“No, Ty. It’s not you.” Zoey covered my hand with hers. “It hurt me seeing you like that. When I found out you were a willing participant in all of it? I understand why you think you were a bad guy. It just devastates me that my actions caused you to have such low self-esteem that you’d allow that.”
Tell her. Tell her. Tell her.
The words wouldn’t come. I was a coward. I continued my justification ramblings. “I know, I was stupid. It took a while for me to come out of it because of all of my substance abuse, but one morning after a particularly embarrassing hookup, I looked in the mirror and my mom stared back at me. I didn’t like it one bit. I’m a guy who only ever wanted to play my music. It made me sick. So, I stopped. Cold turkey. I’ve never looked back.”
Zoey sighed but remained silent, allowing me to finish my story.
“I’m the one who allowed it. I knew I needed help. The therapist I told you about. She specialized in counseling rock musicians. I was able to come to grips with a lot about my childhood, my insecurities, and my tendency to let things happen to me rather than me having a say in my life. Jace cleaned it up. He’ll clean this up too.”
Yeah, I realized the hypocrisy as I spoke the words.
“But then you let them do it all again when they set you up with Ronni.”
Tell her. Tell her. Tell her.
My heart pounded so loudly I swore I could hear it.
The door buzzed, room service had arrived. Relieved at the reprieve, I got up to answer and tipped the delivery girl a hundred dollars just so she’d go away. I returned to the bedroom with a tray of food. Zoey joined me on the edge of the bed. I set the chicken tenders, club sandwich, French fries, cheese sticks, and tomato salad on the bench.
We delved in and devoured the food in silence.
After we finished, I shoved the tray outside the door into the hallway and clicked on the “do not disturb” light. “Let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow, I’m getting to the bottom of this bullshit, babe. I will protect you. I will protect us.”
“Okay. I trust you. The article really sucks. In the meantime, I’ll try not to let some shit-stirring publicist or any article define me.”
“That’s good.”
“After tomorrow, that bitch better be fucking fired though,” Zoey mumbled as she drifted back to sleep.
God, I loved my feisty girl so much. I didn’t deserve her.
Still, I couldn’t sleep. I felt like I’d sidestepped a landmine tonight. I knew the right thing to do was to tell Zoey what happened with Sienna. I just didn’t know how to do it. The words just wouldn’t come out. Zoey was right to be skeptical of Sienna’s motives, after all she was doing what she always did. Create controversy just to solve it.
But would she tell Zoey what happened that night?
Something told me that if I didn’t get my shit together by morning, I’d face an entire field full of landmines that would be hard to come back from.
Chapter 29
ZOEY
My anxiety about the entire mess waned when Ty cuddled me and promised to fix things. Not so much in the early morning light , waiting for yet another discussion about the goddamn media. With goddamn Sienna.
So much about her bothered me.
From outward appearances, I probably looked calm. Freshly showered, dressed in leggings and a plain white T-shirt, I was sitting on the couch, watching the bustling city below me. But it had been a few hours now, and the shock and panic at the label of “crazy, stalker bitch” had fully set in. This weird fictional account of me was out there for everyone to read and it had multiplied. The story now had even more hits than the sweet photos Jace posted.
Hell, if I didn’t know myself, after reading it I’d also think I was a crazy, evil, ugly, fat, skanky, lying, opportunistic slut who had toyed with Ty’s emotions for years. Such a nice way to describe a twenty-six-year-old woman who never got into any trouble whatsoever. Gotta love the misogyny.
It made me want to crawl out from under my skin and disappear. I couldn’t cry. I could barely breathe. All I could do was stare out the window while my mind whirled. And contemplate ways that I could move to somewhere exotic where nobody knew me, like Zanzibar.
Which made me inappropriately laugh out loud because, well, Tenacious D. Thank god for my dad’s musical library.
Katherine, Sienna, and Andrew had come to some understanding about strategy. Katherine and Jace had left to meet with the legal team. Sienna and Andrew sat in our living area, tapping away on their laptops. I didn’t like that they were still involved, but I also didn’t have much choice. And so, to my chagrin, I was relinquishing my need for control and trusting that Ty and his team would have my back.
Even though I was certain that Sienna did not have my back.
From what I could ascertain, Katherine had managed to get the original article pulled at the publisher level, but other articles had spun off and gone viral, and now, entirely new articles and publications had their own versions up. Every celebrity magazine was running stories about the love triangle between me, Ty, and Ronni, and offering up their own “journalistic” commentary. It was like a game of whack-a-mole, and I couldn’t stop reading everything that popped up in my Google alert.
A loud knock at the door startled me, and Ty went to answer it, even though he was on the phone to the band’s lawyers. As if things couldn’t get any worse, the most beautiful, chestnut-haired, buxom beauty I’d ever seen in real life practically danced into the suite. My mouth hung open when none other than a cheery Ronni Miller sauntered into the room and gave
