“What am I doing here?” Bobby asked. “Kid, it’s time to come home. LA is calling.”
Blaire glanced between us. “I’m just going to…head out.”
“Blaire, wait…”
It was the wrong thing to say. I knew it even as it left my mouth. She had no intention of waiting. And now, Bobby fucking Rogers knew that there was a single girl in existence who could make me utter those words.
She shot me one more glare and then walked away. And my manager was here, so I couldn’t follow her. Not that she wanted me to.
“Well then,” Bobby said with a shit-eating grin.
I grabbed him by his stupid lapel and threw him into the dressing room. Then, I followed, slamming the door shut.
“What are you doing here, Bobby?”
“I see why you haven’t left.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Having a little hometown fling.”
“No,” I ground out.
“Surprised a pap hasn’t figured that one out. It’d be good for your image, kid.”
“Don’t call me a kid and leave Blaire out of this. She’s just a friend of my brother’s.”
“If you say so.” His eyes darted back to the door, as if he could see Blaire through the wood, see a way to use her for his own purposes.
“I do say so. Now, cut to the point. You want me back in LA?”
“Not me. If I could, I’d let you have a much longer vacation. The record label wants you to start working on the next album. They need you and the rest of the band in the studio. What you got?”
“I don’t have anything,” I told him.
“Come on. You always keep your little notebook with you. I saw you jotting down songs on tour.”
“They’re trash.”
“You say that about all your songs. We always figure it out in the studio, and they end up working out.”
“Not this time.”
He huffed. “Look, kid, you’ve got to give me something.”
I paced away from him and grabbed my notebook out of my bag. “It’s all rubbish. I don’t want to make any of these songs.”
He snatched the notebook out of my hand and thumbed through the pages. “Hey, hey, some of these are good. They can be reworked.”
“They’re missing something.”
“We can figure out what they’re missing.”
“I’m broken,” I told him with a case of melodrama. I was an artist after all.
“Kid, you’re not broken.”
“Bobby, stop fucking calling me kid.”
“You’re a kid to me,” he said calmly. He was used to dealing with artists. This was his area. “Tell me what the problem is.”
“The songs…they’re not about anything.”
“Is this about the critical reviews of the last album?”
I winced and said nothing. The critics had shredded our last album. Fans fucking loved it. We’d sold out a worldwide stadium tour in under fifteen minutes. But the critics were brutal. They’d called the lyrics trite and boring. They couldn’t believe I’d written this album after the last one had so much heart. I could still hear the words of one particular critic saying, “The album is baseless and unimaginative. Campbell Abbey is a one-trick pony.”
I should have been able to shake it.
But I was afraid they were right.
“I need more time. It’s like I’ve lost my muse.”
Bobby really looked at me. He must have seen the pained desperation on my face. The need to work as an artist and not a machine. The album had to be good enough for me, and with what I had, it wasn’t going to be.
He sighed. “All right. I can give you to the end of July.”
“That’s only a month, Bobby.”
“It’s all the leeway I can pull for you. You have a month to find your muse.” He tossed the notebook back to me. “Either way, you’re going to get your ass on a plane to LA to work on the next album.”
3
Blaire
Campbell was going back to LA.
Good. That was…good. In fact, it was exactly what I wanted. He’d been in Lubbock since Peyton’s wedding. The wedding where I had brought a date and purposely avoided Campbell all night. I’d had a good time. But I would have had a better time if he hadn’t been there at all.
Then, he’d spent the last month in town. A whole fucking month. Hanging out at the winery, spending time with my—our—friends, and generally ruining my peace and quiet.
I couldn’t exactly tell him to leave. He had every right to be back in Lubbock. And I couldn’t tell him to stop hanging out with our friends or at the winery. We were too enmeshed to extricate ourselves from each other’s lives. Which was hilarious when I stopped to think about it. Since in high school, we had been so far from each other’s lives that he didn’t even know I existed until senior year.
LA was where he belonged. It would be better for everyone when he left.
But the last interaction had left me flummoxed. Despite myself, I’d followed Campbell’s rise to fame over the last couple of years. It was hard not to when he was in every headline. I knew the celebrities that he’d dated, the girls he was rumored to have hooked up with, the songs he’d written about the breakups. So, why in the hell had he asked me out?