Page 28 of Dirty Like Me
“Becca is married to Jack. Happily. They’ve been together since they were teens. You met their kids, Sadie and Owen. Becca and Jack own Nudge Coffee, you know, where I work.”
“Right. And why do they call it Nudge?”
“Apparently, Jack came up to Becca in the crowd at a concert and gave her a nudge. And I guess the rest is history.”
“And what else do you do besides work at Nudge and bake tiny pies?”
Sadly, that was pretty much it lately. “I hang out with Devi a lot. We’ve been best friends since sixth grade. You should probably know that too. She’s my in-case-of-emergency phone call, my one-call-from-jail call. You know, all that stuff.”
Jesse cocked an eyebrow in my direction. “You planning on going to jail tonight, cherry pie?”
“One never knows when hanging out with a rock star.”
There it was again, that sexy, throaty laugh.
“Do you have a best friend?” I asked.
“Yeah. Jude.”
The big, biker-looking dude with the tree tat? I’d just assumed the man was an employee. “Oh. I would’ve guessed it was someone from the band.”
“Brody and Zane are close too, but Jude is the closest thing to a brother I’ve ever had. All four of us grew up together. Those are my boys.”
“I didn’t know that.” As soon as it was out of my mouth, I regretted it. It begged the question of what Ididknow, and the only way Icouldknow anything about Jesse Mayes was by creeping on him online.
He didn’t miss it. “How about you tell me what you do know, and I’ll tell you if it’s true or not.”
I sighed. “Okay, full disclosure? I didn’t know anything about you until I was cast in the video. When we met in Devi’s office, I really didn’t know who you were.”
“Really?”
“Really. But when I got hired, I looked you up. I was kind of hoping you’d turn out to be a loser with a sordid track record of yo-yo rehab stints, baby-daddy paternity lawsuits and scary mug shots.”
He looked perplexed, but amused. “Why?”
“So I’d have an excuse to steer clear.”
He absorbed that a moment. “And how did that turn out for you?”
“Not so well. For a rock star your reputation is oddly lacking in scandal and controversy. I think the most alarming thing I came across was the stalker incident. A bunch of girls broke into your house?”
“Two girls, actually.”
“What did you do?”
“Called security, gave them each a kiss and sent them on their way.”
“Really?” For once, I was kind of glad traffic heading onto the viaduct into downtown was at a crawl. Getting to know my fake date was becoming pretty interesting.
“I got a restraining order against them, on recommendation of Brody and our lawyers,” he said. “They seemed harmless enough, maybe a little cuckoo. I get a lot of overzealous fans.”
“So what’s the difference between overzealous fan and stalker, if breaking into your home doesn’t qualify?”
“It qualifies. But I had a serious stalker once, back in our early days. A guy who dressed like me and managed to wrangle his way backstage at a few shows, stole one of my guitars and snuck onto the tour bus. The girls who broke into my house swam in my pool. This guy slept in my bunk, wore my dirty clothes and jerked off in my guitar case. I’d call that a different shade of crazy.”
“Wow. Restraining order?”
“You better believe it.”
