Bitter Truth (Hawthorne Vines #1)

“Hey.”

She smiles. “Hey.”

I take a seat next to her and hand her a glass, before making quick work of pouring each of us a glass of Syrah.

“Cheers,” Murphy says, clinking hers against mine before taking a long sip.

I follow, placing my nose to the edge and inhaling first, then tilting the glass back and enjoying the way the tannins burst across my tongue.

“Thanks for coming out tonight,” she says, after we’ve been sitting silently together for a few minutes. “I’m sorry for being such a downer earlier. We were having a fun conversation, and I just got kind of lost in my head.”

I reach out and place my hand on hers, squeezing gently.

“You don’t have to apologize. Life is hard and sometimes reflecting on it is even harder.”

She nods, and again, like earlier, I get the sense that she wants to keep talking, that she has something important to say.

“And if you want to talk about it, I’m happy to listen,” I add.

Murphy looks at me, and something softens in her face for just a brief moment, before a glimmer of sadness begins to creep back into her expression.

“I went to LA to become a singer, right?” she starts, her voice quiet.

She shifts where she’s sitting, so her body is angled facing forward, and I get the feeling she’s putting a barrier in place. As if it’s safer to tell me her secrets without looking me in the eye.

“For years I worked every shift I could, lived in shitty roommate situations, and dealt with asshole coworkers and nightmare customers. For nine years, I sacrificed. And then, right when I was this close to my dream”—she lifts her fingers up and pinches them together—“it got snatched away by this fucking … misogynistic creep.”

She sets her glass on the bench next to her and shakes out her hands, like even thinking about it is too much to handle.

“I was signed to an agent. Paul was a real, honest-to-goodness agent with a really great record label. It was literally the dream. There was another girl … Dierdre. We’d crossed paths at various gigs around Hollywood, and we got along okay. So when Paul called us in together to talk about ‘our futures,’ we went together and sat in the waiting room and talked about what this could all mean for us and …” She takes a deep breath and lets it out long and slow.

“He called us in together and the conversation started simple enough. Expectations. Attitude. Performance.”

I wince when she says the last word like that, something icky creeping into the back of my mind at where this is going.

“And I guess I was a little more naive than I thought because he literally took his dick out and started stroking it while he was talking, and when I looked over at Dierdre, absolutely horrified, she looked like nothing was wrong. You know? Just a penis out, no big deal.”

She growls then, her anger and frustration and whatever happened coming out in a guttural noise.

“And then he let us know that if we expected to get anywhere in the music world, we’d need to get used to knowing how to get ahead. The unspoken part of that sentence was ‘by giving head.’”

My nostrils flare, my own anger beginning to course through my body at the idea of some gross prick talking to her like that.

“Dierdre walked up to his desk and dropped to her knees, right there, with me in the room,” she continues. “I nearly vomited on the floor, and I told Paul he was a disgusting asshole and didn’t he know that men like him couldn’t get away with shit like this anymore.”

Her voice hitches, and that’s when I realize she’s crying.

“And then he looked me in the eyes with this … glint, this smug fucking glint, and said, ‘Watch me,’ and then tilted his head back as Dierdre …”

She stands then, walks a few feet away, and kicks at a stick on the edge of the grassy hill where we are, sending it flying into the vineyard stretched before us. Her hands are balled into tight fists, her eyes closed. Her posture feels like a contained scream, and I swear it echoes in the open space around us.

I want to hug her or something. Pull her into me and take her pain away. But I know I can’t fix something like this. This kind of manipulation and abuse of power is … so wrong.

Murphy stares out into the distance and wipes at her face before she turns to sit next to me again.

“He called me the following day,” she continues, her voice returning to that quiet, melancholy state. “Told me the label had decided they were going to pass, and that I was a cunt who would never have a singing career.” She turns and looks at me. “He blacklisted me, so I came home.”

I run a hand through my hair, my anger at the injustice she faced melding with my frustration at the fact I can’t do anything to fix this.