Playing Autumn (Breathe Rockstar Romance Book 1)

by Mina V. Esguerra

  There was a time warp, when it came to the industry, that Oliver barely understood himself. When someone was as ubiquitous as Trey, it was almost as if you knew him forever. When you found out that he was a person who aged every year like you did, it was almost jarring; like they lived on a different plane and did more with the same number of hours.

  Trey seemed like he was older than nineteen despite looking like a kid. Oliver remembered being nineteen. It had been awesome. Envy closed his throat for a second.

  “See you around then,” Oliver managed to say. “Happy birthday to your mom.”

  “You're nicer than they said you would be,” Trey said as he went to the elevator.

  Damn right he was. He watched the kid get in, then he knocked on Haley's door.

  “You know what I really want right now?” he said to her surprised face three seconds later. “Fajitas. You think we can borrow Roger for a bit?”

  Chapter 7

  Oliver didn't care where he got the Tex-Mex, as long as he got it now, so Haley suggested a place. It was a bit cute how he was totally and irrationally needing his fajita fix.

  Roger agreed to take them but couldn't stay because his shift at his actual job (bouncer at a club downtown) was starting. Roger was another volunteer, because Victoria knew how to round up people for this cause and make them feel good about it.

  “Everywhere I eat, it's crap,” Oliver was saying as they waited for their food. “I tell you, it's crap.”

  It had been years—too long—since Haley had been to El Cantina, and her mouth started to water from him reminiscing about it the whole car ride. She hadn’t been back in years because, well, she thought she shouldn’t stuff her face with tortillas and steak that often. But this was turning out to be a weekend of weirdness; might as well temporarily drop the diet.

  “I should have been coming back here every year,” Haley said, closing her eyes for a second and taking a deep breath.

  “Do you smell it?” Oliver demanded.

  She did. It smelled of Sunday afternoons, and Thursday nights after games, and those rare Saturday mornings when everyone was up and super hungry. “It’s El Cantina. Like it's always been.”

  “It doesn't smell like this elsewhere. I've tried places. I've been everywhere.”

  “You can't have tried smelling every Tex-Mex restaurant on the East Coast.”

  “I'm not kidding.”

  Haley closed her eyes and took a deep breath and was reminded of yet another thing. This place was a time machine. “It’s like my dad’s birthday.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “There was…maybe a period of five years? My dad wanted his birthday dinner here, every year. I was in middle school. It stopped because he eventually moved on to Chinese food, but this still does remind me of his birthday.”

  “That’s it,” Oliver said triumphantly. “That’s how I feel. Except I remember arrival days—when my parents came back from a trip, and if I wasn’t with them, they’d pick me up from my grandmother’s house and we’d come here.”

  A server placed a chip bowl between them and Oliver lunged for it, grabbing a handful of chips and then picking them off one by one from his fist with his teeth. She would have been concerned, except it seemed like he had done this before.

  “It's the same,” he concluded as he swallowed the last of his fistful of chips. He took a large gulp from the glass of water with a slice of lemon that had been served. “Even the water's the same.”

  “You're joking.”

  “I swear. And you've been coming home every year without doing this? You should be ashamed.”

  Her mouth made a sound that was almost like a word before she stopped herself from explaining the no-fajita diet. “Consider me properly shamed.” Haley tentatively reached for the bowl. “Is it safe to get a chip now?”

  “Get some now before I drop the bowl into my mouth.” He took another look around, his eyes lighting up as they swept through the room. “I performed here, in Houston, a few years ago. Didn't have enough time to drop by, so they sent me fajitas in a bag. Not what I had been dreaming of for years, but close enough.”

  Haley got a Liberal Arts degree (with a business concentration) in college, while getting as much musical training as possible. In any case—she had a semester each of education, psychology, and sociology and was seeing all sorts of cries for help in Oliver's nostalgia.

  “Romanticizing home isn't going to solve your crisis,” she said.

  Oliver grinned at her and gah, she was reminded of melting cheese on her tortilla chips. “Hot Piano Girl is also a mind reader?” he teased. “Or it's that obvious that I'm that close to washing up?”

  “I didn't say that.” Whoops. “But no one loves home that much, especially if he spent so much time away from it when he didn't have to, you know?”

  “Oh, but I had to. Family of traveling musicians. Home was that place we went to between airports.”

  See, Haley had always been curious about that. Traveling to do this job, this career. Her time with Breathe Music showed her that it was possible to stay home and be a musician, but maybe…not the kind of musician she wanted to be? When she was at her height of fangirling Oliver, she was well aware of his tour schedule, and he really did seem to be everywhere at once.

  “Do you consider New York City your home?” she asked. She knew that it was where he was staying between airports.

  He shook his head right away. “No.”

  “Oh. I thought it would be.”

  He leaned back and looked at her in a way that made her feel examined. “Why Tampa?”

  “Because the lady offered me money to go there.”

  “Yes, but it’s not where you should be if you want to do this.”

  Haley laughed. “Who said I wanted to do ‘this’? What is this?”

  “Well, you’re doing something. Not directly, but touching the edges.”

  “I wanted….” Haley looked down at her hands, which were laid flat on the table. “I wanted to try it, away from people who thought I should be doing something else.”

  When she looked at him again, he was still examining her. “That’s how it is. Yeah. So NYC isn’t home, not yet. I need a place to call home. I literally will need a roof over my head after this weekend, because I'm sure that one of the messages I got during our flight was my landlord telling me that my stuff is on a Brooklyn sidewalk.”

  “It's that bad?” Oh man. She tried not to look sorry for him. She forced herself to think of mean people, of baseball, of mushrooms, of superhot green chili, any mundane thing that would keep her heart from reacting like it saw a kicked puppy. But a sliver of looking sorry might have slipped through.

  Oliver picked up the bowl and turned it over, the remaining chip fragments falling into his mouth. “It's bad because I let it get bad. I already had my rock star rock-bottom crisis moment, so don't worry.”

  “I’m sorry. Should I…?” Was she supposed to keep him from alcohol then? Was there a rehab stint at some point, a drug problem? She couldn’t remember all of a sudden. “Is this all right? Anything…we should be avoiding?”

  “Chairs,” Oliver deadpanned. “If you want to know. The worst of the breakdown involved a chair.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Yes. I was writing a song, very badly I must say, and I lost it. I took it out on a chair that had been annoying me for some time.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “That’s an improvement from drunkenly hitting people, of course.”

  Which he did, Haley remembered that. “I’m glad you didn’t do that then.”

  “Don’t worry. What you're seeing is me on my way back up. Or back to the middle. And please, don't try to fix my fuckups, in case you feel the urge to. It'll take longer than a weekend, and we have kids to scare.”

  “Mentor,” Haley corrected him. “And fine. I'll exempt you from my mentoring urges, as much as I can.”

  The fajitas arrived. Two individual servings of the sam
e thing, steak fajitas, and soon their table was overwhelmed with sizzling meat, onion, peppers, and tortillas. Oliver pounced on his. Haley would like to think that she was more civilized at it, but she missed this too and was soon wiping steak juice that dribbled down her chin.

  Yeah, she liked home too. Mostly.

  “So what else is in Tampa?” Oliver asked.

  Haley sighed. “Just my job.” If I still have one.

  “Are you uploading more videos?”

  “No, I stopped doing that.”

  “You should have kept going. Did you see how many views Your Life got? It's insane.”

  How insanely popular could it have been, if no one was beating down her door with offers? “I got my job now because of it. I'm paid well. Maybe this is the best it's going to get.”

  He looked up at her, interrupting a moment with his steak. “That sounds sad.”

  “It's realistic. I was Internet-famous for a second and got a job because of it, and that's all it's going to be.”

  “This is what you tell yourself?”

  It was what was keeping her from completely giving up. Believing for a second that it could be more was dangerous. That path led to broken dreams and being kicked out of your apartment at twenty-four.

  She did not say that.

  “Can you keep your mentor urges away from me, too?” she told him. “I know you've been in the business and will have all sorts of advice, but I kind of want to be outside of it for now. I don't mind helping out some kids every year, maybe teach someone who ends up playing at Carnegie Hall. That's still worth doing, right?”

  Oliver was about to disagree but changed his mind. “It's admirable, yes. Not at all a waste of time.”

  She wanted to pick on that last thing he said, but her phone rang. It was someone she was not ready to talk to yet.

  “Logan?” Haley said. “Yeah, I'm back in town—sorry I forgot to call you right away—”

  “You're in El Cantina, yeah, I asked Victoria,” Logan said. “I'm here right now, just parked.”

  “Oh, okay.” Haley shook her head as she ended the call. Shit.

  “Shit what?” Oliver asked.

  Oh, so she had said that aloud. “Um, there's this guy. My ex-boyfriend. I was sort of psyching myself for when I was going to see him, but he's here now. Shit.”

  “Is he going to be a problem?”

  He wasn't, really. Haley had a feeling that the female population of greater Houston would have no problem at all if Logan Richards called often, and went to their homes, and made nice with their parents, and insisted on meeting for a cryptic “special dinner” this particular weekend. She used to think that was what she wanted.

  In less than a minute Logan himself found her, and Oliver, and their table full of fajita paraphernalia. He was surprised to see that she had company, because Victoria obviously didn't share that with him.

  Oliver stood up when he realized that the guy was joining them. “Hey. I'm Oliver.”

  “Logan,” Logan said, shaking the rock star's hand. “I'm Haley's boyfriend.”

  Haley really, really wanted to drop her head down to the table, but she didn't want to get steak juice on her face.

  Chapter 8

  Boyfriend? The fuck you are, Oliver thought, and he immediately caught himself. This person now in front of him reminded him of a suit, the kind that talked big during the introduction and slinked away without a word weeks later. They had the same slicked hair, the same slightly crooked smile, and this guy was actually wearing a suit. But he hadn’t done anything to Oliver. There was absolutely no reason to get in this guy's face, no reason at all.

  Haley had said ex-boyfriend, right?

  “I'm sorry,” Oliver said, putting more into the handshake. “Were you going to explain this, honey?”

  When Oliver took his hand back and returned to his seat, both Logan and Haley looked like they had walked into the wrong room. He didn't care about Logan getting it, so he let the back of his hand lightly brush over Haley's wrist then enclosed her slender fingers in his. It floored him how warm and familiar it felt to him. Maybe from when they had slightly touched on the plane. That could have been it.

  “Ex-boyfriend,” Haley said, releasing the frown on her brow. Her fingers tensed up but instead of pulling away, she leaned slightly toward him. Her eyes didn't change, but Oliver felt a gentle tap on his shoe. And another, and another. “But Logan and I have been in touch, still.”

  Though it took him a little longer, Logan shook his head and recovered from the confusion, and Oliver took slight satisfaction in seeing that face contort as if from a punch. “I'm sorry, I didn't realize Haley was with anybody. Hope you don't mind if I join you, catch up with her a bit.”

  Haley was avoiding this person why again?

  No one responded, but Logan pulled up a chair and started asking Haley about her flight. Oliver watched them for a few seconds, hand still wrapped around hers. He noticed that she didn’t mention that they had met only on the flight over, one where they weren’t even supposed to be sitting together.

  Logan looked like he was a sports star in high school, exactly the kind of boy that her parents must have liked. Dark hair all in place, sculpted facial hair, and Oliver wouldn't be surprised if he was a banker or something. He had no doubt that Haley's parents loved this guy. But did she? Something about her body language was off, from when she discovered he was coming, and even now as they talked. He didn't have to be an expert to see that.

  The way she was responding to his hand practically spooning hers? He knew what that meant. She darted a look at him from the corner of her eye, and he grinned at her as he released her hand to prep another tortilla.

  “I recognize you,” Logan said to him.

  “He's Oliver Cabrera,” Haley said hesitantly.

  “The singer? Like from the songs on your videos?”

  Her face flushed. Interesting.

  “He's here for Breathe Music, too,” she said quickly.

  “And I've been wanting you to meet the family, remember,” Oliver said, eyebrow slightly raised. “My grandma's so stoked about this trip, too.”

  Logan's eyes went from him to her, a tennis match that eventually ended with his eyes settling on Haley. “You two are together? That’s a surprise. You never mentioned it.”

  “I don't…”

  “She asked me to keep it private,” Oliver said between bites, a little too cheerfully. “She didn't want the press hounding her.”

  “Right,” Logan said.

  Oliver could tell he wasn't buying it yet. All that their the little charade was accomplishing was throwing Logan off, keeping him from saying what he really wanted to say in Haley's presence because there was a stranger around. But that meant Haley had to get into it more, and if this guy was really an annoyance, then he'd be out of her hair.

  Did she want Logan out of her hair? He could help with that.

  “What do you do, Logan?” Oliver said, suddenly okay with being friendlier to the sad dude.

  “I got a job out of college doing stocks,” Logan said. “Nothing as exciting as rock and roll.”

  “Rock and roll isn't as big with Haley's parents, though.”

  “So when did you two meet?” Logan's guard went up a tad higher. “I would think Haley would have mentioned it, if she finally—”

  “Recently,” Haley said, breathless. “This summer. It was a whirlwind thing. I didn't have the time to tell anyone.”

  “You're staying at the hotel again?” Logan asked. “We're still on for Saturday, right? When I called you before your flight, you said yes.”

  “Right, of course,” Haley said, like she had forgotten. “Saturday. I haven't forgotten.”

  What Saturday was, it seemed like a big deal. A grin returned to Logan's face. They were not explaining to him what it was, and Oliver shouldn't have been curious. If he were smart, and some independent testers actually told him that when he was younger, he would let this go. Haley was a person, no
t a prize.

  At least he had his fajitas.

  ***

  Oliver had other minor victories that night: Making Logan wait twenty minutes while he signed autographs and posed for photos with El Cantina patrons and staff. Sitting in the backseat of Logan's Prius, asking inane questions as he drove them back to the hotel. And then at the Lake Star lobby, when he graciously told Logan that he'd leave them alone together so they could catch up, but not leaving before saying “See you upstairs” and leaving a light kiss on Haley's cheek. When he bent down to do this, she grabbed his arm and looked slightly panicked, not sure how far he would go, and then she relaxed when all his lips did was graze her skin. And then he went further into the hotel.

  The Lake Star, now that he had actually paused to take it in, did not look like most hotels and motels booked for him throughout his career. There were bookshelves everywhere: at the lobby, behind the check-in counter, and now that he noticed it, he remembered the one above his room's window that spanned the entire wall.

  “Hey,” Haley said, catching up to him. “What was that about?”

  “I apologize. You sounded like you wanted to avoid him, so I did what came naturally.”

  “Create a relationship out of thin air and rub it in his face?”

  He wouldn't have used those words. But yes, all his previous relationships had been quick to start, created seemingly out of thin air. This didn't feel out of place. “I thought I was helping. But I don't know, he doesn't seem like someone you want to call the cops on.”

  Haley bit her lip. “Logan's not a bad guy, really.”

  “Then this is all harmless fun. If he's really threatened by me, then he'll do something. You might actually like what he does.”

  She was still looking in the direction Logan had taken. “Logan's great, mostly, but he and I broke up because he’s cheated on me before. I don’t think he stopped when he said he did. My parents don't know that. I think even he forgets it, and he starts thinking that I'll be perfect as the mother of his kids. I don't want him to do anything.”