All Bad

5. Stuck on Stupid

There's something about you, baby
And I swear that it drives me crazy
I'm stuck on you baby,
Stuck on you baby...
- Chris Brown

Aubrey's POV

I picked up my hand luggage and shoved it in the overhead compartment then I collapsed into my window seat and crawled into a slightly more comfortable sitting arrangement. I sat looking out the window as the plane started moving quickly along the tarmac and glided smoothly into the clouds above Los Angeles.

My stomach was churning up and down it was so terrifying thinking about being 2000 kilometres off the ground there were so many things that could go wrong. I took my headphones out of my handbag and put my IPhone music on shuffle as I heard Childish Gambino's Heartbeat start to flow through, relaxing and trying not to think of crashing. Flying always made me anxious.

I was headed to Las Vegas. It would be my first time and I was super excited to see the famous Vegas strip and to take photographs and act like a true tourist but I doubted I'd have the time do anything; my first ever trip to Vegas, where they say "what happens here, stays here" and I was visiting  for work.

I was headed to Vegas for the Billboard music awards with my boss, Mariel as part of one of her biggest clients' Jennifer Lopez or JLO's entourage to dress her for the red carpet, her performance, the after party and a bunch of other appearances she had to make during her four day stay in Las Vegas as she was hosting the event this year.

Me, my boss Mariel, Jennifer's band, dancers, tour manager, makeup artists, assistants, her hairdresser and about twelve more people whose association with her were unknown to me were taking up nearly all of business-class. This was extremely generous of an artist, so I'd been told by Lorenzo her hair stylist; most celebrities left their people in coach.

When I got the phone call from Mariel telling me that she wanted me to come on this trip with her I barely had time to prepare. It was literally a rush trying to get everything prepared.

Usually we would have months to prepare for these types of trips but we literally had a week to get everything prepared, we pulled every piece of clothing we could, called in a million favours, put a lot of business relationships on the line to make it happen and were shitting ourselves about feeling unprepared for this and not even being in LA where we could scream for help if necessary which is why Mariel dragged me along for the ride so if, God forbid, anything did go wrong there'd be two people running around the streets of Las Vegas looking for outfits instead of her alone.

I preferred being busy though, throwing myself into work gave me something to do instead of sitting at home watching movies and eating my way to obesity to curb my loneliness.

I cursed myself for a while after my date with Justin for even getting excited and thinking that he could be different from all the guys when after all that he didn't even call me after that night. It became clear that when he dropped me home after dinner he expected me to invite him in and sleep with him but when I didn't he just lost interest. And to think I even broke a rule by kissing him. Shame on me.

He hadn't completely stopped talking to me actually, he texted me and called a few times to see how I was but I usually didn't pick up the call or respond to the texts; it was obvious he was trying to keep me sweet in order to get lucky the next time he saw me which was definitely not going to happen.

To make things worse my ex had started trying to contact me again. I don't know how he got a hold of my number since I blocked him and eventually ended up changing it because he kept calling from different numbers.