The Happy Ever After Playlist - Abby Jimenez Page 0,93

squeezed my temples. “She likes to cook. Paint. See Kristen.”

“Okay, then that’s what you arrange. She needs a vacation from this shit. The burnout is real, and you’re not even overseas yet. You drag Sloan to the UK like this and she’s jet-lagged and miserable, and she’s gonna end up going the way of my second wife, packing up and leaving your ass for your drummer while you’re at sound check somewhere in Berlin.”

I nodded wearily.

“And she’s sick?” he asked.

“She’s been sick for weeks,” I admitted. I probably should have made sure she went to urgent care, but she hadn’t had a fever and it wasn’t exactly easy to get away.

“I’ll send a rock doc over to have a look at her.”

“A what?”

“A rock doc. A musician’s physician? They’re on call for tours. They come to you. There’s a guy in Memphis I like. I’ll get him over there. He’ll patch her up—antibiotics, a shot of B12, she’ll be right as rain. I’ll do that and you figure out how to get her home for a few weeks.”

I let out a long breath. “I guess it’s a good idea.”

“Of course it is. All right, I gotta go. I gotta bring the wife a mimosa and a credit card in bed or my back might never recover from this couch.”

“Why don’t you just turn off your phone?” I asked tiredly.

“Because I need to be there when my clients call. What you’re doing is a hell of a lot harder than what I’m doing. If I would have had an agent who answered the phone to give me relationship advice when I needed him, I might still be married to my first wife. And that was the only wife I ever shoulda been married to.”

There was a serious pause in the silence. “Take care of her, Jason. You won’t get another one.”

Chapter 37

Sloan

♪ Keep Your Head Up | Ben Howard

Zane brought DayQuil and NyQuil. I took the NyQuil. I needed to sleep. I needed to not think about what Jason had just told me. It was too enormous and far-reaching to even comprehend in my current state.

A decade.

This would be our life for the next decade.

I wouldn’t see Oliver grow up. I wouldn’t paint. I wouldn’t even have a home. What would be the point? We’d never be there for more than a few months.

And there was no other choice. I wouldn’t ever leave him. That was the most final thing of all. Our fates were bound—what happened to him happened to me.

The way my body cried for sleep after this news scared me because it felt like before, when I used to sleep through my depression. Only this time I hadn’t lost anyone but myself, swallowed whole by Jason’s career.

I waited until it was 6:00 a.m. in California, and I called Kristen.

“God, you sound like you have the black lung,” she said, when I launched into a coughing fit instead of saying hello.

“I know. I’ve been super sick.” I wiped my nose with a tissue. Tucker pushed his face under my arm on the bed like he knew I needed it.

She snickered. “Did Jason offer you the penis-cillin yet?”

“Uh, what?”

“Men think their penis is the cure for everything. I swear to God, I could have some terminal disease and Josh would be over here bouncing his eyebrows like, ‘Gurl, I know what you need.’”

My snort of laughter thrust me into another coughing fit.

“So how’s the groupie life?” she asked once I’d recovered.

I gave her the recap of the last week since I’d talked to her and told her what had happened this morning.

“Damn,” she said. “That sucks. What are you gonna do?”

“Nothing. What can I do? It’s his job.”

“The guy’s like a nomad. You’re just going to walk the Earth with him for the next ten years?”

“It won’t be the whole time,” I said defensively. “We’ll get breaks.”

“I should have known when you told me the dude lived in a trailer that this wasn’t a put-roots-down kind of guy.” Oliver fussed in the background. “You do not travel well either. Remember in the ninth grade when Mom took us to Coronado and your nose bled the whole time?”

I snorted. “And she kept saying, ‘This is truly unacceptable, Sloan,’ like I was doing it on purpose?”

We fell into laughter again and my mood lifted a bit.

“Look,” she said. “If this was Josh, then I’d go full nomad too. If you love him, do what you gotta do. But try and take better