I didn’t get that far. Blonde #1 stepped in front of me. “You’re not dating Tyler Erickson anymore, are you?”
“I wasn’t dating him.” That much was true. “We’re just friends.” Who had sex together, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Is he coming back here?” Blonde #2 asked.
A loud bang startled me.
The sound of metal hitting metal slammed through my brain. I cracked open my eyelids but was met by darkness. From my cramped position in the enclosed space, I couldn’t tell where I was. My head hurt. That was all I knew.
The world swayed around me.
Someone placed an arm around my lower back, steadying me. “I’ve got you,” a man said.
I blinked him into focus. Blondes #1 and #2 were eyeing me like I was a dye job gone wrong.
“What was that noise?” I asked the man, whom I’d seen a few times in the sports center, working out or talking to his stepdaughter, who had a part-time job there.
“Someone accidentally knocked a chair over,” Lindsey’s stepfather said.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Blonde #1 pointed out.
I shook my head. “It’s nothing. I just remembered something.”
“You remembered something that scared you? What the hell was it?” Chris placed a plastic chair from the nearby waiting area next to me. “Sit.”
“I’m fine. Really.”
Blondes #1 and #2 looked more interested in pumping additional info out of me about Nolan than finding out why I’d been suddenly dizzy. Given I didn’t want to discuss him with them or anyone, I added, “I keep remembering things about when I was attacked.”
Chris’s eyes widened. “Do you know who it was?”
“No. Not yet. I just keep remembering bits and pieces of that night.”
“Other than that, how are you doing?” Lindsey’s stepfather asked, his gaze sweeping over my body. But not in a sleazy, checking-me-out kind of way. Not like what Blonde #2 was doing to him. “Sorry, hazard of the job,” he explained. “I’m a firefighter.”
I could’ve sworn Blonde #2 sighed as if she was about to swoon. Either she didn’t notice his wedding ring or she didn’t care that he was married.
While she might have been sizing him up as her next target, the feeling wasn’t mutual. Seeing that I was okay, he excused himself and headed for the main entrance without giving her a second glance.
“So, are you and Tyler still together?” Blonde #1 asked, returning to the original inquisition.
I let out a long exasperated breath. “Nothing’s going on between Tyler and me.” I didn’t wait for her to ask me another question. I told Chris I would talk to him later and walked off to ask about the class.
The guy working the registration desk checked his computer. “That class is full. But there’s space in the one after that.”
“When is it?”
“January fifteenth.”
“That’s fine.” Even thought I hadn’t told Kayla my plans, I registered her in the class too. She could thank me later.
As if sensing I was thinking about her, she sent me a text: Dylan’s got a work Christmas party Thursday night. You want me to bring over the popcorn? That was Kayla’s way of asking me if I wanted her to come over to watch a movie that night.
Sounds great.
Chapter 38
Nolan
The final notes of the song we’d been working on faded away, and I nodded. The energy electrifying Mason’s studio loft was at an all-time high since my return two days ago. For the past six hours, the band had been creating the arrangement to the song. No one had mentioned the lies I’d been feeding them all these years.
I figured Jared had something to do with that.
From the moment we’d walked through the front door, we were all business. We had just over a week to pull everything together before hitting the studio. And for the first time I realized how much I’d fucked things up for these guys. I’d been so focused on Hailey and how much I loved her, I’d forgotten how much the music meant to them. Being a recording artist wasn’t just my dream. It was theirs too, and I’d put it in jeopardy.
No one mentioned that either.
We were working on the song Hailey loved. It was a ballad, and the moment I’d begun singing it, the guys’ eyes had lit with a level of excitement I hadn’t seen in a while.
“I think that’s it,” Jared said at last, grinning. The guys nodded in agreement. But as much as we wanted to celebrate, we still needed to create the music for five more songs and the lyrics and music to two others. While I’d been away, Jared and I had written eleven songs in total. Some we’d collaborated on via the phone and Skype. Others we’d written on our own. He’d presented them to the band, and they had already arranged the music and tweaked the lyrics to six songs by the time I’d left Northbridge.