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“How big of a problem is this going to become?” Taylor was never good at beating around the bush.
“It’s not a problem.”
Taylor tapped my wrist over my bandage. “Your hands and Sebastian say otherwise.”
“What did that prick say?”
“You know he could sue you. You assaulted an employee.” He rested his chin on his palm.
“Hardly. I knocked a drink out of his hand.” My head was far too fuzzy to talk about this.
“You’re lucky he’s one of us and cares more about loyalty than a payday or selling his story to a gossip site.” Taylor picked at a loose thread on the quilt. It was one my mom had made. She gave us each one when we left for our first tour. We used them to curl up in the back of our van to catch some rest, but we all kept them.
“I’ll make my best attempt to refrain from punching any more employees.”
“Have you seen what this is doing for us?” Taylor changed directions, and my brain didn’t want to keep up.
“What?”
He leaned to the side, half on my leg, to pull his phone out of his pocket. Opening it up before flipping around to lie on the pillow next to me. “The fans are losing their shit. Every day he’s trending, talking about what he might wear. They are going as feral for him as they do Harry. Maybe more so. Not all of his choices are loved, but Aspen is killing it. There are whole pages on Tumblr and Tiktok dedicated to collecting all the photos from each night to show off what he wore. We’ve never trended this much in our whole career.” Taylor showed me photos as he spoke.
Every angle of Aspen and entire pages of my worst nightmare. I felt myself getting hard.
Fuck.
I put one bandaged hand over my dick, hoping that would disguise it enough so Taylor wouldn’t notice.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“It’s taking over the internet. There are cosplayers recreating looks. Queer influencers promoting us. We have sold out every one of our shows, and the label is talking to Levi and our tour manager about adding more shows or another leg for the spring.”
“That’s great. So round two of this.” Hell two point oh.
He side-eyed me. “There it is.”
“Maybe you need to look at it differently. No publicist in the world could do a better job. It’s burying the stuff about Kingsley, and I don’t know if that was Aspen’s plan because who could mastermind all this, but it’s helping.”
“And I’m the liability.” Maybe I should quit. Taylor was the only one who would mind. He’d always been the odd man out with the three of us.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” I glanced over at him. “I’m glad he’s happy.”
“Do you really hate him?”
“I’ve never hated Aspen. I hate myself.” Too honest. I needed to shut myself up.
“Why?”
“I’ve already turned away from everything my dad wanted for me. I can’t be…this.”
Taylor narrowed his eyes, confusion quickly changing into realization.
ELEVEN
Royal
Welcome to hell should have been the name of the next week of my life.
