Picture Perfect

the blackmailers were relying on. The truth was that I didn’t care about the tape as it related to my career; I only cared about my dad.
    “I’m going to give my DNA tomorrow for the paternity test. Will you come with me?”
    “Dad, of course I’ll come with you. In fact, let’s hang out tonight. I’ll spend the night and we can leave from here in the morning.”
    The look of relief on his face told me that he needed that, and that made me feel better.

Chapter Twenty-Three

    My flight home sucked. I felt like I was leaving a part of me behind in LA, and I wanted to kick my own ass for thinking that way. I didn’t like being melancholy and I never wanted to be that annoying girl who listened to sappy love songs and bemoaned being separated from her man. Besides, I wasn’t even sure Flynn was my man. We’d only know each other for a matter of days. From that standpoint, I knew that being apart was the right thing to do. We needed to be apart to figure out if how we felt when we were together was real.
    By the time I’d gathered my luggage from the carousel, I had myself pretty well under control. I tried to call Flynn but got no answer, so I decided to try him later. Jess was at the curb waiting for me, and I hopped in with a smile. It was good to be back with my bestie, and I couldn’t wait to share everything that had happened to me over the last few days with her.
    After picking up hoagies from our local Wawa, we headed back to our apartment. Jess went to the bathroom and I quickly texted Flynn.
    Me: I’m home, safe and sound.
    Flynn: Good. I miss you so much baby. Call you soon.
    I felt like a total idiot for being sad that he wasn’t going to call me immediately.
    Me: Okay, talk to you then.
    He didn’t respond to that text, and I was left feeling uncertain. In the few days that I’d spent with him, Flynn had been downright chatty. Suddenly he was going radio silent on me, and I couldn’t help but think that it was a classic case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Apparently I’d been fascinating to him while I was nearby, but the three thousand mile distance had clearly dampened his enthusiasm.
    Jess came bounding back into the room with a huge smile, throwing herself down on the sofa with a giggle. “Alright, tell me everything! What was it like hanging out with rock n’ rolls gods? Did you love it there? What was Flynn like in person? Did you want to do him?”
    I’d come home so excited to tell her about everything, but now I felt like a groupie loser. Instead of telling her the truth, I downplayed the whole thing. “Flynn was nice. The entire band was nice. Very down to earth. I learned all about my tour responsibilities and I’m so excited about the whole thing. Of course I loved it in LA, can’t wait to get you out there Jess. You’re going to love it.”
    After swallowing her mouthful of food, Jess frowned at me. “That’s it? He was nice ? Six years ago, he eye fucked you for almost three straight hours and now he was just nice? What a letdown!”
    I smiled to cover the pain in my heart, looking down at my hoagie in the hopes that she wouldn’t see any traces of how I really felt in my eyes.
    “It wasn’t a letdown Jess. They were all great and I’m very excited about this tour. The highlight was all the great people that I met who will be working on the tour too. Some of them were crazy hot. You would have been in heaven!”
    One of Jess’s favorite past-times was talking about hot guys, and my diversion tactic worked. She spent twenty minutes grilling me about all the guys that I’d met, and she didn’t ask about Flynn again for the rest of the night.
    After we ate, I headed to my room to unpack and go to bed. I also decided to torture myself and transfer all of the photos I had taken during my trip onto my computer. There were hundreds of photos to go through, but the ones that I pulled out and made a special file for were from my time with Flynn. The picture that I’d taken of us kissing on that bluff in Malibu was so beautiful that it made my heart hurt.
    I spent an hour cropping and touching up the photos that I’d taken of Flynn and his family the night of our dinner. The photos that his Gram had taken of the two of us together were painful to look at. It felt like that had happened eons ago instead of just days. Once I was finished editing, I put them all in a zip file and sent them on to his Gram, along with a friendly email telling her that I would see her