The guy swiped on his phone and then held it out for her. “Looks like more than dinner to me.”
It was a picture of Chance and Tennyson. His arm was around her. They were leaning in close. It almost but not quite looked like they were kissing. She suspected what was happening was that it was noisy by the street and they were saying goodbye, which required leaning in. She wasn’t worried. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t bug me in the parking lot when I just want to go shopping. I know you have a job to do, but really, this is nothing. Tennyson and Chance and I work together.”
“Let’s go,” Elle said. “There is a quinoa salad in there calling my name.”
“Yum,” Jolene said, though she didn’t mean it. She started to walk away, but the photographer stopped her.
“Is this working together?” he asked. He held his phone out again.
There was no point in looking. She did anyway. Because there she went again, needing to poke the fire to see if it was hot. This picture was more than talking. This picture made her blood boil, her fingers go cold, and her heart splinter.
It was Tennyson and Chance kissing in a swimming pool. Not just a friendly hello or goodbye kiss but a full-on, mouth-mashing make-out session. Tennyson’s hair was wet. Chance was shirtless. Tennyson was wearing what might have been a bikini top or a bra. Either way, it showed skin everywhere but her nipples, basically. She was a thin woman with zero breasts, and the top was nothing but two tortilla-chip-size triangles and some string. Chance’s hands were buried in Tennyson’s long dark hair.
Jolene was so shocked and so angry that she reached out and deleted the picture right off the man’s phone. Just swiped and dropped it in the trash.
“Hey!” he yelled. “You can’t touch stuff on my phone.”
“I can if you hand it to me.”
He grabbed for his phone, and the aggressive move made her instinctively jerk her arm back. He went in, crowding her space. Jolene was fighting the urge to cry, and he was making her feel like she was suffocating. She dropped his phone and started to back up, but he let out a groan of frustration and shoved her. Jolene stumbled, and then it was just total chaos and confusion.
She ended up getting knocked on the shoulder, hard, and she fell to the ground. Another photographer was trying to help her up while a third took pictures. Elle was shoving the first guy right back, and Jolene heard shouting, accusations, threats to call the cops. She sat on the pavement, stunned. The second man kept murmuring, “Are you okay? Let me help you up.”
Her legs felt like rubber. She couldn’t reconcile what she’d seen with what she knew. Chance was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a good old-fashioned cheat. He despised that about his father and grandfather. She also didn’t think that there had been time for a private pool party in the last few days. So either they had hotfooted it over to Tennyson’s the day before and Tennyson had a pool, or that picture was old.
She forced herself to stand up. The hell if she was going to be photographed sprawled out on the asphalt of the grocery parking lot. Her muffin top was spilling and she was determined to hold on to her dignity. It was tempting to punch the man with the white hair, but he wasn’t the issue here, not really. The issue was that both Chance and Tennyson had failed to share with her that they knew each other way more intimately than as songwriters in the same business.
“Thank you,” she said to the one decent human being in the bunch who had offered her a hand. “I appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome, Ms. Hart.”
Then the cops arrived and it was a hot mess of he said/she said, and it was an hour before Jolene and Elle got to leave. Without any quinoa or vegetables.
She wanted to call Chance, but she was too angry to say anything coherent. He had texted her like nothing was unusual, so he must not have gotten wind of the scandal. She hadn’t been able to respond to him, because she hated being back in the same place she’d been four months earlier—having people fling Chance’s behavior in her face. It felt like she was trying to walk in mud. She couldn’t get a grip on her thoughts or feelings other than a blinding sense of betrayal and disappointment. So when their older brother, Shane, called Elle and asked to come over because he had some news, she figured it was a perfect diversion from the crappy downturn her day had taken.
Elle, who was usually so pragmatic, kept trying to blow smoke up her ass. They were standing in Jolene’s kitchen eating yogurt that was a little off from being in the fridge too long, but they were both too hungry and stressed to care. “I mean, it had to be while you were broken up. Which is fair, according to the terms of post-breakup behavior. It’s not a big deal, honey, even though it’s ugly to see.”
“You’re missing the point.”