“Which truth is that?” he asked. “The one where I tell you that you hurt my feelings, or the one where I admit that it was my fault for having them?"
“Look, I made it clear right from the beginning that my job came first and that there were lines you weren’t to cross.”
“And I get that. I just didn’t like it. Johnny said he has the same problem sometimes when it comes to Draven, because he’s still in manager mode when Johnny wants his Daddy to help him feel grounded again. Sometimes the rush of playing is so intense it clouds judgment. Any other time and I’d have been happy to get drunk and let the fans hang all over me while they took a bunch of selfies and tried to get in my pants. That night, the only hands I wanted on me were yours, and when I couldn’t have that, I went into brat mode, knowing you weren’t going to bend and give it to me.”
“You just couldn’t stop yourself.”
“Oh, I probably could have if I’d tried hard enough,” he admitted. “I just didn’t want to. I was disappointed. I had planned out the whole night in my head, from ordering room service to falling asleep curled up in your arms. When it turned out you were working, I don’t know, I couldn’t pivot away from what I’d worked out in my head. I get fixated on things all the time. Certain foods, types of movies, I'll play my way through two thousand levels of a game and still keep going back to it, but I’ve never been fixated on a person before I started to get to know you.”
“Do I even want to know what game has more than two thousand levels?”
“Lots of them. Domino Dreams just happens to be my favorite.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Meh, it’s something I play on my phone.”
“Got it,” I said, finally beginning to feel like he was opening up to me without throwing up walls of deflection and snark.
Hearing that he’d been fixated on me, that was a bit harder to process. He was the rockstar. People hung his poster on their walls and asked him to sign his name on their skin in Sharpie, just so they could get it tattooed beneath the band logo. He’d been pelted with underwear and propositioned in some seriously lewd and unexpected ways, at least according to the men who’d guarded him and some of the articles I’d read online. Like the other band members, he was the source of endless speculation, rumors, and seriously outlandish lies that Draven was constantly having to debunk on social media. I was a shadow in comparison. A man few people would ever know.
And yet I’d been the one he’d been backstage looking for.
Damn.
Talk about a mindfuck.
Should I tell him I was flattered and more than just a bit stunned at his admission, or was now the time to mention that his hyperfocus on me could have gotten me fired and removed from his presence permanently? He sat watching me across the table as I debated it and finally decided to go for a bit of vulnerability of my own.
“I’ve thought about little else but that night since it happened,” I said. “Even when I was pissed at you, I couldn’t get you off my mind. Not getting a response to my text has been eating at me almost to the point of distraction. I’ve never checked my phone as much as I have since I sent it to you. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure how I feel about your reason for not answering. When I think about it now, I made it clear that my decision wasn’t up for debate. I guess I didn’t leave you any room to turn it into a conversation. I was pissed that you tried to tempt me into putting my job on the line and even more furious about the trouble you got Cyril into.”
“I feel like shit for that,” he admitted. “I tried to tell Sully thatwhat happened wasn’t Cyril’s fault, but he wasn’t having it. Said that you guys had the kind of training that should have made it next to impossible for someone like me to constantly lose you guys.”
I was shocked by the surge of indignation that shot through me on his behalf. Despite how much of a pain in the ass he’d been, it didn’t sit right with me that Sully had said that to him.
“Someone like you?” I asked, waiting for him to tell me something that was truly going to set me off.
“That’s what I asked,” Rebel replied. “He said he meant a civilian. I guess that’s fair. I told him that I’d honed my skills while attempting to avoid getting ratted out by my tagalong pest of a kid sister. She was always whining about it not being fair that I got to go fun places while she had to stay home with the sitter, which, okay, I could see her point there, but the least she could have done was not snitch on me just to earn brownie points with our folks.”
“How much younger?”
“Seven years, though you wouldn’t have known it with the sass and attitude. I heard,Ohhh,I’m gonna tell Mamaso many times growing up that as soon as theOhhhcame out of her mouth, I’d shove a piece of candy in it and promise her a half dozen more if she’d just keep her fucking mouth shut. I probably shouldn’t have sworn so much around her, ‘cause she’s got a worse potty mouth than I have now, but I was sick of getting into trouble.”
“What’s she like as an adult?”
“Still a pain in my ass, not that we see each other often. She’s part of a longline fishing crew,” he explained. “Loves being on the water.”
“It’s a dangerous job though, isn’t it?”
“She handles herself just fine.”
“Sounds like it. Are you two close?”
“Naa. She was still a kid when I took off with the band, and I wasn’t the best about keeping in touch. To me she was just a pest. I never expected her to miss me. Turns out I was wrong. There’sstill a lot of resentment there that we’ve never taken the time to work through. Doubt we ever will.”
“Seems like that’s a common theme with you,” I said.
“Huh?”