“There are perks to that, trust me. She drove me insane when we were younger. Now I’m pretty proud of her. One of the best things I’ve been able to do is put her through college. My parents wouldn’t have been able to afford it on their own. It’s not like I take care of them, they don’t really let me because they say I’m the child, they’re the parents and they should be the ones taking care of me,” he grinned. “But they let me take care of her.”
“What do your parents do?” she pulled her dress out of the closet and slipped it over head. It was very spring-like, and she loved the blue and white color of it.
“Mom works for the city and dad works in a factory. They’ve had the same jobs for about the same amount of time they’ve been married. I keep bugging them to retire. They could take early retirement next year, but neither one of them really pay any attention to what I tell them they should do.”
As he talked, he was also changing, and she frowned when he put on a button down shirt. “Is something on it?” he asked, looking down the front.
“No, I just don’t like that it covered up your arms,” she admitted.
“This obsession you seem to have with my arms is cute, I like it. Unfortunately, my mom isn’t a huge fan of my tattoos. Plus the place we’re going is nice, so I’m trying to look nice too. I don’t want to look like a piece of shit next to a hot woman, now do I?”
She eyed him up and down. “You look like a lot of things, Garrett Thompson, but a piece of shit ain’t one of them.”
He grabbed his chest and fell back onto the bed. “You cussed, oh my God.”
“I do every once in a while. I just have to really feel strongly about something.”
Garrett sat back up and looked her in the eyes, his twinkling. “But you’ll never say fuck, right?”
She pursed her lips at him and scrunched her nose together. “It would have to be something very bad to make me say that.”
Something about his mood tonight made him test her. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt the need to. Sliding his hand up her leg, he cupped her thigh under the hem of her dress. “Or maybe something very good?”
Her mouth went dry, and she used her tongue to lick her lips. As she started to talk, there was a knock at the door.
“Saved by the bell.” He stood up and went to answer it, winking at her before he opened the door.
“Y’all ready to go?” Jared asked, standing there with Shell.
“Yeah, but where are my parents?” he asked, grabbing his sunglasses.
“You really think you’re gonna need those?” Shell asked. “You do realize it’s dark out, right?”
“I’m a rock star, we always need sunglasses.”
Hannah laughed from where she stood beside him. It was weird, knowing something about someone that others didn’t know. He kept her guessing, but she figured he had contacts in because he’d been able to watch her getting dressed. He apparently liked to keep everybody on their toes.
Jared shared a look with her. Obviously he was in on Garrett’s little secret too. “Anyway, your mom and dad are already in the car. Let’s get going. I want some sushi, and I’m starving.”
“You lead, we’ll follow,” Garrett told him as he put on his sunglasses and grabbed Hannah’s hand.
* * *
“Have you guys been here a lot before?” Shell asked as they sat in a round booth at a local sushi bar.
Jared and Garrett looked at each other, both grinning. “Fuck yeah, we love this place. It’s a must see when we come to Vegas. We’re the only ones who like sushi though,” Jared shrugged. “I’m glad you two like it. Now we can actually have other people to talk to.”
“It took me a while.” Hannah took a sip of the drink sitting in front of her. “But I finally found a few things I liked, and then I ventured out and found I liked other things too. Now, I know how to use chopsticks, and I can properly eat my sushi. I like to think I’m legit,” she grinned.
Garrett laughed. “Look how proud she is.” He ran his hand along her thigh under the table, and she shifted, sitting closer to him.
“She is,” Shell affirmed. “It took her a good year to learn to use chopsticks, and even then it was touch and go. She used children’s for a long time.”
Hannah threw her napkin at Shell. “Stop telling them all my secrets!”
“Is there going to be a chick fight?” Jared asked, looking between the two of them. “Because I can so get behind that.”
Kevin raised his napkin as he took a drink of his beer. “I could also get behind that. I’m not too old to admit it.”
Hannah cleared her throat. “Southern women never have a chick fight. We settle things a little bit differently.”
“Oh yeah, how’s that?” Jared asked.
Garrett grinned. “They say ‘bless your heart,’ which I’ve learned is Southern debutante for fuck you.”
Shell cracked up. “Oh my God, you really do catch on quick!”
“Hey, I’m a smart guy.”
Just then their food came to the table, and Hannah pulled her phone out of her purse. “Can you take a picture of all of us?” she asked the waiter.
“Oh, that’s a good idea,” Marie beamed.
The waiter kept motioning for them to get closer together, until every girl sat in the lap of the guy they had accompanied to be able to fit together. Once the picture was taken, Hannah uploaded it to her account and tagged everyone in it.
Having a great sushi dinner with @ReaperBF @ReapersMom @NightTrainBF @SeaShell here in Vegas! Hope to see everybody at the show tomorrow night!
“So do we get to go?” Marie asked from across the table.
“Go where?” Hannah asked, wiping her mouth with a napkin.
“To your concert tomorrow night. Kevin told me to keep my mouth shut about it, but I would like to see you perform.”
“Of course!” Hannah answered. “I didn’t realize you wanted to come. You can watch from backstage if you want, or you can watch out in the audience. We will find room for you.”
“You’re going, right Garrett?” Marie asked her son.
“I had planned on it.”
“I’m gonna make him come sing with me.” Hannah pinched his side.
“That would be amazing. I saw the video of the two of you at his concert on YouTube. I would love to see that in person.”
“Well hell, Mom, kick a beat and we’ll sing you something right here. I don’t have to go out in front of a bunch of people to do that.”
“Are you worried?” Hannah couldn’t believe that he would ever be worried about anything like that.
“It’s not my crowd,” he shrugged.
“Yours wasn’t mine and it turned out all right,” she pointed out. “If you’re worried, I won’t make you do it, but I might shame you into it.”
“Shame me? I can’t believe you.”
She leaned into his side and put her mouth up to his ear. “If I work hard at it, I usually get what I want.”
His eyes darkened to a much deeper green, and he leaned in towards her. “Are you flirting with me?”
“Maybe.” Her answer was a bit flippant and her perfume hit him as she moved.
“Then I say, you tell me what you want, and I’ll let you know what my terms are.”
Biting her lip, she leaned back towards him. “I really do want you to sing a song with me tomorrow night. I wasn’t joking about that. I love singing with you.”
“Then you do what I tell you to tonight,” he whispered in her ear, keeping the smile on his face so that nobody at the table realized what they were saying to each other.
She eyed him. What did he have planned? What was he going to ask her to do? Did she trust him enough just go blindly into this? Swallowing roughly, she nodded. “Okay, I do what you want, you do what I want.”
He stuck his pinky out to her. “Deal?”
“We’re gonna pinky swear on it?”
“In my experience there’s nothing that Southern girls consider more sacred than a pi
nky swear.”
She laughed, throwing her head back. “Then I’ll pinky swear, but you have to realize what I’m trusting you with here.”
“I think I know exactly what you’re trusting me with, and I know exactly what to do with it.”
Those words caused her to shiver, but she wasn’t sure if it was from fear or excitement.
Chapter Twenty-Three
* * *
“So why don’t you want to sing with me?”
Garrett’s eyes cut over to Hannah. She sat on the couch in the living area of their suite, a glass of Crown and Coke in her hand, her feet and legs in his lap. He too had his own drink, but his was straight Crown. For an hour they’d been here, just talking. Hannah had yet to ask what he would consider a probing question, and she had just come up with a doozy.
“It’s not that I don’t want to sing with you.” He ran his hand through his hair and set it on her leg, rubbing softly. “I just don’t want anyone to think differently about you because of me.”
She was confused. What did that have to do with anything? “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Garrett, and it may be because I’ve had three of these,” she shook the glass, “in the last hour, but you’re gonna have to explain this to me.”
He hadn’t realized she’d had so many, but now he did notice that her face was red and she’d shed her jacket. “You may wanna slow down on those,” he grinned. “Anyway, your fans and country radio are just so conservative. That’s not me at all. What if they decide to not like you because of me? What if radio decides you aren’t a good role model anymore because of me? You had that damn magazine bothering you on all the social media outlets. That’s because of who I am.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” She set her drink down and moved her legs back, coming up on her knees, kneeling next to him on the couch. “Don’t even think that. If fans are fans, then they’re going to be fans no matter what I do. I think I’ve gotten more fans because of you, if you want me to be completely honest with you. I think ‘our’ fans, meaning mine and yours, are happy that we’re together and that we are happy, period. There’s going to be people that hate us, no matter what we do, but I’m not letting them rule my life. If people in the business can’t be happy for us, then that’s on them, not on us.”
He put his hand in her hair, cupping the back of her head. “I just don’t want you to have to change for me, and I don’t want to have to change for you,” he admitted.
This was a new side of him, something he’d never shown to her before. He was nervous about this. He was scared that being with him would hurt her career. “I’m not scared, Garrett,” she smiled at him. “I love this journey you’re taking me on. Why are you being so self-conscious about this now?”
“You got your first hater and that was one of my fans.” He gripped her head in his hand. “I just don’t want the batshit crazy ones to ruin something for either of us.”
She put her hands on his shoulders and widened her knees so that she had a little bit more leverage. “I’m going to be completely honest with you right now. Are you okay with that?”
“Of course.” He turned on the couch, bringing her closer to him. He leaned his back against the arm and pulled her over onto his lap. He wanted to be able to see everything that passed through her eyes and on her face as she talked.
“I let people tell me what to do for the first couple of years of my career and for almost the duration of my relationship with Ashton. When I broke free of Ashton, I broke free of my old management. One thing you don’t know about Shell is that not only is she my personal assistant, but she’s my manager too. We keep that quiet, people assume I’m under some management company’s thumb and I’m not. We have an LLC name for it, and it’s only under the worst of circumstances that we even tell people. They assume that they can walk all over me because some company is telling me what to do. I do what I want to do when I want to do it. If I need to be put in my place, Shell does it. Every once in a while, I do have to bow down to what my record company tells me, but I employ a damn good lawyer and I really do make my own decisions. My career and my life are completely mine. That’s not to say Shell and I are in this alone, we do have someone that we talk to when we aren’t sure if we should do something or not. He’s kind of a silent partner in our LLC. If we need a male figurehead, he goes out there for us. What I’m getting at is, I don’t let people tell me what to do anymore. So if you think that I’m going to let my fans tell me who to be with, you and they have another thing coming. I’ve spent too long being unhappy and being alone to let anyone tell me what to do anymore.”
He put his hands on her thighs, holding her there. So much honesty and fire came from her eyes that he couldn’t help but to lean forward and capture her lips with his. “You’re amazing,” he whispered as he claimed them again in a slow press to the smooth skin there.
“I’m not,” she told him, pulling away and shaking her head. “I let them make me get implants. I stayed in a crappy relationship for way too long, trying to make it work, only to have it backfire in my face. I got sick of it, and I learned to stick up for myself the only way they allow me to. Shell is my rock; she is the only one that gives a crap about me when it comes down to it. Why wouldn’t I give her the power? She knows me better than anyone, and trust me, she is paid well for what she does, but looking at the two of us—you would have no idea how much power the two of us really hold in our hands.”
“That’s pretty fuckin’ hot.” He ran his hands to her back and pulled her so that the cradle of her thighs cupped his.
Running her hands down his chest, she worked to get the buttons undone. “So now, are you going to come sing with me or not?”
He glanced down to where her small fingers were working the buttons on his shirt, laughing when she got frustrated on the fourth one. “Would you like me to do that for you?”
“My fingers don’t want to cooperate with what my brain wants them to do,” she admitted, huffing.
With soft hands, he pushed her back away from him slightly before unbuttoning the final buttons on the shirt and pulling it off. “That better?”
She nodded, using the tips of her fingers to trace the tattoos along his arms and chest. He watched as her fingertips traced a demon in a hood riding a horse on his right bicep that dissolved into a scene of smoke and a dragon on his forearm, down to a date on his wrist before clasping their hands together. “It is,” she told him. “What does that date mean? July 16th, 1999.”
“I graduated high school in 1999—don’t make fun of how old I am compared to you—we made a pact as a band that we would do our first tour the summer we graduated. That date is the first show we ever made money on. Granted, it was all of five bucks that we had to split about fifteen different ways because of all the friends we had helping us load our gear and stuff, but we made money.”
“So you had a dream and you never looked back?”
“Never did.” He tightened the grip of his fingers on hers. “I wanted to, more times than I can count, but I never did. I didn’t want to go back home and tell my parents that they were right. So we just kept going.”
Her fingers went to his other arm and made the same kind of path there; tracing patterns, stopping when she came to one that was interesting to her. “What did you get this one for?”
He glanced down to where she had stopped, and there mixed in with a fantasy scene was a heart with a sword through the top of it. It was brightly colored, standing out against the black and grays he had along the other parts of his tattoos. “I got that one when Vanessa and I broke up. I was feeling sorry for myself, so I went out and got stupid ass drunk, then I got a tattoo. Really not that smartest thing in the world to do, if I’m being completely honest.”
“You cared about her that much? To get a tattoo?”
She felt him flex his arm underneath her hand as he looked at the ink there. “Not really. I made everybody think I did, but I didn’t care about her that much. I know that’s bad
to say, but the only reason I got the tattoo was because I wanted to have a pity party. We were never good together, and the next day I could breathe so much easier, but it seemed like that was the part I should play.”
“I’m not following.”
“We were together for two years. It would stand to reason that I would be broken up about it, but I wasn’t. That was my way of hiding my true feelings. I was relieved. She was something I needed to let go of, but I was too much of a pussy to do it myself. I ended up making her hate me, and that’s why it ended badly. We should have been adults about it and let it end the way it should have, but instead we played games with each other.”
Hannah wanted to ask him what he meant by all of that, but she got the feeling that he didn’t really want to talk about. “What about this one?” she asked, her eyes twinkling. Her fingers were lingering next to his belt buckle, on his lower stomach he had gothic script that read Black Friday.
“I don’t think you can see that one, I think you should definitely get rid of my pants so you can see the whole thing.”
“Whatever you say,” she told him, standing up as he unbuckled his pants and lifted his hips off the couch, leaving him in only a pair of boxer briefs.
“You remember well that I told you at sushi, you do what I want you to, I’ll do what you want me to.”
“I do remember that,” she nodded. He watched as her white teeth sank into her bottom lip, and she waited to see what he told her.
“Did you think I forgot about that?”
Her curls bounced as she shook her head. “No, I didn’t think you had forgotten about it at all.”
“Good, Hannah, that’s real good. What I want for you to do is take off your dress. Can you do that for me?” His voice was impossibly deep; it lulled her into a sense of security, no matter what he was asking her to do.
“Right here?”
“Right here,” he confirmed.
Her stomach firmly in her throat, she reached behind her to loosen the zipper on the dress, closing her eyes as it fell to floor. There was no going back now.
Only The Beginning (Rockin' Country) Page 15
