Then Ollie sighed. “I can leave, you know.”
“What?”
“The tour. If I’m making things hard for you.”
Shay opened his eyes and rose slightly, propping himself up on one elbow. “Why would I want you to leave?”
“I just said why.” Ollie stared up at him. His eyes seemed darker than usual. “All the guys are worried about how moody you are, and I’m thinking it’s probably my fault.”
“Because the world revolves around you?”
“No, because I’m the only thing that’s different from the last time you went on tour.”
“We don’t even play the same show twice. How the fuck do you figure this tour is a carbon copy of the last one? That’s insane.”
“I meant emotionally, not literally.”
“Oh. Well, you’re still wrong.”
Ollie smirked faintly. “I like being wrong.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a pessimist.”
“Have you always been?”
“No.”
“Then you have plenty of time to change back.”
Ollie opened his mouth to speak. Shay silenced him with the first kiss they’d shared in days. Then he lay back down with his head on Ollie’s chest and stayed there until the world moved on.
Chapter Seventeen
Cardiff waswild. Smuggler’s Beat played three shows, each one more stomping than the last, and by the time they finished, the entire cast and crew were wiped out. Only Ollie and Corina seemed unaffected by exhaustion, and that, Ollie mused, was likely because neither one of them slept much anyway.
“Vampires,” Ben muttered when he got up for a piss one night to find them hunched over coffee and laptops.
Ollie flipped him off. Corina ignored him, not looking up from her work until he was safely snoring in his bed again. “How come you’re not sleeping with Shay anymore?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard. Don’t be coy, Ollie. There’s nowhere to hide on a tour like this.”
“You spend plenty of time hiding in hotels.”
“Only because sharing my bedroom with six other people gets on my nerves. You think I’m a cow already? Wait until I’ve spent a solid week with this lot.”
Ollie had a certain sympathy for her there, but whereheslept at night was none of her business, though he wasn’t daft enough to tell her so. He went with the other convenient truth. “I was never sleeping with him. It isn’t like that.”
Corina returned her gaze to her laptop screen. “I don’t believe you. The technicalities aren’t important, but I can’t imagine anyone ever spending the night with Shay and it ‘not being like that.’ That kid is beautiful.”
“I know that.”
“So why are you pretending it doesn’t matter?”
The Ollie who’d joined the tour a few weeks ago would’ve told her to fuck right off, but something had shifted in him the last few days, and he wanted to understand as much as Corina did. More. “I’m not pretending it doesn’t matter, it’s just… hard, when there’s no privacy and everyone’s so busy and knackered. Nothing feels real.”
