Times Like These

by Laura Carter

  They glared at each other as a woman in a black uniform – tunic and pants – took hold of Andrea’s arm. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Andrea said, her eyes still locked on Jay’s. ‘I know the way out.’

  * * *

  She clenched her jaw as she wound her way out to the car park, swallowing down emotion that threatened to break from her throat. Inside the car, she pulled down the visor, looked at herself in the small square mirror and said, ‘No! He doesn’t get to upset you.’

  Except, it wasn’t Jay who had upset her: it was his declarations. Did Sofia hate her? Was she a bitch? Those were the questions she played over and over in her mind as she drove back in the direction of the city.

  Was her motivation for trying to buy out Jay solely Sofia? She couldn’t deny that getting Sanfia Records on the label’s books and, in particular, Seth Young, if things kept showing as much promise as they currently were, would be good for her reputation. It would, undoubtedly, stop her peers thinking she slept her way to the top. It would silence their wagging tongues when, or if, her thing with Tommy, whatever it was, came out.

  Tommy.

  She swung off the road at the next opportunity and wound up parked outside a pharmacy. She took three pregnancy test kits from the shelves and smiled awkwardly at the cashier as she paid. Next door to the pharmacy was a coffee shop. After purchasing a bottle of water, she went to the bathroom and did the deed on all three little white sticks. Jamming them back in their holsters, dropping them into her purse and washing her hands.

  Back in the car, she counted down the seconds as she continued the drive back to the city, waiting the allocated time before looking at those little sticks again as they taunted her from her purse on the passenger seat.

  A mother, Andrea?

  She hadn’t thought about having kids, not seriously. She had never got that burning desire women seemed to get, like Sofia had, like Rosalie had developed. There was no hidden maternal instinct inside her, like Hannah had in abundance.

  In any event, she had spent most of her life mothering Sofia. She didn’t need any more practice, nor any more proof that she would be a terrible mother.

  For another thing, she didn’t have time in her life for a child. She was career-focused.

  Moreover, she was… a bitch. A hated woman.

  God, if she was pregnant, her spawn was either the result of an illicit affair – most likely – or another fling with a rock star she bedded for a few weeks every year or so.

  Taking the tests from her purse, she leaned her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes, because she knew without looking, that everything that was going wrong in her life just got trillions of cells worse.

  She tried to refocus on the road ahead of her but her mind was spinning.

  When? How? Was it Hunter’s? Was it Tommy’s? When was her last period? Had she missed a period?

  How would she tell them? Would she even keep the baby?

  What would people say? Hannah. Sofia. Her dad. Rosalie.

  Oh, fuck, Rosalie. This could be Rosalie’s brother or sister growing inside of her.

  She let out a sob right before throwing up into her lap.

  As she looked down to the vomit, she felt… THUD!

  ‘Fuck!’

  Her car swerved right and left until she pulled off to the side of the road and the car she had just driven into the back of pulled up in front of her.

  She watched the driver as he leapt from his car and came charging toward her.

  ‘Pull yourself together, Andi.’

  She stepped out of Tommy’s Range Rover to receive a barrage of yelled abuse and finger pointing from the other driver. Ignoring him, she went to the front of Tommy’s car and saw the damage. It wasn’t horrendous, most likely thanks to both cars moving in the same direction, but it was bad enough to cost Tommy an insurance job.

  As she ran a hand over the dinted surface, the incessant whining of the man behind her kept going. And suddenly, she flipped.

  ‘Look, it’s a fucking car. Accidents happen. I’ve had a really fucking shitty day. I’m covered in vomit…’ Then tears sprung from her eyes. ‘And I’m goddamn pregnant. So would you please just take my insurance details and back the hell off?’

  ‘I… ah… erm… Are you, like, okay?’

  ‘No, I’m not okay!’ she screamed. She was a raging, pregnant, emotional, terrified, fully-fledged lunatic. And now she was going to have to return this car to Tommy, battered and bruised, whilst she was covered in sick and had pregnancy test kits scattered around the passenger seat.

  After swapping insurance details with the other driver, Andrea pulled herself together. The reality was, she was in a situation that would not resolve itself and would not be resolved with tears. She wasn’t entirely sure how best to resolve it right now but she needed to think it through, strategically, piece-by-piece.

  There was one glaringly obvious way to resolve the problem and go back to the life she had just hours ago.

  What she needed to do first, though, was return the beat-up Range Rover to its owner and clean herself up.

  The thought of driving through the city to Brooklyn and getting back to Tommy even later than she already would, with his expectation of taking her out to dinner, was too much. She made a pit-stop at a shopping centre outside the city and picked up a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She hated the look of sympathy the store assistant gave her and the way she offered to discard Andrea’s own clothes out of pity. Yes, she was a wreck – a pregnant woman, covered in her own vomit, with mascara under her eyes from crying over some little bump in a car. This was not her. She was a CEO of a world-renowned recording label.

  Outside Tommy’s building, she typed the code for the underground garage into the key pad at the entrance to a downward slope and waited for the roller door to rise.

  The code was unique to Tommy’s penthouses – his own and the one that was home to his team – and they would have been alerted to her return.

  Parked in the designated spot, between two of Tommy’s other cars, she rushedly threw the positive pregnancy tests into her purse, just in time before Mike from Tommy’s security team arrived at the side of the car.

  Mike, in his usual black uniform, opened the driver’s side door. He considered Andrea’s outfit and she figured his usual astuteness would have clocked her change of attire, perhaps even the lingering smell of sick in the car. She had attempted at a quick wipe around of the upholstery, given most of the vomit had landed on her person, and she had clipped a new air freshener to the dash, but she could still smell the sick.

  She tried to smile but couldn’t manage it. Seeing Mike was a reality check. A reminder that she really did have something growing inside her. That she didn’t know who the father was. That Tommy was upstairs, expecting her to go to dinner and continue their fling until he next went on the road and she was down here, in the basement, thinking…

  She dragged in a sharp breath… Thinking she wished the baby were his.

  Clearing her throat, she stepped down from the Range Rover. ‘Hi Mike.’

  ‘Andrea.’

  She rolled her eyes at his usual stoicism – an impressive rival for her own.

  Before she had a chance to make one of a number of confessions, Mike asked, ‘Are you okay?’

  She felt her eyes widen. Did he know? Was it written all over her face? Could he sense that she was pregnant?

  He inclined his head in the direction of the scratched hood of the car. ‘The damage.’

  The car. Shit.

  Relief flooded her. ‘I’m sorry… I… A car just… I went into the back of someone. I gave the driver the insurance details from the glove box. I don’t think there’s much damage. A few dints and scratches. She’s driving fine.’

  He took the keys from Andrea and walked around the car to get a better look at the damage, bending to rub each mark, making her feel even worse in the process
.

  How on earth was she going to explain this to Tommy? She couldn’t exactly say she was in a fluster, mulling over whether she should get rid of the child inside her or not – oh, that’s right, I’m pregnant, funny thing. You’re not cross? No, it may not be yours. It could in fact be the child of my best friend’s dad.

  She backed away from the car, gripping the strap of her purse on her shoulder for support.

  Mike looked up to her. ‘Where are you going?’

  Where was she going? Anywhere. Nowhere. There was nowhere she wanted to be, except with Tommy, where she couldn’t be. She had nowhere to go.

  ‘Please, tell him I’m sorry,’ she said, before making a run for it.

  18

  Rosalie

  As she stood outside arrivals with Seth, Billy, Frankie and all their gear, waiting for a minivan to pick them up, Rosalie inhaled the southern air. There was something so homey and provincial about the south.

  ‘You all right there, Rosalie?’ Frankie asked. ‘Kinda look like you’re smellin’ a burger truck.’

  She pursed her lips, brought her Dior shades to the tip of her nose and looking over the rim, told Frankie, ‘Do you really think I would relish the thought of a fatty burger?’

  ‘Now that you mention it…’

  Replacing her glasses, she smiled. ‘You boys only ever think about your stomachs, don’t you?’

  ‘No, sometimes I think of my mouth, and how it would like to taste a burger and a beer before they hit my stomach,’ Billy said. ‘Is anyone else starving?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Seth said. ‘If there’s one thing we know how to do in the south, it’s feed people. My old man will have had the grill stoked all afternoon, smoking meat for us. Wait until you taste his ribs.’

  ‘Oh, are we going to visit your dad before we go to the hotel? Or are we dropping our things to the hotel first?’

  Seth seemed to scowl from behind his thick black shades. ‘We’re staying with my old man. He offered, Sofia was grateful, and down here, somebody offers you hospitality and you turn it down, we have a word for that. It’s rude.’

  Before Rosalie could retort or protest, a black minivan pulled up in front of them and the guys loaded their gear inside. The van smelled of cheap air-freshener and the leather on the seats was coming away at the edges. Rosalie considered her pink wrap dress and the damage those seats would do to the crepe material. She looked at the dirty step up to the van and feared for the cream leather of her Aquazzura bow-embellished sandals, bought new for the trip. Oh, she couldn’t do it to them. Her beautiful shoes.

  ‘Are you going to get in the van?’ Seth asked, appearing at her side in his staple stonewash jeans and scruffy boots. How could he possibly understand the dilemma she faced?

  Was it too late to arrange herself a luxury transfer? Why hadn’t she checked the schedule Sofia had given her in more detail?

  ‘All right, let’s go,’ Seth said.

  Rosalie squealed as she was hoisted into the strong arms of Seth’s tall, extremely masculine frame. ‘Put me down,’ she yelled, kicking her legs as Seth held her as if he was about to cross the marital threshold.

  Ignoring her entirely, Seth stepped into the back of the van with Rosalie in his arms and set her down on the front seat.

  With his body leaning over hers, Rosalie breathed him in, surprisingly affected by his scent – soap and natural musk, that was manly and disturbingly delicious. She found herself wetting her lower lip as she released her grip on his neck and the tips of her fingers traced the line of his ever-present dog tags, taking advantage of the closeness to his firm chest and enjoying the brief investigation into what was under his T-shirt.

  To her surprise, when she glanced up to him, Seth’s eyes were firmly fixed on hers.

  ‘You can’t just manhandle me like that,’ she said.

  Shaking his head, he moved to the back of the van, muttering something about time, his death and Rosalie getting in the van.

  It was going to be a long three days. Made even longer by the fact she was likely to be spending it in a sleeping bag on some worn sofa in a tiny little wood hut with four men who all wore ripped stonewash jeans and smelly, styleless shirts without exception.

  But as the van moved into motion, Rosalie had a thought. ‘Ooo, I almost forgot…’ Digging into her purse, she took out a small paper bag and clumsily got up from her seat, moving to each of Billy, Frankie and Seth, handing out the gifts she had bought them for the trip – mostly in an attempt to win them over.

  ‘They’re solid gold plecs. Not really for use but as a little memento of the occasion. See, on one side, they say Seth Young, CMA and the number one. You know, because its Seth’s first CMA. And on the other side you have your own name. So either Billy, Frankie or Seth. Do you like them?’

  Billy bit down on the plec between his teeth. ‘Yep, solid gold.’

  ‘They’re pretty neat,’ said Frankie.

  And Rosalie raised an eyebrow, eyeing Seth until eventually, his straight lips broke into a chuckle and he said, ‘It’s sweet. Thank you.’

  Rosalie smiled. Mission accomplished. ‘I have one for Sofia too,’ she said, retaking her seat. ‘It’s such a shame she didn’t feel able to make it. She would have been so proud of you guys. But I totally get it. I mean, she just felt like she shouldn’t have fun and leave New York with her husband in rehab.’

  ‘Jay is a jackass,’ Frankie said. ‘You have to want to get clean to get clean. He’s no more likely to get off the drink and drugs this time than any other.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m with you, man,’ Billy said. ‘It kills me watching Soph run herself into the ground, scrimping and scraping to keep Sanfia afloat, when he spends every spare dollar they have on his habit.’

  ‘God, I want this… us… to work out more for her sake than my own,’ Seth said. ‘I know she’s breaking the bank to help me out and I can’t give her anything back right now.’

  ‘I overheard her telling Jimmy that the bank won’t lend her any more cash on her apartment. It’s mortgaged to the hilt,’ Frankie added.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ Rosalie said, turning in her seat to face the guys. ‘I had no idea things were so bad. Why wouldn’t she ask me for help?’

  ‘Because, Ros, Sofia is a great producer, with or without her big-shot sister. She wants to make her own way,’ Seth snapped. ‘Not everyone wants to live on handouts.’

  She wanted to retort. She wanted to argue that she made her own money. But something told her to save her breath.

  Turning her back on the guys, Rosalie considered her designer outfit, her perfectly manicured nails and the large platinum diamond flower decorating her finger. She wouldn’t be able to convince Seth to take her seriously any more than she could convince anyone else. But her dad had faith in her. He was signing over a recording label to her. And when she made the label a continued success, maybe even more successful than Andrea’s Stellar label, everyone would take her seriously.

  But right now, in a van full of people, she felt sad and lonely.

  ‘Crank the tunes, driver!’ Billy called out. Country music filled the vehicle as the highways and city lights of Nashville turned into fields and open country roads.

  After forty minutes, they took a left onto a bumpy track that was lined with trees and horses in fields beyond. Rosalie’s jaw dropped as they approached the huge ranch that Seth’s dad called home.

  ‘Are you shitting me?’ Billy asked. ‘Man, you didn’t say you were loaded.’

  Seth laughed. ‘I’m not. Randy bought the ranch for the old man a few years back. Before that, we had a much smaller place.’

  Seth’s attire, coupled with the whole struggling musician, ex-military thing, had led Rosalie to assume he would have come from not much at all. But, of course, when you had a rock star brother, things changed. And Rosalie found herself smiling. Not because she wouldn’t have to stay on a grotty sofa for three nights but because she found herself thinking that one day, Seth would be a st
ar, too. Something told her he would also be quick to spend his money on his loved ones.

  ‘Randy Jonson is a decent fucking guy,’ Frankie said of Seth’s brother. ‘Who knew?’

  They pulled up by the porch that ran the length of the large house. White decking was surrounded by white railings that broke in the middle to allow for wood steps leading up to the front entrance. Two large swing chairs and two bench seats were positioned on the porch to look out across the ranch’s land. The driver came around to the side of the van and opened the door. Putting her shades in place over her eyes, Rosalie moved to the open door, looking left and right, taking in the beauty of the place. The silence of the fields. The vibrant green of the grass. The fresh air.

  Well, almost fresh, she thought as she made to step out of the van.

  ‘Watch out for the—!’

  But whoever shouted was too late. Rosalie screamed when her foot squelched into a freshly laid pile of horse poop.

  ‘It’s still warm. It’s on my skin!’ she yelled. ‘I’m going to vomit. Someone help me!’

  But the only help she got was an old man coming running from the porch, a driver holding out a hand and three musicians doubled over with laughter behind her.

  ‘I am not a bad person!’ she snapped at them whilst holding her nose with one hand to cover the stench and reaching out to the driver of the van with her other, letting him lead her to cleaner ground.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered, darlin’’ the older man said, before throwing a bucket of cold water over Rosalie’s soiled foot.

  ‘Is it any wonder I don’t come to the south?’ she cried, mostly for her own ears, as the older man, with a slightly smaller frame but strikingly similar features to Seth, was stepping out of an embrace with his son and greeting Billy and Frankie.

  ‘Good thing I brought ten pairs of shoes. I’m going to need them,’ she muttered.

  ‘And this must be the boss,’ Seth’s dad said, holding out a hand to Rosalie.