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He was the spy after all.
***
“We need to talk,” Remy said during move-in for the Arena Riga—a bright-blue glass building that, if the banners hanging from the ceiling were accurate, was used primarily for European hockey games (something Remy didn’t even know existed).
“Is everything okay?” Vivi asked, sitting up straight on the couch in her dressing room. Vivi’s dressing room looked the same as it always did. White couch. Craft table with health food. Navy-blue mugs and cream-colored fabric draping the walls.
Remy shook his head, leaned against the door he’d just closed. He’d been watching the dressing room with near-stalker-brand attention, waiting for the stylists and assistants and glam squad members to clear out for the alone time Vivi took before the show. If he hadn’t been so angry over Parish, he might have smiled at having the right to punch in the door code and let himself in despite the sanctity of that alone time.
“Parish got fired.”
“I know,” Vivi said, frowning, as if she couldn’t understand why Remy was bringing this up.
“Is it because of me?”
“No, it’s because he broke his contract and got high in Amsterdam,” Vivi said.
“And did you know about that because I told you?”
Vivi’s lips parted in a sort of realization. “Remy, it wasn’t really like that. You weren’t tattling on him.”
Remy exhaled, found he didn’t know where to put his hands or eyes or thoughts. “So it was me.”
“I couldn’t pretend not to know once you’d told me! You said he was crazy high. There’s a morality clause—”
“Vivi,” Remy groaned and grabbed the back of his neck.
“He got a warning early in the tour when he got super drunk. This was his second chance. I can’t just let people do stuff like that, not when they’re performing with me. It looks like I condone it.” Vivi rose, holding her palms out, a pained expression on her face. Not apologetic, not guilty, but rather like a teacher explaining something to a small child. It spiked Remy’s adrenaline; he forced his hands down to his sides.
“I’m not saying you weren’t justified in firing him. I’m saying you used information I gave you to do it.”
“Well…I mean…like I said, I can’t just unknow something once I’ve been told,” she said.
“That was information I gave you not as your employee, but as your…” Remy closed his eyes for a beat.Boyfriend? No.She had a boyfriend.
“Oh,” Vivi said, voice low.
Remy dropped onto the ridiculous Muppet-fuzz chair. Vivi walked over and sat on the floor near his feet, smoothing her skirt out. Remy felt both a pull to take her hand and a pull to rise and walk away from her at the same instant. He resisted both, instead saying, “You can’t have it both ways, Vivi.”
“What?” Vivi asked, voice crushed.
“If you want me to be with you, if you want me to be able to talk to you and keep your secrets and for us to betogether, then I can’t be your employee whenever it’s useful for you.”
Vivi looked like he was speaking a different language, one she could only barely comprehend. “Do you want me to hire him back?” Vivi asked when neither had spoken for a few long moments.
“I’m not sure how you could without someone suspecting something’s up. But that’s not the issue right now: I need to know you can keep my secrets as well as I can keep yours. You baited me with that other tattoo story to see if it leaked, right? And you’d have ended things if it had. Well, I unintentionally baited you with Parish. And it leaked.”
Vivi nodded and, for the first time in the conversation, looked guilty. It was some small consolation to Remy and gave him a haunting feeling of hope, one that bounced around his chest and knocked against his heart.
“I’m sorry,” Vivi said in a small voice. She reached a hand up to him, and Remy took it, kissing her knuckles lightly, forcing forgiveness into the action.
“Okay,” he said, breathing against the back of her hand.
“Really?”
“No. But it will be,” he said. She climbed to sit on the arm of the chair, and slowly, slowly, slowly, the rigidity between them began to break to pieces. It didn’t vanish entirely; bits and pieces still prodded at Remy’s corners, but he reached over to pull Vivi into his lap. When she tilted her head back, he lowered his lips toward hers and kissed her, kissed her, kissed her, until he forgot she was Vivi Swan and remembered only that now, in this moment, she was his.
Vivi Swan Guitarist Leaves Tour
With only a few stops left, Parish Wilcox is out and on to greener pastures
Yep, there are pastures even greener than the Vivi Swan Sweethearts tour. The “Better Than” singer allowed her second guitarist (slash banjoist, slash fiddler) to leave her tour in the eleventh hour to pursue a recording opportunity with her label, Blue Robot.
“Vivi knew he’d been hoping to record his own music for a while now, so she hooked him up with some guys at Blue Robot. They wanted him in now, but she didn’t want to get between him and his dreams, so she allowed him to leave before the contract was up,” a tour insider says.
Wilcox will supposedly be recording a few rock-inspired jazz tunes for the label, with a planned release late this year.
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Author: Bianca Treble
