Midnight Blue

My blood froze in my veins. They were the ones leaking those pictures?

Then I remembered the conversation with Lucas. The talk about diversion…about keeping Alex offline. About meeting with Will Bushell…oh, my God.

“Listen. Listen…listen ! Bloody hell, woman. You’ve got balls the size of watermelons. Do you realize it’s quite unattractive? And before you say anything, yes, I am aware your sole purpose in life is not, in fact, to attract me. We bought enough time to recalculate. He won’t check, because he doesn’t give a flying fuck. Or a driving one, for that matter. No fucks at all, by any means of transportation. His knob could be on the cover of Vogue wearing a beret with a cigarette sticking from the tip and he would probably not even recognize it as he passed by a newsstand. He’s a rock star, Jenna. Not a has-been reality TV loser. No one knows.” Blake rubbed his face, then he turned around and stared right back at me. His phone was still cemented to his ear when he said, “Well, scratch no one. The sitter knows. I’ll deal with her now. Sext me later?”

The other line went dead by the way Blake groaned. The need to slap him across the face actually made my fingertips tingle, and I didn’t even know why. I didn’t like Alex, but that didn’t mean I was okay with his team wronging him. Hell, I didn’t even want to be a part of said team, and I still thought this was bullshit. The people he trusted were betraying him. Why would they sell him out? Were they trying to sabotage his recovery?

“It’s not what it looks like.” He held his palms up, his face creasing into a grimace.

“You sound like a cheating husband, so I’m going to say what any cheated wife would answer: it is exactly what it looks like.” I found my words somewhere in the back of my throat. They came out thick and angry. “Wow. You’re…ungrateful.”

“You don’t understand how much is at stake here. Alex is obsessed with Fallon. If he finds out she’s engaged to his archenemy, he will go through the mother of all downward spirals. You’ll fail at your job. The tour will be canceled before it even begins. His career will probably be over, not to mention he’ll have to pay millions of dollars for the damages and loss. We can’t just ask him to swear off the Internet for two and a half months without any explanation. We’re doing what we can to help him. Everyone who cares about him is involved. His family, friends, bandmates. Everyone. You fuck it up, and I swear, Indie, you’re going to make a lot of enemies in Hollywood.” He pointed at me with the hand that held his phone.

I blinked, incredulous, wondering if he was for real.

“Blake”—I took a step deeper into the room—“no matter how you spin this, you’re lying to your client. To your ex-roommate. To your friend. You can justify it from now until your last day on this earth, but at the end of the day, you leaked pictures of his privates to keep him from logging onto the Internet, and that’s shitty.”

“I didn’t. One of his one-night stands did. We paid her, and part of the money goes to charity, so don’t slam it all the way.”

“You shamed your friend, and the fact that he doesn’t feel violated doesn’t change the fact that he was violated.”

“Don’t act like a saint, Indigo. Part of your job is to slip into bathrooms with him. You’re on this gravy train, too, doll. Just because your conscience is less stained, doesn’t mean it’s clean.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“I’m telling him.” I stomped down on an imaginary cockroach.

“Then you’re out,” Blake deadpanned, his face switching from wary and anxious to harsh in the blink of an eye. He took a step closer to me, eliminating the distance between us. I could smell his breath, cinnamon and a fruity gum. A fresh and light scent Alex was too carnally male to possess.

“The minute he knows the truth he’ll drop everything and run to his precious coke. In which case, we will no longer need your services, Ziggy will no longer get his tubes, and Craig would still be a miserable, drunk sod. Think before you do something stupid, Indie. Because you can very easily steer your life onto a very bumpy road.”

I stared at Blake.

He lifted his chin, returning a look just as firm.

He knew. Knew about my family, about our financial situation, even about the tubes we were planning to get Ziggy with the money.

How the hell does he know ?

I’d gone through a personality assessment with the HR person who’d hired me. The girl with the pedicure asked me two hundred questions, all of which I’d answered with brutal honesty. She must’ve paid it forward. Now Jenna and Blake had leverage over me. Maybe Alex, too. Hell, for all I knew the whole tour knew how much debt I was in and my nephew’s health problems.

Feeling my blood bubbling with the kind of anger that makes you want to puke, I turned around and stormed from Alex’s dressing room. I was no longer sleepy and jet-lagged.

I was wide-awake.

Vibrating, like my stammering, rebellious heart.

Burning like bonfire and completely alive.

“One is the loneliest number.

So you said we should be two.

But in the end, baby, it was all about you.

The worst part is, I’d still take you back.

Though this time, I’d be sure to be the one to break your heart.”

—“Poison and Poetry,” Alex Winslow.

 

E verybody wants to be a rock star. It’s the closest thing to being a god, but what people often forget is that God has a hectic job.

God creates. Twenty-four-fucking-seven.

God is worshipped.

God is expected to answer, to deliver, to reassure.

And when God is sent to earth to deal with humans? Well, God is bound to disappoint.

See, when you’re a rock star, your fans feed you expectations.

And you almost always swallow them down greedily and ask for seconds.

Because you want to believe you’re a genius, whose lyrics are immortal, whose tunes run chills down people’s spines. You want to be unforgettable, irresistible, and unique. You don’t want to believe there’s nothing more after this—because there isn’t, you might be a hotshot millionaire motherfucker with a different model in your bed every night—but at the end of the day, you’re human.

So, terribly human. A human who is expected to be much more than a human. Which was how I’d gotten here. To where I was today. The very laughable cliché I’d taken the piss out of when I was younger. A washed-up, alcoholic, druggie rocker who is never alone but always feels so desperately lonely.