I get into fresh clothes and take the chance to grab a drink and have twenty minutes of downtime before I’m due in the VIP room. And by downtime, I mean going through all the gifts and fan mail people brought to the arena.
“How many of them are creepy this time?” I ask my assistant.
Jamie’s an adorable, recent college grad with a short pixie haircut, thick-rimmed glasses, and a bubbly attitude. She hands me some handwritten letters. “Only four marriage proposals, one offer to go to Thanksgiving family dinner, and, uh, a really gross pair of underwear.”
I cock my head. “Gross?”
“There was, like … stuff in them I don’t even want to think about.”
Gideon’s towering presence looms over me. “Now that you’re home for a while, I think we need to reassess the security situation again.”
Ugh. He’s been on this since a fan somehow snuck past security and was in my dressing room one night during this tour.
“Why now? Because some chick sent me her used underwear? Not the first time that’s happened.”
“It was, uh, a guy’s underwear,” Jamie says.
I grin. “Did it come with a photo?”
“Harley, this is serious,” Gideon says.
“No, it’s not. It’s fan mania. People being in my dressing room and giving me dirty underwear is nothing compared to some of the stuff we got on an Eleven tour. We once had tiny vials of blood sent on chains to wear around our necks. Now, that’s fucking crazy. The current security team is fine.”
If I ever need to go out, I have a driver and bodyguard on call. On tour, we have an entire team that follows me around from the venue to the hotel, and anywhere I want to go in between. It works.
It took my security team three seconds to get the fan out of my dressing room, so it was never a dangerous or risky situation.
I don’t need someone full-time. I don’t need someone living with me.
In my own home, I can be me. That’s my safe space—our safe space. Mine and Evah’s.
My relationship with my “fiancée” is, and always has been, a publicity stunt organized by my record label. It was a punishment of sorts for rumors spreading about me and Jay.
Apparently, letting the world know I’m gay would result in a loss of music sales so drastic that my career would be over. This is what music execs have told me for the better part of a decade. Do I believe them? Enough that I’m not going to risk everything I’ve sacrificed so much for.
Even when I question them by throwing artists like Sam Smith in their face, they tell me I’m no Sam Smith.
Thanks.
They remind me I’m one fifth of a complete act—a boy bander trying to make it on his own.
And I believe them. Every time.
Because I know how easy it is for careers to end.
Mason, one of the guys from Eleven, had a crappy solo album release. Music is over for him. Blake had every intention of trying to make it on his own but only got halfway through cutting his album before landing a major acting gig. He hasn’t looked back since. Aside from a small group of fans, no one’s asking for his next single.
It’s that easy to disappear from this life, and if I throw my career away over something as trivial as who I have in my bed at night, I will lose my ever-loving shit. I don’t see how it’s relevant to making music.
Music is my life. Always has been.
It was there for me during my awkward preteen years when Harry Stench was being teased for being short, chubby, and, well, having the last name Stench. After puberty did its job, and I’d hunked out, Mom realized I had star potential. She sent in an audition video to Joystar Records, and just like that, we left Kansas and were flown out to LA. The label immediately wanted to sign me to a boy band they were putting together, and that’s when they made me Harley Valentine.
I don’t need anyone prying into my life and finding out that underneath it all, I’m still Harry Stench.
“I think you need someone full-time watching your back,” Gideon says. “An NDA will mean a twenty-four-seven bodyguard wouldn’t be able to talk to the press if that’s what you’re worrying about.”
Ugh. More NDAs. Like that’s what I need. I think it’s at a point where if something leaked about my life, we wouldn’t know who broke their contract