Stuck With a Rock Star

by Amelie Bloom

  I looked around.

  “Of course, I’m by myself.”

  I wasn’t sure why that should matter. We weren’t the type of couple who engaged in phone sex, and seven in the morning, when I was about to head off into the wilderness, seemed like an odd time to start.

  “I shouldn’t really be telling you this over the phone,” said Hugo.

  Up until this point, every single time Hugo and I had broken up, it had been me who’d been the one who called things off, but I had a sick sinking feeling that I was about to find out what it feels like to be the one who got told things were over.

  “Are you about to break up with me?” I asked.

  I sounded cool and calm, but my hand was shaking so badly I almost dropped the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” said Hugo. “I didn’t want it to be this way.”

  He was lying. He did want it to be this way. I suddenly doubted his story about his mother’s broken pipe. Hugo had timed this news, whatever exactly it was, to be delivered when I was heading out of town, and he hadn’t even had the guts to deliver it in person.

  “I don’t think we should get married,” said Hugo.

  “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t think we are meant for each other.”

  He had someone else. He must have. Hugo had somebody he believed he was meant for.

  “Who is she?” I screamed into the phone.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jax coming around the side of the Jeep carrying an enormous backpack and a guitar case, but he beat a hasty retreat as soon as he saw my face, or maybe it was the screaming that did it.

  “Does it matter?” Hugo was infuriatingly calm.

  It definitely mattered.

  “Do I know her?” I refrained from screaming because I suspected that Jax was just on the other side of the Jeep, still listening.

  All I got back from Hugo was silence.

  Yep. I knew her.

  “Abby, let's finish this conversation when you’ve calmed down,” Hugo said.

  I don’t usually use the words that get bleeped out on primetime television, but I used a whole string of them before I hung up on him. After that, I kicked the front tire of the Jeep so hard I nearly broke my toe.

  “You OK?” Jax said from somewhere outside my range of vision.

  I was crying. Not pretty, solitary tears welling up and streaming one at a time down my face in an orderly manner. That would be too dainty for me. I rarely cry, but when I do, I’m a wailing, snotty, mess of heaving sobs.

  I wasn’t sure how many of my tears were from my throbbing toe and how many were the result of heartbreak and humiliation, but I knew I wasn’t up to driving.

  I tossed Jax the keys and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come inside and pull yourself together?” Jax asked as he reached over and awkwardly patted my shoulder.

  I shrugged off his attempt to comfort me.

  “Just drive,” I sobbed.

  I was no longer destined to become Mrs. Hugo Ebbers, and it suddenly felt absolutely essential to put as many miles between me and Mr. Hugo Ebbers as humanly possible.

  I put my head down and wailed like a banshee for the next five minutes. When I finally looked up, we were on the interstate heading north.

  “You know, I’m not entirely sure where we are going,” Jax admitted.

  He doesn’t like to drive, and even though there was hardly any traffic, he was white-knuckling the steering wheel.

  “Are you alright?” I asked. “I think I can drive now.”

  He turned to look at me, and I realized it wasn’t his probably diagnosable anxiety disorder that was causing him to grip the steering wheel like that. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him.

  “You knew,” I said. “You knew about Hugo and me.”

  Chapter Seven

  Jax didn’t reply when I asked him if he knew about Hugo and me.

  “Did you know he was cheating on me?” I asked.

  This time Jax nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Jax didn’t answer. It wasn’t a fair question, really. It was hardly his place to tell me my fiancé was seeing someone else. Jax wasn’t my brother or my cousin. He wasn’t even my friend, although based on the indignation he seemed to be experiencing on my behalf, you wouldn’t have known it.

  “Do you know who she is?” I asked. I sounded a lot calmer than I felt.

  Jax kept his eyes straight ahead on the road but gave me a barely perceptible nod.

  “Who is she?” I demanded.

  I didn’t expect Jax to tell me, but he did.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s Bettina,” Jax said.

  “Bettina? Your stylist Bettina? Bettina who’s having a baby?”

  Jax nodded again.

  I’d thought things couldn’t get any worse, but they had.

  “Do you think Hugo is the father?”

  Jax shrugged.

  I did the math. It came out about right. If Hugo had done the horizontal tango with Bettina while we were broken up, she’d be about this far along.

  This realization raised all sorts of other questions. Had Hugo and Bettina been seeing each other behind my back this whole time, or was this a recent decision on Hugo’s part to choose the mother of his unplanned child over his long-time girlfriend?

  Either way, Hugo was a lowdown lout for breaking up with me over the telephone and then leaving it to Jax to fill me in on the dirty details.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.

  I put my head down between my knees until we pulled off at a gas station.

  I barely made it out of the car before I hurled my breakfast straight into a garbage can.

  Jax stood back until I was done, then he handed me a wad of tissues and a bottle of water.

  “This is a real role reversal,” I said. I tried to laugh it off, but it sounded shaky and forced.

  “I did learn my assisting-the-sick technique from the best,” Jax said. “Do I look that hideous when I throw up?”

  “No, you look pretty when you vomit. You should charge money for a before-show meet-and-greet so the fans can get a look at such an integral part of your process.”

  “Well, Miss Stabby might like it,” said Jax, “but I don’t think she’s representative of the average fan’s tastes.”

  That made me laugh for real. I threw the vomity wad of tissues into the trash and headed for the back of the Jeep.

  “What are you doing?“ Jax asked. “You’re very neat when you vomit. You don’t need to change.”

  Jax invariably throws up all over his shoes. Lilith insists Jax wears slippers before every show. He’s not allowed to change into street shoes until he’s upchucked his dinner.

  “I’m not looking for clean clothes,” I said as I hauled out my box of Bride Magazines. “These are going straight in that dumpster over there.”

  Jax wouldn’t let me drive until we’d gotten to Heavenly and turned off the pavement onto a labyrinth of gravel roads heading off up the mountain.

  “Did your Uncle make this map?” I said as I peered at the blurry photo of a hand-drawn diagram saved to Jax’s phone.

  “He insisted on sending it. Google maps don’t work up here.”

  “What about cell service?”

  “It’s spotty. You’ll have to hike to the top of the slope above the cabin if you want to make a call.”

  “So, I guess that means there’s no internet.”

  I hadn’t been counting on the internet. Before I’d left, I’d queued up three weeks of instructional videos and social media posts that my sister, Bianca, would send live according to the schedule I’d sent her.

  I’d counted on keeping myself busy with planning the wedding while I was stuck in the back of beyond, but now the very thought of anything bridal made me feel queasy.

  “You bring any good books along?” I asked Jax.

  “No, but my uncle has a
complete collection of Popular Mechanics bound in hardcover.”

  “Does he have a TV?”

  “Yeah, but there’s no reception.”

  “DVDs?”

  “VHS.”

  “Well, I guess that’s something. I like the classics.”

  “I wouldn’t get too excited. My uncle only watches documentaries.”

  “What kind of documentaries?”

  “World War II and the history of the American railway system.”

  “You must be exaggerating.”

  “I’m afraid it’s true,” said Jax.

  Chapter Eight

  Jax had not been exaggerating. That became abundantly clear as soon as I stepped through the door of his Uncle Rodney’s cabin.

  The place looked exactly as you’d expect from a remote 60’s era log A-frame cabin used mainly by a life-long bachelor in his seventies with a keen interest in taxidermy.

  “I feel like we’re being watched,” I said.

  “It’s the moose,” said Jax, pointing up at the motheaten head staring down at us from the railing of the second-story balcony.

  “I didn’t know moose were native to this area?”

  “They aren’t. I think Uncle Rodney shot that in Alaska.”

  “Oh.”

  “Wait until you see what he has mounted over the bed upstairs.”

  “Perhaps, you’d better tell me before I have to face it in the flesh.”

  “You’ll never guess.”

  “I don’t want to guess.”

  “Think Florida Everglades.”

  “Not an alligator?”

  “Just a small one. I suspect he bought it already stuffed at one of those alligator farms.”

  I was horrified, and I think it showed. Jax seemed to find my discomfort enormously amusing.

  “I’ll take the downstairs bedroom,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

  “I think you’d better have a look at it before you state a preference,” said Jax.

  “Why?”

  “Just look.”

  I could see most of the cabin from stepping through the front door into the living room, which was stuffed cheek by jowl with rustic log furniture, a TV from the 80s, and a wall-to-wall bookcase full of, as promised, bound copies of Popular Mechanics, VHS tapes, and paperback westerns.

  The rest of the space was taken up by a small kitchen, a minuscule bathroom, and a massive log staircase ascending to the loft.

  “That’s the bedroom,” Jax pointed at a closed door next to the bathroom.

  I pushed open the door gingerly with one foot as if checking the premises for an armed assailant.

  I don’t think an actual armed assailant would have frightened me half as much.

  “No!” I said. “Your uncle actually sleeps in there?”

  “He does.” Jax was trying not to let me see him laughing, but his eyes were watering, and he was having trouble getting words out.

  I’d thought the moose was bad, and I hadn’t been a huge fan of the stuffed pheasant over the mantle, but the bedroom was a nightmare.

  A large, tattered fox with one glass eye missing from its socket was perched on the dresser, a trio of deer heads hung from the opposite wall, but it was the creature on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed that really got to me.

  “How could a person want to wake up every morning and stare a crouching mountain lion in the face?”

  Jax shrugged.

  “I can’t—”

  “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t sleep in here.”

  “I’m not sure I can, either,” said Jax. “To be honest, whenever I come up here with my folks, we stay at a condo at the ski resort.”

  “We could put them all out on the back porch,” I suggested.

  I shut the door to the bedroom carefully, trying not to startle the poor dead creatures awake as if they could come to life, which was pretty much what I knew I’d be having nightmares about.

  Jax followed me out the backdoor, and we stood on the tiny back porch, which was stacked with boxes of food and supplies Lilith had ordered to be delivered preceding our arrival.

  “The taxidermy might get eaten out here,” said Jax, “and if something happens to even one of them, Uncle Rodney will be devastated.”

  “Well, it’s not like you can just get Lilith to order a replacement dead moose head off Amazon. What are we going to do? There’s not even room inside to store all these boxes.”

  I peeked inside the nearest box. It appeared to be full to the brim with dried pasta. How long did Lilith expect us to be up here?

  “Maybe we could put all the taxidermy in the bedroom,” Jax suggested.

  “And barricade the door?”

  “I don’t think they’ll be coming back to life whenever the moon rises,” said Jax.

  I pride myself on being tough and rational, and my transparent discomfort in the presence of Uncle Rodney’s taxidermied menagerie was amusing Jax no end.

  “Since you’re so comfortable with dead creatures, then you won’t have any trouble sleeping in there.”

  “I don’t think that once we get all the animals in there, anyone will be able to use the bed.”

  In the end, we took the mattress out of the bedroom, only to discover it wouldn’t fit in the living room.

  “It’ll have to go in the loft,” Jax said.

  “I am not sharing a room with you,” I said.

  “It’s not really a room,” Jax said. “There aren’t any walls to speak of anyway. I’d describe it as more of a space.”

  “A space? For sleeping? I believe that’s a pretty good description of a bedroom.”

  “We still have to bring in all those boxes of food,” Jax pointed out.

  Jax and I wrestled the extra mattress upstairs to the loft, took down the juvenile alligator from over the existing bed, and started bringing up boxes from the back porch to form sort of a barricade down the middle of the space.

  “Certainly no danger of you stumbling into my bed in the middle of the night,” said Jax as he surveyed the wall of boxes.

  “There was never any danger of that, to begin with,” I said, but I couldn’t look him in the eye as I said it.

  Chapter Nine

  After we’d brought all the boxes in from the back porch and finished the barrier between the beds, I suggested that we’d better climb the slope behind the cabin and try to get reception.

  “Lilith will be dying to know that we made it to the cabin in one piece,” I told Jax.

  I’d hoped that he’d stay behind. I was desperately in need of a private conversation with my sister, Bianca.

  I was still in shock over Hugo’s seemingly sudden announcement that we were through. The end of a nine-year relationship was not something I was ready to process on my own.

  We had to climb almost twenty minutes up the steep rock-strewn slope behind the cabin before Jax said he had coverage.

  I checked my phone. I, too, had a signal, but I pointed up the slope and said I was going a little higher. I think Jax understood that I wanted to get out of earshot.

  “You call Lilith,” I said. “She’ll want to hear your voice. Just me texting to say we made it isn’t going to be good enough for her.”

  Truthfully, I wasn’t eager to give Lilith a chance to put any additional pressure on me not to quit. Now that it looked like Hugo and I were over I was surer than ever that I didn’t want to stay on Jax Fitzroy’s security detail. I couldn’t stomach the thought of working alongside Hugo anymore, but I knew Lilith wouldn’t give up until I convinced her that all hope was lost.

  I sat down on a boulder and texted my sister, Bianca.

  You busy? Call me

  It was ten minutes before she called. I could hear kids shrieking and laughing in the background, then a man’s voice admonished them, and they went quiet.

  “You must be at Rob’s?”

  “Yeah,” Bianca said. “It looks like I’m stuck here until they figure out what to do about my
flooded apartment.”

  Bianca’s basement apartment had been the unfortunate victim of a flood when her upstairs neighbor let her bathtub overflow for fourteen hours while she was out.

  Now that Bianca was homeless, our brother Rob and his wife had taken Bianca in until her landlord’s insurance company got its act together.

  “Rob and Camilla back from Spain?”

  “They are not,” said Bianca.

  “So, it’s just you and—”

  I heard a door close. When Bianca spoke again, her voice was muffled.

  “I’m in the closet under the stairs.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to be overheard.”

  “Why don’t you just go to your room?”

  “I’m in Camilla and Rob’s room, and the kids treat it like Grand Central Station. Besides, I’ll never make it through the living room without being waylaid.”

  “That bad?”

  Rob is our older brother. Ten years ago, he married Camilla, and they now have four sweet but extremely energetic kids under the age of six.

  “What about the manny?”

  I’d never met this mythical manny. Rob and Camilla gave him holidays off, which was when our family usually got together.

  Timo, the childcare provider in question, had been with them for the last three years. The way Rob and Camilla talked about Timo, you’d have thought the man was Mr. Rogers, the Dali Lama, and St. Francis of Assisi all rolled into one.

  “Timo’s here.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s OK.”

  “Ok?”

  “He’s good with the kids, I guess.”

  I smelled a rat. My sister Bianca is a woman of strong opinions. She either loves you or hates you. There’s no such thing as somebody being just “OK.”

  Bianca was hiding under the stairs, so she wasn’t just being diplomatic because one of the kids might be listening.

  Normally, I would have dragged the truth out of her, but I had other things on my mind, so I decided to delve into my own troubles.

  “Hugo and I broke up,” I told Bianca. “The wedding is off.”

  “Why’d you break up with him this time?”