Unexpected Circumstances
An Excerpt from Unexpected Circumstances
It took a good hour or more for me to get moved into another hotel. It was only two blocks from the one I had been staying at. Even as I checked in, my mind was still on a plane ride home. I was in limbo, wanting to call Elijah Blu or Tian, yet not wanting to. I texted Kevin and Rick my new contact information. Kevin wrote back that I needed to stop avoiding David’s calls to me. I had let his calls go to voice mail, and I had ignored his texts for at least a day. Sometimes I just didn’t want to talk to him. I reluctantly called him. He ranted on that I was a bad friend. I was a bad friend. Maybe I was a bad everything.
Elijah Blu beeped in twice and texted me during that extremely long seventeen-minute call with David. I listened to his voicemails. “Hey. Are you here at the hotel? You didn’t answer your door. Call me.” Was the first one. “Where are you? The hotel clerk said you checked out. I really hope you didn’t leave. I know I have treated you badly and I’m sorry. I’m just so jealous that you and Tian seem tight. Well, you already know that. Please call me.” Was the second one. There had been some desperation in his voice, and that made me feel some satisfaction. It also reminded me that I had promised to do a mini-concert with them. I couldn’t leave yet. I didn’t make promises that I couldn’t keep. Maybe I could just keep my distance from them until then.
Then I read his text. He was clearly desperate now: “Babe, where are you? Tian is freaking out. He’s convinced that you’re at the airport waiting to take a plane home. I believe you’re an honorable person and wouldn’t just leave without talking to us. If he’s right, please don’t go.”
As soon as I called Elijah Blu, he sounded subdued, drained, and pouty. “Where are you?”
I explained to him why I had to move to a different hotel. “This just happened so I didn’t have a chance to call you guys yet. I was talking to my guardian (ok, that was a lie) when you called and texted. I was going to call you next. I’m a celebrity. Shit happens!” Yeah, I had thought of running. There was no denying it, well, no denying it to myself anyway. He and Tian really didn’t need to know that. They didn’t need to know that they were both correct about their assumptions of me. “Do you think I have a reason to leave, Elijah Blu? Do you think maybe you haven’t treated me as well as I deserve to be treated?”
I could tell he was feeling bad. “Yes, and Tian totally agrees with you. I’m sorry, babe. I’ll do better. I…I’m confused about so many things.” So that was his excuse?
As he was rambling, I had walked over the window and pressed my face against it. I was on the tenth floor with a nice view of the city. Most people could get lost in the city but not me. I’d get recognized and discovered. “I don’t have a clue either. I didn’t expect anything like this to happen. And I’m hungry! Cook something for me. I have a suite and it has a kitchen. All the utensils, dishes, and stuff are here. All that is missing is the food.” And I could probably have gotten a cook if I’d wanted to fork out additional funds. This room was costing me five hundred a night. I shuddered at that figure. Even the cheap hotels were expensive here. But it had really tight security and a service that would wash my clothes. And, maybe Elijah Blu would actually cook since he realized that I could leave at any time and that he wouldn’t be able to find me if I didn’t want to be found.
I was surprised when he did bring some groceries over. “I don’t know how to cook.” He replied as he took rice and chicken, and a rice cooker out of the bag. He repeated those words a few times as he cooked. “Don’t you know how to cook?” He asked.
“Nope, and I don’t care to learn so you’re going to have to up your skills,” I replied as I lounged on the couch texting David.
“Are you kidding?”
“Nope, not kidding.”
“Ummm.”
Yeah, I’d let him think about that. I wondered if he knew that the video he’d just posted five hours ago already had over 62,000 views and 2,500 comments. David had enlightened me about that.
I took some video as he cooked. He managed to cook the rice and richly brown the chicken until it was almost burnt. He’d just have to learn if we ended up together. If I was going to make the money, he needed to know how to feed me.
“Aren’t you afraid of gaining weight?” He asked offhandedly as he regarded me eating most of a second chicken breast. I intended to eat fudge afterwards.
I stopped mid chew and looked at him. I took a drink of water and washed it down. “I ran two miles today and then worked out in the gym for two hours. Do you think these guns stay rock hard from playing the guitar?” I flexed my arm muscles at him, something all the guys liked to feel.
“I’m just trying to get to know you.” He replied as he glanced at his skinny arms. He hadn’t eaten much of anything on his plate. Now that I rewound my memory, I realized that he hardly ever ate much of anything. But I suppose at maybe five foot two and one hundred twenty pounds he couldn’t afford to eat much if he didn’t exercise. I wondered if at some point he would try to regulate how much I ate every day. “I don’t suppose you do dishes.” He remarked hopefully.
“You’re so funny,” I replied as I went back to eating.
Maybe you’re wondering if by telling him to cook that I was testing him. Maybe you’re thinking that him treating me so unkindly made me more defensive and argumentative. Maybe you’d be right.
“How are you going feed our ten children?” He asked that so innocently too.
“If I’m having your child, I would think that you would be doing the cooking,” I replied ever so smoothly.
He took notice of that. There was a pause. “Babe, I don’t mind trying but in my world the women cook.”
“In my world, David cooks for me, and if he’s not around then I have a cook that I pay. She’s really great.”
I thought it funny that he had started this charade and now he realized I was serious. “Are you kidding?” then “Wait. Who’s David?”
I was done eating. “He’s the lead guitarist in my band, but he’s family too. Everyone in my band is my family. We met in high school and have been together ever since. He’s the one with the social media accounts who’s promoting your mini-concert tomorrow.” My mind flashed back to about two hours earlier when David was ranting that I was a bad friend.
“Aw yeah, the gay guy that you’ve had wild sex with.” Elijah Blu remarked in a rather sarcastic tone. He took that moment to eat one more bite of chicken.
You would have thought that I’d described every detail or even one detail to him about the sex I’d had with David. All I had done was to state a fact, once. I’d never said another word about it. And the sex with David had definitely not been wild. “Is there something we need to talk about?” I asked.
He looked up from his plate and put his fork down. “Did you practice the piece you’re going to perform tomorrow?”
I was about to tell him where to stick his practice when his phone rang. Tian, of course.
“What? You’re fucking kidding me!” Elijah Blu exclaimed as he jumped up and was bouncing around as he listened to him. I swear he was like a little kid at Christmas.
“Babe! Babe! The dating video we released five hours ago has over 76,000 views! And the comments aren’t too bad either!” he laughed. “Oh my God, we’ve never had a post get so many views!” Then “What? We do?” He nearly dropped his phone and fell over a chair at that point. “Babe! We have a little over ten THOUSAND new subscribers on our YouTube channel! TEN THOUSAND!”
I almost asked him to repeat what he’d said. His words sometimes ran together. The words clicked in my brain and I was smiling but it was because I thought his reactions were hilarious! It was too bad I hadn’t filmed him taking that call.
It took a minute for him to sort out all the puzzle pieces in his mind. We were sitting on the couch and he was talking to friends of his. I was on my phone too. Friends had been texting me about the video. Most of the comments were funny.
“Hey,” he said softly as he touched my arm. I put down my phone. “I don’t know what we’re really doing relationship wise or dating wise, whichever you want to call it, but just by you saying you’re going to perform at our mini-concert, and your friend advertising for us, you’ve already helped us so much. It took our YouTube channel two years to get thirty-thousand subscribers. And you got us ten-thousand new subscribers in five hours! You told us this would happen. I can’t imagine what your appearance at our mini-concert will do.” He leaned towards me and we kissed. His eyes as we pulled away had so many emotions in them. Most of those emotions were in my eyes too.
“Elijah Blu, understand that there will be haters regarding anything the three of us do. Everyone has a camera looking for someone they can exploit. I wish I could control that. Nothing really has hurt me so far but you just never know.” I glanced down at my phone as another text came across. “This is your AGENT. Call ME! I mean it!” appeared on the screen. It was JerryLee. Crap. I looked up and saw that he had read the text too. “You said something at the end of that dating video that you never mentioned to me and that, has caused a little stir in both our fanbases.
His eyes widened.
I picked up my phone and called JerryLee knowing that he was serious as it was past his office hours. “I hope so,” I told him as he asked if I was going to pursue a relationship with Elijah Blu. “He and Tian,” I added.
He’d known me long enough to know that I wasn’t kidding. He went on to tell me the dangers of a throuple especially since I was a woman going after two men. “You’re going to have to keep that relationship out of the media. You know that, don’t you?” He asked.
Elijah Blu looked at me, trying to figure out what was being said.
“But I want to live too.”
“If you want to keep your fame, you’ll keep it quiet, otherwise go at it. Just know that it probably won’t go over well.”
Elijah Blu’s phone rang then. He walked away to talk. He left soon after.