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I shrieked and wiggled, trying to get free. The only thing my struggle accomplished was me shaking my ass in his face. That led to me asking for a much different thing, and I found myself breaking another rule of mine—getting naked in the not-quite studio.
But it was worth it.
In a way, Georgia had fared better than I had, since Walter already had a duet in his catalogue. That meant she had more downtime than usual since her partner didn’t need to rehearse. “It’s a good thing,” she explained as we sat side-by-side in pedicure chairs. “The poor man is tired. I sometimes wonder if Brandon should have put his foot down and not let his grandfather do the show. Walter is stubborn, though, so I can’t imagine that going over well.”
“Speaking of Brandon, how are things going on that front?”
Georgia’s eyes lit up. “Fantastic. He took me to dinner the other night after rehearsal. Did I tell you that?”
“Nope.”
“Of course I didn’t”—Georgia wriggled her eyebrows—“because you haven’t been coming back to the hotel some nights.”
My first reaction was to look around to see if anyone was listening, but no one paid us any mind. We might have been on the number one singing competition show in America, but our faces weren’t instantly recognizable like some of our celebrity counterparts’. Besides that, it was LA. People were used to seeing celebrities, or so I assumed.
“That is also going well,” I said in a neutral tone that gave nothing away.
Georgia groaned. “You’re still pulling that ‘I don’t kiss and tell’ crap, aren’t you?”
“You might have better luck asking Trenton for details,” I said, and she scowled. But what did she expect? Even if I had been in a more sharing mood, I certainly wasn’t going to air my naked laundry in the middle of a nail salon.
Later that night, after we both had eaten yet another dinner of sad prepackaged salads, I lay in bed, waiting for my face mask to harden so I could scrub it off and go to sleep. I was scrolling through my phone when it chimed with an incoming text from my little sister. I frowned. It was after ten, which meant it was after one a.m. in Ohio. She should have been asleep.
OMG!!! You made out with Trenton Mazer and didn’t tell me!
There were several things wrong with her text. First of all, how did she know that? And second, why would she think I would share those details with her? My sister and I were close, but she was thirteen. If I wasn’t going to confide in Georgia, I sure as hell wasn’t going to talk to Emily.
I might have kissed him. What do you know about it?
She sent me a screenshot of a picture of us kissing at the skating rink. It had been taken right as I’d come off the ice. It was actually a cute picture of the two of us—my legs were in his lap, and his arms were around me—but it was creepy, considering I hadn’t known anyone was taking our picture. If I was going to have career in pop music, I supposed I would have to get used to that sort of thing.
She texted me another picture of us holding hands in the Christmas marketplace. Yet another picture popped up in my texts, of me kissing him after he’d bought me the ornament.Jesus.Had someone been following us? Or had several different people recognized us and taken pictures? Either way, it was a little unsettling. The last photo had captured a special moment that I’d thought was between the two of us—or at least us and anyone within sight at the marketplace. I didn’t like that it had been shared with the world.
Trenton’s unease with the media suddenly made a lot more sense.
There are tons of them!Emily texted.
Thanks. It’s late. Go to bed!
She sent me the angry-face emoji.
Curious, I opened Google and typed my name in an image search. I got hundreds of hits, most of them stills from mySing Battleappearances. But there were also a fair number of pictures of Trenton and me on our skating date. Since we’d gone out in public before, it hadn’t even occurred to me to be worried about something like that. I obviously knew Trenton was a celebrity, but somewhere along the line, I’d stopped focusing on it.
I clicked on one of the images to read the accompanying article. I didn’t have to scan past the headline to get the gist of it: “Ali Prescott claps back at Lindsey Piccolo with kiss that claims Trenton Mazer as her man.”
They only got worse from there: “In Your Face, Lindsey Piccolo! Trenton Mazer is MY man!” and “Trenton’s tough choice: bona fide movie star or maybe pop star?” The one that really sucker punched me was “Ali Prescott plays the lovebird angle to drum up sympathy votes onSing Battle.” That was the only article I actually read, and I wished I hadn’t. The title was a succinct summary, and reading that point reiterated over and over made me sick to my stomach. Even worse were the reader comments at the bottom. I was nearly physically ill before I forced myself to stop reading.
It was all my fault.If I’d kept my distance from Trenton, as I’d originally planned, none of that would have happened. People might still have speculated that we were successful because he was pulling in the majority of the audience votes—and I couldn’t refute that it might have been true—but they wouldn’t have been able to claim that I was essentially sleeping my way to success.
I exhaled. There was no way for anyone to know that Trenton and I were sleeping together and that we had an actual relationship. I didn’t know if that made these speculations better or worse.
I did an image search for Trenton. The first several pages of hits were a mixture of just him or him in Misdirection. It wasn’t until the fifth page that the photos of the two of us appeared. When I had searched for my name, the pictures had come up instantly. So if I crashed and burned onSing Battle, my lasting internet legacy would be the posts accusing me of trying to manipulate voters. Meanwhile, they were barely a blip on Trenton’s online presence.
I called him, and when he answered, I told him to Google my name. Though he seemed confused by the request, he did it. A moment later, he cursed. “This is clickbait, Ali. You know that.”
I agreed with him—I’d definitely clicked.How many others had too?“Did you read what people are saying?”
“I don’t give a shit about what people are saying because I know the truth.”
