Worlds Apart

Chapter Seven

I had this one huge weakness.

Seriously, in the face of it I was fucking powerless to resist.

Sour keys.

If any man I’d ever slept with had any sense they’d have given me sour keys instead of flowers, I might have stuck around longer.

On the other hand, I wasn’t an easy one to get along with so it was probably easier that I’d never been given sour keys, because I was liable to marry the man that gave me them. And that was coming from a woman set in the ideal that marriage was an archaic construct. It had to mean something.

That was what lead me to standing with the bag of sour keys in bulk at the grocery store, waiting impatiently for the checkout line to hurry along.

I’d found that in a town this small, there were very few places to buy things such as sour keys. And that got me to the single grocery store in the town, one that was quite quaint to the ones I habited in the city.

There had been a sweet shop that I’d spotted one day walking down the main road, but I’d opted out of a visit to that store quite yet. I could only imagine the man that would be behind the counter, all white hair with a moustache the quirked up at the ends, rosy cheeks and a blooming smile with a red apron. If I walked into that store, I wasn’t sure whether my childhood dreams would be crushed or inflated if that was truly what awaited in there.

One thing was certain though, I would start laughing.

Moving up the line diligently, I let my eyes wander about until they fell upon the magazine rack in front of me.

It was a habit to see what the newest shit being said about me was since I’d first started been splashed across tabloid covers if the option was in front of me, at least now I had a thicker skin about it. I suppose there came a time when you realized that the people who mattered to you wouldn’t believe the lies, and those who do don’t matter.

Sure enough, I didn’t have to look long until I found myself gracing a cover.

However it wasn’t the photo of me that had me raising my eyebrows.

Seriously, I just wasn’t going to be allowed to escape them even for a minute anymore, was I? I couldn’t even go to the fucking grocery store without a run in. Even if the run in was just a magazine cover that the Harrison brothers and I shared.

My photo was on the right side of the magazine. My dark hair had been pulled into two separate braids with a red bandana tied about my head and a smirk along with some dark red lipstick and a low cut grey v-neck that I had written Red Riot across in a black felt. I knew for a fact that there was an original photo floating about somewhere that head the rest of my band not a step to my side, it had been snapped backstage at a gig in Korea, but apparently someone was skilled at cropping.

The Harrison brothers took up the left half of the page. They were back to back, both with their typical dark sunglasses on though the photo had obviously been taken in a studio with a plain backdrop. Cam was leaning his head back against his brother’s, his hair had been just a tad shorter in the photo and he looked almost bored as he stayed facing away from the camera with his focus on the ceiling wearing a plain dark green cargo jacket that had an Union Jack patch on the sleeve.

Logan was an entirely different deal altogether, though. Whereas his brother was disposed to ignore the camera, Logan seemed to be eating up the attention with the dark hood of his sweater pulled over his head, his long hair coming out the side. He had his attention right on the lens, something resembling a snarl on his mouth with a cigarette caught between his lips. I was struck once again by the sensation that he was always looking for a fight.