CHAPTER 9 ALEXIS
My eyes moved toward the door no less than a hundred times, but it was never Danny who walked through it tonight.
And I have no idea why.
I told him to come back, and he didn’t show. And now I’m on my way back to my hotel suite with Brooks, my chest heavy after what felt like the start of a new friendship, at least.
He was able to get back here before the show…so why didn’t he come after?
The only way I’ll ever know is if I use the number that’s already been programmed into my phone.
I sigh.
Brooks did a search on him, and he pushed the results over to me while Vail performed before I went back out for the encore.
Baseball’s Bad Boy Caught with His Pants Down is certainly the most recent, but it’s not the only headline.
The Heat’s New First Baseman Caught Going to Third Base with Mystery Woman inside Vegas Nightclub.
And older ones, too. Colorado’s Danny Brewer Spotted Making out with Porn Star Eve Jewel.
Porn star. He’s made out with a porn star.
That’s a far cry from America’s sweetheart pop princess, and that’s the image that keeps rotating through my brain.
I don’t like it. I don’t want to think about him with a porn star.
But I do want to think about him with me. Except…he didn’t show up.
Maybe he didn’t have credentials. Security is pretty tight, and that’s the one inkling of hope I’m holding onto.
I have to know.
I stare at the text after I draft it.
Me: I’m disappointed you didn’t show.
I think about adding something about the show he was going to watch after the actual show I had mentioned and we had flirted about, but I don’t know who reads his texts, and I don’t know him well enough to trust whatever I say won’t hit the media tomorrow.
I still have an image to uphold.
Even admitting I’m disappointed might be taking it too far, but I hit send, and I turn off my screen and toss my phone down on my lap. I can’t take it back now, and maybe I’ll have an answer.
If he knows who sent that text.
Oh, shit.
I pick my phone back up and send another one.
Me: This is Alexis, by the way.
What if he knows ten different Alexises?
Me: Bodega.
Oh my God, I am such a loser.
I’ve now sent three texts in the span of sixty seconds and I have no idea what he’s going to think but it’s not going to be good. And now he has my number, and I don’t know if I’ve ever been more mortified in my life.
But wait a minute…
Why should I be mortified?
As far as he knows, Brooks and I are together. And he’s chasing after me.
Maybe.
He showed up today. I guess that doesn’t mean he’s chasing, exactly.
He came to meet me before my performance and flirted a little. If the headlines about how he’s a womanizing party animal have told me anything, it’s that this is what he does.
I’m more than likely some challenge for him—to corrupt the sweet, innocent pop princess who’s been in a relationship with Brooks Donovan for four years.
That’s all this is, and disappointment lances through me at the realization.
I shouldn’t feel disappointment. I should just pull up my big girl panties and move on.
But I don’t want to. I want to be sad for a minute about yet another failed relationship—if I can even call it that. A failed friendship that never even had a chance.
Would I have told him the truth about Brooks and me?
Maybe eventually I would have—if we started a friendship and I found a way to gain his trust. But now there’s no telling, and it doesn’t matter much anyway.
I’m going on tour in a few weeks. His season is just getting underway. We’ll both be traveling, and that’s hardly a recipe for a successful budding relationship-slash-friendship.
I stare out the window.
“Are you okay?” Brooks asks, interrupting my thoughts.
“Fine. Why?”
“Well, you’ve huffed out three heavy sighs in the last twelve seconds and you’ve picked up your phone and put it down about ten times since we got into this car.” He shrugs. “I know you pretty well, and it seems like maybe something might be wrong.”
“I’m fine,” I snap.
Brooks doesn’t deserve my wrath. He didn’t do anything wrong other than agree to be my partner under my father’s direction several years ago.
We both agreed to it.
And now we’re stuck with it.
“Do you ever…” I begin, and I stop short.
His brows draw together. “What?”
“Do you ever want more?” I ask softly.
“More what?”
Is he really that dense? “More…out of life. More than a longtime friendship.”
He shrugs. “I’m happy with everything I have.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like you’re getting laid on the side. Don’t you want to get laid?” Okay, so I may have had two glasses of wine after the show, which I usually don’t do.
“Are you offering?” he asks.
I smirk, and I swear I hear Gregory chuckle up from the driver’s seat, but he never chuckles so that could be the wine talking.
“No, Brooks. I’m not offering.”
“Is this about Brewer?” he presses.
I stare out the window and huff out another one of those heavy sighs he just accused me of.
“I knew it,” he says. He shakes his head with a bit of disgust, and I shouldn’t have said anything.
I can trust him, though. He won’t say anything to my father.
He wouldn’t…right?
We’ve been close a long time, but ultimately he reports back to my dad. He works for my dad. Not me.
“Let’s just drop it,” I suggest.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I think we need to have this out right here, right now.”
“Have what out? The fact that I’m not allowed to date anyone so the media thinks I’m with you?
The fact that the only sex I’ve had in the last five years came with strict NDAs and secret hotel rooms and the understanding that nobody could ever know?
I’m a woman, Brooks, and maybe I’m getting tired of living my life that way. ”
“It’s what you agreed to,” he hisses. “It’s what you gave up for the fame and fortune. Remember?”
Those are my dad’s words, not Brooks’s, and it’s not really what I gave up.
I agreed I wouldn’t be able to have a normal life and normal relationships, and I’ve been burned enough times to know that there are very few people I can trust in this world.
Or maybe I’ve been conditioned to believe the only people I can trust are my father and Brooks.
“Yeah,” I mutter.
The more I think about it…the more I can’t help but wonder whether that’s true. My father is my agent. Brooks is my manager. Aside from me, they’re the two people who most stand to benefit from my successes and who stand to lose the most in my failures.
But Alexis Bodega doesn’t fail.
She sets goals and smashes them. She tries new things and always succeeds.
But it’s all an illusion. She’s a brand. She’s not a person.
Caroline Alexis Bodega…she’s the real person behind the brand.
Carrie, as my mother used to call me before my father eliminated my first name because Alexis was a stronger stage name…
and because Caroline was her name, too, and he couldn’t bear to look at me and say her name.
Never mind the fact that he got to choose my middle name—Alexis.
Nobody knows me as Carrie anymore. That name died with my mother.
But she’s still in there somewhere, and as the inevitable clock ticks forward and I find myself drawing closer and closer to thirty, I’m starting to find that I want to know who Carrie is again.
Maybe Alexis is who I was destined to be in my twenties. But in two years, after I win the Academy Award and the Grammy, I’ll be thirty.
And maybe then I’ll want something else out of life.
Or maybe I want something else out of life now.
My phone buzzes just as that thought enters my mind.
My eyes fall to the small screen.
It’s Danny. And maybe he’s the one who can give me that something else I’m searching for.