Chapter 9: The Beard

The tour bus smelled of coffee and amps and clean laundry.

It was parked in a lot behind the stadium, with the crowd still singing somewhere beyond the fence.

Ashton sat on the lower bunk with his guitar across his knees, not playing it.

I stood in the aisle with my arms folded.

"Lila says to ask you why you said yes to her," I said.

He didn't flinch.

"I thought she would."

"So I'm asking."

"Sit down."

"I'll stand."

He nodded and set the guitar aside.

"I signed with Kotter Records when I was nineteen," he said.

"I wrote every song on three albums, and Rex owns the recordings of all of them.

"Masters, they call it.

"If I leave him, I lose the songs.

"Not the money.

"The songs."

I stayed where I was.

"Three years ago, the first album broke, and Rex said I needed a story.

"The press wanted a girlfriend.

"He had one picked out.

"Lila."

"She's a pop star," I said. "Not a person you pick out of a drawer."

"She's both.

"She'd come to him with the same problem I had, and he fixed both with one clause in both our contracts.

"Clause nine.

"Two artists, one public romance, renewed on thirty days' notice."

The bus was very quiet.

I had known it, a little, since the garage.

I had known it since the word rental.

Knowing something and hearing it said aloud are different.

"So it's fake," I said.

"It's a contract."

"You've been telling twenty million people that you're in love with her."

"Yes."

"For three years."

"Yes."

"And you didn't tell me."

"I told you to ask me in a week."

"You told me in a garage, in a truck, with my ex's ring on someone else's finger," I said.

"I took your deal because you were kind to me.

"You never said you were carrying all of this."

My voice cracked on the last word.

"I wasn't hiding it," he said. "I was waiting until you could hear it."

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