Playing Autumn (Breathe Rockstar Romance Book 1)

by Mina V. Esguerra

  The only other person inside was a teenage girl. Oliver hesitated, then figured that she’d be fine with whatever she saw. So he took Haley’s hand, pulled her up so she was standing, and laid a full, hard kiss on her mouth. Surprised, she gasped a bit and then relaxed into it but pulled back as soon as she lost her breath.

  “Um, yes?” She struggled to regain her composure, but she was smiling. “Rough morning so far?”

  “I don’t work well with other people,” he admitted.

  “Well, that’s too bad. You’re going to have to work with at least two.”

  “I know. I needed an energy boost.”

  “Tell me about it later,” Haley said.

  Chapter 13

  Haley discovered Breathe Music by accident.

  She was a freshman in high school, and on her first day, she had been waiting for her mom to pick her up. They had a mix-up over where exactly this would happen and had ended up with both of them waiting for fifteen minutes on opposite sides of the campus. Haley decided to run to her mom instead, and she cut across a maze-like covered walk to get there. The walkway sort of abruptly ended with a corkboard, which she almost bounced off of in her rush. She disturbed half the fliers on the board, but one of them caught her attention by falling right into her hand—BREATHE MUSIC FESTIVAL FOR YOUNG MUSICIANS. Learn from the best and all for free—if you’re good enough! Prove to us that you are.

  She kept the flier in hand as she negotiated the rest of the maze to find her mom’s car. And then it took her another couple of days to gather up the nerve to try out for a slot.

  So Haley understood completely when a student felt completely perplexed by this arrangement, being holed up in a hotel and asked to perform twice a day or more. She knew that it was part of her job as a mentor to settle them in. Her favorite spot for mentoring was by the window in the small library beside the coffee shop in the Lake Star Hotel.

  When she first started volunteering at Breathe Music, the Lake Star Hotel looked like a lodge, an imposing log cabin with the occasional stuffed deer head peering at her. Inside the library, looking out into the garden, was nicer. Since then they had renovated and now the entire hotel looked like a library, but she still chose the same spot for her three-hour session with Mia Anders, sixteen-year-old singer/songwriter.

  Mia had a wonderful rasp to her voice, Haley noticed immediately. The kind that filled songs with depth, and when done right lent an impression of experience despite being so young. The students were scheduled to perform several times during the weekend’s activities, and technically the least a mentor should do was help the student with each song. That was all.

  “Are you two together?” Mia asked, in what Haley was learning was her direct way, after Oliver made his scene and then left their room.

  “We’re not,” Haley said, still a bit shaken.

  “Does he know that you’re Hot Piano Girl?”

  “I don’t…I’m not…” Haley stammered through this, not sure how to defend herself. “How do you even know?”

  Mia shrugged. “The list of mentors was up on the site. I looked you all up. You’re a fan of his, aren’t you? You did covers of his songs. You have like two million hits on them.”

  “What? No…what? It can’t be that much by now.”

  “Oh, it is. Like, last week. You don’t look at your channel?”

  Haley shook her head.

  “Because the comment threads started up again once I posted that you were going to be mentoring this weekend.”

  A familiar tension collected in Haley’s neck. Those videos, they seemed to her to have been made another lifetime ago. She would have deleted them, but it was easier to go off the grid and stop looking. Another reason why she wanted out of this festival. Maybe the main one. Criticism she could take; encouragement led to hoping, and expecting.

  “Did you know each other before he became famous? He’s from here, isn’t he?” Mia consulted her phone and started to go online. “No, but he would have left when he was in his early teens…and you’d have been really young…”

  “Mia, can we not go on the Internet while we’re in session?”

  Haley earned herself a glare from the teenager, who slipped the phone back into her pocket. “Well, you got to make out with someone during our session.”

  “And you totally saw that it was accidental and I had nothing to do with it. Let’s talk about you now, okay?”

  Mia did try to talk about herself, but the next hour was also spent talking about other people. It was a tic she seemed to have. She said things such as: “...like Taylor Swift, but more awesome,” when describing the song she wrote that got her into the festival. “...like Lea Michele, but less melodrama,” about her short stint in high school theater. “...like Carly Simon, but modern,” about the song she wanted to perform at the public concert on Sunday.

  How many years had Haley been part of this festival? Eight, counting the year she joined as a student. A volunteer since she was fifteen, and then a mentor since she was twenty. In all that time, she'd met countless people who no doubt had talent but lacked any savvy in promoting themselves. Even Trey, back in his time as a student, he didn't even know which shirt he should be wearing onstage. (The tighter one, someone would eventually tell him.)

  Hearing Mia talk like this also gave Haley the impression that the girl had it all figured out. That she didn't need to be here, and that being here meant she needed validation, not actual help. Could someone be too self-aware?

  “I don't know who that is,” Haley admitted now, after Mia said her song for the evening was like “Alicia Keys and (someone else).”

  Mia shrugged, dismissively, the way Haley used to when she came across someone who couldn't care less who Oliver Cabrera was, and she realized that she should cut the girl some slack. And so she asked her to sing. Mia made herself more comfortable on the bay window, propping her guitar against her thigh. And she started to sing.

  Instantly, Haley felt something tug at her ear, heart, and gut, spots that wonderful voices always got to reach in her. Now this was more like it. Mia had the look down pat too, with her curly hair held in place with a clamp, bangles clinking together whenever she moved her wrist so. She didn't have to talk too much about the other people she was better than.

  Listening to Mia let her drift her attention out the window, and she thought of Oliver. What was he thinking, coming into the room and kissing her? Nowhere had she read reports of erratic behavior like that, in any of the fan groups and forums. He never socialized with fans, was the thing. Oliver was polite and signed and took photos, but he didn’t have the back-and-forth with the groups that other singers did.

  Haley shook her head and tried to get thoughts of him out of it. She had been thinking about him eighty percent of the day already, from when she woke up and remembered what it was like to kiss him, to when she helped Victoria unpack snacks and prepare breakfast, and now, again, as she looked out at nothing in particular.

  She still couldn't believe he was there. Like, right there. Close enough for her to know that she had to look up a little bit to look him in the eye. And in fact to remember what he smelled like, how his mouth moved when he kissed. That he sang when he was alone in his room, because she heard it through the wall that they shared.

  So they both agreed not to play mentor to each other, but how could she not feel sad about what was happening to him? He was hiding out here in Houston. Lucky her that he was hiding out in exactly the same place she happened to be in, but…

  “What do you think of that last line?” Mia asked, ending her song abruptly, hugging the guitar to her chest.

  “What? Um, can you switch it with the one right before? Makes more sense that way,” Haley said.

  “But I wanted to end it on that word.”

  “Maybe you should go with a different song on your first performance.”

  That was a dangerous thing to say to an artist, and Haley’s brain was in so many places that she wasn’t able to
deliver that right. Mia’s eyes widened, her hand stiffened. There was a tiny bit of confidence behind them, and Haley had snuffed it out.

  “Fine,” Mia conceded, her voice cracking. “What should I sing?”

  Frankly, Haley had heard so much commentary from Mia that she wasn’t even sure what the girl liked anymore. But Haley did know a thing about being new here and the nerves that could overcome you on that first performance. She wanted so badly to make a good impression. She didn’t have any professional training and knew that in the same small group there was an opera singer, an award-winning young composer, a singing tap dancer.

  “Sing your audition song,” she said. “It’s the one that got you here.”

  “But…”

  “What did you sing?”

  “Time After Time.”

  “That should work.”

  “It’s old. Everyone’s done that.”

  Haley shrugged. “You asked me what I thought.”

  There was a notebook beside Mia, and she scribbled something. Haley guessed that this was the right time to pick up her phone again and noticed that it had a message from Anastacia Lee: Hope you're enjoying your weekend. Don't forget, we'll talk when you get back.

  Haley paused to think, and then she started a new message.

  Mrs. Lee, until when would you like for me to stay on as tutor?

  Short, simple. Not so scary-looking.

  The reply came in seconds later.

  I was thinking that let's start wrapping up now, so when you go for Thanksgiving weekend that can be your trip home.

  One month, give or take a few days. She just got her notice. What had changed? Did she totally misread Mrs. Lee’s job offer? Was it supposed to be a summer thing?

  “I can't believe Trey Lewis is here,” Mia was saying, almost breathlessly. “I kind of want to tell him how big of a sellout he is, though. You think he'll be okay with that?”

  “We try not to pass that kind of judgment here,” Haley said, measuring her tone. “Sure, you can tell him that whenever you want, but we kind of want to encourage everyone to find success however they define it.”

  “So. Overproduced, overrated, temporary music that makes bubblegum pop sound like genius. You're okay with that?”

  Every now and then there would be this kind of student, too. The kind who wasn’t merely talented, but also overly critical of everyone else. They were great artists, sure, but were a bitch to mentor. Haley took a deep breath and went with her standard line. “Mia, you should work on you right now.”

  Mia shrugged and scribbled into her notebook again. “I work on me all the time,” she muttered. “I thought I’d be getting solid industry advice here. I mean, what else is the point, right?”

  Ugh, and a smartmouth, too. Haley knew what that meant: Why do others get record execs and pop stars and I get the has-been Internet girl?

  And she would be right, this smartmouth Mia, because Haley couldn’t even keep a job teaching a high school girl to play the piano. What could she teach anyone about being an artist?

  But this feeling—this suspicion that she was totally irrelevant to the person she was mentoring—this wasn’t new. Victoria kept telling her to push it away because she was a teacher first, and that was more helpful at this stage than wisdom from a chart-topping artist. Usually Haley could take it, but maybe not today, at the same time she had essentially gotten fired.

  “What’s the point indeed,” Haley said, not disagreeing.

  Chapter 14

  One hour of watching Kari and John practice a Katy Perry song, the way Trey told them to do it. Oliver hung back and instead nodded, checked instruments, and listened.

  Kari and John were going to attempt a duet on this, and when he got back after his quick trip to find Haley, they were already arguing over verses. It reminded him of that one week on Tomorrow’s Talent when they had to do duets with fellow contestants. He had been “randomly” partnered up with the eight-year-old girl who sang country. Audiences and critics considered that to be one of his best performances, surprisingly touching and a stretch of both contestants’ ranges, but rehearsal for that had been hellish.

  “Do you know this song?” Kari looked up at him, eyes scrunched up in near-pain.

  “Everyone knows that song,” Oliver said. “You really want to perform it?”

  “Trey knows what he’s doing,” John said.

  Trey and Ash were on the other side of the room; he would have heard it, and John probably meant for that vote of confidence to be heard.

  Though he owed much to Tomorrow’s Talent and they knew it, they did something that he could never get over until today. They put contestants in shared rehearsal spaces, meaning to psych each other out. He’d only ever taken private music lessons until then, and at recitals he was able to tune out everyone else onstage. Going into a competition and being thrown together with fellow musicians, with parents hanging around pretending to “collaborate” and “help”—as soon as he got out of there, Oliver closed ranks on his “creative process” again. No one got to come in.

  “John, you take this part and start memorizing. Kari, walk around with me?” he said.

  John did not like this plan. “You’ll be back when?”

  “You’ll get your alone time with me soon enough. Kari?”

  ***

  Like riding a bike, some skills were coming back to him. Divide and conquer, for one. Standing Soft Taco Time was another.

  He chose Kari for Standing Soft Taco time because she seemed like she wasn’t going to be a smartass about it.

  “I didn’t want to say this in front of Trey,” Oliver explained as the waiter at the hotel café served their food, “but I’ve been around for a while. Longer than him. And he has his way of doing things, but I also have mine.”

  “Soft tacos?”

  “When I was on the show, we weren’t allowed to go out and have long lunches. There was catering, but sitting down to eat there seemed like forever when you had lines to memorize and on-set schoolwork to do. But meals were also the time when nobody was expected to hassle you about the competition, so I took food I could eat with one hand and walked off to think.”

  He handed her a hotel taco and she gingerly accepted it. Then he gestured for them to start walking outside, by the pool.

  Kari was not familiar with this and held her taco horizontally for a bit, considering when to bite.

  “I’m sorry,” Oliver said. “I didn’t ask if you ate tacos. Or chicken.”

  She nodded. “I do. This is…weird, that’s all.”

  “Believe me, you’ll need all the space to think that you can get.” He started a slow pace around the pool, thoughtfully chewing his first bite.

  “I know who you are,” Kari admitted. She took her own first bite and caught the falling chicken slivers with a hand. “I know about Tomorrow’s Talent and your season. I know about your classical career and the rock one too. John doesn’t.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “He’s not really into this, that’s why. Doesn’t care for the rest of the stuff. Wants to sing and be applauded.” Kari sighed. “I’m sorry. He’s going to be more of an ass as this moves along.”

  “He seemed to like Trey.”

  “Because Trey sings and gets applause. That’s all.”

  “Are you really going to sing the song Trey picked out for you?”

  Kari paused, then swallowed. “It’s way better than what John picked. And I usually give in to his choices so we don’t end up arguing too long.”

  She was a short girl. The top of her head barely reached his chest, and he was able to see the roots of her hair as they paced around the pool. It occurred to him that he hadn’t hung out with a real teenager in so long. They sounded like adults but experienced things differently.

  This short walk was bringing back another skill: the ability to strategize. Oliver swallowed the last of his taco and told Kari they’d be heading back upstairs.

  ***

 
Oliver decided to let Trey have Kari and John’s day one. The song he chose, the advice he gave, the works. John didn’t want to sing it straight up and wanted a new arrangement; Trey agreed. Oliver let John create that arrangement, hastily teach it to Kari, and rehearse the whole thing twice before it was time for lunch, their first performance for the group.

  It was, as expected, a trainwreck. Despite Oliver’s recommendations to Kari to just go with it, she did not want to. She deliberately did not use the same arrangement when she was on her verse, which made the duet part as perfectly matched as mustard and vanilla ice cream.

  Like the old days, Oliver thought, clapping politely. Drunken karaoke glorification.

  Kari looked mortified after. John was annoyed too, but not in the way that Kari was; he thought she had screwed him instead of both of them bombing. He was great at the guitar though, and if Oliver cared a little more, he would have asked him to play instead of sing.

  But it wasn’t time for that yet.

  He was wondering when he’d see Haley again. Lunch had apparently been planned as an outdoor barbecue, but it had to be moved indoors because of the Trey Girls.

  He found her hovering by the grill area, still outside in the garden. Ribs, shrimp, and corn were being prepped. He had to wade through students, volunteers, and mentors all mingling, but it wasn't exactly a party atmosphere yet. He could hear Trey’s student Ash performing—one of Trey’s songs, surprise surprise—and he didn’t feel like stopping to critique it.

  “Oliver.” He felt a hand against his arm, and he stopped to face the esteemed Mr. Bolton himself, responsible for a number of top R&B and jazz acts. “Please give my regards to your parents.”

  “Of course,” Oliver replied, reluctantly realizing that this was what he was supposed to be doing. “Mr. Bolton, how long has it been?”

  “Since I saw your dad? Must be ten, twelve years by now. Where do they live mostly?”