Playing Autumn (Breathe Rockstar Romance Book 1) (2 page)

Chapter 2

Who was she again?

Oliver Cabrera had long since given up on remembering every name and face he met on the road, in fancy executive lounges, and airports. He approached the beautiful young woman waiting near the boarding gate because his fear—no, it wasn't really a fear—had returned. But when he got close enough to see her face, he actually recognized her. Sort of. Almost.

Maybe he went to school with her? Except the last time he was actually in regular school was the fifth grade, and apart from Chris Minot (now his manager, then his neighbor), he had no idea where his friends from there were and what they looked like.

He'd remember
her
if he actually knew her then. He was sure of it. And if she didn't look like that as an eleven-year-old, then good job growing up. She had wonderfully bright not-quite-red hair tumbling down her shoulders unself-consciously. The slight touch of pink on her nose and cheekbones looked like actual sun exposure, which he didn't see enough of. Much as he respected people who knew their SPF, that unintentionally sun-kissed thing was a turn-on.

So he tried talking to her, in case it would jog his memory, but it didn't. Yet. Hearing her voice actually made the nagging feeling worse.

In any case, she didn't react like an old friend to his sudden appearance. Or better, she didn’t seem like a bitter ex, because there were a few of those in his past too. In fact, she didn't react all that much. She would be able to help with the Not-Fear nicely.

The fear that was
not a fear
, by the way, was this thing he had, a general discomfort whenever he had to ride public transport and not know who might be sitting nearby. He had a problem, he knew. One among several.

During the height of his solo career, four years and an eternity ago, he managed to live a life that required a lot of travel but never alone. Or he got to ensure that no strangers would be breathing the same air as soon as he exhaled.

But the solo career was no longer at its height, and was in fact close to the bottom or at that very spot, so he couldn't be an ass about this. Not anymore.

The dread over this flight in general could also be explained by the unsavory mission that was powering it. Oliver was rarely in a position of being someone’s only hope, and he managed to stumble into being a so-called “only hope” for himself, his best friend in the world, and the very army of people who made him what he was.

So maybe it was that, huh? And not some irrational, childhood Not-Fear. It was frightening, to the point of paralysis, to be a reluctant savior.

***

It wasn't a full flight, and he was relieved to see that she had her row to herself. So as soon as the “fasten seat belt” sign was off, he jumped out of his seat and asked to join her.

“Are they going to let you do that?” she said, but it looked like she was going to, anyway.

Oliver took the aisle seat, leaving the middle free, hoping the gesture made her feel that he wasn't a creepy seat-jumper. “I do this all the time,” he said nonchalantly. When he was a kid, yes. And when he flew coach. Both those events were separated from today by more than a decade.

He buckled up, tossed her a smile as she watched him, and settled in.

She was smiling all right, but it was the cautious smile of someone looking at a rattlesnake. “You're going to tell me what this is about, right?” she said. “Because I can press a button and those flight attendants will be so on you.”

“Of course. I'm sorry, I didn't get your name—”

“Haley.”

“Haley, I'm Oliver. What you're doing is helping someone who has, um,
quirks
whenever he has to travel like this. Believe me, you're being a hero right now.”

She frowned a little. “Is it a fear of flying?”

“No no no, nothing as simple as that,” Oliver said. He took a deep breath and might have inhaled some of Haley's perfume at the same time. He had no clue how to identify the stuff, but it smelled good. Comforting. Clean. He felt the nerves start to go away. “It's more of the not knowing who I'll be sitting with.”

“What?”

“It's not a phobia.”

“You mean if you
knew
whom you were sitting with, you'll be okay?”

“Yes, that makes things loads easier.”

It looked to him that Haley's wall had started to come down, and maybe she wasn't going to sic the flight attendants on him after all. “So why do you still travel alone?”

“I try not to. This one couldn't be avoided.”

“Okay.” She looked like she was going to start reading her magazine again, but then: “Are you like this in buses too?”

He usually did not want to talk about this, but what the hell. He owed her that. “And trains.”

“How about cars?”

“Not cars.”

“The plane isn't full. You can't go to an empty row?”

Oliver shook his head, taking another deep breath. “You don't understand. If I take an empty row, the next three hours will be spent obsessing over who might move to my row. There will be dread.”

“So your solution is to move to my row. The one I had all to myself.”

He'd been like this for as long as he could remember after what he suspected was an incident at a school bus that he'd blocked out. But his parents were professional musicians who performed across the country all the time, and he had flown with them often, so who knew when and where it actually happened?

“No one's going to take the middle seat,” Oliver said, “And I'm comfortable with you now. Trust me, this is the best way for me to take this flight without freaking out.”

“This is so weird,” Haley said, but now she was amused at least. “What an odd phobia.”

“It's not a phobia,” Oliver insisted. “It's a thing. A problem. That you've already helped with. Are you visiting or going home?”

“What?”

“Houston.”

“Oh. Both, kind of. I grew up there but live in Tampa now. Since the summer started, anyway.”

“Do you work there?”

“Yeah. I teach.”

“Do you like it?”

Haley set down her reading material. “Yes, I do. I'm a tutor for the kids of a really rich family. What are you doing now, Oliver?”

“Me? Nothing.”

She bit her lip and her head shook a little. “I know who you are, Oliver Cabrera. You can't be doing
nothing
. Aren't you in the middle of a tour right now, writing new songs, something like that?”

Then, a new sensation. He felt
embarrassed
that she knew who he was. For years, that was not the case. He had taken it for granted that every attractive woman he'd get to talk to would know who he was and was even talking to him because of that fact. It was the future he had seen for himself, as the pre-teen music geek, and he actually enjoyed it. Took pride in it. Indulged a little too much in it.

But today, with Haley, he felt for the first time what the pre-teen music geek's future was probably
really
destined to be had the rock star stage never happened. It felt more than a little crappy.

“Like I said, I'm not doing anything,” Oliver told her. “You probably know that my record company dropped me last month?”

That was the simplest way to say it. What actually happened was that the record company had decided that they were going to make it impossible for him to finish the album they were obligated to release if he did not make one exactly the way they wanted.

In his mind, they had already dropped him.

But for Chris, who had quit his job to manage Oliver, this deal was worth saving. And to the producers of
Tomorrow’s Talent
, the show that had catapulted him to stardom (however briefly), this was their final shot. The show had been tanking in the ratings for years, producing winners who barely made a dent in pop culture let alone music sales, and the ax of cancellation was dangling over them. Unless Oliver,
their
Oliver, the odd, unlikely success they had released into the wild, could do one more thing for them.

You owe us.

If it were just the
TT
folk, Oliver had no problem telling them to fuck off and enjoy a last martini as the ship sank. He was not the kind of artist they wanted their winners to be, and his victory was one of those flukes of time and space that never happened again. They made sure it never happened again: making little changes in the rules to prevent another Oliver Upset, promoting him as little as possible, leaving him out of show retrospectives, providing only the minimum of support when he needed them.

Get your darlings to suck popstar dick for you.
(He actually said.)

You know we tried, right? But let’s face it—you were the best thing to come out of this program. Because you actually knew what you were doing. The others are drones who listen to people who don’t know the answers. We think that if you make this happen, you’ll do it right. You’ll make something out of it.

I can’t even get my own record label to release something the way I want it. What makes you think I can do this well enough to save your asses?

Jesus, Cabrera, is this how badly they’ve run you down? You know why you won, don’t you? Because when you’re next to a hack, you look like a fucking diamond.

I don’t work well with others.

We’re merely asking you to be a diamond next to a hack all over again.

(He reluctantly agreed at this point, to the whole thing, because the ass-kissing had worked on him. He also believed it, mostly.)

Haley’s eyes widened, and it had sympathy, which was probably close to pity, and that didn't feel good at all. “No. I didn't. That must suck.”

That it did. But did they have to spend the rest of this flight going over that? Not if he could help it. “So yeah. Tutoring high school kids. What's that like?”

Chapter 3

Oh my God.

So Haley was mortified,
mortified
, to not know that Oliver had been dropped by his label, and to have been told by Oliver himself. Was it announced somewhere? She would have noticed it if it had been, right? Back in the day she knew all of this, every little thing about him, more than she knew her little brother's daily activities.

It was probably her fault, kind of, why he was dropped at all. She grew up and stopped being as
fangirly
. She didn't even buy his last album. When did that come out even? Couldn’t have been more than a year ago. She kept meaning to, out of nostalgia, but the weeks and then months went by and she… moved on.

This was all her fault. “I'm sorry,” she said before she could stop herself.

“What?”

“I'm sorry about the record deal thing,” Haley said with more conviction. “I won't ask the flight attendants to throw you back to your row.”

It wasn't a line; it was a sincere apology because she felt like she had let him down.

Oliver acted like it was a line and offered his hand. “Thank you and I forgive you. I want to talk about the teaching now, so we can drop this topic. That all right with you?”

Fair enough. And yet it was weird to be sitting so close to him and not be able to ask him the many questions that were popping into her mind right now. “It's not
teaching
, really. I graduated in June.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks. I was lucky enough to get a job over spring break. This rich lady in Tampa wanted some after-school tutoring for her kids and was willing to fly me over to stay there three weeks. I helped Ellen—that’s the eldest daughter—out, but now she’s off to college. They seemed to like me so I was asked to continue after I graduated, but I’d be helping out Sophie—the younger one—this time. She’s going to be a high school senior in the fall.” But really, in her head:
What was it like, being the youngest member of the Parkland Orchestra Tour?

“This spring? That’s interesting.”

“Hmmm?”

“I was in Florida then. Orlando. Had a show there.”

Haley knew that because she was there. She coughed and shrugged, because she was cool like that.

Oliver did not pick up on it. “What do you teach?”

Haley did
not
want to say music. Or anything Oliver might relate to. Did she call herself an “accomplished musician” a while ago, in her head? Because no, she wasn’t. She was an amateur, and this job made her feel like a fraud already.
This guy
was an accomplished musician. “Um, everything. I helped with homework…and other things their parents wanted them to learn after school.”