My curiosity finally erupted.

I knew it was a mistake...but I had to.

"What on Earth are you talking about?"

He looked legitimately surprised.

"You... wait, you don't know?"

"Know what?"

Steven's face curled into surprised menace.

"Ohhhh...you're in for a world of fun."

He whipped out his smartphone and began fiddling with it for a minute. By the time he'd pulled up a webpage for me, I was thoroughly confused.

But that confusion quickly turned to horror.

It was a highly trafficked celebrity news and gossip site called "Web News Now", or WNN for short. Right there at the top was the latest article: RARE: Trent Masters spotted hara.s.sing employees, treating mystery woman. Sugar baby, or s.e.xy new fling? Interview inside!

"Go on," he whispered wickedly. "Read it."

Swallowing my hesitance, I opened the article. Inside were the cell phone pictures we had seen before the ones that the attendant had deleted off of her phone as well as a few others after we had left her company.

"I don't... but how?" I asked. "We made her delete these! We watched her do it in front of us!"

"You're that nave?" Steven snarled. "By the time you two spotted her, she could have already emailed them to herself or texted them to friends or let them upload to the f.u.c.king cloud. There's all sorts of ways to keep them. That would be bad enough, but Trent got the girl fired?"

My spirits sank as I continued reading.

Sure enough, there were a few paragraphs of speculation about Trent in public with me, buying me clothes, and then about my relationship to him...

But after that, there was the interview.

Turned out, that girl who went by the shortened "Chel" for the interview had taken offense to Trent snapping at her. She'd leaked the photos intentionally, by the sounds of it, and during the small interview she went on the absolute warpath.

WNN: Meeting Trent must have been fun, right? What was he like in person?

CHEL: Complete paranoid jacka.s.s.

WNN: Oh? Care to go on?

CHEL: He was cool at first, but the longer I was talking to him, the weirder he sounded. Like he was a loose cannon or something. Then, he lost his s.h.i.t at me for absolutely no reason at all like a total f*cking douchebag.

WNN: And that's why you reached out to us? With the photos and the interview?

CHEL: I just think that the world deserves to know how much of a creep and an a.s.shole Trent Masters really is.

WNN: You didn't provoke him?

CHEL: He was buying clothes for this vapid b.i.t.c.h who clearly didn't know what she was doing. I worked at the store, so I thought I'd do my actual job and, you know, help?

WNN: And that's when he lost his temper?

CHEL: Yeah! He threatened me, and I decided to peace out away from that. But when she came out in our clothes again, we have to keep an eye on the clients, right? So I dutifully hovered out of the way.

WNN: And when he saw you, he was angry.

CHEL: Oh, he lost his s.h.i.t. They both did. And that's when he made a scene to my manager. I thought that might be the end of it, but no, the jacka.s.s made some phone call and got me f*cking fired.

WNN: Just for doing your job.

CHEL: I used to think he was totally cool.

WNN: Don't meet your heroes, as they say.

CHEL: Yeah. He even said that to me before he pulled my livelihood out from under me. I'm a college student, putting myself through school, and some rockstar high school dropout decides he's going to screw my life up? Not cool, dude.

WNN: Not cool indeed.

CHEL: And the girl didn't try to stop him or come to my aid at all. She just watched him tear my life up. She's probably f*cking him. I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted to get rid of me to have a quickie in the dressing room.

WNN: Tell us about this mystery woman.

CHEL: Woman? Nah, dude, this groupie chick is way out of her f.u.c.king league with a guy like him. Didn't see much of her. She had obvious lovey dovey eyes for him. I mean, what girl who likes a bad boy wouldn't?

WNN: You think she's a groupie?

CHEL: Or a prost.i.tute. She certainly dressed like the kind of hooker a rockstar would go for.

WNN: Think that's his girlfriend?

CHEL: No way. Trent Masters doesn't date. And even if he did...after he flew off the handle at me and ripped out my only way to make a paycheck, I pity ANYONE who winds up stuck with that low-life, grade-A son of a b.i.t.c.h.

WNN: Thanks for your time, Chel!

CHEL: Thanks.

I looked up from the phone with horror and regret plastered across my face.

"She's lying," I told him in futility.

"I don't care if she made up every f.u.c.king word," Steven glowered. "The truth is, you've been a liability from the start. A distraction. You've been around my client for weeks, now. Did you know that he's not returning my calls, texts, even my emails?"

He poked his finger into my chest again.

"Trent's too wound up with you. You've been keeping him preoccupied from his duties to the band, to his manager, to everything."

"He just got back! He's relaxing!"

"Yeah. And as careful as he is, he's back one day with you and then something like this s.h.i.t happens. Did you know that he's never been caught by the paparazzi? Not even a single cell phone picture? Guy is clean as a whistle. You come into the picture, you f.u.c.k it up from the word Go."

"He should be back tonight," I told him. "I don't have a phone...I can wait for him and tell him to talk to you. That it's urgent."

"Little late for that, sweetie," Steven growled. "You see, my job isn't to f.u.c.k Trent. My job is to make sure that he stays on the straight and narrow. And you have made my job this much harder."

"So, we'll wait for him to get back, and then we'll talk it all over and find out what we need to do."

"Nuh-uh. Ain't gonna fly."

He crossed his arms and looked at me expectantly.

"So...what, then?"

"You make a decision," Steven told me pointedly, tilting his head. He was almost grinning. "You either decide to stay here and continue distracting your little rockstar crush, or you let him move on with his life and continue making the magic happen."

"You...you want me to leave?"

"Of course I do. You've been a thorn in my side and his since the start."

"That's not true," I told him furiously.

"No? Do you have any idea how hard he works to keep this band together and out of trouble? And now he's publicly p.i.s.sing off fans and getting coverage on the biggest paparazzi site on the web."

"Of course I know how hard he works. He tries as hard as he can to keep a clean image. And she's lying," I insisted.

"Of course she's f.u.c.king lying! You think I don't know my own band? But what does that matter? The damage is done. This is how it starts. He's going to be scrutinized now, and they'll find something else, and then something else, and another..."

I shook my head.

No. He'd knock Steven out if he were here.

"Of course, Trent doesn't listen to reason, either," Steven continued. "He's gonna run this entire thing into the ground for a hot piece of a.s.s, isn't he? It's not even just him you'll drag back down into the dirt with yourself. You'll be taking the whole band with you."

My breath caught in my throat.

"No...that can't..."

"If I were you and I am so glad that I'm not I'd ditch town. It's still fresh in his head. Trent hasn't totally invested in you. You're still just some groupie to him, you know? You can get out without hurting his feelings."

"But that's not true," I answered sadly. "We talked so much... he went out of his way to try and prove how much he cares..."

"And you fell for that? What are you, f.u.c.king eighteen? Do you know how many girls that a.s.shole has made feel special right before he rips their heart out?"

The sound of his raucous laughter was like a pail of icy water to my face. It snapped me out of the daze I'd been in for the last few days no, the last few weeks.

I'm just a distraction.

A liability.

His laughter started to die down, and Steven looked at me with something that vaguely resembled pity.

"You see it now," he told me sympathetically. "How stupid you've been. You thought you could change him? You seriously thought that you would be the one girl in the world who would improve him?"

I turned away.

I spoke the only words I could.

"I don't have any money," I told him.

"Of f.u.c.king course you don't. Do you think he'd just leave you his credit card or something? He doesn't trust you, honey. He never really has."

The words stung. I wanted to run and hide and never come back up for sunlight.

"I can't get a bus without money."

Steven went silent.

I looked up at him, afraid that he was angry. But no... he was merely calculating, weighing options in his head.

"Listen. Pack your s.h.i.t. I'll take care of the bus ticket. And I'll even toss you a few hundred bucks to get you on your feet when you're there."

"You would... do that?"

"Of course," he told me. He wasn't smiling. "You think I'm a bad guy? I'm just doing my f.u.c.king job. Ironing out the creases. Cutting off loose ends. It's what I'm supposed to do. Doesn't mean I'm a p.r.i.c.k. Trent just paints me that way because he doesn't like it. Who would? I'm sympathetic..."

I nodded quietly.

"Like I said, pack your s.h.i.t. I'll have you on a bus in the hour. Where do you need to go? Back to Riverton, or wherever it was called?"

"No," I shook my head. "I can't go back there... Not after the way I left..."

"Smart thinking," Steven agreed. "Maybe you're more intelligent than I would have figured. So, where are you going instead? Pick a spot, honey. I can have you on a bus to Miami, or Philadelphia, or wherever the f.u.c.k you wanna go."

I sighed heavily. There was only one other place in the world for me... one other place where I knew I really deserved to be. It's where I should have been all along.

A place so terrible I shut it out.

A place so awful I never thought about it.

I took a deep breath. "It's time I went back home."

25.