Page 7 of The Oscar Escape
Dom cocked his head to the side.Dammit!He wasn’t buying it.
Luckily, she was an expert when it came to putting on a show. She lifted her chin. “We’re at the end of the tour and my voice is shot. The same thing happened to my aunt, back in the day, when she was on the road,” she answered smoothly, grateful the whiskey and meds were kicking in.
Now, was this the truth about her aunt? Not exactly.
She’d never witnessed her aunt Harper toss back a bucket’s-worth of hard alcohol with a medicine-cabinet chaser, but that wasn’t the point. Summoning her take-no-prisoners side, Aria put on her best eat-worms expression to close the deal to keep her manager off her back. “You and Malik agreed that you’d help me do whatever it took to go double platinum. That was our deal.”
Dom shook his head, but the hint of a grin graced his lips. That whisper of a smile let her know he was still in her corner.
“I’ll walk you to your dressing room, Miss Too-Skinny Thing,” he said, swiping a bonbon from the table before hooking his arm with hers. With her notebook and phone tucked under her arm, Dom led her out of the shadows. They’d barely made it two feet when Dominic gasped. “What the hell happened to your face? Are you melting? Are you the rock star version of the Wicked Witch of the West?”
She released another rickety ribbon of sound. She’d meant to groan but ended up emitting a noise akin to that of a cackling witch—only proving Dom’s point. She cleared her throat. “It’s makeup, Dom. The label wants me to look like—”
“Like you were the wax version of yourself, and then a heat wave hit? You didn’t look like that when you went out on stage.” He tapped her cheek. “Is that a layer of pancake batter? Or maybe they made a mistake and sent a drywaller.”
Aria smacked Dom’s arm as they weaved through the mass of speakers and electrical cords. “You know damned well that the label wants me dolled up. They have focus groups that weigh in on it,” she lectured, then cringed and gingerly touched her neck. The pain wasn’t as bad as when she’d left the stage, but she’d need to get her hands on another bottle of whiskey or something more powerful than cold and cough syrup to ease the discomfort.
Dom shot her a pointed glance. “How’s the throat?”
“It’s nothing. I’ll power through it.”
“You need to rest.”
“I’ll rest when I hit double platinum. What’s on the schedule? How much time do I have before the next event?”
They turned down another corridor, and Dominic led her toward her dressing room. “About that. We’ve got a few pressing issues to discuss.”
They stopped in front of her door, and she held her notebook to her chest. “How do the numbers look on my socials? I must be trending after the concert. The audience loved the show.”
“Speaking of the concert, I thought you were going to play one of those,” Dom said, and tapped the notebook. “Your instrumentals are getting decent traction online.”
The man had posted a few video snippets of her taking a break from rehearsals and playing her secret compositions.
“These aren’t . . .” She tightened her hold and the spiral coils dug into her skin.
“Aren’t, what? You?” he challenged. “Or whoever the label wants you to be.”
“Of course, they’re me. I wrote them. But they’re not what I’m trying to sell. They’re classical pieces. I have to stick to the plan. I can’t deviate from the course I set when we started this tour. Not now. Not when I’m so close.”
Dom looked away and rubbed his neck. Two very bad signs. “You’re trending, but not for the reason you’d hoped.”
A bout of jittery topsy-turviness hit, and Aria shifted her stance. The whiskey and the meds were doing a number on her balance. She leaned against the door to hide her wooziness from her manager. She stared at a shit-colored scrape against the wall and had a good idea of why she was trending. “It’s Justin, right? That’s what the internet is buzzing about, isn’t it?”
“He’s a lying manwhore, Aria. You deserve better,” he shot back, then scowled as he looked her over. “Do you need to sit down? How much whiskey have you had? You haven’t mixed it with the cold meds, have you?”
“No, I’m good,” she lied. “And don’t worry about Justin. I’ll deal with him, and I’ll figure out my life after I hit—”
“Aria, Jesus, I know. Everyone knows!” Dom blurted, exasperation coating his words. “You’ll take care of yourself after you hit double platinum. But I need you to prepare for what happens if you don’t.”
If she wasn’t still barely standing, she would have sworn her heart had stopped beating.
Dom had never spoken to her like this before.
Ice crystallized in her veins. “What does that mean?”
“It’s not looking good. Your sales trajectory is down.”
“Down?”
