Free Break It Up by E.M. Tippetts Page B

interviews. I’ll introduce you next chance I get.”
    We fall right back into our old pattern of conversation. “Must be weird for you, doing this without your mom.”
    “Yeah. I didn’t expect it to mess with my head this much.”
    “Right.”
    Silence descends, and I know I need to fill it.
    “You… um… you want to come by?” I ask, my heart racing again. “Or…”
    Or what? What am I doing?
    It seems to take a long time for him to respond. While it’s probably only seconds, it feels like an eternity, long enough for my stomach to flush full of acid, my throat to go dry as sandpaper, and my palm to sweat my phone slick.
    “You want to come up here? I’m in room 1207,” he says.
    “I don’t want to impose.”
    “You aren’t.”
    “Okay. I’ll come up then.” Because I’m stupid.

    Zach opens his door the moment I knock and smiles at me with unreserved happiness. This suite is much nicer than the one he had in Albuquerque. It’s two stories, for one thing, and the bedroom has a balcony that overlooks the living area.
    “You hungry? Thirsty?” he asks.
    “No, I’m fine.”
    He heads over to the couch and flops down, looking way more “rock star” than “guy I text with all the time.” I feel like I’m alone with a guy for the first time in my entire life.
    And he’s got that brooding stare and general overwhelming hotness. He’s in his jeans and shirt unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. Of course, he has a t-shirt on underneath. He doesn’t show a lot of skin, which is just as well for me. For both of us. I’ve known him long enough that I get the innocent vibe loud and clear. He wouldn’t just disapprove if I jumped him—he’d freak out.
    He pats the couch cushion next to him and I make myself go sit down, even though my muscles are so tense that I’m probably moving like a jerky marionette.
    “How’s Aidan as a boss so far?” he asks.
    “Good,” I say. “I didn’t know what to expect. I’m mainly here just to see what this is all like, you know? See if there’s a job I’d be interested in long term.”
    “See, that’s…I can’t imagine doing that. My job was decided for me when I was eight. Not that I’m complaining.”
    “Do you like being a singer?”
    “It’d be ungrateful of me not to.”
    That wasn’t exactly a yes. I look him in the eye.
    He lowers his chin a moment. When he looks at me again, I read pain and confusion. “I don’t know. But I don’t know what else I’d do.”
    “You probably wouldn’t ever need to work again.”
    “But I don’t know how I’d spend my time. And fans, with the way they demand more music and more tours and stuff, I feel like I owe them. I’d be nowhere without them.”
    It occurs to me to point out that Triple Cross is replaceable. There are a hundred other boy bands poised to leap into the limelight. Five years from now, their fans will be finding their Triple Cross t-shirts in their old clothes and giggling about their former obsession. But I don’t want to tell him Triple Cross is just a fad. What do I know anyway?
    It never dawned on me at the time, but all those years that Jason was unbearable, this was probably what he was going through. His biggest roles were so big that he no doubt wondered if he’d have a long-term career or if he had to make other plans.
    “I just wonder how long I can go before people figure out I know nothing about music,” says Zach.
    “You don’t know nothing ,” I say.
    “We’ve got to pick songs for our next album. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never listened to demo tracks or anything like that. I’m twenty-one years old and I’ve been babied for so long.”
    This, I know, is typical of a child star. A lot of them reach adulthood and find out they’re still kids in a lot of ways because they didn’t have a typical childhood. Jason once joked that child actors melt down in their twenties because they’re “doing what normal people did at eleven. They’re on a