it against her. Jessa was actually pretty nice, and we seemed to have an unspoken agreement that we didn’t discuss Lola, which helped. Zane was super close with Jessa’s personal assistant, Courtney, so we all hung out a lot. We always got rooms next to one another so we could go in and out the connecting doors and borrow curling irons and watch TV together.
I shook my head. “I’m not going sightseeing without you. If we’re not seeing Memphis, we’re not seeing it together.”
He kissed my forehead and smiled, his blue eyes creasing.
I put a hand up to his cheek. “I hope our kids get your eyes.”
His smile got deeper. “And their mother’s artistic talent.” He took my hand and curled it up in his.
I sighed. “I haven’t done anything talented in a while.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Well, maybe not artistically. But there was that thing you did with your mouth on the bus last week.”
I gasped and hit him, and he chuckled.
“You know how I knew you were the girl for me?” he asked, pulling me into him, his forehead to mine. “When I saw you licking that chip bag. I said to myself, ‘That’s her, Jason. She’s the one.’”
I giggled, and he started to tickle me. I shrieked and tried to wriggle away from him, and he laughed. Then his alarm went off again and all the fun abruptly stopped. We both let out a sigh and got up and wandered to the bathroom.
He handed me my toothbrush and we stood over the sink brushing our teeth in our well-practiced routine. I stared at myself in the mirror. God, I looked like hell. Like I needed to be dipped in a full-body moisturizer or something. I had dark circles under my eyes and I was pale again. Even though most of our hotels had pools and spas, we didn’t have time to use them.
Maybe we needed to drink more water. I made a mental note to make Jason do that with me—even though he looked great.
Jason was born for this life. None of the traveling fazed him. Not to mention it was in his contract that he had to do at least an hour at the gym with a personal trainer four times a week. So while I was getting puffy and pale, he was getting toned and hotter than he already was. It was so unfair.
I let my eyes follow the line of hair down Jason’s six-pack stomach into the waistband of his pajama bottoms. When I looked up, he was smirking at me with his toothbrush in his mouth. He bounced his eyebrows, and I laughed and spit. “Don’t let it get to your head just because you’re still gorgeous despite this marathon we’ve been running.”
He spit too. “Well, I have to be equal to my beautiful girlfriend, don’t I?” He winked.
I scoffed. “Yeah, right.” My eyes were bloodshot from coughing. I was bloated and exhausted.
I did not adjust to change well. I hadn’t known this about myself until change was all I did.
We’d been on the road three months. And none of it was at all what I’d expected. There was nothing glamorous or vacation-like about anything we were doing.
Bus, hotel, venue, flight. Radio station, news station, photo shoots, fast food, six hours of sleep, four hours of sleep, back in the bus. Perpetual motion, all the time. It was so constant my body couldn’t catch up.
The crew got two days off a week—but we didn’t. There was always some sort of media thing they needed Jason doing. He was too afraid to not do it. If he didn’t sell out his concerts, they’d bring in Lola. It was exhausting.
I’d been fighting this cold for forever. My stomach was a mess too. We were eating nothing but junk—and there really wasn’t much of a choice. Jason’s tour manager had him on such a tight schedule, stopping for anything longer than gas and whatever restaurant was in the adjacent parking lot was all we could manage. We ate at all different hours of the day. Sometimes we had dinner at five before his show, sometimes we didn’t eat until midnight. I was jet-lagged and we weren’t even out of the United States yet.
I was living for our five-week break. Counting down the days. It was September fourth and we had ten more weeks of this until the time off for the holidays. I hadn’t seen Kristen in months. Jason kept offering to fly her and Josh