Chapter Eleven #2
The vision was pretty obvious. Small-town Americana.
Coca-Cola, apple pie, and Cadillacs. It didn’t go with my music, and it barely matched Brooks’s image, but our PR team had taken a page out of the post–world war propaganda playbook.
At the end of the day, we were doing this to project the American dream. A stable, happy home.
“Holy shit.” Brooks pushed himself off the car. “Look at you. Wow. That dress is going to give me a heart attack.”
“It doesn’t leave much to the imagination,” I said and did a little twirl.
“Oh, I’m imagining a lot of things right now.”
Brooks was so much better at finding the right words to make us look believable in front of others. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the entertainment industry. Lying on the spot had never been my strong suit.
“Okay, please keep your imagination to yourself. There’s people around.” I twirled my finger in the direction of the entire photo shoot team, who responded with a low chuckle.
“Y’all are gorgeous.” The photographer swooned as she ushered me toward Brooks.
“I know you two are pros, but we want this to look nice and natural, so just play around with the set, with the costumes, have some fun. I’m going to play some music for you guys while I make sure the lighting works, all right? ”
“Sounds good,” Brooks said, and I gave her a thumbs-up as well.
“The ring should probably be in the picture, so I’ll go—” I was going to maneuver to his other side, when I caught a good look at his face—or more importantly, the hair framing his face. “Oh no, what did they do to your hair?”
“Why? What did they do? Is it bad?” He touched the auburn waves styled away from his forehead. That part of his hair was fine though.
I ran my fingers over his temple to the shorter bits of hair that someone had dyed to match the rest. How fucking dare they? “They covered up the little salty hairs above your ears.”
He chuckled and pulled my hand away from his hair to clasp it against his chest. “I asked them to do that.”
Country music started playing from some speakers, loud enough to drown out the clattering and whispers of the crew. A catchy song by The Chicks couldn’t distract me from this affront to my eyes though. “Why the hell would you ask for that?”
“Are you actually upset about this?” He seemed puzzled.
“Yes. I like your hair the way it is. It’s unpretentious and cute and very much you.”
“I didn’t want to look like a grandpa next to you.”
I sighed, my flare of anger at the stylist dissipating. “You wouldn’t. And if anyone thinks that, they’re dickheads. I don’t want you to change. I want you next to me exactly the way you are. Gray hairs and all.”
He smiled and gave my hand on his chest a little double squeeze. “I’ll wash it out tonight.”
“Thank you,” I breathed.
“So, you think I’m cute?”
“Ugh. Don’t get cocky.”
“Don’t worry, I think you’re cute too, Addie baby.”
The photo shoot was quick. Easy. We started with a couple of cute prom poses, kissed for the camera a few times, and ended up just goofing around in the car, feeding each other candy from little paper bags.
At one point we did the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti thing with a gummy worm.
It was fun and creative, and it reminded me just how much of a playground this career could be if you got the chance.
Someone ordered lunch to set, and Brooks continued our newfound tradition of giving me a little private concert while I was eating. This time, he just had a few more listeners.
After wrapping up in front of the camera, we sat down with one of CM25’s reporters. Jamie had made sure to brief them on which questions to ask—and us on which answers to give.
“You two were first publicly linked almost four years ago when you had a joint birthday party,” the reporter asked after we covered a lot of fun breezy questions about proposals and rings, “and the rumors of are they, aren’t they followed you when you started touring together.
Can we finally get the answer to what happened back then? ”
“We weren’t,” Brooks said decisively.
“It would probably make for a juicier story if we had been hooking up,” I said, “but Brooks was the friend I needed when I got my start in the music industry. He’s really just an honest, supportive, and good person to his core.
He offered me true friendship during a time when people would say or promise me just about anything because they thought I was the next big thing.
It’s hard to find that kind of genuineness in the entertainment industry.
People say you should marry your best friend, and I think they’re right. ”
“So how did you go from friendship to romance? What changed?”
I knew the answer Jamie had prepared for us to give. The PR-friendly answer: Time. Life. Circumstances. Just like some friends grow apart, we grew closer.
Brooks knew it too but neither of us said it out loud.
“I’ve admired Adriana from the day I met her, for her talent and her guts and her willingness to face her own discomfort for her art and for other people. I think a lot of people misjudged her early on because of her age and her looks.”
“That’s not an answer,” I said, voice suddenly clogged.
“Sounds like you had a crush on her,” the reporter said.
“What changed is that we didn’t see each other in person for a long time. And when we did, a switch just flipped. Everything I’d always admired about her was still true, but now I also really wanted to kiss her.”
He was too good at this. Even I could believe him. I had to clear my throat to add: “He is a really good kisser.”
“Last question,” the interviewer said, shifting in her seat toward Brooks, “the one on everyone’s mind, obviously. What does this mean for your music career?”
Pretending to be completely oblivious to the way that question was meant solely for him, Brooks leaned back, elbow on the backrest, and turned his attention on me.
“I get private Brooks Monroe concerts every day. Other than that, I think we’re prioritizing our little family for now.
” It was the rehearsed answer that Jamie had prepped for us.
I just left out the middle part: I have a whole journal filled with songs that I hope to record one day, but other than that…
I did have a notebook full of lyrics. We’d stuck close to the truth with that in the rehearsed answer.
I even had it in my bag in case they wanted to take a picture of it.
I just hadn’t opened the damn thing in two years, and I was a completely different person now.
None of those songs would be authentic to me anymore.
If Brooks noticed me ditching that part of the answer, he didn’t show it.
We thanked the interviewer, shook hands with people, returned the clothes, and the stylist freed the clips from my hair before we left together.
Brooks kept his arm around my shoulder, and I was slowly getting used to the weight of having it there.
Shockingly, I didn’t mind that little public display of affection.
Not when, cradled against Brooks, his perfect woodsy scent filled my nostrils, like the air of an old stage when you first stepped on it, all the wood of the floorboards, the ornate trims, and the auditorium chairs coming together in a comforting harmony.
“What’s that song?” Brooks asked from the driver’s seat on our way back to Wild Fields. The sun was slowly lowering toward the horizon, but a warm evening breeze trickled through the open window while I let my hand dance waves on the air.
“Hm?”
“The one you were humming.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just this call-and-response bit that’s been stuck in my head for hours. I don’t have lyrics to go with it. Just this part.” I hummed it again. It was a simple few notes. But I hadn’t hummed anything new in a long while.
“I like it. It’s catchy.” He hummed it back to me, and I smiled to myself, because he didn’t realize that, on the second half of the melody, he was hitting all the notes of his own words. I think you’re cute too, Addie baby.
By the time we made it to my place, the world was tinged in the lavender haze of a late summer sunset.
Caught in the dusk, a few fireflies flickered between the trees.
I watched Brooks’s side profile become more and more of a silhouette, his strong brows, the arrowhead nose, the perfect trim of his mustache, and the deep dip between his mouth and his chin—all in all the perfect definition of ruggedly handsome.
I also watched his gaze hang on to my butchered red mailbox just a moment longer than necessary, but he didn’t comment on it. He just took the car down the driveway.
“Do you want to come in?” I asked before he’d even stopped the car. “I have some pasta bake leftovers if you’re hungry. Or do you need to get back to Skye?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I could eat.”
My place wasn’t exactly clean minimalism.
It was earth tones and textures. It was tapestries and photographs and vintage furniture.
Keepsakes I’d collected over the years, trinkets I’d owned most of my life, gifts I’d never thrown out.
It was also a very compact layout of one bedroom, one bathroom, and one living room with an open kitchen.
This had to look like a shoebox to him. A cluttered flea market kind of shoebox.
“This place is amazing.” He trailed his fingers along the framed photographs on the wall.
“It’s tiny but it’s mine.”
“I can tell. I mean…it’s just you. I love it.”
I tried to ignore the way my chest squeezed at those words. “Thank you.”