Playing Autumn (Breathe Rockstar Romance Book 1) (5 page)

An info packet was handed over to him when he checked in, and it had a welcome letter, his schedule for the weekend, details of his return flight, and numbers for local services.

After a few more minutes of conversation that ended with Oliver seeing Haley fumble her way into room 815, he found himself alone again. He set down the dark blue carrying case that held Cornelia, his guitar, on one side of the large bed, and then he plopped down on the other side.

The phone in his pocket kept buzzing. The cellphone signal had obviously found him, carrying the thoughts and feelings of his mom and a few other people along with it.

Twenty-seven unread messages. He scrolled to his mother's.

Visit your grandma.

It looked like the most benign of them, but it was still a command. He was twenty-four years old, and yet people had been talking to him like this all his life. He remembered Chris, his voice of reason, telling him that they did that because it was the only way he responded to requests—if they weren't.

True enough. The other messages at the moment were from Chris, his broker Mally, his landlord Stefan, and
Tomorrow’s Talent
producer Pat. The short previews to the messages hinted at the content:
Answer your fucking phone, Are you there yet, Have you saved our asses yet
.

Well, not really, but he could guess. Maybe he wouldn’t answer the fucking phone right now. He didn't have to, right? Maybe he could pull rank a little bit this weekend, as right now he was officially an important person again and had kids to mentor. He unzipped Cornelia's case, wide enough to slip his phone through, and left it inside.

It had started to ring again when he closed the door to room 817 behind him, which caused him to almost run into the kid.

No, he wasn't a kid. But he looked at least sixteen and smelled so strongly of soap that Oliver was reminded briefly of his own mother.

“Oh my gosh. It's really you,” the kid said. “Oliver Cabrera.”

“Hey,” he said, offering his hand.

“Trey Lewis. I...I did
Close Her Eyes
. Years ago.”

Fucking Trey Lewis.
The other reason that Oliver was there, in the room next to his. Of all the damn things.

It had to have been about three years since the kid wormed his way inadvertently into Oliver’s life, and Oliver didn’t need to be plugged into the scene to know that Trey was still riding high. The radio stations still played him. He still got invites to the big awards shows and random important parties. “Still,” because these things dwindled over time, depending on how the tide turned, but as it was, Trey still had a career. He also didn’t look all that different yet, still playing off of the blond boy-next-door image and the aw-shucks demeanor.

Upon a closer look, because Oliver straightened up all of a sudden and looked the kid in the eye, he saw familiar bits of himself. It wasn’t that long ago when Oliver was exactly in
that
spot where Trey’s life currently hovered, and he could still feel the rush of it sometimes. You would think that it would help endear Trey to him, but no, he still wanted to punch the kid's handsome, almost feminine face.

One dark day last year, Chris, who was not normally a dick, came to his home and said something only a dick would say:
Be like Trey.

“Be like Trey,” Oliver had repeated. “They’re fucking kidding, right?”

“They think you can do it.”

“They think I’m an idiot.”

They
had names that kept changing every few months. Label executives being assigned to “cradle him to success,” only to never be heard from again until the next one. Oliver felt bounced around like a hot potato by the most incompetent of potato-catchers.

“
They
think you can take the transition.” Chris was starting to sound like them, except his shirt and haircut combined had to have cost about ten bucks. Which was why Oliver was relieved to have him around.

“Because I’m an idiot?”

“Because you’re young. And you’ve got the female fan base. And…”

“And?”

“You can be pretty if you cleaned up some.”

“Not enough.”

“They sent us videos to watch. But we’ve heard them, since they’re all anyone has ever played recently.”

“You didn’t tell them I’d rather eat the broken shards of that disc?”

“I need to get paid too, brother.”

Oliver’s better judgment won right then, so no punching. “I know that song. Awesome,” he said to Trey, but his voice probably sounded a bit tight.

Trey smiled and nodded. “Whatever. I'm sure you hate it. I do. I pretty much do what they tell me.”

Oliver laughed, relieved that he probably didn't need to hate the kid on top of everyone else. “It’s been a few years. You still want to do it that way?”

Trey shrugged. “It works. How did it work out for you?”

Oliver hung back a second, wondering if that was a dig at his recent troubles, if the kid was being cocky. It was hard to tell because the voice was so damn
sweet
. “It’s a mixed bag,” he said carefully. “Some stuff I’m proud of, some not so much.”

“I don’t want to rock the boat. I happen to like what’s happening right now.”

Sure, all of the perks but none of the freedom.
But what was freedom, anyway? Oliver had nothing but time now, but he also didn’t have enough money to do anything. Some tradeoff
. “
Enjoy it,” he said.

“I'm trying.”

“You're from around here?”

“Katy. I live in LA now, but it's my mom's birthday this weekend, too. And Breathe Music gave me my big break. I was one of these kids a few years ago. Can't believe I was invited as a mentor this early. I’m just nineteen, but it already feels like so much has happened. Are you in this room? We're neighbors.”

There was a time warp, when it came to the industry, that Oliver barely understood himself. When someone was as ubiquitous as Trey, it was almost as if you knew him forever. When you found out that he was a person who aged every year like you did, it was almost jarring; like they lived on a different plane and did more with the same number of hours.

Trey seemed like he was older than nineteen despite looking like a kid. Oliver remembered being nineteen. It had been awesome. Envy closed his throat for a second.

“See you around then,” Oliver managed to say. “Happy birthday to your mom.”

“You're nicer than they said you would be,” Trey said as he went to the elevator.

Damn right he was. He watched the kid get in, then he knocked on Haley's door.

“You know what I really want right now?” he said to her surprised face three seconds later. “Fajitas. You think we can borrow Roger for a bit?”

Chapter 7

Oliver didn't care where he got the Tex-Mex, as long as he got it
now
, so Haley suggested a place. It was a bit cute how he was totally and irrationally needing his fajita fix.

Roger agreed to take them but couldn't stay because his shift at his actual job (bouncer at a club downtown) was starting. Roger was another volunteer, because Victoria knew how to round up people for this cause and make them feel good about it.

“Everywhere I eat, it's crap,” Oliver was saying as they waited for their food. “I tell you, it's crap.”

It had been years—too long—since Haley had been to El Cantina, and her mouth started to water from him reminiscing about it the whole car ride. She hadn’t been back in years because, well, she thought she shouldn’t stuff her face with tortillas and steak that often. But this was turning out to be a weekend of weirdness; might as well temporarily drop the diet.

“I should have been coming back here every year,” Haley said, closing her eyes for a second and taking a deep breath.

“Do you smell it?” Oliver demanded.

She did. It smelled of Sunday afternoons, and Thursday nights after games, and those rare Saturday mornings when everyone was up and super hungry. “It’s El Cantina. Like it's always been.”

“It doesn't smell like this elsewhere. I've tried places. I've been everywhere.”

“You can't have tried smelling
every
Tex-Mex restaurant on the East Coast.”

“I'm not kidding.”

Haley closed her eyes and took a deep breath and was reminded of yet another thing. This place was a time machine. “It’s like my dad’s birthday.”

“Excuse me?”

“There was…maybe a period of five years? My dad wanted his birthday dinner here, every year. I was in middle school. It stopped because he eventually moved on to Chinese food, but this still does remind me of his birthday.”

“That’s it,” Oliver said triumphantly. “That’s how I feel. Except I remember arrival days—when my parents came back from a trip, and if I wasn’t with them, they’d pick me up from my grandmother’s house and we’d come here.”

A server placed a chip bowl between them and Oliver lunged for it, grabbing a handful of chips and then picking them off one by one from his fist with his teeth. She would have been concerned, except it seemed like he had done this before.

“It's
the same
,” he concluded as he swallowed the last of his fistful of chips. He took a large gulp from the glass of water with a slice of lemon that had been served. “Even the water's the same.”

“You're joking.”

“I swear. And you've been coming home every year without doing this? You should be ashamed.”

Her mouth made a sound that was almost like a word before she stopped herself from explaining the no-fajita diet. “Consider me properly shamed.” Haley tentatively reached for the bowl. “Is it safe to get a chip now?”

“Get some now before I drop the bowl into my mouth.” He took another look around, his eyes lighting up as they swept through the room. “I performed here, in Houston, a few years ago. Didn't have enough time to drop by, so they sent me fajitas in a bag. Not what I had been dreaming of for years, but close enough.”

Haley got a Liberal Arts degree (with a business concentration) in college, while getting as much musical training as possible. In any case—she had a semester each of education, psychology, and sociology and was seeing all sorts of cries for help in Oliver's nostalgia.

“Romanticizing home isn't going to solve your crisis,” she said.

Oliver grinned at her and gah, she was reminded of melting cheese on her tortilla chips. “Hot Piano Girl is also a mind reader?” he teased. “Or it's that obvious that I'm that close to washing up?”

“I didn't say
that
.” Whoops. “But no one loves home that much, especially if he spent so much time away from it when he didn't have to, you know?”

“Oh, but I had to. Family of traveling musicians. Home was that place we went to between airports.”

See, Haley had always been curious about that. Traveling to do this job, this career. Her time with Breathe Music showed her that it was possible to stay home and be a musician, but maybe…not the kind of musician she wanted to be? When she was at her height of fangirling Oliver, she was well aware of his tour schedule, and he really did seem to be everywhere at once.

“Do you consider New York City your home?” she asked. She knew that it was where he was staying between airports.

He shook his head right away. “No.”

“Oh. I thought it would be.”

He leaned back and looked at her in a way that made her feel
examined.
“Why Tampa?”

“Because the lady offered me money to go there.”

“Yes, but it’s not where you should be if you want to do this.”

Haley laughed. “Who said I wanted to do ‘this’? What is
this
?”

“Well, you’re doing
something.
Not directly, but touching the edges.”

“I wanted….” Haley looked down at her hands, which were laid flat on the table. “I wanted to try it, away from people who thought I should be doing something else.”

When she looked at him again, he was
still
examining her. “That’s how it is. Yeah. So NYC isn’t home, not yet. I need a place to call home. I literally will need a roof over my head after this weekend, because I'm sure that one of the messages I got during our flight was my landlord telling me that my stuff is on a Brooklyn sidewalk.”