out, but there was no point. We almost never stayed in the same place for more than two days and the baby wouldn’t do well with all the traveling.
So the plan was to spend a week in Ely with his family for Thanksgiving, and then a month in California so I could paint and see Kristen and my parents. A month wasn’t a lot of time to pull off the piece that had been commissioned. But I didn’t want to leave him early and honestly, I was so excited to do it I didn’t care if it meant I had to paint fourteen hours a day just to finish it in time.
I missed painting like a penetrating ache in my soul. I’d never gone this long without doing it in some capacity. Now, over three months without a paintbrush in my hand and I craved it. Not to mention I wanted the work. I’d made a nice chunk of change from the sale of my house. I had my own money to spend—not that Jason would let me. But I wanted a purpose. Something that wasn’t just being Jason’s girlfriend.
Someone knocked on the door and I put on my robe and went to answer it. This was part of our system now. I got the door and Jason got out of sight in case someone passed by and saw him inside.
We’d learned to do this the hard way. If someone spotted him in the room, we had to move or we’d have fans or cameras waiting for us when we came out—or worse, knocking and waking us up.
I opened the door to Zane holding our coffees and the room service guy with the cart standing there at the same time.
“Hey,” I said, letting them both in.
I breathed in the warm smell of pancakes and bacon as the cart pushed past me into the room. At least I could count on a semi-decent meal when we stayed in a hotel with room service. But even that had lost its luster months ago. All the menus were the same. The same five or six options for every meal at every hotel. I had never thought I’d be bored of room service, but here we were.
I’d pictured we’d eat at all the signature restaurants in the cities we would visit. Barbecue in Kansas, deep-dish pizza in Chicago, cheesesteaks in Philadelphia. But we didn’t really visit the cities we were in. We drove through them. Sometimes so fast we didn’t even know we’d been there.
Zane handed me my Starbucks latte and put Jason’s black Sumatra drip next to the TV. She pulled a folder out from under her arm. “Here’s the schedule. They booked him in the six o’clock slot.”
I groaned. “They couldn’t prerecord it?”
“Nope. Live. Sorry.”
Ugh. This meant that instead of any kind of sit-down dinner tonight, he was going to run right from the news station onto the stage. Again.
I sighed, mopping at my nose with a tissue and scanning the rest of the timeline for the day. After the concert tonight we were making the three-hour drive from Memphis to Nashville for a festival tomorrow. So we’d check into the hotel at 2:00 a.m. Sound check at 8:00. Festival at noon.
Another crappy schedule.
Zane seemed to sense my weariness and signed the room service slip for me.
“You okay?” she asked, after she let the guy out.
Jason was in the shower. I could hear the water running.
I rubbed my forehead. “Yeah. I’m just so tired.”
“Go get your nails done or something. Skip this shit.”
I looked down at my hands and the chipped polish on my fingers.
It was funny, because when I was grieving Brandon, I didn’t take care of myself and it was exactly like that now too.
“Want me to get you somethin’?” she asked.
Zane was great. She was like our life raft out here. We were so isolated. Jason couldn’t even get off the bus half the time or he’d end up signing autographs. He couldn’t even go into a CVS and pick his own deodorant. Zane did everything for us. Our laundry, our errands.
“I’m fine,” I said, coughing into my elbow. “Thank you, though.”
“You just gotta get used to the road,” she said, leaning down to grab the bag of dirty clothes where we always put it by the door. “You’ll be a pro by the next one.”
I scoffed. “At least I’ll get a few years to recover from the one I’m on.”
She flung the bag over her shoulder. “You wish.”
“Ha.