by Eden Finley
I want to be over this ridiculous hold he has over me. I thought I was, and all it took to come back was laying eyes on him again.
“Just exhausted? Are we lying to each other now? Nice.”
I cock my head. “If either of us is a liar, it might be the guy who forgot to mention he was in a serious relationship while he flirted with me.”
“I did not flirt.”
I give him my best I call bullshit face.
“I didn’t intentionally flirt,” he amends.
“I’m not in the habit of trying to kiss guys who don’t flirt with me.”
Soren purses his lips. “No. I don’t suppose you’d need to.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Calm down. I meant you’d have a million guys lining up to flirt with you. You wouldn’t have to waste time with someone who wasn’t putting in any effort.”
“Well, that is true.”
“You going to tell me about the guy?”
My brow furrows. “What guy?”
He leans in, bumping me with his shoulder. “The one you’re running away from.”
I want to lie and keep up the exhaustion excuse, but trying to keep up with that is more exhausting than dealing with my unresolved feelings for Harley. “I met him on tour.”
“Bad breakup?”
“How do you know we’re not just fighting?”
“I don’t know anyone who’d fly halfway around the world to escape a fight.”
“You underestimate overdramatic musicians.”
“Ah, so he’s a musician too.”
Shit. I’ve probably already violated a term in the NDA I signed.
“Yeah. He’s, uh, part of the Eleven backup band,” I lie.
“I’m guessing none of the guys know.”
“They’d turn all big brother on me and coddle me and … yeah, I’m good, thanks. I’m dealing.”
“Did you want to … maybe … if you need an ear—”
“You look about as willing as a hooker facing a fifteen-inch cock.”
Soren’s forehead scrunches. “I don’t know what that means. Would a hooker like that or not?”
“That’s way too big.”
“Oh. Then yeah, true. Because I don’t exactly want to hear about you with other guys, but if you need to talk, I’m here.”
“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.”
“Rock star politics, eh?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Soren’s hand covers mine, and it throws me. I want to pull away, I want to turn my hand over and hold on for dear life, but most of all, I want to be strong enough not to climb into Soren’s lap and feel the heat of him against me again.
“I’d like to know more about it. About your life,” he says. “I never stopped following you online and watching your videos. It reminds me of how you made me brave enough to face the scariest part of my life and say, ‘fuck it.’”
Damn him. He knows exactly what to say to make me forget all the mistakes he made two years ago. I mean, I know realistically he was only a little bit of a dick, and technically did nothing wrong, but it’s been easier to forget about him by painting him as an asshole than remembering that he truly gets me.
He takes his hand back. “If you don’t want to get into it with me, I understand. We can talk about the guy, if you want. He got a name?”
“Why do we have to talk at all?” I can think of a million things I’d rather do with Soren.
He stares out at t
he water. “Guess we don’t. I just figure this is the most you’ve said to me since you landed on the island. I’m scared if we stop you’ll run away again.”
I hesitate only for a second because if I’m honest, I might run away again, but I don’t want to. If I had a logical side, it’d yell at me to run, but lucky for Soren, I never did have that part of the brain stopping me from doing stupid shit.
“It’s Harry,” I blurt. Technically not lying. Harley’s real name is Harry, but just like I had to change my name because of some Nickelodeon character from the nineties named Jett Jackson, Harley had to change his because of Harry from One Direction. It happens a lot in the industry. We couldn’t record as Fallout because it was too close to Fallout Boy. So that’s why we became Radioactive.
“How over is it between you two?”
“He’s getting married, and after Wayne, I promised myself I wouldn’t go there with a married person again. Not that I knew about Wayne. He didn’t wear a ring and basically barked instructions at us, so it’s not like we talked much for him to say, ‘Oh, by the way, my wife and daughters say hi.’”
“What about the new manager?”
“Luce? He’s one hundred percent in a committed relationship with his assistant, but even if he wasn’t, he’s the most professional guy I know. We lucked out with him finding us. He only did because Marty—that’s his partner—was a huge fan of ours.” I can pinpoint the exact moment my career turned around, and it started with Luce knocking on my hotel door in Australia.
I was a mess. It was a month after the night in Tampa with Soren, and everything was going to shit. We got booed off the stage at the festival because their roadies sucked and got wires mixed up. Our mics weren’t working properly. My guitar wasn’t tuned right. Massive mess.
I thought Luce was there to drop us from the label. Instead, he promised to make my life ten times easier. Not only that, but we hit our first number one, thanks to him. He fought to take us in a new direction, and while we’re not Eleven famous yet, thanks to Luce, we’re halfway there.
“I’m glad you’ve got someone in your corner to look out for you.”
I’m about to say, “me too” because I owe everything to Marty and Luce, but Soren beats me to talking.
“And I don’t mean that to say you can’t look after yourself or you need a babysitter. I purely mean it because being alone sucks, and even the strongest people need support sometimes.”
He makes a point. I know Luce would support me in anything, and so would Benji and Freya. But at the end of the day, Luce goes home to Marty, Benji and Freya are too busy fighting to see when I’m struggling, and I’m constantly surrounded by people who see me but don’t know me.
Even when I was with Harley, he’d always leave. We weren’t allowed to be together, and some would say that’s some romantic Romeo and Julien bullshit, but everyone seems to forget how that story ends when they claim it to be so fucking romantic.
Not being able to be with the person you love is not romantic.
It’s painful.
It’s why I can’t do it to myself anymore.
I stand before I do something stupid like ask Soren to share a bed with me so I can fill the emptiness in my chest for a little while. “I’m gonna go to bed.”
“Jet.”
I step off his deck and freeze at my name. Jet sounds like a foreign name to me now, but when Soren says it, it feels like three years ago. I close my eyes, trying to hold on to it.
“You’re not running away again, are you? I thought we were getting somewhere.”
Staring at him over my shoulder, I force a smile. “Not running. Super tired.”
I try to stay strong in case he’s thinking the same thing as me.
We’re both hurting. We’re both trying to move on from bad breakups. It makes sense to seek comfort in each other.
But I don’t know if I’ll survive it. Not with Soren.
The night I met him, there was a spark I haven’t experienced since. There was potential for more and that fluttery feeling of us possibly having epic love. Reality crushed that. An ex-boyfriend, a music tour, and conflicting schedules don’t mix.
Then when he turned up at my show in Tampa, I thought … stupidly thought it meant something.
I went into the music industry with fewer expectations than the ones I put on Soren that night. I’m not usually a naïve kid, but when it comes to him, I’m ridiculously and hopelessly idealistic.
The last thing I want is for him to see me that way.
“Try to get some actual sleep tonight,” Soren says with genuine care in his voice.
Caleb Sorensen caring about me is the last thing I need right now because the stupid kid with love hearts in his eyes is fighting to make an appearance again.
Chapter Nine
Soren
Fiji is officially the land of the best dreams ever. What’s even better is not being woken by someone interrupting the wicked things Jet was doing to me in my sleep.
I don’t know if I sleep until lunchtime because I needed to catch up from the previous night or if I didn’t want to leave the dream, but when I do finally climb out of bed, shower, and head out, I can’t find anyone anywhere.
You’d think that would be statistically impossible.
The pool’s empty, the beach is deserted, and unless they all went for a walk to the top of the headland, I’m thinking there was an alien invasion and the only ones left are the people who slept through it. It’s the only logical explanation.
That is, until I find Ema in the main house.
“Hungry?” she asks. “You slept through breakfast.”
“Starving. Thank you. Where is everyone?”
“Joni took the other hockey player, his partner, and the musician to the mainland to do some sightseeing. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Huntington should be on the private beach outside their suite. The football players are resting up and preparing for tonight, and the other two … I don’t know where they are.”
I smile.
“Sorry. I’m terrible with names. Great with faces. Names, not so much.” She gestures for me to sit on a stool at the kitchen counter and slides a cup of coffee in front of me.
“No problem. Why are the football players preparing for tonight?”
The door to the front entrance opens, and Damon steps through.
“You’re all going to Rua Daulomani Island,” Ema says.
“We are? What’s that?”
Damon claps my shoulder and joins me. “It’s a gay island.”
“The whole island is gay?” I quip.
Ema gives Damon a cup of coffee too. “Homosexuality is still frowned upon in Fiji. There are no gay bars, no same-sex marriage, and not many rights at all. Rua Daulomani is owned by friends of ours. They wanted to create that safe space for those who need it.”
“Oh, wow. I knew it wasn’t exactly liberal here, but I didn’t know it was still that bad.”
“Our boy is gay, but he recently moved to Australia with his partner so they could get married and have kids.”
There’s an ugly truth no one really thinks about anymore. Some people still need to move countries to be with the person they love.
“It’s why we advertise as gay-friendly accommodation. We don’t care who people love.”
“That’s very cool of you,” I say.
“Here is nothing like Rua Daulomani though. This is more a vacation spot where you can relax and sunbake. The island is more … uh … like a party? That’s probably the tame way of saying it.”
“Is everyone going?” I ask Damon and hope I’m not being obvious.
He nods. “After dinner.”
“Wait, why’re Talon and Miller getting ready now?”
Damon laughs. “Miller’s trying to convince himself to get on another boat. I think Talon’s helping.”
Sure. Helping.
I wish I had someone to help when I needed it.
“While I’ve got you,” Damon says, “Carl
y called.”
His assistant. The person doing his job while he’s away.
I swallow hard. “And?”
“They finally caved on the no-trade clause.”
“Yes!”
“Calm down. It’s only a one-year contract.”
Fuck.
“There’s still the three-year deal without the no-trade clause on the table.”
“Option for an extension on the one-year?”
“Yes. Want me to counter for two with no trade? They’ll probably lowball you for it, though.”
The one year will take me to thirty-four. It’s not a bad age to retire if I can’t get an extension, but it’s not ideal because if I have a bad season, then I’m done. I need to think of my priorities though, and right now, my priority is a no-trade clause.
“I’ll sign the one-year and hope to extend it.”
“Are you sure?” Damon asks.
“It’s done then and signed, and I won’t have to stress about them dumping me completely.”
“I’ll have the papers sent to Joni and Ema’s office, and you can sign today. Then that’s all the shop talk I’m allowed. I’m supposed to be on vacation.”
“So … a gay island, eh?” I ask.
Tonight should be interesting.
The whole boat rocks violently as we climb in to go to Rua Daulomani, and there are just enough seats for all of us if we squish together. Jet takes the last seat on the other side at the front near his brother, and the only one left for me is at the back next to Miller.
“Wait … are you going to puke again? Anyone wanna swap places?” Preferably Matt.
“It’ll be fine,” Joni says. “Water’s not rough tonight, and it’s not far. He should be fine.”
While we wait for Joni to get the boat ready, I kick Ollie’s foot as he is sitting opposite me. “What’d you guys get up to today?”
Ollie smiles. “Just went to the mainland to look around. I was gonna wake you to see if you wanted to join us today but thought better of it after last night.”
“What happened last night?” Jet asks. “Were you really jerking it when Ollie walked in?”
