Page 17 of Dedicated
“You can crash if you want. Take the couch. I’m fixin’ to go to bed.”
“Nah.” He waved off the offer as he started for the door. “I’m picking up a few gigs in Nashville, so I need to get back.”
“You sure you’re good for the road?” I had no idea how long he’d been up, but it was entirely possible he’d only slept a few hours over the past few days.
“Oh yeah. I pounded a couple of Red Bulls.” He cut me a confident grin and opened the door as I trailed along after him.
“That shit’ll kill you eventually.”
“Everything will. At least I’ll be awake.”
We exchanged a loose, mostly insincere hug, and I lingered in the doorway as he walked out to the rental car.
“Take it easy, write some hits, all the good shit,” he called over his shoulder. He stopped after he opened the car door, glancing up at me like he had something else to add. I suspected it would be about Les, so I was glad when he changed his mind with a quick shake of his head and ducked into the car.
Back inside the cabin, I picked the magazine up from the floor and threw it on the coffee table among its other out-of-date brethren. The black plastic bag Les had tossed me was still on the couch, tempting me. I snatched it up and turned it over to find a small plastic case with a clear top and a sticker that read “Lundgren Hand Made.” Six wooden picks of varying thicknesses and wood types were slotted into a gray foam bed. Popping the case open, I ran my thumb over the smooth edges. I’d been interested in playing around with wood picks for a while because of their reputed warm tones, but I’d never gotten around to actually getting any. These were exquisite, probably not cheap, and I examined each of them individually before selecting one indicated as being made of rosewood. I grabbed one of Les’s guitar cases from by the door, too lazy to go down to the basement, and set up on the couch, running quietly through some scales, getting a feel for the way wood changed the level of attack on the strings.
It was a thoughtful gift. Les was good with stuff like that. So often he seemed absorbed in his own world, and thenbam, out of nowhere he’d say or do something that let you know he’d been paying attention to everything all along.
It also seemed like an apology in a way, but maybe I was reading too much into it. Regardless, it kept him on my mind, and twice that night I almost walked into his room. But I didn’t know what I wanted to say, besidesthanks, and he needed the sleep anyway, so I abandoned the idea and went to bed.
Chapter 14
Levi started blowing up my phone at eight the next morning.
“You hooked up to Wifi yet?” he asked right off the bat when I answered. I was puttering around the kitchen, dumping coffee grounds into a filter, but the urgency in his voice gave me pause.
“Yep. Need me to look at something?”
“That’d be good. Go over to TMZ. Les around?”
“Sleeping it off. What do you think?” I hit the button on the machine to start the coffee and poked through the fridge before closing it, empty-handed.
“Get him, take a look, and call me back.”
“You’re making me nervous,” I said, already on my way to the kitchen table where I reached into my messenger bag to pull out my laptop.
“It’s not a huge ordeal really, but I know how you are about privacy.”
I figured the news about my breakup with Leigh had finally gotten out, though why that would be newsworthy, I had no idea. I’d done such a good job of keeping my shit locked down that my love life was rarely mentioned these days, and it wasn’t like Leigh was some high-profile celeb, anyway. I got my laptop fired up, then navigated over to TMZ.
I recognized her instantly, even at thumbnail size.Ella. I couldn’t think of her name without a hundred images flashing on the backs of my eyelids. My hand in her hair, Ella on her knees, the dart of her tongue along Les’s cock.
My eyes glommed onto the headline next, a sour mash of feeling erupting in my gut. “Porter & Graves Share More Than Music; Gatlinburg native spills all the details of her steamy tryst with the dynamic duo.”
The next photo was grainy, as if she’d zoomed in from a distance on her phone while standing in the doorway of Les’s bedroom in the cabin, but it was unmistakably me and Les in that bed. Unmistakably Les’s dark hair slicing at an angle over his cheekbone, unmistakably the small tattoo on my bicep visible where my arm wrapped around a pillow, and unmistakably Les’s arm draped low over my back. I didn’t remember that. At all. Granted, we’d been sleeping, and with Ella between us, but when I’d woken up, Les and I had migrated to opposite sides of the bed.
“I think they’re secretly together” was called out in a big block quote and given plenty of real estate next to the blown up shot of us in bed. My heart thudded in my chest as I read in mute, horrified silence. A lot of cruel words for Ella ran through my head before I got ahold of myself, tried to remind myself that she wasn’t at fault and technically hadn’t done anything wrong besides selling us out. But I couldn’t quell the sense of panic at having my privacy violated like that. I might have lived in the spotlight, but there was a part of me that would always resist my personal life being dragged out as fodder for gossip sites. After my last breakup, rumors had circled for weeks that I’d cheated on the girl with the singer for Flow. And that wasn’t the case. So, I was careful to make my love life seem as boring and ordinary as possible, and now that appeared to have backfired in the worst possible way and made them eager to pick up this story. I wondered how much they’d paid Ella. And I wondered why the hell she’d done it in the first place. She hadn’t seemed the type.
Without Ella to be mad at, that left Les, who was currently still in his self-induced coma coming down off his probable booze and sex orgy in Vegas—which only pissed me off more. I yanked the laptop from its power cord, then carried it with me down the hall to Les’s room and kicked the door wide.
The blackout curtains were drawn tight, and he stirred briefly with a groan when I entered, fumbled for a pillow, and pulled it over his head.
I flicked the overhead light on, crossed the room to drag the curtains back, then stalked toward the bed. Once at the edge, I reached down and tore the covers from him with more force than was needed. He shriveled back into the mattress like an unearthed bug, goose bumps erupting over his bare skin.
“What the fuck, Porter?” His grousing was muffled by the pillow that I promptly yanked from his face before opening the laptop on the mattress in front of him.
“This. Open your fucking eyes and look.”