Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 104498 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 522(@200wpm)___ 418(@250wpm)___ 348(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104498 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 522(@200wpm)___ 418(@250wpm)___ 348(@300wpm)
“Why don’t you want to hear about it? This is what you wanted for me. To fall in love. Though I don’t know why because it fucking sucks.”
Soren huffs. “I didn’t want you to get hurt. I wanted you to find someone you could be happy with.”
I’m convinced true happiness might not exist. “Were you happy? With Bryce?”
“I thought I was. For a long time, I figured all relationships have issues like we did. You never hear a married person say, ‘We love each other so darn much and it’s so easy!’ I expected coming out would fix us, but it just brought other problems forward.”
“But you were with him for, like, three years. Something had to have been right.”
“I wanted it to be right, so I forced something to fit when it didn’t. He’s not a bad guy. He’s particular and likes to have things his way, which is why the guys didn’t get along with him, but he’s not inherently bad. I wish I could say there was a certain thing that drove a wedge between us so I could have something to blame or a reason for why we didn’t work out, but the truth is … I think I made the wrong choice three years ago.”
“What do you mean?”
“Even though this hot rock star I met turned out to be Matt Jackson’s little brother, and even though he was leaving to go on tour … I should’ve fought to see him again instead of trying to make something work that had already failed once.”
“Oh.” I hate what that does to my insides—turns them into lovey mush. Eww. “It’s probably for the better. The first year of the tour for me was sucky. Having someone back home would’ve made it impossible. I was close to quitting as it was.”
Soren pulls back in surprise. “Really? You were born to have that life though. It’s obvious in the way you perform.”
I thought that once upon a time too. And I do love it. But ever since leaving New York, I’ve had the constant fear of not being good enough and not wanting it hard enough to hack it. “It’s not as easy as everyone makes it out to be. It’s hard work and exhausting, and if you’re doing it alone …”
“Why don’t you quit?”
“It got better after that first year. Enough to keep pushing forward anyway. It’s still not easy, but I can handle it a lot better now.”
“What changed to make it better?” Soren asks.
“We fired Wayne. Our manager.”
“The guy who didn’t even watch your show in Tampa?”
“You remember that?”
“I remember a lot of things I shouldn’t when it comes to you.” The heat in Soren’s gaze thaws some of the coldness I still hold toward him but not enough to ask him to tell me every single thing he remembers about me.
“Well, yeah, him. He was … a shit manager. Actually, he was a shit person in general. Aside from treating the band horribly, he was an asshole who thought it was his right to help himself.” I gesture to myself and shudder.
Soren’s jaw hardens. “Wait, he—”
I hold up my hand to stop him from jumping to the wrong conclusions. “It was consensual but only because I was lonely, naïve, and wanted someone. Anyone. But that made him believe he could have it whenever he wanted. And to add insult to injury, it wasn’t until after Luce took us on that I found out Wayne was married to a woman and had kids.”
“Luce?”
“He’s our new manager … well, I guess he’s not new. We hired him after that Australia trip we went on not long after Tampa. We met him there. He kinda took me under his wing and taught me all the stuff I should’ve already known about the industry—like how common it is for situations like Wayne and me to happen. Here I was thinking Wayne was an out, gay man. Nope.”
“But why …”
I know what he’s asking. I was shocked too when I found out. “You’d be surprised how bigoted the entertainment industry is. We all like to think Hollywood is liberal and progressive, but seriously, it’s not.”
“And I thought being gay in sports was bad,” Soren mutters.
“I guess I was lucky I was never in the closet, so to speak. The label might’ve made me change my name and the band’s name, but at least they didn’t make me hide my sexuality.”
Small mercies.
“With a song like ‘He’s Mine,’ it was probably too hard to hide anyway,” Soren says.
I laugh. “I reckon it had more to do with them trying to replicate Panic! At the Disco’s brand until Luce came along and took us in the Eleven direction. We went from kind of emo rock slash grunge to pop rock, and it made us more marketable.”