“Hey!” he shouted. “I don’t want to be an asshole here, but if you don’t let us through, I’m gonna start swinging.”
Immediately, the crowd backed off and parted.
He moved us out of the circle of the crowd, and then glanced at me for a moment. Back to the crowd of paps. “Okay, guys, here’s the deal. This is the only statement I’m going to make.” He glanced at me again, and I knew he was about to out us as a couple publicly; I squeezed his hand and nodded with a smile. “This is Laurel McGillis. She’s my girlfriend, and I love her. End of statement. Get your photos, and then leave us alone. Please.”
I turned my body into his and smiled my professional smile, holding it and then adjusting my position and my head and my smile and holding that again—I knew the drill from my brief stint as a model.
Titus turned us to face this way, then that, letting the other photographers get their shots, and I played along, and we ignored the shouted questions about marriage and babies and how did we meet and will Titus ever do a normal tour again.
Finally, Titus held up a hand. “Okay, ya’ll. We gave you the scoop, and this the exclusive, okay? You guys know I’m private, so take this as the gift it is. Now leave us the fuck alone. It’s all you’re gonna get from me.”
And then we were hustling away, his arm protectively wrapped around my shoulders, fast-marching us to where my car was parked.
There were long days alone, showing houses and going through closings, while Titus traveled for pop-ups in various places. He’d show up at my house in the middle of the night, sometimes, and I’d leave the side door unlocked for him and he’d climb into bed behind me, half dressed, and wrap his long arm over my side and sidle up behind me and I’d be half awake, and suddenly safer simply because he was there.
There was a movie premiere he was invited to, since he’d done a couple songs for the soundtrack—he’d recorded them a good year before we met, while the movie was still in production. This was exciting for me—I got to buy a fancy dress and get it tailored, and Titus somehow got me a jewelry set on loan, a pair of massive diamond earrings and a matching necklace worth a shuddery, gobsmacking amount of money, even to me, who’d grown up with a diamond-crusted spoon. There was a Rolls-Royce limousine, and the red carpet and the gauntlet of flashing cameras as I hung on to Titus’s arm for dear life, ignoring the shouted barrage of questions. We were posing for photos in front of the media wall.
“Do you think the reporters ever get tired of shouting questions and being ignored?” I asked him, doing my best attempt at ventriloquism.
He snorted. “I guess not. Mainly because every once in a while, we’ll answer one.” He smirked at me. “Case in point. Yeah, you, second row. With the white tie. What was your question—can you repeat it?”
There was a brief hush as the chosen paparazzo asked his question again, more loudly. “Titus, do you think you’ll ever propose to Laurel?”
Titus smiled at me, speaking to me rather than the reporter. “Yes, I do.” He laughed. “Now, don’t go getting your hopes up, I’m not proposing right now. But yet, someday in the near future, I will propose. It won’t be public, though, so don’t get to thinking you’ll be able to get spy shots of it happening. Trust me, it’ll be private. But it will happen, and soon.”
My heart leaped. Jumped, twisted, soared.
A promise—that was him reassuring me, promising me.
As we moved away from the media wall through the throng of reporters and gathered celebrities—most of whom Titus seemed to be on wave-and-a-chin-nod familiarity with—I pressed my lips to his ear for a private word.
“Titus, I hope you know I’m not expecting that. A proposal. I’ll never try to tie you down.”
He stopped dead in his tracks, twisted to face me, nose to nose. No smile, here—serious, piercing. “It’s not tying me down, you goose. It’s choosing roots. Choosing home.” A soft kiss. “I know you didn’t ask. You don’t have to.”
“I just want you to understand that I love you and I’m fine with the way things are now.”
A grin, then, finally. “Yeah, well, maybe I’m not.”
I let it go, then. We made it into the theater, where we hobnobbed with A-list celebrities and I pretended to not be starstruck as I met household name after household name. There were quite a few curious looks at us, at the perennially single Titus Bright, whose name was, once and for a long time, synonymous with the rock star life, with alcohol and drugs and women and crazy antics, who had been a tabloid darling for the absolutely insane pace of his life, who had been seen and photographed with a who’s-who of gorgeous women—none of whom he’d ever been seen or photographed with more than once; that Titus Bright, now very publicly in a relationship with a noncelebrity.
Thank god for him I cleaned up well, wasn’t afraid of publicity, and didn’t get scared of cameras being in my face.
I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.
Ten in the morning, Six Chicks office—I was pounding coffee and wishing I’d had breakfast, ignoring my growling stomach, and missing Titus. He was only halfway through one of the longest series of shows he’d done in months: eight shows in four weeks across the Southwest and into Texas, two in Vegas in two days, three in Lake Tahoe, Sacramento, and San Francisco, respectively, and then a whole further series of eight more shows in the Pacific Northwest, working his way through Oregon into Washington State and up into British Columbia.
He was slated to be gone almost two and a half months.
The upside of his unique way of doing shows was that he could spread the timeframe out, so the schedule wasn’t as grueling; in the old days, touring the traditional way with Bright Bones, they’d have done eight shows in eight days in eight states, and that would have been just the first leg. Titus’s way, as Bright Star, he could take his time, and if he felt like adding a show or two in a particular location because he felt the city in question wanted more, he could do it on a whim. No stadiums to book months ahead of time, no ticket sales to worry about. The downside was, he was gone almost as much as a traditional tour schedule, but he performed fewer shows. It was the nature of the beast, I knew. Now that we were together, he was spacing his pop-up tours farther apart than before, so he’d have a month or two home with me before he had to leave again.
It never got easier, him being gone.
Today was a bad day, for me. I missed him. I was cranky. I was horny. I had bombed a showing the day before—not really my fault, as I’d done my job as well as ever, it was just the prospective buyers were what we called house hunter tourists. Wealthy, qualified buyers who could afford the home in question, and who were, ostensibly, looking for a second or third or fourth house. But they weren’t serious. They just took these vacations that basically consisted of looking at expensive houses as a form of entertainment. Wasting my time, my resources, getting my clients’ hopes up that a sale was imminent, and then… “Oh, we’ll be in touch.” Translation: nada.
The worst.
I heard a diesel rumble but ignored it—this was a busy stretch of road, and you heard all sorts of vehicles.
“Um, Laur?” Teddy’s voice.