I giggled, and he started to tickle me. I shrieked and tried to wriggle away from him, and he laughed. Then his alarm went off again and all the fun abruptly stopped. We both let out a sigh and got up and wandered to the bathroom.

He handed me my toothbrush and we stood over the sink brushing our teeth in our well-practiced routine. I stared at myself in the mirror. God, I looked like hell. Like I needed to be dipped in a full-body moisturizer or something. I had dark circles under my eyes and I was pale again. Even though most of our hotels had pools and spas, we didn’t have time to use them.

Maybe we needed to drink more water. I made a mental note to make Jason do that with me—even though he looked great.

Jason was born for this life. None of the traveling fazed him. Not to mention it was in his contract that he had to do at least an hour at the gym with a personal trainer four times a week. So while I was getting puffy and pale, he was getting toned and hotter than he already was. It was so unfair.

I let my eyes follow the line of hair down Jason’s six-pack stomach into the waistband of his pajama bottoms. When I looked up, he was smirking at me with his toothbrush in his mouth. He bounced his eyebrows, and I laughed and spit. “Don’t let it get to your head just because you’re still gorgeous despite this marathon we’ve been running.”

He spit too. “Well, I have to be equal to my beautiful girlfriend, don’t I?” He winked.

I scoffed. “Yeah, right.” My eyes were bloodshot from coughing. I was bloated and exhausted.

I did not adjust to change well. I hadn’t known this about myself until change was all I did.

We’d been on the road three months. And none of it was at all what I’d expected. There was nothing glamorous or vacation-like about anything we were doing.

Bus, hotel, venue, flight. Radio station, news station, photo shoots, fast food, six hours of sleep, four hours of sleep, back in the bus. Perpetual motion, all the time. It was so constant my body couldn’t catch up.

The crew got two days off a week—but we didn’t. There was always some sort of media thing they needed Jason doing. He was too afraid to not do it. If he didn’t sell out his concerts, they’d bring in Lola. It was exhausting.

I’d been fighting this cold for forever. My stomach was a mess too. We were eating nothing but junk—and there really wasn’t much of a choice. Jason’s tour manager had him on such a tight schedule, stopping for anything longer than gas and whatever restaurant was in the adjacent parking lot was all we could manage. We ate at all different hours of the day. Sometimes we had dinner at five before his show, sometimes we didn’t eat until midnight. I was jet-lagged and we weren’t even out of the United States yet.

I was living for our five-week break. Counting down the days. It was September fourth and we had ten more weeks of this until the time off for the holidays. I hadn’t seen Kristen in months. Jason kept offering to fly her and Josh out, but there was no point. We almost never stayed in the same place for more than two days and the baby wouldn’t do well with all the traveling.

So the plan was to spend a week in Ely with his family for Thanksgiving, and then a month in California so I could paint and see Kristen and my parents. A month wasn’t a lot of time to pull off the piece that had been commissioned. But I didn’t want to leave him early and honestly, I was so excited to do it I didn’t care if it meant I had to paint fourteen hours a day just to finish it in time.

I missed painting like a penetrating ache in my soul. I’d never gone this long without doing it in some capacity. Now, over three months without a paintbrush in my hand and I craved it. Not to mention I wanted the work. I’d made a nice chunk of change from the sale of my house. I had my own money to spend—not that Jason would let me. But I wanted a purpose. Something that wasn’t just being Jason’s girlfriend.

Someone knocked on the door and I put on my robe and went to answer it. This was part of our system now. I got the door and Jason got out of sight in case someone passed by and saw him inside.

We’d learned to do this the hard way. If someone spotted him in the room, we had to move or we’d have fans or cameras waiting for us when we came out—or worse, knocking and waking us up.

I opened the door to Zane holding our coffees and the room service guy with the cart standing there at the same time.

“Hey,” I said, letting them both in.

I breathed in the warm smell of pancakes and bacon as the cart pushed past me into the room. At least I could count on a semi-decent meal when we stayed in a hotel with room service. But even that had lost its luster months ago. All the menus were the same. The same five or six options for every meal at every hotel. I had never thought I’d be bored of room service, but here we were.

I’d pictured we’d eat at all the signature restaurants in the cities we would visit. Barbecue in Kansas, deep-dish pizza in Chicago, cheesesteaks in Philadelphia. But we didn’t really visit the cities we were in. We drove through them. Sometimes so fast we didn’t even know we’d been there.

Zane handed me my Starbucks latte and put Jason’s black Sumatra drip next to the TV. She pulled a folder out from under her arm. “Here’s the schedule. They booked him in the six o’clock slot.”

I groaned. “They couldn’t prerecord it?”

“Nope. Live. Sorry.”

Ugh. This meant that instead of any kind of sit-down dinner tonight, he was going to run right from the news station onto the stage. Again.