Frustration -SERIES- [Part 2] Headphones & Reveries [boyxboy]

Chapter Six

We spent a couple of hours wandering the city together but it was hot and we'd already seen most of the sights the previous day, so we ended up making our way to the STAPLES Centre in time for soundcheck. We made our way backstage just as they were finishing up and the band trooped offstage to us sarcastically demanding an encore.

'Hey!' Conor's face brightened when he saw me, despite the fact that I was making fun of him. 'Tell me everything.'

I followed him to the green room, repeating my rendition of lunch, and Conor hugged me excitedly. 'That's great! You'll be signed by the end of the week, it seems. I can't believe I'm dating a real life supermodel. Lucky me.'

'Shut up,' I told him, rolling my eyes. 'Anyway Chloe wanted to come tonight but she couldn't get a ticket so I told her I'd put her on the list. Is that okay?'

Conor nodded. 'I'll take care of it.'

'How was your day? Is your ego still relatively normal sized after meeting those fans or should I insult you a bit?'

'Fans were great, but journalists took care of ego-shrinking so you're off the hook,' he said, walking to the fridge by one of the couches and taking out a bottle of water.

'Why? What happened?' I asked as he came and sat by me.

Conor rolled his eyes. 'They are all suddenly very interested in you.'

I felt that familiar twist of anxiety in my stomach. 'What do they want to know?' After the PR catastrophe that was Name Withheld's first tour with The Tiny Manatees, Conor and I had made a pact to basically never speak about one another to the press. That was pretty easy for me; the press have not been super interested in talking to me about anything until lately. Conor had also managed to stick to it pretty well.

'I mean, most of it is normal, I don't mind answering questions about Harley or his campaign. Some of them want to know what your plans are, so I just tell them you're working on a few different options. Then of course some of them get weird with the sex questions. It's so fucked up because I bet if you were a girl they wouldn't ask those.' He saw my face and looked at me skeptically. 'I said a lot of "no comment"s, don't worry.'

'I've been burned before,' I reminded him.

'I learned my lesson,' Conor responded, holding up one hand like he was swearing on the Bible.

We looked up as some of the others made their way into the green room, grabbing bottles of water from the fridge and throwing themselves down on various couches. I felt my phone buzz in my pocket as the others began to catch up with each other about their days, and fished it out to see that Chloe had uploaded the photo of us to Instagram. I opened it to take a look.

We both looked pretty good I guess; it's hard not to in glaring sunshine when you're wearing sunglasses and are a model. She had captioned it:

Lunch with my new bestie #mcm #modellife @TylerLincoln

It already had thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, and the little orange tag at the bottom right corner of my screen was counting up fast.

'What are you looking at?' Conor queried, looking over my shoulder at the photo. 'Whoa, hey, you look so good in that.'

'In what?' Rachel demanded from across the room.

'Chloe posted a picture of she and Tyler,' Conor answered before I could stop him, and everybody in the room reached for their phones to take a look.

'Man Crush Monday?' Philip demanded, disgusted. 'You're not straight or available. This is patently unfair.'

'Bestie?' Josh demanded, even more disgusted. 'Um, excuse me. You already have a bestie. It's me. You're my best friend.'