She had not kicked him. For the record.
“If they want to know where I am, tell ’em,” he said.
“No.” She shook her head and channeled that tone her mom used when she was insistent on something she thought was important. “Maybe Bax of yesterday was done with fame. But Bax of today needs to seriously reconsider his options.” This was her professional opinion and she was sticking to it.
Huh. That seemed to get his attention.
“Brennan Baxter, you built this.” She waved a hand up and down in front of him. “You’re a big deal. Stop trying to downplay what that means.” Also, one did not just extract himself from the empire he’d built with the band Dimefront. Not without a lot of forethought and planning and consulting his freaking publicist. Otherwise, it hurt the people who relied on the band for their income.
She for one.
But also the sound guys and the roadies and the drivers and the producers and the list went on and on.
“I want to be,” he said, again. “Done.”
“You don’t.”
“I. Do.”
“Okay.” She held up her hands, but still kept her grip on his phone—just in case he wanted to make a swipe at it. “Maybe right now you want to be. Maybe yesterday you wanted to be. Things changed. Your life plans changed. You’ve got bills, people who rely on you for their paychecks. Are you really going to screw everyone over on a whim because a bad thing happened to you?”
“You know nothing about me,” he said, the words ice. “This has been coming for a long time.”
“I know everything about you,” she replied. “We know everything about each other.” That was 99 percent of the issue between them. They knew each other too well. Maybe he didn’t know her address, but it couldn’t have been a shock to walk into her condo and find a pantry of cereal and a freezer of premade meals.
Just like she knew that if she walked into his kitchen, she’d find tofu and cucumbers.
That was what came from growing up across the street from one another. Growing up together. From finding their way to Hollywood as a team with Knox and Linx. They knew each other.
They didn’t like each other, sure—but they knew each other.
“If you stopped for more than two seconds,” her voice wobbled. That wasn’t good, no voice wobbling allowed. No feelings around this guy. “If you let yourself heal from this bullshit that Em is dragging you through, then maybe you’ll come out on the other side and realize you’ve got many people who care about you.”
“Like you?” he asked. He didn’t sound hopeful, he sounded like this was an accusation.
“No.” She shook her head. “I got over caring for you a long time ago.”
Things in her life got easier when she didn’t care about Brennan Baxter or what he thought of her life choices.
The light in his eyes dimmed a smidge.
Perhaps that was too low a blow for the current circumstance. He deserved to be off-kilter, but… “Bax, I need you to let Hans and me deal with the media and whatever Em’s going to say. We figure out the planning, because this is our gig. When you’re onstage, that’s your gig. We don’t tell you how to do it.”
“You did.” He glanced up from where he’d been staring laser daggers into the carpeting of her floor.
One time. One stupid time early in the game she caught him feeling up a groupie behind the speakers and she’d thought Brennan was better than that. Thought that he wanted to be better than the cliché of a rocker he’d apparently become. She seriously thought he was the kind of guy who wouldn’t take advantage of his celebrity to get a few rocks off. She’d said that, out loud, and it hadn’t gone well.
The parting shot was when the woman he felt up told Courtney she was jealous because she wasn’t a girl who got the rock star.
It stung because Bax didn’t correct her, so maybe it was true. From that moment forward it was game on between Courtney and Bax.
Hating him and sparring was easier than missing Brennan.
“Can we puh-lease move forward fromonething I said years ago? I made a suggestion.” She thought her opinion mattered to him. Thought he appreciated her thoughts. Turned out, hereallydidn’t. “You didn’t like my suggestion. We survived. I learned my lesson.”
Don’t talk to Bax. Or care about him. Or wonder why you’re not the kind of girl Bax would give a bracelet to.
He grunted.
