Page 65 of Dirty Like Dylan

Which just made me wonder why he hadn’t been nicer to me.

At least now I knew he didn’t have something against photographers in general, so that was something?

I started uploading the images from today’s shoot; I still had a lot of photos to go through from the previous days and I didn’t want to get way behind. Especially if I was catching a plane out of here soon. The last thing I wanted to be doing while I was overseas was sitting at my computer trying to finish processing photos from this shoot when I could be out taking new photos where I was.

So I got to work, organizing the images into folders, highlighting and rating my selects to narrow down my favorites. I really wasn’t thinking about Roslyn Pike holding Ashley’s hand in those online photos. Or how hot he’d looked, or how cute he was with his hair a little longer. I definitely wasn’t wondering if there were more photos of him out there, where he might look even hotter.

But then the curiosity really got to me…

I did an image search for Ashley Player, then another one for Dylan Cope. Until now, I hadn’t even looked either of them up.

As it turned out, the photos of the two of them online were virtually endless. Official band photos. Red carpet photos. Concert photos.

Photos of Ashley sweating and singing into a mic.

Photos of Dylan playing his drums—in a kilt.

And it felt weird seeing them like this, by way of the internet.

I wasn’t exactly in the habit of researching the men I met, no matter how famous they were. I’d learned, from my earliest brushes with the handsome and the famous, that it was often a bad idea. Put you in a weird place when you knew things about someone they hadn’t even told you yet, simply because you’d cyber-stalked them.

And besides that, sometimes you saw shit you didn’t really want to see—like the man you were crushing on on the arms of a whole lot of other women.

Which was a whole lot of what I found when I searched Ashley and Dylan.

There were no photos of either of them getting cosy with men, but that didn’t mean much. Either way, I felt uncomfortable, looking at those photos. So I stopped.

Then I thought of something.

I wasn’t famous, but…

I did a search for myself and my ex-husband. Because what if Dylan and/or Ashley did the same?

What would they find?

I actually had no idea. I’d seen a few photos of the two of us pop up when we were together, but since we’d split, I really hadn’t looked. I didn’t want to. I’d just hoped the whole thing would fade into obscurity in the back pages of the ever-expanding internet. Kind of the way Johnny O’Reilly had faded into obscurity in my heart and mind.

But once things were out there on the web… they just didn’t die.

My search came up with several hits. Most of them repeats of the same five images of us. Just five.

Okay; I could live with five.

But wow. It was so weird looking at those photos. At how young I looked, only four-and-a-half years ago. More baby-faced and so starry-eyed I almost didn’t recognize myself. And did I ever look fucking smitten. I was all aglow holding onto Johnny’s hand as we walked into some party or club. Each of the photos was from a different event, and in every one of them I was smiling.

I’d almost forgotten how happy I’d been with him—for a while.

A very short while.

Fortunately, none of the images I found showed how I’d felt toward the end of our relationship, when I realized I wasn’t quite as special to him as he was to me. It was kind of nicer this way. Who needed a visual reminder of that? I really didn’t need to see my twenty-three-year-old self all crestfallen and heartbroken.

I’d just feel so sorry for that girl.

I allowed myself to really look at Johnny in each of the photos, once. Well, twice. And shit, he was handsome. With his bleached hair and overly-white teeth and deep tan, and those wide, mesmerizing blue eyes with all the lashes. No wonder he’d been able to play me. It wasn’t his money or his burgeoning fame or the music that had gotten me, though I wasn’t gonna lie to myself; those things were nice. It was just him.

He was so confident, so sure of himself, so sure of what he wanted.

And for the brief period of time that what he wanted was me, it was intoxicating. He’d swept me right off my feet. When I looked back, it literally seemed like I hadn’t touched the ground in those memories, like I hadn’t stopped to breathe for the first few months we were together.

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