Playing Pretend

Playing Pretend - Chapter Two

XAVIER

I had been right.

Guy's night had been a terrible idea and it had gone horribly wrong.

And we had only been at the bar for less than a half an hour before things got turned upside down, and I somehow find myself being hauled off to a police cruiser with handcuffs wrapped securely around my wrists.

But where was I right now?

Well, six hours and one night in a jail cell later and I'm sitting inside of one of the many--mostly likely unused--rooms at Olympian Records. I had been to the tall, eight-story high building before.

Nothing had changed--or, at least, anything I could notice as I sat seated in a black swivel chair with a glass of water sitting in front of me on the long oval glass table that reached from one end of the room to the other.

Sitting on the other side of the table was my manager, Sean. Sean had salt and pepper hair, with brown eyes, and a receding hairline. His face had lost its youthful glow years ago, and where the skin used to be tight was now wrinkles.

I remember when I first met him at a bar at seventeen.

But back then, he was working for a lousy, washed-up band in San Diego that could barely even sing and I was just a newly graduated high schooler who had one thing on his mind. And unlike every other teenage boy at the time, I wasn't looking to get laid.

Instead, all I had was five bucks to my name, my father's old guitar, and a passion for singing.

Sean had been merely a stranger back then. But eight years later, he had become a well-needed father-figure and one of the most important people in my life. He came second, whereas my mother came first. Because I was busy with my music most of the time and my mother was too far away, I found myself looking to Sean in times of need--and this just happened to be one of those times.

Except, unlike all those other times, Sean didn't seem like he wanted to give me a comforting hug and one of his sappy, fatherly speeches.

No. But what I did receive from him was an icy, disappointed glare.

"....You don't look very happy," I point out, and at the sound of my voice, Sean's gaze drops from where he stares at the clock hanging on the wall behind me, finding my eyes.

"And why do you think that is, Xavier? Because I can tell you right now that it has absolutely nothing do with the fact that it is eight in the morning," he says, brown eyes narrowing as he leaned back in his chair.

As he fixes his tie, I hear him grumble, "....Honestly, what were you thinking sneaking away and starting a fight?"

"It wasn't my idea," I mumble just above a whisper, and I don't think Sean expected me to hear what he had said, but it becomes clear when his eyes widen. When I glance over at him, I find him already staring at him, a skeptical eyebrow raised.

"That's your only defense?" He questions, forehead wrinkling. "'It wasn't my idea'? You're going to try harder than that to convince me, kid."

My jaw clenches at the word 'kid'. It felt like an insult instead of an endearing nickname you'd call a twelve-year-old boy.

And I'm certainly no boy.

"In case you've forgotten I'm twenty-five," I tell Sean, annoyed.

He chuckles humorlessly. "Really? Could've fooled me."

I grind my teeth together, going from annoyed to mildly pissed off in seconds. "You're a real jackass, you know that?"

Sean simply shrugs as he pulls out his phone, averting his gaze and looking down at the device in his hands as he retorts quietly, "And you're a real pain in my ass, but you don't see complaining like a five-year-old...."