You know, I expected to hate this whole thing a lot more than I do. Don't get me wrong, I'm still going to be eternally angry with Sophie for just springing it on me (or, okay, at least for a few weeks) but this doesn't suck as much as I anticipated.

The schedule's crazy, a lot crazier than it would have been with Sophie, but oddly enough I seem to be adjusting. My body clock's a little out of whack but nothing I can't work my way through with a little caffeine. Speaking of, may I say how refreshing it is to be around people who don't give a shit what I eat? Sophie, God bless her, is always worried about my intestinal health and what all the caffeine and sugar I consume will do to my internal organs and blah, blah, blah. Last night at dinner was great - Justin looked at me like I had two heads when I tried to order just a salad, and Lynn Harless (I love this woman so much) said I needed fattening up.

Do you know when the last time somebody said that to me was? I'll give you a hint; my grandpa was still alive. Everybody else always looks at me next to Sophie - a.k.a she who might as well have been carved from marble by Michelangelo - and then they call me chubby. I know it's only because Hollywood standards are not in tune with that little place we call reality, but it's still really insulting. Yet there was that wonderful, wonderful woman, telling me I looked skinny. Hah, I love Justin's mom almost as much as I hate Sophie's dad; this ought to tell you something because I really do loathe that man. She's awesome. Bet she doesn't drive Justin bat shit crazy like my momma does me.

In a lot of ways it's not entirely dissimilar to what I do with Sophie. We're zipping around a lot more places in a much shorter space of time, but I can do this whole travelling thing. The paparazzi are pretty much the same, although they're being pretty vicious with him right now. To his credit, he's hiding behind his shades and keeping his head down. Sure, the glowering isn't too attractive, but the main thing is he's not acting out. We're currently walking along the street to this diner they like to go to when in Chicago (yay, junk food!) and are being followed by a couple of particularly obnoxious creeps. There's about ten of them following us, but it's just those two who are really trying to goad him.

"Chelsea sweetie?" Lynn calls to me - she and Justin are walking behind me and Tiny.

"Yes Lynn?" I twist my head around and try to keep my eyes on her and on where I'm going. It's difficult, to say the least.

"How long have we got for lunch?"

"Hour and a half and then we need to be back on the road to get to BB." That stands for Best Buy, by the way. I abbreviated it in vain hope that these idiots don't already have their mitts on Justin's schedule and won't understand me.

"Have I got time to change?" Justin asks.

"We haven't got time to go back to the hotel," I shake my head, "so only if you're happy with those shirts you just picked up."

Justin stares into his bag for a moment, pondering this. He just had to stop along the way, like he doesn't already have a wardrobe three times the size of my apartment. For a guy who claims to hate shopping he does a lot of it.

"Eh, that'll work."

My newly changed ring tone - Coldplay's Clocks - goes off and I immediately pull my cell out of my purse. I was hoping it was Kennedy, but it's Sophie. Ken finally seems inclined to return my messages but we're playing voicemail tag and it's irritating. One of these days I will manage to call her at the right time.

"Hey Soph," I answer. Lord I hope this isn't another dumb question.

"Hey chica!" Her bubbly voice sounds down the line and for a moment I feel a pang of loneliness.

I know I complain about her a lot but she is my friend and I do miss her. Everybody here is cool and everything but it's not the same. Sophie is familiar, whenever I'm with her I know exactly what I'm doing. This little assignment JT's got me on isn't sucking as much as I thought, but I still feel out of my depth a lot. If it weren't for Trace being at the other end of the phone constantly I have a feeling I'd be screwing up left and right. Not to mention that I just… I don't feel close enough to anybody around here to really talk to them. People are friendly, don't get me wrong; I can find a conversation easily enough but it's trivial and when all is said and done, fleeting. I couldn't have a really good talk with anybody here - I have to phone home for that. Or at least I would if Kennedy wasn't always away from her phone at the crucial moment.

"So, oh my God, I just had to call you because you are never going to believe this. You are never going to believe who showed up at the signing today."

"Who?"

"Benny."

"Oh my God, are you serious? I thought he'd disappeared!"

"Mmmhmm. He fell on top of the table and the whole thing collapsed. I'm still amazed I got my legs out from under in time."

Let me give you the history here - Benny would be classified as a stalker if he wasn't so utterly harmless. He's married, has kids, but Sophie is his hero and he tries to meet her every chance he can. I met his long suffering wife once who said at least it wasn't a porn star he was obsessing over. Sophie jokes that she wishes it was because then his accident prone self would be causing a ruckus at somebody else's events. I think he just gets flustered or something, but one time he managed to accidentally dump a full cup of coffee all over a nice pile of shiny new 'making of' books she was signing. He's a lovely guy, really, very sweet, but he is the world's biggest klutz. I fear for my safety every time he gets near. But he's been AWOL for the last six months and Sophie and I figured he'd latched onto somebody else.

"Jesus. How many injured?"

"Well, he had to pay the store about fifty bucks for wrecked posters because they all got creased and scratched and stuff, but by his standards that's not too bad. No human casualties. So anyway how are you babe? I miss you, Dad is driving me nuts."

I swallow down the sarcastic comment about being more careful with giving me away so easily. "I miss you too, I'm surrounded by boys."

"You say that like it's a bad thing!" I can just see the gleam in her eye. She can be a dreadful flirt sometimes. "Seriously though, is everything going okay?"

"Yeah, it's fine," I shrug like she can see me. "Little manic but I'm coping."

"Bueno. So long as they're looking after you. So how's Justin?" She asks. "Any gossip for me?"

Ahh. I was hoping we could skip this part. I try to resist the urge to glance back, and Tiny's presence at my side suddenly becomes oppressive. In my head I know none of them can hear her, but I'm irrationally paranoid. Of all times to ask this question, she had to pick one when he was around - though, to be fair, what with being his PA he is around me a lot.

"Umm… not really." I try to keep my voice light and to be as vague as I can. That's partly to put her off a little, I confess (I mentioned before how uncomfortable spying makes me, right?) but mostly it's because I do not want him getting even the slightest little inkling of what I'm talking about. "Not much I could tell you that you don't already know."

"Honestly, you're useless," she teases, though thankfully seems to let it go. "Well, as a spy anyway, I tell you I really wish I had you back right now. My father seems to think I'm still cinco."

"What's he doing?" I try to hide the sigh, knowing that she's about to start bitching.

"What isn't the bastardo doing? I swear he pisses off every journalist who comes to speak to me before they even get in the room with me, and last night when we were…"

I zone out as Tiny turns towards what I'm guessing is our diner of choice. She can keep talking for long after I stop listening, and usually response is redundant. I keep telling her to do some Shakespeare - soliloquies are never going to be an issue.

I wake back up when somebody's grabbed my phone from me. I yelp and look up expecting to see a mugger, but instead Justin is holding my phone as he automatically holds the door for his momma… and I guess me.

"Sophie, Justin. How are you?"

"I'm not so good actually; it's about Chelsea."

Oh shit. What did I do? I bet it's about that wake up call I nearly missed this morning, I was up too late reading…

"Yeah, I'm not happy that you keep calling and monopolising my assistant. She's on my time now Señorita; it's not my fault if you were fool enough to give her up. You know, I'm not so sure I'm going to be handing her back either, I might just have to keep her..."

Oh thank God. Shit that was not funny - well, maybe Sophie's laughing at the other end of the line but he nearly gave me a damn heart attack. I swear I could physically feel the blood leaving my face. He shouldn't do that to me, I'm too young to die.

***

Sometimes I feel sorry for Tiny and my guards. I get to sit down and eat and they get to stand around glaring at folk who dare come near me. I would have told him to either sit with us or do his own thing for an hour if it hadn't been for the photographers crowding the entrance. The restaurant has managed to keep them out, but it can't stop them from paying people who come in to take pictures on their phones. Tiny's doing what they all do at my shows - keeping an eagle eye out for phones so he can threaten to smash the things if they don't delete the pictures. It might seem heavy handed and it probably is, but sad experience has taught me that if you give people an inch they take a mile.

This would be the discussion I'm quietly having with my mother right now - people who take advantage and namely press people who take advantage. I wish we were talking about Grandma and what she baked today. Though, come to think of it, that always puts me off dessert because I start hankering for cobbler or crunch cake and then nothing else will do.

I pop another cheese fry in my mouth, take a swig of Coke and nod my head at what Mom is saying.

"I mean, I think baby that we just have to ride this out. I know you hate feeling like you can't do or say something but I think we need to give them time to forget about it first."

"Respond once they've already got bored and headed onto the next scandal?"

"Exactly," she says. "And it's good that you're on tour right now. I know we didn't want you to go but at least they're too busy with the reviews right now."

"But… God." I try not to throw my fork on my plate. "I hate this. They're like pre-school children that need to be distracted."

"I know honey," she rolls her eyes and shakes her head, blonde curls going everywhere. "But on the bright side, Chelsea seems to be doing a pretty good job scaring them off."

"She works for Enrique Fuentes, enough said," I snort before taking a big bite out of my burger and chomping as I speak. "That guy wrote the book on how to intimidate the shit out of reporters, that's why Sophie never gets any bad press."

"Don't talk with your mouth full," she scolds me. "Still…" Mom has that look on her face like she's contemplating something seriously. "I wonder how wise that is. When I saw him on set I couldn't help thinking that one of these days he's going to slip up and all those people he's been rude to are going to take great delight in dragging Sophie down to get back at him."

"That's probably true," I have to agree with her. It's the way Hollywood works - build 'em up, knock 'em down. The trick is to keep getting back up. "I felt like telling her to do a Janet and ditch Daddy Dearest from the payroll, but I thought she'd get pissed at me."

"You know I still wonder why Chelsea sticks around with them," she says idly as she pushed pasta around her plate.

I nearly choked when she said that. She said it so nonchalantly, like she was just musing that she needs to do laundry when she gets home. Chelsea, I might add, is in the bathroom and has been for some time. With some people in Hollywood I might suspect they were snorting something, but with Chelsea I'm guessing her phone's gone off. That thing never stops ringing. One of these days I'm going to throw it out of a window - I was only half kidding with Sophie when I said her calls were annoying me. I feel like telling her that if she reassigns her assistant to cover somebody else, she shouldn't then keep calling her and giving her double the workload. It stops her doing all the crap I need her to do when the whole point is that she's working for me not Sophie right now.

"How do you mean?" I ask.

"Well…" she takes a sip of her water. Mom and Chelsea were relatively good, they got water and pasta; I went straight for the cholesterol. "She just seems so… sad all the time, don't you think?"

"How so?"

"Oh, I'm probably being silly," she smiles at me. "I don't know… she just seems like she could be doing so much better. I mean she's a bright young woman, or at least she seems, and bright young women don't generally lack ambition. She just seems to be very stuck, I get the feeling there's something she'd rather be doing."

"Oh, she told Trace she only got into being a PA because they offered her a shit load of cash." I'm purposely ignoring the look she gave me for swearing. I am a grown man, damn it, my mother cannot tell me not to swear.

"Hmm. What else has she told Trace?" My mother asks.

"I think he mentioned something about her going into film production eventually… I don't know," I shrug. "We were kind of busy at the time laughing about how Elliot's PA totally stuck her foot in it with Sophie because she took Chelsea's to do list, decided to do it for her to score points with Sophie and proceeded to royally screw it all up."

"You notice how compliant she always is?" Mom says thoughtfully.

"Well yeah," I swallow another fry. "Isn't that the point of a PA?"

"Hmm. I just wonder when she ever says no to anybody. Oh well, just a thought."

She shrugs and like that, the topic is done. Sometimes I can't work my mother out. She seems to have some weird intuitive thing going on that really isn't genetic, because I never get what the hell she's thinking. Nine times out of ten she's right, but damned if I know how. And now she's got me wondering if I was just taking advantage of Chelsea's inability to say no, seeing as I could clearly tell she was not thrilled by Sophie's magnanimous little gesture in 'lending' her to me.

Eh. I can't be working her as bad as Enrique would. That man runs his daughter's entourage like Hitler ran Germany - or should that be how Franco ran Spain? (Hey, sometimes I know stuff alright?)

Oh, wait… now I see why Mom abruptly changed the subject, Chelsea's sitting back down, giving an apologetic smile and saying something about Kennedy. I had my back to her and couldn't see her coming. I did offer to bring Kennedy out on tour with us to keep her company but apparently she was busy or something. Mom, lying through her teeth, says we were just talking about my grandparents and asks about Chelsea's family. I vaguely remember that she has a sister, nieces and nephews and a mom who drives her "bat shit crazy" (direct quote), so I zone out a little.

Or at least I zone out until Tiny quietly leans into my ear and speaks.

"The horde outside's getting bigger," he tells me quietly. "I'm thinking I should go bring the car to you - walking down the street in that is not going to be pretty."

"Shit." I run my hand over my face, trying to keep from wincing. "How many?"

"Hostess is telling me at least twenty."

"You think they'll get nasty?"

"I took a quiet look out the window." Tiny shakes his head with an inscrutable expression. "The two who were bugging you on the way in got some buddies along for the ride. The rest of them I could go either way but I don't trust those assholes."

"Okay." I can't do anything but agree with him. When it comes to my safety, I put everything into my security's hands. They rarely lead me astray. It happens, but that's the name of the game. In this business you have to be prepared for shit to happen at any given moment. Tiny nods and immediately heads for the door, only stopping to ask the waitress if she'll get our bill.

Sometimes I wonder if this is all worth it. I don't tell too many people that. I always tell them that music and doing what I love makes up for all of it and this is just a minor distraction. The truth is that sometimes I'm kept awake at night considering whether it's really worth continuing all this when I've made my money and I could probably just slip into obscurity and do some producing behind the scenes and stuff, away from the spotlight. It's got to be easier than this.

"No, I hate to admit it but I was pretty impressed. I thought it was cool just having him and the piano," Chelsea is saying to my mother when I finally manage to start paying attention to my fellow diners.

"That was pretty much how he learnt," Mom tells her. "Just him and a piano. Most of the music we listened to was like that too, either country with just a guitar and a vocal or blues with the piano."

"Are my ears burning?" I joke lamely. I'm guessing Chelsea was talking about the show last night, she said she'd never seen my stuff before and she's one of the few I believe when she says it. Mostly because you can't fake that kind of disinterest. People do try sometimes, but I see through it in about… oh, two seconds.

"I was just saying to Chelsea that we'll make a Justin Timberlake fan out of her yet."

"Hmm. I always preferred the Backstreet Boys," she jokes.

You know, all of a sudden I see what my mother means. She cracks jokes, and she smiles and laughs, but I'm not entirely sure I believe her all the time. That's far too much psychoanalysis for a girl I don't know too well, but then Dad always said if I hadn't been a musician my nosy self would have had to be a psychiatrist or something. I responded by saying that all shrinks had something wrong in the head themselves, and he just said he didn't see how that disqualified me.

Hmm… what might have been? Not that it matters, I'm currently more concerned about what will be - and specifically about what will be in the next ten minutes or so because Tiny wasn't kidding when he said that crowd of paparazzi had got larger. Ay.