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“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it’s over with her. She has no bearing on us, so I didn’t want to get into it.” He seemed kind of annoyed to be talking about her now.
I snorted. “She certainly has bearing now, especially since I’m partnered withher man. Right,babe?” My snide tone was oh-so petty, but I couldn’t keep it at bay. I’d been blindsided by that clip. Thank goodness I’d only had Georgia with me, but that didn’t change the fact that everyone else in America saw it.Damn it.It was so humiliating.
Trenton’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know what that was about. I haven’t talked to her since she broke it off.”
“She broke it off?” From her words, I had surmised that she was the jilted ex who hadn’t gotten over the breakup.
“Yeah.” He laughed bitterly. “Her publicist advised her that it would be better for her career if she dated her costar instead of me.”
I blinked. “Are you serious?” I tried to remember if I’d seen anything online about her dating her costar, but I came up blank. I hadn’t had much time lately to pay attention to celebrity gossip.
He pursed his lips. “Now do you see why I didn’t want to talk about it?”
“But why would she say those things about you, then?”
He ran a hand through his hair, and with the motion, his shirt rose a few inches to show a sliver of his abdomen. Despite my hurt and frustration, my belly warmed at the sight. “I have no idea. We’re doing well onSing Battle, which is getting me some attention, so perhaps I’m suddenly famous enough for her. It wasn’t cool that they interviewed her. I already blasted Evan over it, but apparently, he didn’t know they were using her.”
“Evan knows every other damn thing about the show,” I muttered.
Trenton pursed his lips. “Evan is a lot of things, but he’s a good friend. He would never take part in something so manipulative.”
“That wasn’t what I was implying.” Except maybe it was. The show had made me crazy enough that I couldn’t say for sure. I barely had a toenail in the music business, but perhaps it had already hardened me and made me more cynical than I already was.
Trenton took my hands in his. “Let’s take a day off and do something not related to the show.”
“We don’t have time to slack off, not at this point in the competition,” I protested. “Besides, we just had a break at Thanksgiving.”
“That was weeks ago, and the show is much more stressful now,” he argued. “You’re no good to anyone if you get burned out. This week, we’re doing one of my songs, right? That’ll be easy for us. We don’t need to rehearse as much as we normally would.”
He had a valid point. The requirement for the week was to turn one of the celebrity partner’s songs into a duet. I had opinions about that because it would naturally give more attention to the celebrities than the contestants because audiences would much rather hear the original artist sing than the contestant cover it. It seemed that ratings were all that mattered to the producers. From a business perspective, I got it—the show needed to make money. But from a contestant’s perspective, it sucked.
He was also correct that I wouldn’t be much good in rehearsal. Despite the perfectly reasonable explanation he’d given me, I was still wound up over the Lindsey situation. I hated that I’d let it get in the way of preparing for the performance. Maybe if I wasn’t in a relationship with Trenton, it wouldn’t hurt so much. Maybe then it would simply be frustrating and annoying.
I’d broken my rule about not dividing my focus between my career and a man. The saying that rules were made to be broken was shit, because breaking that one had made me miserable.
Trenton
I wracked my brain to come up with a suitable activity for Ali and me. Anything even remotely related to the entertainment industry was out, since that was precisely what I was trying to distract her from. It was a head-scratcher, for sure. Neither of us was outdoorsy, so I didn’t suggest a hike. Daylight was waning, so the beach was out. Besides that, it wasn’t good beach weather. Suddenly, an idea occurred to me.
Two hours after swinging by Ali’s hotel so she could change clothes, we arrived at Dodger Stadium.
Ali frowned. “I didn’t think it was baseball season.”
Good—she hadn’t seen any advertisements or understood what the sign for Dodgers Holiday Festival meant. I had wanted it to be a surprise. Normally, she probably would have peppered me with questions, trying to figure out what my scheme was. The fact that she was silent told me she was still upset. We were doing the right thing by taking a mental health break.
I was happy to be there with her, but I wished it was just a normal date. There was nothing I could do about that except make the most of it. “It’s not,” I assured her. “This is even better.”
She seemed skeptical, but as soon as we entered the stadium and she saw the ice-skating rink set up on the outfield, she grinned. “I didn’t know you skated.”
“I don’t. I’m fully prepared to fall on my ass.”
“It’s not that hard,” she assured me.
My face fell. “Please don’t tell me you got a minor in figure skating to go along with your opera.”
