Break It Up

by Tippetts, E. M.

  The tension drains from his face at once. “Oh.”

  The way he falls for it without question makes me feel even guiltier. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s all good. I thought you were mad at me.”

  I shake my head. That much, at least, is the truth. I’m mad at me for putting myself in this situation.

  “Was it really complicated to get out of your summer job?”

  “Complicated is a good word, yeah.”

  “So you’re here.” He grins.

  It doesn’t seem to matter to him that I was cagey and indifferent all throughout the plane ride. He’s ready to forgive me and go back to being best buddies, just like that.

  I am an awful, awful person.

  “Everything okay?” he asks.

  I force a smile and nod. “I’m really tired and stuff—”

  “Oh, right. Yeah.” He puts my bag down on the bed. “Listen,” he says. “Thank you. It means the world to me that you’re here. I know it wasn’t easy for you to pull off.”

  “Well, I wanted to be here for you.” I’m not sure whether that’s a lie or the truth.

  But it rings true to him. He grasps my shoulders and I relax, hoping that he’ll kiss me. Instead, he touches my cheek with the tip of his finger.

  My pulse thunders and I’m back to the weak-kneed, incoherent state I was in when I first met him at that restaurant.

  His hands slide down my arms and until he grasps my wrists, lightly.

  I gaze up at him, ready to have him hug me again.

  “Can I ask you something else?” His gaze doesn’t waver.

  “Sure.”

  “You and Ben?”

  “It’s all good. He’s annoying, but, whatever.”

  Those steely eyes search my face. “Please don’t ever lie to me.”

  My blood runs cold. “I’m...not.”

  He lets me go and backs away. I want to grab the front of his shirt and stop him, but I’m too stunned. “All right,” he says. “Fine.” He turns and exits the room.

  I open my mouth to call him back, but my voice is gone. I can barely squeak.

  The next chance I have to see Zach is a couple of hours later when he, Logan, and Ben hold interviews with various news outlets. The three of them are seated in one of the hotel suites, and interviewers come through like an assembly line, each for an allotted time slot. Some get fifteen minutes while others have up to forty-five. A translator sits in a chair off to one side, though he isn’t needed for every interviewer. Quite a few speak English. Aidan sends me out to get coffee for the camera crew so they can stay awake to film, though fortunately he doesn’t bother having them record every last second of it. For one thing, several of the interviewers want their footage to be exclusive, and for another, the questions are pretty repetitive; I get the impression the band could do this in their sleep.

  Zach doesn’t even so much as glance at me, but I sense that he’s aware of my presence. The way he doesn’t look at me is almost as conspicuous as staring at me outright.

  I sip my coffee until it’s time to vacate the room, and then Aidan has me carry the spare camera in its case. My job, so far, is what I expected with one exception. I didn’t think I’d be brought along to see the band this much. Given the huge crowd of employees that comes along on a tour, I assumed I’d be just another one of the nameless masses on the outer fringes of all the action.

  The next meal is dinner and the band goes out to a swanky restaurant somewhere while the rest of us eat in the hotel restaurant. I sit wedged between Aidan and Brent, the cameraman who has kind blue eyes and always wears a dusty baseball cap that he turns around backwards whenever he’s operating the camera. Everyone’s too out of it for there to be much conversation, which is fine by me.

  Aidan quizzes me on my knowledge of Spanish. “You seem so…American,” is how he puts it.

  “I am American,” I shoot back. “And I’ve got Spanish ancestry.”

  “You look like you’ve got Indian ancestry.”

  “That too. But my ancestors chose to be Spanish. They were subjects of the Spanish monarch and lived according to Spanish law and had land given to them by the Spanish crown.” Of course, my dad and I were pretty far removed from that line of the family. His mother was Anglo, and I have spent my whole life in Albuquerque.

  “Interesting,” he says.

  I stifle the urge to roll my eyes. I never get why people with pure European heritage feel confident calling themselves American but question me calling myself Spanish. Obviously race isn’t the deciding factor there. But Spain doesn’t seem like a good place to stage a showdown. Unfortunately, modern day Spaniards would probably laugh at me too.

  Once the meal’s over, I check with Aidan, who assures me he won’t need me to do anything else tonight. “Just come by before eight tomorrow,” he says. “We want to get over to the concert venue early to set up.”

  This means I should head back to my room and get ready for bed. I should be glad for a moment’s freedom from all my confusion with Zach.

  I call him.

  “Hello?” he answers on the second ring. He sounds glum.

  “Everything all right?” I ask.

  “Oh, hey!” His voice brightens with recognition. “Yeah, I’m tired is all.”

  “I can leave you alone then.”

  “We shouldn’t have done interviews right after we landed. That’s the kind of stuff my mom would have us do, and it’s crazy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Our new manager suggested we not do that, and I overrode him.”

  “Have I met your new manager?”

  “Rick? I don’t know. He wasn’t on the jet with us, but he was there when we did interviews. I’ll introduce you next chance I get.”

  We fall right back into our old pattern of conversation. “Must be weird for you, doing this without your mom.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t expect it to mess with my head this much.”

  “Right.”

  Silence descends, and I know I need to fill it.

  “You… um… you want to come by?” I ask, my heart racing again. “Or…”

  Or what? What am I doing?

  It seems to take a long time for him to respond. While it’s probably only seconds, it feels like an eternity, long enough for my stomach to flush full of acid, my throat to go dry as sandpaper, and my palm to sweat my phone slick.

  “You want to come up here? I’m in room 1207,” he says.

  “I don’t want to impose.”

  “You aren’t.”

  “Okay. I’ll come up then.” Because I’m stupid.

  Zach opens his door the moment I knock and smiles at me with unreserved happiness. This suite is much nicer than the one he had in Albuquerque. It’s two stories, for one thing, and the bedroom has a balcony that overlooks the living area.

  “You hungry? Thirsty?” he asks.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  He heads over to the couch and flops down, looking way more “rock star” than “guy I text with all the time.” I feel like I’m alone with a guy for the first time in my entire life.

  And he’s got that brooding stare and general overwhelming hotness. He’s in his jeans and shirt unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. Of course, he has a t-shirt on underneath. He doesn’t show a lot of skin, which is just as well for me. For both of us. I’ve known him long enough that I get the innocent vibe loud and clear. He wouldn’t just disapprove if I jumped him—he’d freak out.

  He pats the couch cushion next to him and I make myself go sit down, even though my muscles are so tense that I’m probably moving like a jerky marionette.

  “How’s Aidan as a boss so far?” he asks.

  “Good,” I say. “I didn’t kn
ow what to expect. I’m mainly here just to see what this is all like, you know? See if there’s a job I’d be interested in long term.”

  “See, that’s…I can’t imagine doing that. My job was decided for me when I was eight. Not that I’m complaining.”

  “Do you like being a singer?”

  “It’d be ungrateful of me not to.”

  That wasn’t exactly a yes. I look him in the eye.

  He lowers his chin a moment. When he looks at me again, I read pain and confusion. “I don’t know. But I don’t know what else I’d do.”

  “You probably wouldn’t ever need to work again.”

  “But I don’t know how I’d spend my time. And fans, with the way they demand more music and more tours and stuff, I feel like I owe them. I’d be nowhere without them.”

  It occurs to me to point out that Triple Cross is replaceable. There are a hundred other boy bands poised to leap into the limelight. Five years from now, their fans will be finding their Triple Cross t-shirts in their old clothes and giggling about their former obsession. But I don’t want to tell him Triple Cross is just a fad. What do I know anyway?

  It never dawned on me at the time, but all those years that Jason was unbearable, this was probably what he was going through. His biggest roles were so big that he no doubt wondered if he’d have a long-term career or if he had to make other plans.

  “I just wonder how long I can go before people figure out I know nothing about music,” says Zach.

  “You don’t know nothing,” I say.

  “We’ve got to pick songs for our next album. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never listened to demo tracks or anything like that. I’m twenty-one years old and I’ve been babied for so long.”

  This, I know, is typical of a child star. A lot of them reach adulthood and find out they’re still kids in a lot of ways because they didn’t have a typical childhood. Jason once joked that child actors melt down in their twenties because they’re “doing what normal people did at eleven. They’re on a delay. If they were eleven, people would just ignore them after they got sent to their room.”

  Zach doesn’t seem to be on the verge of any kind of meltdown, though. He just seems scared and lonely. “Sorry to just complain all the time,” he says.

  “You’re fine.”

  “You’re always nice.”

  “Listen, I get it. This isn’t like picking out what outfit to wear to your first day of work. Each song and album you record determines your life for the next year or…however long.”

  “We release albums nine months apart. So if one flops, we can theoretically survive it.”

  “Nine months?” I have all their albums, but I never did the math.

  He nods. “Again, my mom’s idea. So now Ben wants to take a break and Logan wants to take our sound in a different direction.” He rubs his forehead, and I wish right then that we were a couple. Even if I didn’t jump his bones, I could hold him and comfort him. Not that I know how that kind of thing goes, really.

  My first ever kiss was approximately ten minutes before I lost my virginity. I was playing drinking games at a friend’s house and trying to catch the eye of Rico Martinez. He was sixteen and on the varsity football team. I was twelve. It was ridiculous for me to be out with this crowd, and my father would have dragged me away if he’d had any idea. But it was two in the afternoon on a Saturday, so all my dad knew was that I was out “with friends.”

  When I went to the bathroom to wash my hands, Rico followed me and shut the door behind us. I don’t even remember what we said—I was so drunk—but I do remember him hoisting me onto the counter, ramming his tongue down my throat, and going “all the way” with me, which hurt something awful.

  Wow, is that ever sick. I haven’t thought much about that encounter in years, and there have been so many since. I just remember that, despite the pain, I felt so proud of myself because he obviously enjoyed it.

  That was about the last time I ever saw him. Within months he dropped out of school and was living with a pregnant girlfriend. I don’t think he stuck around for the birth and can’t even guess where he is now. Back then I was devastated and wondered what I’d done wrong. My next several hookups were an attempt to get him out of my system—and it worked. But each one also hurt in its own way. I suppose every relationship and one-off I’ve had has been as a result of that first experience in some way. Even if Rico is history, those ten minutes in the bathroom set in motion the whole chain of events that led to my giving it all to anyone who was interested.

  If Zach knew any of this, he’d shake his head in disgust and walk away. He’s the kind of guy who was always out of my league. The honorable kind. The kind who isn’t kidding when they say they aren’t into casual sex. I’ve known and bagged enough fakers to know the difference.

  “Something wrong?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “I just wish there was something I could do to help. I mean, I know nothing about music or else I’d listen to demo tracks with you.”

  “You let me whine. That’s way more help than I deserve.” He chuckles.

  “It’s not whining. You start complaining about this room being too small or that your assistant made you wait fifteen minutes before cutting your toenails for you, then I’ll tell you to shut up.”

  He’s laughing before I’ve even finished the sentence. “Okay, gross. Do you actually know people whose assistants cut their toenails?”

  It’s strange to me that someone who’s spent as much of his life famous as he has is still so naïve about it all. I’d have assumed he’s met way more famous people than I have. “No,” I admit.

  “Listen, if you have time, you can definitely listen to demos with me. I mean, do you know our music at all or—”

  “Yeah, I’m a fan.”

  “Oh, you are?”

  “I’m female and between the ages of twelve and thirty, so yes.”

  He looks surprised, and I wonder how he interpreted my star-struck freak out in the restaurant when we first met. “Tell me if you’d be a fan of any of these songs?” He reaches down the side of the couch and hoists a laptop.

  I’m only just getting used to the idea of hanging around with Triple Cross. Helping pick their music is something else entirely. Still, the first song he plays makes me wince. “Too much like Giggle Gals,” I say. “I mean, sounds like you need a woman singing that.”

  “Fair point.” He hits the next one.

  I listen to its punchy, syncopated rhythm, spoken vocals, and then the chorus, which is sung. “If you did that one, you’d want to do your three-part harmony thing for the chorus, and I don’t know if that’d work.”

  “Right. Yeah, I’ll mark that one a maybe.”

  I bite my lip as he keeps on playing tracks. I feel like I don’t deserve to have an opinion, but I have one anyway, so I might as well share it.

  Zach smiles at me as we work through the tracks, his eyes twinkling.

  My whole universe is those eyes and that smile and the sensation of his hand on my shoulder. Even when Rico was having his way with me, I noticed the mildew stains on the ceiling and had time to wonder if it was supposed to hurt that much. I knew nothing about lubrication or foreplay at the time. One touch of Zach’s hand, though, on the outside of my clothing and I’m a goner.

  “Do you really not have a boyfriend?” he asks out of the blue. “Other guys have no idea what they’re missing.”

  Well, no, they have more than an idea. Many got the full demo with unlimited replay. That memory kills my good mood. “It’s late,” I say. “I better go.”

  “No, wait. Sorry. Look, I didn’t mean to make it awkward.”

  I shake my head. “No, you’re fine. It’s just…”

  He waits, his eyebrows raised.

  I have no lines to feed hi
m, so I try honesty. “I’m exhausted. Major jet lag.”

  Zach nods, and he’s close enough that I inhale the scent of his aftershave and soap—nice clean scents. No cologne or stale cigarette smoke or pot. He’s so different from every other guy I’ve ever been with, which is saying something.

  About how narrow the field I played was, I suppose.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’m about to fall asleep. Not that you’re…”

  “Boring?” He smiles.

  “That is not the issue.”

  “Let me walk you to your room.”

  “Thanks, but…” I say. Eventually I’ll slip. Someone will get a picture of me with Zach, and then it’ll all blow up. Someone from my past will blab. I even made a sex tape once, and I’m sure it could be found with a little investigation. I am the poster child for what not to do before you become famous. “I’m fine,” I finish lamely.

  “Okay, well…let me walk you to my door at least?” He escorts me all ten feet of the way and gives me a hug that presses my body against his muscled torso. Agony. I make sure the hall is empty before I slip out. I have no idea what time it is; my body clock is way out of whack. I just know that I need to get some sleep before morning, when it’ll be back to work. Around Zach.

  To prepare to shoot the concert footage the next day, we have to step things up a notch. This footage can’t be shot with a handheld camera, but rather requires a crane and several wheeled cameras. We have to work while the roadies set the stage for the concert, so there’s a lot of tripping over one another and murmured apologies as we haul equipment around.

  The stage is enormous, but not as enormous as the rest of the venue, which makes Journal Pavilion look like a school auditorium. The population of Santa Fe could fit in this arena.

  We work until lunch, for which we go to craft services, and after we eat, it’s time to run through the lighting presets while Brent and two other camera operators ensure that they’ll be able to get clear shots with the right color and light balance. I once thought I knew a lot about cameras. Photography’s a hobby of mine. Compared to these guys, I don’t know anything. The cameras they’ve rented for this occasion have more controls than an airline cockpit.