I’d be okay with being ordinary for the rest of my life. I’d looked at him in confusion for several seconds until he explained that anyone could go to college. Anyone could get a degree and go to work, slogging away as they made their way up the corporate ladder, but I was being offered an opportunity that millions of people would kill for.
I tried to rationalize that what I’d been chosen for wasn’t full-proof. Just because I’d been selected didn’t mean I’d make it big or have success. The band, which didn’t even have a name at that point, could easily fail after a year. Max had just smiled and said, “So what.”
I remember looking dumbfounded at him, like he was slow. How could he say that so flippantly? Then he went on to explain that even if the band failed, it would be the experience of a lifetime, and any sane person would do it. College could wait. It would be there in a year. I could defer my acceptance, but something like what I was being offered couldn’t be deferred.
So I’d done it. I’d blindly joined a boy band, not knowing what the hell I was getting into and hoping I wasn’t going to live to regret my decision. And I hadn’t. There wasn’t one day that I looked back and wished I’d chosen a different path. I was meant to do this, even if it wasn’t something I’d ever realized.
But I’d never gotten wholly comfortable with every piece of me being known to the world. I liked keeping parts of myself hidden, which is why I never corrected anyone when they assumed things about me. I’d rather them assume than know the real me. If they didn’t know me, they couldn’t take me down, and in an industry as cutthroat as ours, that threat was always there. It was better to stay as anonymous as possible and keep your guard up at all times. That was the motto I’d always lived by, and it had worked for four years. I wasn’t about to abandon it now.
I was just glad my sex tape situation hadn’t gone public. That was just about as personal as it could get, and I would have hated something like that being seen by millions of people. If nothing else, I regretted not being more careful that night. I’d vowed never to let something like that happen again. I’d been lucky that the stripper and her friend had been more than accepting of the pay-off my lawyer had offered them, and they’d erased the recording, knowing they’d never be able to pay the penalty they’d have to pay if the video went public.
“What was the question, Katherine?” I asked her, dragging my attention back to the meeting.
She looked mildly amused as she said, “We were just looking for your opinion on what we just presented.”
“Me? Why not one of these guys?” I asked, gesturing to my bandmates.
“Because Epic Snowboards asked you to be their spokesperson,” Brent chimed in, with just a touch of sarcasm in his tone.
I narrowed my eyes at him. He wasn’t one of my favorite people, but he was good at what he did, and he’d been on our team from the start. He just had an arrogant, douchebag vibe about him that rubbed me the wrong way.
“Oh.”
Dammit. Why couldn’t I string words together so I didn’t sound like a moron?
“So, do you like the idea? Would you want to be a sponsor for Epic?” Brent continued, acting like he was talking to a child.
“Yeah, sure. Definitely,” I said quickly.
I’d ridden Epic boards for the past few years. They were awesome. Being their spokesperson was kind of a no-brainer, and had I been paying attention, I would have responded that way from the start. Although, the panicked look I’d deciphered in Brent’s eyes as I’d been supposedly deliberating his question was
almost worth it. The guy almost never got rattled, and it was nice to see that he wasn’t as together as he wanted everyone to think. I had a feeling he’d already told Epic I was in, and he’d probably been wondering what he was supposed to say to them if I said no. Good thing for him, I was too nice of a guy to do that . . . and I might have also feared that I’d look like even more of a dick in front of Elisa if I turned down what was an easy and effortless partnership. The fact that I was taking into consideration what she’d think of me unsettled me more than anything else.
“Very good,” Katherine said, taking charge once again. “I think that settles everything.” She turned to Damon and our agent, Gus. “Did we miss anything?”
“No, I think we’re all set,” Damon said, nodding his head as he reviewed the packet in front of him. “Good work, Katherine.”
Katherine looked smug. “I promised you nothing less when you signed me four years ago.”
“And that’s why we keep renewing your contract,” Damon told her.
Under the table, my foot was tapping nervously as I anticipated the meeting coming to a close. I figured I’d have to go talk to Elisa. It would be rude not to, and I wasn’t sure I’d see her again. This might be my only chance to say what I needed to say, but just the idea of doing that was making my stomach churn.
“Aww, Damon, you’re too kind,” Katherine teased him. “Now if there isn’t anything else, I’ll ask my team to leave so we can discuss one more thing.”
I watched as Brent and Elisa gathered their things, realizing I wasn’t going to get to talk to her after all. A mix of relief and remorse coursed through me, since although a part of me wanted closure with her, another part didn’t want her to tell me to fuck-off again, or worse to act indifferent toward me because she could have cared less about what transpired between us two years ago.
Westside Series Box Set Page 43