Playing Autumn (Breathe Rockstar Romance Book 1)

by Mina V. Esguerra

  It was her own fault for not including him in that part of her life, right?

  Logan, in the meantime, expected her to be “the girlfriend” at every game, every party, every hanging-out-with-the-buds.

  “You’re putting words in my mouth,” he protested. “I never said that. I don’t think you’re in a serious relationship with him.”

  “Why not?” she said, more curious than anything.

  “Because it takes too long for you to let someone in,” Logan sounded argumentative, fighting from the other side of the city for whatever his plans were this weekend. “Whatever you think you have with him—come on. Get real. It’s not serious enough for you not to see me tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think tomorrow is a good idea, Logan.”

  “You haven’t heard me out yet.”

  “I don’t think—I’m really busy. I’ll be back Thanksgiving.”

  She could still hear him making his case as she ended the call.

  ***

  “What do you think?”

  Haley blinked. “Why is it different now?”

  Mia shrugged. “I told you, to make it more Alicia. It isn't?”

  Huh. On one hand, she could admit that she didn't notice the style change. On the other, she could say that she didn't listen to a word Mia had said before she started singing. Both true, and not the right thing.

  “Please start over,” Haley said, “and this time give me Mia.”

  Mia shrugged. “Which means what?”

  They were both on each other’s last nerve by now. Haley had started their afternoon session with a not-so-gentle critique of her performance at lunch, and Mia immediately went on the defensive.

  “You told me to sing that song!”

  “I told you to sing what you auditioned with. That wasn’t what you auditioned with. That wasn’t even what you were practicing in this room with me. Did you come up with that right then?”

  Mia’s lip was trembling as she listened. “I wanted it to be different. What exactly should I be?”

  Haley sighed. “That's what we're trying to figure out.”

  Still, Haley acknowledged some of the blame and let Mia pick her song for that evening. I Knew You Were Trouble.

  “Taylor Swift?” Haley said. “Okay then.”

  Mia was already frowning before Haley even said anything. “Why, what’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with it.”

  “How should I do it?”

  “Mia…I think you should come up with how, and then I can help you with it when you’re ready.”

  WTF, Haley, she told herself. Fix this. She’s worse than she was this morning.

  “I'll figure it out,” Mia grumbled. She stood up, guitar in hand.

  “Where are you going?” Haley asked.

  “Look, I appreciate this, but sometimes I need alone time when I practice.”

  “Oh, okay.” And it would give me time to check out job openings, Haley thought with a dash of guilt. Since Victoria probably didn't need her help anyway. Even just for an hour.

  ***

  Maybe she should have gone up to her room. But she was curious about the Trey Girls, so as Mia practiced by herself, Haley peered out into the hotel driveway, where more tents had been set up since this morning. There had to have been over a hundred girls there by now, relaxing on folding chairs, huddled around their iPads or phones, watching videos, singing along to the thing they were hearing from their giant purple headsets.

  It was pre-teen Woodstock over here. Where were their parents?

  Nobody recognized her (of course) so she was able to take the outside path back into the garden, deserted but for a hotel employee cleaning the pool. The wireless Internet from the hotel reached that far, so Haley settled onto a poolside lounge chair and fired up her job search.

  Jobs in Tampa. Jobs in Orlando. Jobs in…where?

  She’d need to be conveniently away from Houston. Texas even, if she wanted to be serious about not coming back for Breathe Music.

  “They said you’d be here!”

  She almost didn’t recognize Cass up close like this. Sure, she saw pictures, and she was fully aware of how Cass had decided to become less blonde since she started college, but it still took her a second to process it.

  “Cass!” She was genuinely happy to see her but at the same time wished she had decided to check the job listings upstairs.

  “Realized that this was on the way to IKEA, and you know me and the meatballs…”

  “So you’re back for good?”

  “I am. Moved back, unpacked, everything.”

  Cass looked great, sunnier for some reason. Haley joked more than once that she was starting to look like a California native, which depending on the mood Cass would take as a compliment or an insult. Haley knew she didn’t look like Tampa at all, but she was hoping she would be given a chance to. Maybe.

  Ugh.

  “So, starting a business, huh?” Haley asked.

  “I don’t think you should cancel on Logan tomorrow,” Cass said at the same time.

  “Are you kidding?” So Logan had gotten to her already. What a baby.

  “Look, all you two need is alone time, some dinner, okay? Talk to him. It’s been a while since you talked anyway, and…”

  “Cass,” Haley said, squeezing her friend’s shoulders and trying to make it seem affectionate instead of threatening. “Why are you Logan’s spokesperson? You’re supposed to be on my side.”

  “Hey, you’re both my friends. I worry about you too, Haley. I’m not sure what exactly you’re trading this for. You’re actually here with Oliver Cabrera?”

  Haley bit her lip, not that it prevented her face from flushing with discomfort. “It’s complicated. Logan had no business telling anyone—”

  “You said you’d have dinner with him Saturday night, yes?”

  “I did.”

  “Then have dinner. Just have dinner. Don’t blow him off on the phone.”

  Haley shook her head. “I haven’t thought of what I’ll say to him if he tries to talk about ‘us’ tomorrow. Seriously. I had that talk with him months ago. I don’t have anything new to contribute.”

  Cass drew Haley into a hug. “You know I’m only watching out for you, right? You’ll know what to say.”

  Haley couldn’t imagine what she would say. Haley knew she should be happy that she had such practical, reasonable friends. And family. Where did the dreamer streak come from? Was it a gene that skipped her parents? Where was the family member she inherited it from—locked up in a tower? Because that was probably why she hadn’t met her yet.

  “I’ll go to the dinner,” she said. “But I can’t promise anything.”

  “He’ll be happy to hear that,” Cass said. “And I really need to go get those meatballs. But I’ll see you when you’re back? You can work for me, you know.”

  “What?”

  “When my business is up. I’m going to need someone to manage clients, and that’s not my strong suit at all.”

  “But I don’t know a thing about the photography business.”

  Cass smiled and patted her head. “I know nothing about it either, but we can figure it out together. I need someone I can trust on this.”

  “I’m not going to decide on this now.”

  “Oh, I don’t expect you to. But you’ll think about it, right?”

  Chapter 16

  Tomorrow’s Talent flashbacks, all day.

  The experience, honestly, wasn’t so bad. He wasn’t into TV back then so he didn’t realize what a big deal it was. He had the impression that music nerds were all misfits in their respective schools and no self-respecting cool kid would be watching a show that was, essentially, the glorification of the music nerd.

  When you were in the show, it didn’t feel like a big deal either. There wasn’t any time between rehearsals and performances to mess around, so he didn’t get to see any of the apparently rabid fan reactions until several weeks in and
the producers agreed to share this info with the young contestants.

  As one of the older kids, he thought he took the news of instant national fame quite well. His parents were expecting it and had known about it but typically chose not to say anything to him. Would it have mattered? his mom once asked.

  No, it wouldn’t have.

  But it did, to other people. If his fellow contestants were intense and withdrawn before, the added pressure of millions of eyes on them made everyone go a little weirder. Their parents too.

  It was this kind of vibe that was coming back to Oliver now, in his afternoon session with Trey and the gang. There was no reason for it; they weren’t on TV, this was supposed to be a retreat from everything, but Trey was reminding everyone every damn time that the world was going to be watching and that the scrutiny was going to be intense. Instead of actually letting Ash, Kari, and John make music, they were sort of sitting around each other in a room listening to Trey talk about his bad reviews, his run-ins with the press, his first time at this and that.

  “…craziest place a pap ever sprung up on me,” Trey was saying, “Dumpster behind my recording studio. I kid you not. Watch out for anything that can fit a human being.”

  John was getting restless, Oliver could see. He didn’t like his own performance at lunch and was hoping to get mentor wisdom from Trey, not paparazzi stories.

  “John’s gonna go with me to get a beer,” Oliver said, standing up and interrupting Trey mid-share.

  “He’s not old enough,” Kari said.

  “Coffee,” Oliver corrected himself. “We’ll get enough for everyone.”

  Instead of taking the flight of stairs down, Oliver led him to the elevator.

  “Down, to the café, right?” John said, mildly annoyed.

  “No.” Oliver found the right floor and hit the button. “Up to the gym.”

  ***

  John was going to get Random Weightlifting Time.

  For a second Oliver wondered why he hadn’t subjected Kari to this, but Random Weightlifting Time was meant to produce some kind of breakthrough while stressing oneself physically, and Kari hadn’t needed that. John did.

  While holed up with the contestants at the same hotel, Oliver also discovered that he could get time alone at the gym. None of the other contestants were old enough to care about fitness. The mindless repetition of lifting a weight on each arm helped clear his head too. Not that he could explain it.

  He couldn’t explain it to John right then either, so he told him to do it anyway. “Unless you can’t handle the weight,” he added.

  John snorted and picked one up, testing its heft in his hand. “I said no because it’s stupid, not because I can’t do it.”

  “Prove it then and keep at it.”

  “How many reps?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  So they were at this for a few minutes, doing bicep curls in an empty gym. God, it had been a while, Oliver realized. He started off like this was nothing, and a minute later he was feeling the strain.

  “What’s the deal with being a sibling act, John?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “You and Kari clash musically. You’re both here as one act why?”

  “She and I clash because she complains a lot.”

  “I’d say the same thing about you. Your voice is louder.”

  John grunted, pulling one curl up faster, for emphasis. “I’m not difficult. We were always like this. Always performing together since we were kids. The songs I’m choosing, we already did them together. She keeps wanting to do her own thing.”

  Oliver looked at himself in the mirror, his own reps coming in slower. Twenty-four was when many guys’ lives started, he knew that, but he felt exhausted. Not old, not exactly.

  “Try and keep up, old man,” John taunted, his voice sounding freakishly like the one in Oliver’s head.

  “It’s endurance, not speed, asshole,” he said, and his breath hitched before he could finish his sentence. “What do you think of Trey’s lessons?”

  John smirked, but his reps slowed down a tiny bit. “I won’t ever be like him. Dancing for people like that. But he can’t be that dumb if he’s famous enough for me to know his name.”

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “No. No offense. Kari was into the TV shows, not me.”

  “Break for a minute.” Oliver dropped his weights and leaned against the mirrored wall with his arm. “And I’m not offended. Even when the show was on, nearly half of America voted for the other one anyway.”

  John’s weights landed with a thud on the mat. “Was this supposed to help me? Now I’m sweating.”

  Oliver shook his head. To be young and think only of the present. He missed that. Random Weightlifting Time was something he took with him throughout his career, because there was often a gym wherever he ended up. The time spent paid off in other ways and made the suits think that he’d actually be a sex symbol of sorts.

  “It helped me, so it’s gonna help you,” he told John. “You still want to go with Trey’s song choice for tonight?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we keep the goddamn song, but we do it my way.”

  “Trey had comments—”

  The short workout hadn’t just given Oliver’s heart a jolt. It also slipped him back into TT mode, as if it hadn’t been more than a decade.

  “John,” and this was Oliver’s best impression of one of the stage parents, “I don’t know if you understand what’s happening here. Trey has his own student, and he’s going to make sure she’s better than anybody. He’ll give her his time and attention, and he’ll make sure she’s better than you. You willing to risk that? With your career hanging on how impressed you make the people here this weekend?”

  He only saw John’s face in the mirror after, but it had the expression Oliver wanted to see.

  Chapter 17

  While Mia practiced, Haley managed to send off an application to a school in Orlando looking for a music teacher. She did that to make herself feel better, but on filling it out remembered that yeah, she didn’t have a degree in music education. What experience did she have actually teaching music?

  Internet-enabled teaching, she wrote, making that up. Private tutorials.

  Agh, even she wouldn’t hire her. But she sent it out anyway.

  Fifteen minutes later, she was in a car, driving away from Lake Star, with Oliver at the wheel. There had to be at least an hour left on the afternoon mentoring session. He shouldn’t have ditched—but she shouldn’t have gotten in the car with him either. They both seemed to be flirting with irrelevance lately.

  “How did you get this car again?” she asked, a bit nervous.

  “I told Victoria I was borrowing it,” he said.

  “Did you ask her, or tell her?”

  “I may not have asked.”

  “Did she say yes?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “What about your rehearsals?”

  “Kari and John and I are tight now. Told them what to do. They’ll get it done tonight, I know it.”

  “Great,” Haley sank a little bit deeper into her seat and touched her seatbelt instinctively. “You want to add grand theft auto to your story of hitting rock bottom then?”

  “Relax. Victoria said she was okay with it. Maybe she didn't realize I would use it right now, but…are you scared?”

  Haley realized that she had been gripping her knee a little too tightly. “What? No. It looks like you don't really drive.”

  “I have a license.”

  “You're taking a really, um, leisurely route. If you told me where you wanted to go, I could have taken us there on the freeway. Or are we lost?”

  “We aren't lost.”

  “It looks like…”

  “Old Louetta, yes…” Oliver was muttering as they turned into the road that bore that name. “We aren't lost,” he said with more conviction. “A second ago, we might have been.”

&
nbsp; “I could have gotten us here faster.”

  A few more turns, and then into a residential area. They slowed down at a row of brick homes, each one looking like the other's sibling, slight differences on the same theme. He stopped abruptly at one of them, 17335C, and nodded at her, looking vastly proud of himself.

  “I'm sure you could have,” Oliver said, “but the only way I know how to get here is through my grandmother's route, and she doesn't take the freeway.”

  “You were serious about the grandmother thing? We have a GPS,” Haley reminded him. “Or this car does, anyway.”

  “I don't know the address,” he insisted. “And if my grandmother had painted her door another color, I would have missed it entirely. It's this one, the blue door.”

  His grandmother's house. For the twenty minutes they'd been in the car together, a few thoughts cycled in her mind. At first she thought they were ditching the festival mentoring sessions to make out or maybe more, but then the drive went on a little longer.

  Then she wondered if he was starting to lose it, like seriously, because he was on the very end of some kind of downward spiral, and who knew if it didn't just start spiraling downward still? But then, his grandmother's house.

  “My mom said I absolutely had to visit,” he explained. “Not sure if I can get another chance this weekend.”

  “You could have said so,” Haley told him as she stepped onto the lawn. Now she wished she had worn something else. The floral shirtdress, the flip-flops… they seemed right for the weather and her plans for the day, but not for visiting Oliver Cabrera's family. Not that she had a spare Vera Wang in her luggage, which would have been the only appropriate thing that she could think of at the moment.

  “If I got lost, I was going to say I intended to bring us to a CVS all along,” he said. “God knows I'd run into one eventually.”