Harrison sighs, turning to face me. “Things are good. I saw Trixie and played a few sets for the house band.” My mouth drops open and he shrugs as if it’s no big deal that he went back to the bar that gave us our start. “What’s that?” he asks nodding to the pictures in my hand.
I swallow to push away the dryness in my throat. Laid out before me are images of Harrison and Katelyn. The headline is unfavorable, saying: Harrison James of 4225 West wanders. I know that’s the furthest thing from the truth, but the pictures tell a different story. While Katelyn watches the game, Harrison is watching the cheerleader in front of him. His eyes are dead center on her ass. One of the images shows him shrugging as Katelyn stares him down.
“Nice spread,” I say as I toss the images down onto the table much to Harrison’s displeasure. JD snickers behind him, causing Harrison to turn an ugly, embarrassing shade of red.
He shakes his head and covers the photos with a piece of paper. “Katelyn was so pissed but I couldn’t help but look when they’re shaking their asses in my face.”
“You look, but you don’t get caught,” JD adds because he’s the master of looking without detection.
Harrison cuffs him upside his head and glares at him. “Anyway, we need to discuss Metro.”
“Why?” I ask, sorting through the rest of our mail. Most of it is fan letters, in which one of us will respond. We take turns answering them, knowing how much it means to our fans when we reply personally. Each letter receives a signed photo from the three of us. Cheesy, I know, but it helps sales. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
“Trixie’s closing Metro. With the surge of online videos and social media, playing gigs to get noticed isn’t the thing anymore. Like I said, I played a couple sets, but most of the bands brought their laptops in and used electronic music as a backup. Trixie is losing money, the bar is run down, and I didn’t see one agent while I was there.”
Metro is the place where my grandfather was discovered, the place where Harrison and I developed as musicians, and the place where I met Sam. That place paved my way, and I almost gave up on music until Trixie called that fateful night and gave me the coveted “headline” spot. If she hadn’t, I would’ve come home and begged for forgiveness. That’s something I’ve never told Josie.
“When’s she closing?”
“Two months. She’s hoping to find a buyer before then, but no one wants to invest in a bar these days. It’s old, not the ‘hot spot’ anymore and in need of some serious repairs.”
“We should so something for her,” JD adds. I forget that he played there too. We have ties to Metro and owe Trixie a lot, but we’ve never thanked her. Hell, once we signed with Moreno Entertainment we never went back.
“There’s another thing you should know,” Harrison says, but this time his expression is grim.
My insides turn, preparing for more bad news. “What’s that?”
He clears his throat. “Some journalist named Calista Jones is writing a tell-all about you. Somehow she got a copy of Sam’s diaries and according to the word on the street, a few of your ‘friends’ added some colorful commentary.”
“What?” my voice breaks and my heart beat increases. This is the last thing that I need, and definitely the last thing that Josie needs. We’re in a good place and with the baby coming; the added drama will just be too much stress for her.
Harrison hands me his phone and I read through an excerpt of this novel. Everything that I don’t want to remember about my past is about to come out and there won’t be anything I can do about it. Sure, I can take to social media and ask people not to buy it, but I know that they will, even though they’ll tell me they won’t. It’s in our nature to know all the juicy gossip of Hollywood.
“Well, this is fucking great.” I mutter as I read what Harrison has shown me. She talks about the tattoo across my chest and the day Josie called the office and left me a message. But it’s the words about the time that Sam and I hooked up in my tour bus that really jars me. The date is written there and for the first time, I recognize it as our anniversary... mine and Josie’s. Dead doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel inside right now.
The guys don’t have anything to say. I don’t blame them. I brought Sam into our lives, and aside from JD, she did everything she could to ruin us and we’re pretty sure she set Alicia up to drug Harrison.
“We should get to work,” I say without any conviction whatsoever. My mind should be on the joyous news I want to share, but thoughts of my past plague me. I’ll have to tell Josie about this book and pray that she doesn’t want to read it. Nothing good can come from a book written by a journalist… one that I don’t ever remember meeting.
“What are we working on?” JD asks as I shake my head.
“I have no idea,” I say completely lost for yet another time in my life. I’m starting to think that my career is over because I’ll be spending the rest of my days trying to make up for everything I did in the past to my wife. She’s not going to understand. Hell, I don’t even understand.