“Oh, yeah. One of the few times I remember him putting his foot down. He said you needed to do your own thing. I guess he was right.”
They were quiet for several minutes. It was the first time in longer than Rowan could remember that she felt comfortable with Adalynn.
She inhaled and exhaled slowly and it was as if a huge weight was expelled with her breath.
“Luke has a relationship with Laney Faith,” she said.
Adalynn’s brows pinched. “The singer? What kind of relationship?”
“The kind where they swap spit.”
“No way!”
“Way. I saw the pictures,” she said. The images were imprinted on her cerebral cortex.
“On the internet? I haven’t seen anything and I follow all the gossip pages.”
She shook her head. “Not yet. His manager brought them to the house to show me.”
“Why?”
“He said because he thought I deserved to know what I was getting into. That Luke might love me but I’d never be the only woman in his life.”
“That’s bullshit,” Adalynn said. “Luke Stone has always been a one-woman man. Even when you weren’t his woman yet.”
Rowan lifted her head. “What do you mean?”
“Sophomore year Linda Jo asked him to Sadie Hawkins and he turned her down because he was waiting for you to ask him.”
“That hussy.” She shook her head. “That was a long time ago. People change.”
“Not Luke. And not when it comes to you. That boy’s been stupid for you since he realized you were a girl. He wouldn’t jeopardize that. Especially not after he made a public spectacle of himself.”
“I want to believe that, Addy. I do, but I saw the pictures.”
“Is this the same manager from before or a different one?” she asked.
“The same one.”
“The one you didn’t like because you thought he was a slimeball?”
“That’s the one,” Rowan said.
“So maybe he has a reason for showing you those pictures.”
That didn’t really make any sense. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. To get you to leave Luke? I mean you left him before for pretty much the same reason.”
“Yeah but that was…” She looked down at the worn wooden planks of the porch “…not all that different,” she said softly. “The first time, I saw it happen but Brett was there. He stopped me to talk to me about my and Luke’s relationship. How it wasn’t good for his career and how I was holding Luke back from really taking off. I pulled away from Brett and when I turned the corner, Luke was kissing some random girl. Except…”
“Except?” Adalynn said.
“Except if someone had taken a picture of that moment, it would be almost identical to the one of him and Laney.”
“How so?”
Rowan pictured the two incidents. The girl was wrapped around him, but his hands were on her hips. She focused on Adalynn. “When Luke kisses me, he wraps his arms around me so tight it’s almost hard to breathe. In the picture, his hands were on her hips.”
