With Ezra keeping the girl, who’d started sobbing, to one side, I carried on walking as swiftly as possible. I fixed my gaze onto a billboard outside the exit doors, focused on it, eliminating the chaos around me, and wouldn’t take my eyes off it until I felt the fresh air beyond the doors hit my face.
Jesus fucking Christ.
It felt good to arrive at my house after spending the first night back in London at a hotel. I understood why it had to be that way, why we needed a cooling-off period to give the paparazzi enough time to get their exclusives while my team brought their plans together to get me back here, but I liked my own stuff. I liked pillows that smelled familiar, sheets that weren’t tucked into the mattress in a way that made me feel like I’d been taken hostage, couches with padded arms, toilet seats that only my arse had graced. I could’ve got it all and more, if I’d asked. Plenty of others did, demanded even. However, it turned out being an arsehole wasn’t mandatory to be a celebrity. It was simply a trait too many acquired along the way.
“Need me to stick around for anything?” I’d almost forgotten Ezra was still here until his thick, low voice rumbled from the other side of the room.
I stopped looking through the vinyls on my shelf, turned my attention to his huge frame. “I’m good. Cheers, Ezra.”
With a nod, he strode over, heavy boots thumping on the wooden floor. “You’ve got your panic button. Keep it close, yeah?”
I tipped my chin. I knew the drill. “Sure thing. Have a good night.”
I wondered, as he left, what a good night actually meant for Ezra. He didn’t really know anyone over here. He couldn’t have nights out or time off. He was paid, essentially, to be obsessed with me, my whereabouts and wellbeing. He’d had a family once, a wife and two daughters, and I’d always suspected his job had played a huge part in their separation. He was away too much, spent more time with me than he ever could with his ex-wife. Right now, we’d only had a month’s break since the stateside gigs wrapped up. Before that, the tour had made its way through Europe, Asia, and then onto Australia. Ten months he’d been on the road with me then, leaving his kids with only a buffering image of their dad via FaceTime.
“It’s what you pay me for,” he’d told me a thousand times, but I still felt a stab of guilt. I did pay him, and I paid him well, but I doubted I could ever pay him enough for what he’d had to put up with over the years. Ezra had been my bodyguard since I’d waltzed off the stage of Next Up as an elated and terrified kid who had no comprehension of what was about to happen to his life. In a lot of ways, I looked to Ezra like a father, though I was sure he’d deck me into next week if I’d said that to his face. He was, after all, only twelve years older than me.
So, now I was alone in another one of my gratuitously massive houses and I felt…lost.
You got this.
“Right?” I said aloud, answering my mind’s voice as if it were sitting right in front of me. The trouble was I hadn’t sounded so convincing. I’d been here countless times before, right here in this house days before a first show was due to begin, sinking into the white leather couch after selecting a record guaranteed to soothe my mood.
Only Oh! You Pretty Things wasn’t loosening the knot in my stomach today. As I hummed along with Bowie’s elastic range, I felt tension rise in my shoulders. I shuffled further into the leather, cranked my neck side-to-side. I’d lived with anxiety since my earliest memory. The condition wasn’t just familiar to me, it was intrinsically a part of who I was, embedded into my DNA. That’s how I knew this feeling building inside me was something else, something more.
Fuck.
Getting up, I left Bowie singing to an audience of none and headed to the bar next to the kitchen to pour a scotch I didn’t need. Still, I drank it anyway before pouring another, and then decided it was probably easier to just take the whole damn bottle to bed with me. It was a bad idea, I knew from the start, but one I’d deal with in the morning.
I’d stopped myself drinking before reaching the point of no return last night. The third glass was enough. Even that had left me feeling rough around the edges. I struggled through a shower, brushed my teeth, and padded downstairs to the kitchen in my robe, bare feet slapping the tiles. I chugged down some water, hoping to flush the queasiness away. Didn’t work, unsurprisingly. I knew better than to mix alcohol with new meds, meds that I hadn’t told anyone, bar Ezra, about. I had to let him know in order to get them on the fucking plane, seeing as I couldn’t so much as fart without someone knowing about it. Ezra didn’t really mingle with anyone else, didn’t gossip or answer to anyone other than me. I could trust that he’d keep it to himself.