AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My eyes bugged out as my back shot straight, indignation dripping down my spine. “What?” I barked, my voice so aggressive Tortellini looked away from his food for two seconds before diving back in.
“Relax, Freckles. It’s really not a big deal.”
How he could say something like this wasn’t a big deal was beyond me. “What could your manager possibly be pissed about that he’d give out your private number to a complete stranger?”
Roan heaved out a sigh and flipped the burner off beneath the bacon. He spoke as he began transferring each strip onto a paper-towel-covered plate.
“It’s not just him. It’s the label too. They’re upset I’m not caving to what they want; I’m holding my ground on what comes next with my career.”
The blood in my veins began to chill. Talk of his career, his fame, was something I’d intentionally been avoiding. In the back of my head, I knew that mentality wasn’t sustainable, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to keep Roan to myself for as long as possible. I’d lost him to his career once before. It was inevitable that it would happen again.
He plated the bacon and slid one plate in front of me, placing the other in front of him and digging in. I, on the other hand, had suddenly lost my appetite.
I dragged the tines of my fork through the sunny yellow yolk, breaking it and spreading it across the plate. “What is it you’re fighting back on?”
“Mainly, what I’ll be releasing next.”
As hard as I’d tried to avoid Roan’s music over the years, it had been impossible not to catch bits and pieces here and there. One of my issues with his songs was they were so far in the opposite direction of what he sang when we’d been together. The songs he used to play for me in the living room of our shitty apartment were full of heart and passion and emotion. Those songs meant something. But everything he’d released since signing with a big label had been watered-down country anthems about good times, cold beer, and women.
The music that made him famous wasn’t him. At least not the man I used to know. But the masses gobbled that meaningless shit up.
A voice in the back of my head kept screaming at me to let the subject drop, if I let the real world creep in now, I’d lose him sooner than I was ready. But my curiosity got the best of me. I still couldn’t bring myself to look up at him, but I also couldn’t keep from asking, “Oh? And what’s that?”
“I want to recordmymusic,” he answered. “Songs I actually give a shit about. Songs that mean something.”
My head shot up at that, and I found him watching me closely, a grin on his face. “Yeah, I was starting to wonder what it was going to take to get you to look at me.”
My eyelids narrowed in a glare. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh. Sure you don’t.” He crunched into a piece of toast and followed it with a sip of coffee, black, how he’d always taken it, while mine was full of milk and sugar, masking the coffee taste completely, how I liked it. “Anyway, I decided I was tired of putting out the same bullshit, one album after another. Each one has been a version of the same goddamn thing. I laid down a few tracks on my own dime recently, stuff similar to what I used to play when we were together. Meaningful songs. But the label didn’t like that. They wanted more of the same, and I basically told them they could fuck off.”
I choked on my sip of orange juice and proceeded to cough and sputter as I tried to work it out. “Youwhat? Can you really do that? What if they drop you?”
He shrugged like he didn’t have a care in the world. “I can do whatever the hell I want. My name’s big enough; I don’t really need them anymore. I can produce my next album on my own or call some of the connections I’ve made over the years and hire a producer myself, one that sees my vision. My contract is about up with the label. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, and maybe they aren’t the best fit for me anymore.”
A tiny little coal of excitement deep inside of me sparked to life and the thought that maybe things were different this time around filtered into my mind.
But I quickly snuffed it out. All Roan had ever wanted from the moment I met him was to be famous, to have his music played to millions of people across the country. He’d succeeded in that, and I couldn’t imagine him wanting to give that up. Besides, he wasn’t talking about leaving his career behind. He was simply re-evaluating the direction it was going in and thinking of shifting gears. That didn’t mean there would all of a sudden be room for me. That was a world I hadn’t fit in ten years ago, so what made me think I could all of the sudden fit now? And did I even want to?
It was those thoughts that had the few bites of breakfast I’d taken sitting like a lead ball in the pit of my stomach.
Nothing had changed, not really. Eventually, Roan would go back to Nashville. The ending of... whatever the hell we were doing would be here before I knew it.
I swallowed down a gulp of coffee and pushed down the unpleasantness swirling around in my brain.
Whether this ended sooner or later didn’t matter. The fact was, I had him now. And I was going to make the most of the time we had left together.
I shoved my plate away and hopped off the barstool, slowly rounding the counter as he looked on with curiosity.
“What’s the matter? Are you not hungry?”
I smiled, slipping the persona I’d been wearing for the past decade right back into place. “Oh, I’m hungry,” I told him, stopping mere inches away and dragging my fingernail down the center of his chest my gaze catching on the date tattooed there. “Starved actually. But I’m in the mood for something else.”
A groan worked its way from him chest as he wrapped an arm around my waist and yanked me to him, slamming his lips against mine in a bruising kiss. He pulled back just enough to look in my eyes, his own having gone dark with need.
“Then get on your knees and have your fill, baby. It’s all for you, anyway.”
I didn’t have to be told twice.
