“Hey thanks,” Devon says. “The guys would be pissed if I dropped a pizza. They each order different stuff, and they’re not good at sharing.” He laughs. We carry our boxes outside and walk to where he parked his truck. He opens the back door and motions for me to put my stack down first.
“That’s funny.” I set the stack of boxes on the seat of his truck and then he puts his stack down next to it. “Well, tell everyone I say hi.” That’s as close as I get to Connor, I guess. Fuck. I should just ask about him. It’s easy. Just open my mouth and say, ‘can you give Connor my number?’. Nothing to it.
“Okay, I’ll do that.” He gets into his truck and starts it up. Just as he’s about to pull away, he rolls down the window and yells at me as I’m going back in. “We’ll let you know how the Lexi Girl pizza is.” and then he drives away with a wave.
Yeah, sure. How are you going to do that? None of you have my number. I missed my chance to give it to you. I sigh. It was nice while it lasted, I guess. Might as well go back to swearing off men. Clearly I was misreading the Connor situation. He is a rock star after all, flirting is basically his job.
Chapter 21
Connor - Amateur Stalking
“Alex?” Travis yells. “The Alex that Connor has been brooding about since she ran away after the concert, leaving him with no way to find her? Friends with the photographer chick? That Alex?”
“Um, yes?” Devon seems confused. “I haven’t seen you since the meet and greet. And from the way Connor and Alex were eye fucking each other, I thought everything was good?”
“That’s what I thought too,” I say. “But her friend Becca started telling some bullshit stories, and then Alex got up and left in a huge hurry. I tried to chase her down, but I got there just as she was getting into a cab up the street. I don’t even have her number.” I sit down and put my head in my hands.
“About Derek? I heard that story. Apparently Alex is quite the little slugger.” Devon laughs a bit. “She broke her favourite umbrella though, that’s too bad.”
“Yeah, that’s not the only story that Becca told, though,” I sigh. “She talked about other boyfriends having cheated, saying that almost ten of them have, and that’s when Alex got up and left. She ran out of there like she was on fire. I chased after her right away, but I didn’t find her until it was too late.”
“Yeah, and Becca got up right after Connor did.” Johnny adds. “I think she realized she was saying something she shouldn’t be. She was cool, too. I was going to ask for her number but I didn’t get the chance after all that.”
“Uh, well, I guess it doesn’t help at all that she told me to tell you guys hi?” Devon shrugs. “I told her we’d let her know how the pizza was. I didn’t know that we didn’t actually have any way to contact her.”
“What if we call the pizza place? Maybe they can tell us something?” I can tell that I sound desperate. I can almost hear Ryder laughing at me in his head. Fucker.
“Nah, that won’t work. She knows the guy by name. I think he’d be too protective of-” Devon stops in the middle of his sentence. “OH SHIT!” he yells. “Why didn’t I think of this before. She actually gave me her pizza and got the owner to make her another one.”
“You took her pizza?” I ask. “That seems like a dick move.”
“Whatever, she insisted.” Devon stares right at me, looking excited. “She says she lives pretty much next door so it would be easy for her to just come back and grab it.”
“What?” This is amazing news. I can just go over there and wait for her to show up. I can use the pizza place as an excuse, so I don’t look too crazy. Or even the gym. It’s a little further away, but it’s pretty close. Close enough to use as a reason to be there, anyway.
“Oh, fuck.” Devon looks disappointed now. “She was getting pizza because she and Becca were packing. She’s moving. This weekend.”
“Nooooooo.” Ryder dramatically falls to his knees and shakes his fists in the air. “Now we’ll have to listen to Connor whine for months about not being able to find her.”
“Fuck you, dude.” I throw my pizza crust at him. “I can’t explain, but I feel like I need her. I need to find her.”
“Well,” Travis finally joins in the conversation. “We have a big SUV with tinted windows parked right outside. Teenage drive-by?”
“Haha Travis,” I’m not amused. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m serious,” he says. “We’re not getting any work done in the studio, anyway. It’s already Friday. If she’s moving this weekend, then we should be able to catch the moving truck and see where she lives right now. And if she’s moving herself, we will see her making trips with boxes and stuff. It’s really your only chance.”
He really is serious. He came up with this plan so quickly it’s almost like he’s done something like this before.
“If she sees us all driving by, she’s going to know something is up.” Aiden is the voice of reason, as usual. He’s the oldest of us and usually keeps us all in line. “What if we do it in shifts?” Scratch that. He’s as crazy as the rest of them.
“What the fuck guys, we can’t stalk Alex.” I guess I have to be the sane one.
“You’re no fun,” Ryder, of course. “We’re not stalking. We’re looking for her during the only time available to us to do so. Do you really want to just give up now and let her move away forever?”
Fuck, when Ryder starts making sense, I know my head is messed up. But I already lost her once because she had to move away when her parents died. We promised to stay in touch. Alex was supposed to call me when she got to her grandfather’s place and give me her new number and address, but she didn’t. I can’t blame her for that, though. Her parents had just died. She had more important things to think about. I can’t let something like that happen again, though. It nearly killed me the first time.
“So,” I look around at the guys, “who wants to go for a drive then?”
