Hindsight was a fucking bitch.
Dean just nodded, slowly, his gaze sure and steady. “Philandering man?”
The memory turned her stomach as she nodded. “Yeah. We were still together then, but I’d started…questioning him. About our relationship, and what he did when we were apart. He pushed it onto the album. Used the producers to wear me down, and threatened not to publish the album at all if there weren’t enough singles on it, he said. They bought the rights to that song in an auction, they told me at the time, but I’ve since learned that the other people supposedly interested had been approached by the songwriter, not the other way around.” The manipulation and deceit still enraged her.
“Can you think of other instances where he’s tried to control your music like that?”
She barked out a laugh. “How much time do we have?”
A muscle twitched in his cheek. “As much time as you need.”
It was cathartic, detailing the steady and subtle derision she’d faced over the last eight years. She got mad, too, because saying out loud all the ways Track had used other people to control her framed it in a new way for herself.
A real way.
Her eyes got hot, scratchy. “So yeah. All of that. And then he drops the bomb that they’re covering ‘Forget Me Not’, and I just lost it. That’s the sum of it, I guess.”
He let the silence between them stretch a little long, then double-clicked his pen on the table. “Okay. Tell me more about being on the road.”
She licked her lips, a quick swipe. Back in control. Back to safe ground. “I don’t talk a lot later in the day of a show. Sometimes I need to do a second interview, and that’s fine, but I prefer to keep them short. Save my voice for the concert.”
“Anyone give you grief about that?”
“Not really.”
He nodded. “So Savannah was your last show, right? And we’ll hook up with the tour again in Washington. Tell me what I need to know about the remaining dates.”
She got up and gestured for him to follow her. She pulled her iPad out of her purse in the living room and sat down on the couch. He sat next to her with enough space for her to notice that he wasn’t close, but not so far away that she couldn’t show him the tour dates.
“We’ll take the buses for these…six dates, until Tulsa. There’s a break in Nashville in there. And then we’ll fly north and have a few days off before Bozeman, an outdoor festival outside Idaho Falls, Salt Lake City.” She shifted closer. “And then another break before we hit the west coast. So three legs of a bus tour. Some nights we’ll get hotels, but other nights we’ll sleep on the bus.”
He twisted, his arm brushing hers as he looked at her. His eyes were hazel, brown flecked with green and gold, and shadowed at the moment with concern. “What are the sleeping arrangements?”
“I share a bus with my band. I’ve got a bedroom at the back, they sleep on enclosed bunks. There are four bunks and I only have three band members, so once we clear all the instruments out of the fourth pod, you can have that.”
“How will your band react to me joining the tour?”
“They’re super chill, it’ll be fine.”
“Well, that’s something.” A muscle relaxed in his cheek, but worry lingered in his eyes. He was so serious, and it suited him. Like he’d been born to be a cop and a bodyguard, at the ready to fight the good fight.
“Thank you for asking,” she said softly.
“Just doing my job.” He clenched his jaw, then nodded. “Okay. So what would your preference be in between those legs of the tour? Do you want to fly home to Nashville? Stay in the same time zone? Get away from the tour?”
She usually went home. Or, when a dark, unseen panic gripped her, ran away to her best friend’s house. “No preference,” she lied.
He clearly didn’t buy it for a second. “Really?”
“I’d rather not stay with the tour, I guess.”
His eyes danced a little as he gave her an amused look. “Was that so hard?”
“What?”
“Saying what you want.”
Had he already forgotten that she’d locked him out of the house when she didn’t want to talk to him? “I promise you I don’t have any problem saying what I want.”
