The officer met his eyes. “Where are you speeding off to?”
Sterling grimaced. “An intervention for my sister.”
The cop nodded but didn’t say anything about that. He tapped the car door twice and said, “Be right back.”
Sterling closed his eyes and tried to calm down his anger and the stress at possibly being late. He hated being late, especially to important things. It would only make him look worse and make his mother feel more justified in not wanting him there, like if he couldn’t get there on time, it obviously didn’t mean that much to him, despite the fact that he flew across the country to get here.
The officer was back. He handed Sterling back his license, the paperwork for the car, and a rectangular sheet of paper. He had expected a ticket, but it was a formal warning. Glancing up, he found the officer staring at him. “Thank you,” Sterling said.
“Son, you deserve a ticket, but I’m giving you a warning. I don’t usually do that. Do you know why?”
“Because cops get more money if they write tickets?” Sterling shouldn’t have said it, but it was like he couldn’t help himself.
The officer laughed. “Touché. The reason I don’t give warnings is because most people ignore them. A warning is supposed to have an impact on you. It’s a reminder of where you’re supposed to be and where you are instead. A warning is a sign.”
Sterling felt like he had been transported inside of some kind of movie where a stranger gave unexpected, deep advice. “Uh huh. I’ll watch my speed.”
Nodding, the officer tapped the side of Sterling’s car again. “I hope that you do. The warnings are meant to protect you and to change you. Whether you let them or not is up to you. Let them. Don’t miss the signs.”
“Okay. Can I go?”
The cop sighed. “Have a good day, Mr. James.”
Sterling resisted the urge to floor it as he drove away. He could see the officer shaking his head as he walked back to his cruiser. Just one more person that Sterling James had disappointed. But this was not the day to get philosophical warnings from cops. He would have preferred to get a ticket, pay the fine, and just move on.
* * *
Eventually, Reese got off her knees and walked out into the suite.
The suite Sterling got for her before he realized that he hated her.
That brought on a fresh bout of crying. How did she have any liquid left in her body? Maybe that’s why her head hurt so badly. She must be dehydrated from all the crying. It was a crying hangover. The phone on the bedside table rang.
“Hello?”
The voice on the phone was polite, but a little clipped. “Ms. Montgomery. I was just calling to make sure you were going to keep your spa appointment. It began ten minutes ago.”
Reese jumped out of bed. “Oh! I’m so sorry. I … I’m not feeling well and won’t be able to make it.”
“Are you sure? It’s all paid for.”
Reese closed her eyes. “If you can return the charges to the card, please do. I understand if changing the appointment this late is a problem.”
The woman sounded apologetic. “Our policy is a 24-hour cancellation.”
“I understand. Wait! Can I give you another card number to charge instead?”
“That would be fine.”
Reese managed to find her purse and her credit card. When she heard the total for the day, she almost choked. But she couldn’t let Sterling foot the bill. He wouldn’t want to now, especially since she wasn’t going to use the spa. Of course, that left her with hours to fill until he was done. She couldn’t imagine waiting. Or the plane ride home.
Reese fought back the tears. She couldn’t keep crying about this all day. She should be praying for him instead. He was heading into the intervention with his sister, which he knew would be incredibly difficult. She had only seen them on television and wasn’t even a fan of watching strangers deal with such hard things. Knowing that he was probably going in with all the residual anger and the emotions from their conversation made her feel sick.
He probably had the same feeling of whiplash she did, going from ecstatically happy to crushed all in one day. At least they found out fast. Even if this now officially was his shortest relationship ever. He hadn’t exactly broken up with her, but he didn’t need to say the words. He had shown her.
Enough. She needed to focus on him and his struggles with May, which were a much bigger deal than her heartache. She could deal with that later.
Reese sat down on the balcony, watching people walk on the beach. It was hard to feel this amount of pain on such a beautiful day. As she sat, she prayed silently or sometimes in a whisper. She didn’t have a lot of words, but just repeated a few like a mantra. Be with Sterling. Help May. Restore their family. Give him strength. Heal him.
She didn’t know how long she had been outside when her phone started buzzing repeatedly. She had purposefully left it there, not ready to face Staci, who had texted her several times to see how the date went. But the continued buzz gave her pause. This might be more than a check-in.
When she saw the screen of her phone, her stomach dropped. She hadn’t thought that it was possible to feel worse than she did. But now she knew that things could actually get worse. Because in the past few hours, her life had gone nuclear. She called Staci first.
“How bad is it?” Reese whispered.
“I’m really, really sorry,” Staci said. “It’s very bad. But you know it will be okay, right? You’ll land on your feet. This stuff passes and it will all be forgotten the next time some starlet throws a temper tantrum at an event.”
“Just tell me.”
Staci sighed. “Have you really not seen yet?”
“I haven’t looked at my phone today. Just saw you calling and a million texts that gave me the heads-up.”
“There are pictures all over the internet of you and Sterling kissing on a balcony and then going into a hotel room together. You and Sterling on the beach and in a private cabana. I know you said nothing more happened, but whew. These look steamy. You said he was a great kisser and he sure looks like it.”
Reese wanted to cry. Surprisingly, her eyes were completely dry right now. She could still feel the way his lips had moved against hers and how protected she had felt in his arms, just yesterday. It only made the way he had left hurt more.
“The headlines?”
“What you’d expect. Along the lines of homewrecking slut steals Sterling James from his childhood best friend. The baby mama is back again, of course, on the talk circuit and the internet, running her mouth to anyone who will listen about how this just shows who he is.”
Reese sank down onto the couch, running her hands through her hair. “I knew that this was the wrong play—creating a fake relationship. Kevin pressured me into it, but it felt wrong. I should have said no and come up with something else. Is Kevin going to kill me? I think I’ve missed some calls from him.”
“I bet you have. I haven’t gone into the office yet.”
“Staci, it has to be afternoon there. What do you mean you haven’t gone in?”
“If you aren’t working there, I’m certainly not working there. Maybe we’ll have to move back to Texas together. Whatever. I hate him and I hate that place. I love you. And I’m sorry.”
“You think he’s going to fire me?”
“Do you really need to ask?”
“I just kind of hoped.”
“Has Sterling seen this? I’m guessing not if you’re talking to me, not him, right now.”
“I’m not sure he’s talking to me at all right now, actually. I think we broke up.” Reese felt her breath catching and heard Staci groan on the other side of the phone.
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. Are you okay? What happened?”
“I’ll be okay, but I’m not right now. I can’t talk about it. I need to focus. Maybe trying to fix this can take my mind off of the whole heartbreak thing. I think I know what I have to do. Well, at least part of it. I’m pretty
sure there is no fixing what happened between me and Sterling. But as a parting gift, I can fix his PR problem.”
“What’s the story going to be this time?”
“No story. No spin. I’m done with that. Kevin can take his lies and shove them. But I may need some creative wording.”
“Do I want to know what you’re going to do?”
“Nope. Because you’d talk me out of it. I’ll call you later when I have a task for you. Just, maybe, keep praying.”
“Always,” Staci said before Reese hung up.
Before she set the phone down, Reese sent Sterling a quick text. Even if he didn’t want her to, she wanted him to know that she was praying.
Reese pulled out her laptop and set it on the table. Despite how horrible everything was, she had a plan that would hopefully help Sterling as much as possible. A verse kept coming to mind as she worked. She hadn’t ever been good at memorizing Scripture, but it was somewhere in Romans. Maybe Romans 5? When she stopped to take a breath, she would look it up. It said that few people would die for a good man, but Jesus lay down his life while we were still basically still acting like his enemies.
Sterling might not want her praying. He definitely would not want her help right now, especially the kind she was going to give. He wasn’t exactly an enemy, but he had definitely been cruel to her. And now she was going to lay herself down for him. Because this plan? Putting it into action meant that Reese would be taking a very big and very public fall.
Chapter Twenty-One
When he pulled up to his mom’s house, there were already a few cars outside. He hadn’t been home in at least three years. In his mind, he realized that he was still calling it home. Though it really hadn’t been in a long, long time. His heart sped up in his chest and he got out fast, partly because he was a few minutes late and partly because he was afraid if he sat much longer, he might just drive away.
His mother said that May would likely be sleeping. The interventionist wanted to meet them all beforehand. Apparently, that was a thing—hiring an interventionist. Sterling had come with something he had written for May, but wished he’d had more time. Last night when he looked over it again, he wished that he could have asked Reese to read it. Then again, maybe not. Since Reese was like his mother, hoping in things that didn’t make logical sense. He was still trying to wrap his brain around how he had gone from kissing her and feeling like he was falling headlong into something real to the way things had ended: him furious, leaving her at her door without a backward glance.
He still felt hot thinking about it. Angry, but also something uglier. He felt ashamed.
Sterling simply hadn’t been expecting Reese to start talking religion. And to sound like his mother. He hadn’t been prepared, so it felt like a slap in the face, like a betrayal of some kind. His jaw ticked, and he reached for his pick. He had overreacted. Not for the first time in his life.
The crushed look on Reese’s face haunted him. He was angry at his father. Yet he had made it about her, pointed his words toward her like a weapon. The same way he had been angry with his mother for years. Sterling felt like a truly terrible person.
He sighed and pulled out his handwritten letter to May, stuffing the police warning into the glove compartment. If the officer had been right in his cryptic philosophizing about warnings, Sterling had no idea what the messages of the last day were trying to tell him. Probably nothing. You couldn’t read signs into everything.
Sterling debated about calling Reese to apologize before going inside. Pulling out his phone, Sterling’s fingers hovered over his text messages. But he couldn’t apologize over text. Hopefully, Reese would enjoy the spa and he could find her after and tell her what a jerk he had been. For now, he needed to be present. For May. Later, he could beg for forgiveness from Reese. He felt like he would need her steadiness and her kindness after this intervention. If she still wanted to be there for him.
With his letter to May in one hand and the pick in the other, Sterling walked to the front door like he was walking toward war. That was dramatic. Like he was walking toward a business meeting with the record label that he really didn’t want to attend. Better.
At one time, he would have simply walked in. But now he knocked. As though she had been waiting on the other side, his mother threw the door open. For a moment, they both stood there, staring at each other. She looked older to Sterling, her face more heavily lined and her dark hair less pepper and more salt. But it was her eyes that caught him. He had expected to see anger there or a cold detachment, since that was the feeling that marked their relationship the past few years.
Instead, her eyes brimmed with tears and her gaze only showed love. His mouth went dry. Before he could speak or move, she closed the distance between them, wrapping him up in a hug.
“You have no idea how good it is to see you, James,” she said.
Sterling hugged her back, feeling a sense of relief at her reaction. It was confusing, since she hadn’t wanted him to come home for the intervention. He thought this would all be an uphill battle. “I thought you didn’t want me to come,” he said.
She pulled back and touched his face, lightly, as though she was afraid he would pull away. “I was worried,” she said. “I didn’t know how May would react. I didn’t know what kind of frame of mind you were in either. But I think above all, I was afraid you wouldn’t want to come. Rather than letting myself hope and be hurt, I thought it would be better. That was wrong of me and I’m so sorry.”
Again her eyes filled and she hugged him. He hugged her back, trying to reassure her with his grip. The scent of her perfume sent a rush of warm memories through him. She still wore Trésor by Lancôme. He would know that smell anywhere.
“I’m here, Mom.”
“I’m so glad. Though this isn’t going to be easy.” She pulled back again, holding him by his upper arms. “Let’s go inside. It’s almost time and the interventionist wanted to say a few words before we start.”
“Where is May? How are you getting her here?”
His mother smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “She’s here, asleep. Came home around two in the morning and usually she’ll sleep until eleven. I’ll wake her up in a few minutes and bring her out.”
“Wow. She’s slept through this?” Sterling asked as they reached the formal living room that was at the front of the house.
“She sleeps like the dead,” his mother said. “Trust me, she has no idea.”
There were just a few people in the room. His Aunt Rebecca jumped up and hugged him. Aunt Bex, as he and May had always called her, was his mother’s sister and lived in Arizona.
“Oh, James. How wonderful that you’re here!”
He swallowed down a lump in his throat. “Hey, Aunt Bex. Good to see you.”
She pulled back and gave him a wide smile. She was ten years younger than his mother and when he and May were young, she had been their cool Aunt Bex, who was almost like a nanny for them, especially after his father left and his mother was working and trying to make it as a single mom.
Rebecca had actually moved in for almost a year around that time. May had been barely a toddler and Sterling had been an angry eight-year-old. A few years later she had gotten married and moved to Arizona, which meant they didn’t see her as much for a few years. Sterling didn’t realize how much he had missed her in his life until this moment. Guilt washed over him as he thought of how many times he had been close to her on tour and hadn’t thought to offer her tickets or even call.
“Let’s not let it go so long next time, okay?”
“Deal,” he said. His mother tugged gently at his arm and he sat down in a chair, while his mother and Bex sat on either side of the couch, leaving the space between for May, he guessed. The only other people were the interventionist, May’s art teacher Mr. Davis, and her best friend, Sara, who had really grown up in the past few years. He wouldn’t have recognized her.
“Hey,” he said, a little nervous.
Though he was used to teenage girls squealing and being reduced to a puddle of emotions around him, Sara just gave him a small smile. At least she wasn’t angry with him about May. “Good to see you again, Sterling,” she said.
For the next twenty minutes, the interventionist, a man who insisted they call him Dr. Bob, talked them through what would happen. He kept bringing up the fact that normally he would do a longer dress rehearsal as he called it the day before. Sterling wanted to punch the man by the time they were ready to wake up May. He just had that kind of an attitude. Hopefully, May wouldn’t feel the same way about him or this would all be off to a bad start.
“Sterling, I understand that the relationship between you is tense or maybe even nonexistent,” Dr. Bob said.
Sterling fought off the urge to say something insulting. “You could say that.”
Dr. Bob nodded. “The order here is important. May isn’t going to like this, but if we start with people who might anger her, then the whole thing could fall apart. I understand you brought something to read, but I’d like for you to hold off. You may not get a chance to read it at all.”
Sterling opened his mouth to protest, but his mother held up a hand. “Even though they aren’t close now and there is some history, I know that May looks up to him a great deal and has missed him. I think that it will mean a lot to her that James is here.”
Dr. Bob tilted his head to the side before answering. “But you said when we talked that she was angry with him. And that his fame was part of the impetus for May’s spiral.”
Sterling felt like he had been punched in the stomach. He tried to sit still other than the pick moving in his fingers. This was about May, not about him, he told himself.
His mother pursed her lips. “That’s right.”
“Then I stand by what I said. We’ll wait on Sterling. I’ll see how it’s going and give you an opening if I get the sense that you should share,” Dr. Bob said.
Managing The Rock Star (Not So Bad Boys Book 1) Page 21