I picked my head up. “Zane the Rock God has music problems?”
He rolled his eyes. “I can’t write anything new. Or I can, but it’s all still garbage compared to my old stuff. I’ll figure it out.”
I asked, “Do you still get scared? Before a show?”
He pondered the question. “Not really. Not the kind of piss-yourself-terror I had when I first started playing big shows.” His expression got distant. “Now there are just moments when I’m playing in front of a hundred thousand people and every single one of them is singing along to something I wrote and it’s my words, but it means something different to each of them. I dunno man, it’s something else. It feels bigger than me…and sometimes that feeling can knock me on my ass.”
“This part feels like that. It really means something to people. It’s bigger than me and I thought I could do it, but now I don’t even know. I don’t want to give it up, but I don’t want to fuck it up either.”
He said, “It’s good to be scared. That’s how you know you’re growing. How you know you’reliving.”
He was right. I felt most alive when I was pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, whether that was in the outdoors or during one of Elena’s lessons.
I winked at him. “Taking advice about fear from the guy who tries to barbecue himself onstage every night may not be the standard I want to shoot for.”
Zane’s love of pyrotechnics was legendary, adored by fans and hated by our mother.
Zane smiled and shrugged, but then sobered. “I like this for you, Alex. Do the stuff that scares you. Take some risks. Professional ones for sure…but personal ones wouldn’t hurt you either.”
“Ha. You haven’t met Elena. I assure you, she’s capable of hurting me.”
In more ways than one if I didn’t shut the unprofessional feelings down.
Zane grinned. “So introduce us. Hell, bring her to dinner and let Mom meet her too.”
“We’ll see how it goes when I get back…”
17
Elena
Icouldn’t sleep after Alex dropped me at home after the film screening. It had been such a roller coaster of a night between the film and seeing Max and then seeing Alex so vulnerable. I didn’t want to feel sorry for him, was so used to mocking the idea of “poor you, you’re so rich and famous.”
The mob who had assembled outside the venue waiting in the off chance they got to see him was eye-opening. Where the hell did people get that kind of energy and how could I get some?
There had been an uncomfortable side to the excitement too. I saw more than one woman touch his chest or squeeze his arms, and one drunk-looking lady grabbed his ass when he turned to take a picture with someone. He was unfazed by it, making me wonder if he was good at pretending or if it really didn’t bother him. As far as I was concerned, sexual harassment was sexual harassment regardless of the gender of the harasser. It had made me want to step in to defend him.
People seemed to think he was public property and they were entitled to him. It reminded me of my clients in some ways. Because my services were for sale, some of them assumed all of me was for sale. But there weren’t millions of them and they had a vested interest in my privacy since they had more to lose than I did if anything got out.
Alex had obviously picked up on the weird dynamic between Max and me. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come up, but since he asked point blank, I’d been forced to lie.
It didn’t really matter if Alex knew Max used to be my client, but I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. It had been a deeply humiliating experience having to use the panic button. I’d been so powerless that security had to intervene and afterward was so shaken that someone else had to drive me home. Telling him the story would’ve meant reliving all of that. I’d also technically signed an NDA. As though that wasn’t enough, I took the ethical responsibility of not talking about my clients outside of the immediate dungeon family very seriously.
I’d promised not to lie to Alex, but I’d also promised never to talk about my clients. My professional integrity trumped a harmless lie.
I had to throw my phone across the room to get to sleep because I couldn’t stop googling Alex. I spent the next two days torn between waiting for him to text and typing then deleting dozens of messages letting him know I was thinking of him and making sure he was taking care of himself.
He wasn’t mine to look after. Not really.
I didn’t want him to feel like I was one more person invading his privacy. If he wanted space, I should respect that. We hardly knew each other and I was essentially his employee. It was fine to care about your clients, but what I was feeling crossed a line into psycho stalker territory.
I’d never checked the tabloids so much in my life, and the only update was an apology from the hospital and a promise to investigate.
The isolation made me hyper-aware of how few friends I had. I tried reaching out to Ophelia, but she was well-known for taking days to answer a text when she got focused on something else. Or someone else. I tried to read, but for the first time in my life couldn’t focus on any of the books I picked up. I even called my bridge partner, Leigh, to see if she wanted to hang out, but she was in Palm Springs with the girls.
He didn’t text, so neither did I. I told myself over and over again that we weren’t really in a relationship and he was just a client. I wasn’t going to make a client feel like I was prying into his personal life.
I bounced off the walls waiting for him to get back, obsessively reading through the script. I was grateful he’d managed to include me in the table read because this script needed some work. Alex and I could do all the work we wanted, but if the raw material was problematic, he wasn't going to be able to act his way around that. Working on the script kept me busy, but it didn’t help to distract me from Alex since I pictured him every time Lucas Steel spoke.
