There were literally hundreds of thousands of tumblrs dedicated to all aspects of this band—their music, their influences, their girlfriends, even their clothes. And that didn’t even count the tumblrs dedicated to shipping the members together. Right now, Ryatt seemed to be the favorite ship—and after looking at hundreds of pictures of the two of them together, even she had to admit Ryder and Wyatt made a cute couple. The fact that Wyatt was currently cuddled up next to her in bed was completely beside the point. Especially when she was looking at really pretty pictures of him and Ryder hugging each other at last year’s Grammy awards…
She was still grinning as she clicked on another timeline, this one from Shaken Dirty’s early early days, back before they were signed, when they were still playing clubs and hoping for a big break. She skimmed through the pictures and captions, laughing a little at all the inside jokes the fandom had. And yes, she knew the fact that she now got all those jokes might indicate that she had spent way too long on these blogs in the last two days, but it was so fun she didn’t care. Besides, if she squinted hard enough, she could totally claim all this “research” fell under her newest job description.
She paused over a particularly adorable picture of the guys on a small outdoor stage in what the caption identified as Springfield, Missouri. The photo had obviously been taken when they were playing a county fair, which was odd enough for them during this time period. But what really gave her pause was that the maker of the timeline claimed they were playing there because Springfield was Wyatt’s hometown. Even more perplexing was that as far as Poppy could see, none of the twenty-four thousand people who had reblogged the timeline had given its maker any grief about the misinformation. And since that was totally not like Tumblr users, she couldn’t help wondering what was going on.
Shaken Dirty had formed in Austin, when lifelong friends Jared Matthews, Ryder Montgomery, Wyatt Jennings, and Micah Tarrent were still in high school. Quinn Bradford was a later addition, having met them in a club after one of their shows nearly a year later. So if Wyatt had grown up in Austin with the others, as the bio claimed, what was all this talk of Springfield?
She clicked back to the tumblr, one that had nearly forty million followers and was obviously one of the most respected in the fandom. Once she did, she searched through the blogger’s list of tags, found the ones that she had basically dedicated to Wyatt.
As Poppy scrolled through them, she felt herself getting more and more confused. Because according to this blogger—Dani was her name—nothing was quite what it appeared when it came to Wyatt Jennings.
For example, he’d said in numerous interviews that he’d grown up on a farm, but then other interviews—and his official bio—talked about him growing up in Austin where there weren’t a lot of farms. In another interview, he’d mentioned that at one time his big claim to fame was that he had gone to Brad Pitt’s middle school. At the time, the interviewer had joked that soon Brad would be claiming to have gone to Wyatt’s middle school and everyone had laughed.
A quick Google search showed her that Brad Pitt had been born in Oklahoma but had moved to Springfield, Missouri, with his family when he was young…So Wyatt had spent a significant amount of time in Springfield, then. How did she not know about this? And why was his official bio disguised to make it look like that wasn’t the case?
Intrigued now, she started combing through the rest of the tags. As she did, she came up with a bunch of things that seemed to contradict the label’s official narrative regarding Wyatt. Little things like when he’d learned to play the drums. Or what musicians had influenced him growing up. Or how old he was when he’d moved out on his own.
There were bigger things, too, though. Things like whether it was his widowed mother who had raised him or his father’s sister. Or disputes on whether or not he’d ever been arrested. On whether or not he had a kid. And even, if she could believe some of the more outrageous conspiracy theories, on whether or not his name was actually even Wyatt Jennings.
Because she was curious, she also searched the other guys. Found little to no ambiguity between the official bio and what the fans held to be true about Ryder, Jared, and Quinn. So it was just Wyatt who things didn’t add up for, Wyatt whose background looked to have been professionally whitewashed, considering almost nothing appeared online about him that dated back more than five or six years. It was like he hadn’t actually existed before Shaken Dirty was signed. But some intrepid fan had actually dug up a birth certificate for him from Missouri twenty-eight years ago, so obviously that wasn’t the case.
Which only made the whole thing weirder. Not to mention setting off every trigger and trust issue she had.
She had just clicked over to another big Ryatt blog, determined to see what this blogger had to say about Wyatt, when the man himself started stirring. He groaned a little, burrowed deeper into the bed. Then flung an arm around her waist and cuddled into her.
“Do you always get up at the crack of dawn?” he asked, his voice all smoke and gravel in the early morning quiet.
“Trying to catch up on some work,” she answered. “Since I spent so much of yesterday either fucking you or worrying about you, I’m a little behind.”