Groupie/Rock Star Bundle (26 page)

“Andy,” he started but I pulled away as I sat
up.

“I’m not asking for excuses,” I told
him. “What you do when I’m not around is none of my business.” I
didn’t know who I was trying to convince. Vanni or
myself.

“I’m just…” I searched for any words that would
justify this jealous word vomit erupting from my mouth. “I’m
worried. If you sleep with the wrong person it could be dangerous
for you.”

He was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“That fan who has been chasing you all over the
country. She’s not abiding your rules.” After a moment he started
to laugh, which made me angrier. “What’s so funny?”

“You think Talia is a stalker?”

He knew her name. I turned away.

“Baby,” he said as he reached for me. “Come
here.”

“No!” I exploded, but he pulled me back
anyway.

I was powerless, really, to resist. I wanted
him to pull me into his arms and tell me I was nuts and imagining
things. That he really did still love me, and wanted me more than
anyone.

“Talia is a fan. She’s even married,
I think. She gets a little excited here and there but she’s
harmless overall. I spent some time talking with her when the tour
stopped in Vegas and she’s really just going through a tough time.
It’s all part of the illusion.”

“And Kat?” I asked, though I knew I was
pressing my luck. “Is she part of the illusion too?”

He pushed me back onto the bed and covered my
body with his own. “Why are we spending time talking about everyone
else when we could be making love?” He kissed my mouth as I opened
to protest, and played with my lips under his own.

“I’m with you because I want to be,” he assured
as his hands danced down along my body. Within minutes I had
forgotten about anything but the feelings surging through my
body.

This time our union had a rougher edge to it.
It was almost as though maybe he were punishing me for bringing up
those uncomfortable topics, or at the very least showing me how
much he wanted me so I would have no lingering doubt. I responded
to the more primal lovemaking by digging my nails into his back,
and he branded me with his teeth.

He pulled me to the shower for another quickie,
and I tried not to think that I might be preparing him to go to
another woman. He took me from behind, with my body pressed up
against the glass, and his teeth clamped down on my
shoulder.

I lay only in a towel on the bed as I watched
him dress. I wanted to say so many things, but I knew it was
pointless. I had made my choices in this relationship a long time
ago. I knew I had to share him.

I couldn’t change the rules now. Could
I?

My only solace is that by the time he left it
was 4:30 p.m. If he was going to meet someone else, she’d have to
be the one to get the unsatisfying quickie before he had to head
off for the concert.

Of course, Kat would join him for the concert –
but I tried not to think about that.

That night I skipped the concert
altogether. I went online with the information Alana had given me
about the fan forums and quickly found Talia. She was known by the
moniker GiovanniGirl1, which meant she had created that name quite
some time ago. I glanced over her profile, which said nothing
really about her being married. In fact, the more I looked over her
profile and tracked her down on social networking sites the more
concerned I became.

She cited her location as “Giovanni’s Bedroom,”
referred to him as her “boyfriend” and dedicated songs to him on a
regular basis. The only photos that were posted were ones that
contained Vanni, and she had a whole folder of photos of him with
personal asides as captions. “I know that look!” “He wants
something here… oh yeah, ME.” “He’s got the softest hands.” “He’s
singing ‘our’ song!”

It was different from what others
were writing, who playfully described Vanni as their boyfriends
too, because it implied something deeper. She would respond with
authority to different threads as if she knew what Vanni was
thinking or feeling and everyone deferred to her for any personal
questions about him. This could either mean they had a close
relationship, or she thought they did.

I didn’t see a positive outcome from
either scenario.

The passwords that Alana gave me also included
the server information for fans’ emails, which were primarily left
unread because there were so many of them. Tons of emails sat in
the “new” mail folder, something that Alana had not yet been able
to tackle with her schedule. And most of it was for Vanni anyway,
which didn’t really concern her.

She had asked me to go through the emails and
send back a form reply to get caught up. It was a personal touch
Iris and the band (i.e. Vanni) decided needed to be
done.

But that really became my secondary
goal as I started the task. I went back to the dates for Vegas, and
sure enough I found what I was looking for.

“Thank you for dinner tonight, Giovanni,” Talia
wrote. “I knew the moment we met we would have so much in common.
And now you know why we can’t be together yet, but I’m working on
squaring all that away. Hopefully by New York.”

After Reno: “Thanks for singing my song to me
again. One day everyone will know that it is me you
love.”

Then Salt Lake City: “Thank you for the kiss.
It was everything I ever dreamed.”

It was 1:00 a.m. by the time Vanni came home
that night, and by this time I was livid.

“You lied to me,” I accused angrily from where
I sat behind my laptop.

“What are you talking about? Lied about
what?”

“Talia,” I gritted between clinched teeth. “You
kissed her.”

He laughed, which pissed me off even
more. “Are you talking about Salt Lake?”

“I don’t know,” I snapped. “Have you kissed her
anywhere else?”

He came over to me and kissed me
atop my head before he plucked an apple out of a basket on the
counter where I sat. “I kissed her for a picture, Andy. It wasn’t
even on the mouth.”

I wasn’t buying it. I had gone through each one
of her photos and I had seen no such photo. “I’m not asking for you
to be faithful, Vanni. I just want you to be honest!”

He stopped mid-bite. “Faithful? Andy, we’re
not…”

“Yes, I know!” I finished for him. “That’s not
the point.”

“Then what is the point, Andy? You’re the one
with an axe to grind.”

“You don’t know how dangerous it is to lead
someone on,” I said. “There’s something wrong with her and if you
actually slept with her…”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. I told you I didn’t sleep
with her.”

“You told me a lot of things,” I said bitterly.
“But everything we’ve ever shared has been in secret. How am I
supposed to know that you’re not doing that with other people? I
mean, does Kat know about me?”

“What is your fixation on Kat? Just because you
saw us at the park together?”

“You were with her in public like
you can never be with me!” I finally exploded.

He perched on a barstool. “So let me get this
straight. You’re not mad because I’m sleeping with someone else.
You’re mad because I’m cavorting with her publicly.”

My heart closed in at his admission. So he was
sleeping with Kat. “Exactly,” I managed to eke out.

“I don’t buy it,” he said. “I think
you’re jealous but it has nothing to do with Talia or Kat or anyone
else. You’re mad because of what happened in San Francisco. I think
there’s a part of you that wanted to be pregnant so we would have
to be together.”

My mouth fell open. Of all the pompous,
arrogant, hateful things to say…

“I don’t sleep with groupies,” he assured me.
“That stopped with you.”

It was as though the world crashed down around
my ears. “So you’re sleeping your way up from the ladder from now
on?”

He realized his mistake too late. “You know
that’s not what I meant, Andy.”

“No,” I told him coldly as I closed
my laptop and unplugged it. “I never know what you mean, Vanni. You
say one thing to me, something to someone else and something else
entirely to the entire world. I don’t even think you know who you
are anymore.” Before I stomped off to the bedroom I spat, “You
should have been an actor, not a singer.”

He followed me into the bedroom. “What about
you?” he wanted to know. “You’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of
being at the right place at the right time. You knew how to get on
Jasper’s payroll; you even knew how to get in good with someone
like Graham Baxter in Las Vegas.”

I spun around. “How could you say that to
me?”

“Tell me you didn’t sleep with him,”
Vanni demanded. He dug out the card I’d long ago given him like I
had promised Graham I would. Vanni flipped it around to show the
room number scrawled across the back. “Don’t talk to me about
sleeping my way up a ladder.”

I pulled out my suitcase and flung
it open. “What if I did sleep with Graham?” I challenged. “Why
would that matter to you? We never had a commitment, as you are so
fond of reminding me, especially if you want to sleep with someone
else. It’s only for the moment, girl,” I sneered, mocking the song
he had written for me. The one that had meant so much to
me.

“A moment’s all you need,” he snapped back.
“And a moment’s all I wanted.”

Angry tears blinded me as I stuffed clothes
blindly into the suitcase. I might have been packing his stuff for
all I knew. “You are a bastard,” I told him.

“Maybe,” he conceded. “But I never said I’d be
anything else.”

That was his excuse for everything. He never
made promises, so no one could ever expect anything. What a perfect
little world for him.

I slammed my suitcase shut and zipped it, then
stormed up to where he stood blocking the doorway. “Then you
deserve everything you get,” I spat. “You’re nothing more than a
dancing bear being paid to sing.”

We were face to face and I could see the corner
of his mouth twitch with anger. “And you’re nothing more than a
climber,” he shot back. “On to the bigger, better deal. Do you want
to call Graham or should I?”

“Go to hell,” I gritted as I pushed by
him.

“Tell me when the baby comes,” he called after
me. “I want to know what kind of gift to buy.”

I slammed out of his house and called a cab
from the sidewalk, where I walked aimlessly blinded by unshed
tears. By the time it caught up to me, my eyes were bloodshot and I
could barely croak out a destination.

Since I already had a hotel room rented in the
city I simply went there. I knew it was in the same hotel as the
M&G events but by then I was too tired and emotionally
devastated to care. I needed to get to a place to lick my wounds
privately. It was only for one more night anyway, I had a Monday
flight back to Nashville.

It couldn’t come soon enough. I was so over
this whole crazy affair and the stupid fabricated world in which it
flourished. I thought about seeing what it would cost to switch my
ticket but the minute I opened the computer it landed right where
it had been before: the band’s email box.

Right at the top was an email from Talia. “I’m
sorry I couldn’t let you come up to my hotel room tonight,” it
read. “But everything good in life is worth the wait. I’ll be
thinking of those words you said when I touch myself. Then, soon,
you can touch me too. Until then, read this and think about me when
you jerk off.”

She included a rather explicit piece
of fan fiction where she and Vanni were together for the first time
at last. I stopped reading two sentences in.

I was instantly horrified. If it was true, then
Vanni was an even bigger asshole than I currently thought he was.
If it wasn’t, then this woman was going headlong off the rails.
What really sucked was that I couldn’t figure out which was the
more feasible of the two.

I slept until pretty late in the
morning. In fact, it only had a few minutes left of being morning.
I took a long shower and dressed down for my first steps out into
my new Vanni-less world. I kept my hair straight, my makeup minimal
and all my curves sufficiently camouflaged by layers of
clothes.

This was who I really was. I wasn’t
some sexy glamazon who chased around superstars. I was just a
writer from a Southern town, who mistakenly thought she wanted to
be a part of another, glitzier world.

I always liked things that glittered. I never
knew it would be my downfall.

On the way down in the elevator I thought
briefly about what Vanni was doing. Was he missing me? Was he
regretting our fight or the nasty things we said? Or had he already
called Kat to come and sleep in my vacated spot? I tried to rattle
such thoughts from my brain.

Instead I went to the brightly lit
café on the ground floor. I would have ordered room service but I
thought maybe if I could see Talia and speak to her I could get a
better read on how dangerous she might be. If she was seeing things
or hearing things that weren’t happening or weren’t being said,
then she definitely could pose significant risk. That was a
dangerous level of delusion.