and finally see the real me and realize I'm entirely too damaged for him. But those words aren’t really me. They can’t be. My mother won’t let them be.
“Layla, this is amazing. Did you write all of these?” Brady asks in awe as he flips through a few more pages. I don’t even care about stopping him at this point. I know what he’s going to say next, probably even before he does.
“I don’t understand. Why the hell aren’t you singing this shit? This is YOU. This is what people want to hear. They don’t care about partying on the weekend or random hook-ups; they want real life. They want the real you.”
A cynical laugh bubbles past my lips, and I turn away from him, taking my coffee cup to the sink to rinse it out.
“You’re right. You don’t understand so don’t bother trying.”
He comes up behind me, and I see him set the book down on the counter next to the sink out of the corner of my eye.
“Hey, don’t do that,” he tells me softly.
“Don’t do what?” I ask angrily as I shut off the water and whirl around to face him. “Don’t be honest?”
“Don’t push me away!” he shouts back. “I just found a book filled with songs that make me want to rip out my own heart. Words that are real and deep and fucking amazing and yet here you are, week after week, singing shit songs that have no meaning. I just want to know why?”
He’s so close to me that I’m pinned against the counter and it’s too much. I need space and I need to breathe. I put my palms on his chest and push him away from me so I can move out from around him to the other side of the kitchen table across the room.
“You don’t want to know why. You just want to fix what’s broken. You can’t fix me, Brady. What you see is what you get. I sing what I have to. End of story.”
He advances on me and for the first time ever, I’m glad to hear my front door open and my mother snapping at me from across the room.
“Why aren’t you dressed? The meet-and-greet starts in two hours and hair and make-up will be here any minute.”
Brady gives me one last burning look, pleading with his eyes for me to tell my mother where to go or to just prove to him that the woman who wrote those songs is real.
I turn my back on him and head upstairs to my room to put on the outfit my mother has chosen for me and have my hair and make-up artfully constructed the way my mother insists.
The woman who wrote those songs may have been real at one point, but she doesn’t exist anymore. It was foolish of me to think that with Brady’s help I could find her again.
When Layla comes back downstairs after getting ready, all traces of the woman I'm slowly getting to know and truly like are gone. Her hair is perfectly styled, her make-up overdone and sparkly, and her clothes are practically painted on, showing enough skin that she might as well be going to this thing bare ass naked. What the hell happened to the fresh-faced, jeans and T-shirt wearing woman who smiles easily and wants to be a fighter? The pop star robot has taken over and that woman is long gone. I’m not even sure she really exists.
The surprised look on Eve’s face when she finds out I'm tagging along to the signing is quickly erased, and she graciously asks if I’d like to ride in the car with them. The way she fawns all over me and kisses my ass only proves she is just trying to make sure I won’t out her to the world and tell everyone what a raging bitch she really is. Instead, I follow Layla in my own car. I can see Eve turn around in the passenger seat every so often, no doubt lecturing Layla about something. Finn keeps his eyes on the road and continues to drive. As soon as we are a block away from Capitol Records, I can hear the screams through the closed car window. Aside from Layla’s concert a few weeks ago, I’ve never seen so many screaming people in one place.
The tension between Layla and Finn is still so thick, like a wall of tungsten steel that nothing can penetrate. I'm used to seeing