Page 7 of The B Side

He stumbled back a step, his camera swinging wildly from its strap.

The other photographers behind them went silent. The man stared at her, his eyes wide. Then the cameras came back up from behind them. Click. Click. Click. Every click of the cameras was a reminder that this was going to be memorialized.

Darcy looked at the lenses pointed at her and realized, all at once, what she’d just given them. Her hands were shaking, the reality of what had happened settling over her. She could already see the headlines forming through her mind’s eye, the way lyrics usually did.

Her heart hammered against her ribs, her stomach sinking. God, Eliana was going to be so pissed.

And there was a chance Juliet would be, too. Juliet, whose biggest rule was to never engage with these people. Smile and move along.

The photographer straightened his jacket. “You just assaulted me.”

“I told you to back away,” she shot back, incredulously. “And you touched me first.”

There was a legal leg to stand on there; she was positive about that. Even so, her emotions were running high, and her chest felt like it was getting too tight, especially as some of the other patrons from the café had come outside and were looking at them. Phones were out.

Fuck.

Taking advantage of actually having the space to walk again, Darcy started hustling down the sidewalk again. Toward the safety of their home – their security-gated, camera-monitored home.

“I just wanted a coffee,” she murmured to herself, almost feeling a little dazed. And now she and Juliet’s drinks were littered on the sidewalk.

Behind her, the shutters kept clicking.

Juliet had already seen the video three times before Darcy returned home. It would be impossible to miss the video, actually, because she’d been alerted to it by not only the headlines popping up on her phone, but also by about a million texts.

The first time she’d watched it was because she didn’t want to believe it.

The second time had been because she needed to see exactly what had happened. It was going to be necessary to report back to their legal team. They could add that meeting to the ever-growing list.

The third time because she was apparently a masochist. A masochist who was pacing around the foyer, waiting for Darcy’s return, because she couldn’t stop this gnawing concern for her.

Darcy had made that exact coffee run dozens upon dozens of times. She’d been snapped by paparazzi a bunch on those coffee runs – they both had – but always at a distance. Even when someone decided to get a little too friendly, it had never been like this.

The entire altercation had lasted for forty-three seconds on the video. Apparently, it only took forty-three seconds to ruin a day.

Her phone buzzed again where she had it firmly clutched in her hand, but unless it was Darcy… she couldn’t really give a fuck right now.

But – hey. At the very least, this provided a wonderful distraction from the phone call she’d just gotten off of with Golden Tide Records!

This – Darcy’s well-being – was just about the only thing that would be able to distract her from that phone call.

The phone call that had everything inside of her raging, her blood pumping through her veins so powerfully, she just wanted to – to scream. She wished she’d been able to push that pap. She wanted to rage, but had no one to rage at.

Juliet’s rage had always been kept on a leash. She’d felt it plenty, but … she was Juliet Jacobs. She had to deal with those emotions privately.

And nothing – nothing other than Harrison himself – had ever made her feel the way the phone call with Golden Tide had just made her feel.

The meeting she’d spent the entire last month covertly setting up so that Thomas, her manager, and Copper Canyon wouldn’t catch wind of it… had been canceled as of eleven minutes ago. Unceremoniously canceled, the rug was pulled swiftly out from under her feet.

Given the circumstances, we think it would be best to revisit this conversation down the road.

“Down the road.”

No timeline. No hint of what that could mean. Which told Juliet everything she needed to know. Confirmed everything she’d been concerned about but had pushed away.

But she’d wanted that label.

More than wanted it; she’d built a future around it in her mind. She’d been able to see it all as her tour had been coming to an end, as she and Darcy had been fervently, passionately, working on their album together.