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“Youaccostedhim?” Cameron presses. “For crying out loud, what did you do, Rhys?”
“It’s not on me!” I jump into defending myself. “He was trying to hit on Alyssa, and he was being a huge fucking creep about it. I just wanted him to leave her alone.”
“Fuck. No wonder I got so many notifications on Instagram this morning.” He sighs. “It looked like everyone was getting hype about the album, even though it doesn’t come out until midnight tonight. I was wondering how people even knew who the hell I was.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I apologize with a shrug. “But look on the bright side! We’ve got a pretty good PR rollout headed our way.”
“Which is going to blow up in our faces if our album isn’t amazing.”
“…Which is why our album is already amazing.” I smirk over at him. “You know it’s okay to get excited about things sometimes, right?”
“Who approved that?” Van asks, now joining the conversation too, his eyes darting back and forth between Cameron and me. “I thought we were going for an organic build with the album, not something so splashy and public—”
“Blame Rhys.” Cameron hastily nods toward me. “He got us a leg-up with Harrison Wentworth.”
“How?”
“…I threatened to break his legs,” I quietly admit.
Van loudly chuckles in response, seeming to be thoroughly amused by my admission.
“Good,” he finally replies. “About time someone put that creep in his place.”
“…Is that us?” Alyssa’s voice is low as she walks up to the rest of us, her attention focused on the billboard. “Oh my God. We look so…”
“Airbrushed?” Van suggests.
“Perfect,” Alyssa finishes her sentence, before a smile breaks across her face. “We look so fucking perfect! We look so good!”
“I guess we do look pretty good together.” I offer her a smile in return, something warming behind my chest at the sight of her seemingly so happy in the moment—
Fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
A sudden realization hits me like a sucker punch to the side of my fucking head.
I’m completely in love with Alyssa Smith.
I manage to keep the realization to myself as I hastily turn away from her, absolutely clueless on what’s supposed to happen next.
Chapter 16
Alyssa
“What happens if we’re a total flop?” I ask while pacing back and forth across Rhys’s living room. The band’s all here, with Van on the couch, calmly reading some literary fiction book about a political scandal while Cameron absentmindedly plays Elton John-like melodies on his keyboard. Rhys is off to himself in the corner, slicing through a block of cheese with half of a cracker sticking out of his mouth.
Which means that no one in the room is giving me the time of day.
“Did I die and turn into a ghost or something?” I joke, even though my tone is lined with anxiety. “You guys can still hear me, right?”
“We can hear you, Alyssa,” Van answers, his face still in his book. “But the whole point of us hiding out at Rhys’s place was so we wouldn’t let ourselves go crazy wondering how our album’s going to be received by the general public.”
“Yeah, Alyssa,” Cameron joins in. “You should calm down. There aren’t going to be any big reviews until after midnight, anyway.”
“Depending on if the critic is in New York,” Van muses.
“Uh, how am I supposed to calm down?” I scoff. “Our debut album’s minutes away from coming out! How is everyone not crawling out of their skin?!”
