Taking the Bull by the Horns, a Cascade Texas novella by MJ Fredrick Page B

before.”
    “Trust me.”
    So he turned and got to the shady hilltop overlooking the winery and its fields of grapes in neat rows, in half the time as before. But when he was shaking the tablecloth out onto the ground, he could have sworn he heard her humming something familiar.
    And not the song they’d danced to at the Longhorn.
    A song he hoped he’d never hear again. How did she find out? He looked at her sharply. “What’s that?”
    She knelt at the edge of the tablecloth and blinked at him innocently. “What?”
    “What you’re humming.”
    “Sound familiar?” She unpacked the French bread, deli sliced turkey, cheese and tomatoes and a bag of chips.
    He dropped onto his ass and looped his arms over his knees. “How’d you find out?”
    “Jerri, the blonde from the Longhorn, recognized you.” She reached in the oversized bag she’d brought and pulled out one of those damned teen magazines, already bent open to a page with the members of Crushin’ spread across the page.
    “Ah, hell.”
    Her eyebrows winged up over bright eyes. “You were pretty cute.”
    He rolled his eyes. He didn’t want that complicated part of his life mixed with the pleasant simplicity of being here with her. “Lavender, I don’t want–it’s not something I’m proud of.”
    She sank onto her bottom, her legs folded to the side as she flipped the magazine closed. “I just want to know how you went from this to, well, this.”
    “I don’t talk about it.” He picked up a bottle opener for the wine.
    “Oh.” She rolled up the magazine to tuck it back in her bag, but he reached for it and flung it off the hillside.
    She stared, and heat crept up his own neck. But she didn’t say anything, just took the knife from the basket and sliced the bread.
    “It was an opportunity,” he blurted, stopping with the cork half out of the bottle. Okay, so he’d never hold up under torture, not when Lavender’s silence made him cave. “I’d tried to get into acting, and it never went through. But some scouts saw me, approached my parents, and they signed me up.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Fifteen.”
    She peered up at him, still making the sandwiches. “But not your choice.”
    He sighed and looked out over the open land. “At the time, I thought it would be cool. All that money, all those girls. Then I ended up being the family breadwinner, and the bread just wasn’t enough, you know?”
    She set down the loaf and watched him now, but didn’t speak. Her silence was no longer a pressure, but an offering for him to talk. He hadn’t talked to anyone about this in, well, ever. He finished opening the bottle of wine, set it aside to let it breathe, and leaned back on his hands.
    “At first, you know, it was a big deal. Photographers and girls and people throwing money at us, pretty much. We didn’t have to go to school, we had tutors, but no one was really strict about it. We saw all these places we’d never thought we’d see, and we had this incredible freedom.
    “But the more popular we got, the less freedom we had. The less we saw, the less we could go out. It was just hotel to venue to airport, alternating with home to recording studio to dance studio, and it was exhausting, and boring.”
    “And you couldn’t stop.”
    The empathy in her tone surprised him. “I couldn’t stop,” he repeated. “My dad had quit his job, my mom had moved the family into this huge house that we never would have been able to even drive past before I joined the band. If I quit, we would lose everything.”
    “You were just a kid.”
    “With way more earning potential than either of my parents.”
    “So what happened?”
    He shrugged. “The inevitable. We got too old, stopped being marketable. Boy bands went out of fashion.”
    “And you lost everything?”
    He blew a breath out his nose. “I know you hear those stories about parents mismanaging kids’ money like that, but my dad was pretty smart. He knew it couldn’t last