“Really?” Roxy took a bite of her pickle and wiped her hands on a napkin.
“Yeah. Can, um, this part be off the record?”
“Yeah, sure. Begin off the record section,” she said toward her phone.
“With Zack.”
“Zack…as in your frontman?”
“Yeah.”
“So the rumors I’d heard were true.”
Nodding, I told her the rest of my history, the part I hadn’t told her earlier, about falling in love with Zack back in highschool. I didn’t tell her all the horrible parts, but I told her I thought I’d always taken our relationship more seriously than Zack. I even mentioned how he’d stifled me as a musician, even though now he appeared to be more open to the contributions the rest of us could make to our second album. “We’re broken up now, but I’m telling you—he was a lethal combination. Sure, I’d loved him before, but then watching him onstage and hearing him bleed through his lyrics every single night did a number on me.”Until he ruined it by becoming a different person.
“Hey, I know that was probably hard for you to share. So thank you. Are you ready to be back on the record again? We have a few more minutes before we have to leave.”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Roxy said, “Actually, I have one more question if you’re okay with answering it. Again, off the record.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Do you think you and Zack will ever get back together?”
Just hearing those words made my heart beat harder. It had been something I’d wanted for so long, but I’d lived it enough to know it would be the stupidest move I could ever make. “No. I’m dating Braden now.”
Roxy raised an eyebrow while keeping a professional air. “Oh, yeah. Ishewhy you and Zack broke up?”
I shook my head. “No.Zackis the reason why we broke up…but I’d rather not talk about that.”
“That’s cool. I didn’t ask at our earlier interview because Zack pretty much shut it down, but how long have you and Braden been dating?”
I wasn’t about to tell her about our first night together. In my mind, we hadn’t become official until we’d come back to Colorado and I’d told him we could try. “Not long. A few months.”
“You are one lucky woman,” she said, crumpling up the paper her sandwich had been in. “Braden is hotter than hell.”
I’d never really thought about him that way, but I knew he was. Lots of women had claimed him as their favorite band member, just as they had the other two men. “He is really sweet.”
“Aw. Hotandsweet? My favorite kind of coffee.”
At that, we both laughed.
Then Roxy said, “If you guys weren’t dating, I gotta tell you…I would actually consider hitting on him.”
I raised an eyebrow, not out of jealousy or anger, but marveling at Roxy, the epitome of a strong woman…the kind of woman I wanted to be. But I didn’t know how to say any of that, even though at that moment I knew I’d found a woman who could be a real friend.
All I managed to say was “Braden is a good guy—probably the best guy I know. You have good instincts.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” she said, a silly lilt in her voice. “Andyouhave good taste.”
We laughed, tapping our paper cups together as if in a toast, as I basked in the glow of finding my first real friend.
Through the next week,we continued practicing—and Zack promised the label we’d be ready to enter the studio by mid-July. The rest of us weren’t so sure, especially because we hadn’t eliminated any of the fifteen songs…and the more we played them, the more they felt like they all belonged on our next album.
But just a couple of days after Amped in Anaheim, we all got an email from Russ, the publicist at Crushed Velvet. Braden sent me a text, telling me to check my email. Thesubject line was a bit intimidating:Urgent: Unapproved Media Circulation. Response Needed ASAP.Because I hadn’t looked at my inbox in a couple of days, I was relieved to see this correspondence had just been sent earlier that morning.
The content of the email itself, while overly dramatic, was surprising. In it, Russ asked Braden and me to confirm our relationship status because they needed to write a press statement about it. But I wondered why he’d sent it to Zack and Cy too—maybe because, as part of the band, they were affected somehow.
