The Mixtape Read online

  PRAISE FOR BRITTAINY CHERRY BOOKS

  “Readers will be drawn in by the complex characters, snappy pacing, and believable portrayals of both small-town life and the music industry. Cherry’s fans will be pleased.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Brittainy Cherry has the ability to shatter our hearts and heal them in the same story.”

  —The Bookery Review

  “This is not just your ordinary romance. It is completely addictive and intensely consuming. Heartbreakingly real in all its entirety.”

  —Kitty Kats Crazy about Books

  “Full of heartbreak and loss and pain. But also so full of love and hope and sweet and happy moments. I adored every single word in this book!”

  —BJ’s Book Blog

  “As usual Brittainy wrote a stunning story that will touch your heart and stay with you.”

  —Mel Reader Reviews

  “I’m speechless and completely overwhelmed by the beauty of this story.”

  —Two Unruly Girls

  “As always Cherry aims straight for our hearts and hits a bull’s-eye!”

  —Book Bistro Blog

  “STUNNING! Brittainy Cherry has once again blown my mind with another one of her beautifully written stories. There is no doubt in my mind that readers are going to fall just as madly in love with this story as I have.”

  —Wrapped Up in Reading Book Blog

  “You don’t just read a Brittainy Cherry book—her books, her words, devour you. Landon and Shay’s story is positively magnificent, and the best part is we’re only halfway through it.”

  —Passionately Plotted

  “There is so much emotion throughout, so many beautiful words, and I could not get enough. I laughed, my heart broke, and I felt everything the characters felt.”

  —Bibliophile Ramblings

  “Beautiful, heart-achingly real, and one of the best books I have ever read.”

  —Elle’s Book Blog

  OTHER TITLES BY BRITTAINY CHERRY

  The Elements Series

  The Gravity of Us

  The Silent Waters

  The Fire Between High & Lo

  The Air He Breathes

  The Compass Series

  Southern Storms

  Other Titles

  The Wreckage of Us

  Landon & Shay, Parts 1 & 2

  Eleanor & Grey

  A Love Letter from the Girls Who Feel Everything (coauthored with Kandi Steiner)

  Disgrace

  Behind the Bars

  Art & Soul

  Loving Mr. Daniels

  Our Totally, Ridiculous, Made-Up Christmas Relationship (novella)

  The Space in Between

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Brittainy C. Cherry

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542018364

  ISBN-10: 1542018366

  Cover design by Hang Le

  To my family. My favorite mixtape.

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE OLIVER

  1 OLIVER

  2 EMERY

  3 EMERY

  4 EMERY

  5 OLIVER

  6 OLIVER

  7 OLIVER

  8 EMERY

  9 OLIVER

  10 EMERY

  11 EMERY

  12 EMERY

  13 EMERY

  14 OLIVER

  15 EMERY

  16 OLIVER

  17 OLIVER

  18 EMERY

  19 OLIVER

  20 OLIVER

  21 EMERY

  22 OLIVER

  23 EMERY

  24 EMERY

  25 OLIVER

  26 OLIVER

  27 OLIVER

  28 EMERY

  29 EMERY

  30 EMERY

  31 OLIVER

  32 EMERY

  33 EMERY

  34 EMERY

  35 OLIVER

  36 EMERY

  37 OLIVER

  38 EMERY

  39 EMERY

  40 EMERY

  41 EMERY

  EPILOGUE EMERY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This story came from a place of compassion and love for women around the world who go through so much day in and day out. I wanted to write a story full of heart and meaning with an authentic feel.

  For those reasons, I’d like to note that parts of this story may be sensitive to a few readers due to the subject matter, which includes substance abuse, depression, verbal abuse, and rape.

  PROLOGUE

  OLIVER

  Six Months Ago

  I came from a family built of extroverts. Me? Not so much. It didn’t bother me any. I was one of those lucky bastards who knew who he was at a very young age, and my family loved me for exactly who I’d always been. I thrived in my introverted ways. If I had a book, a jam-packed playlist, and a dog companion, I was a happy guy.

  My brother, Alex, was the complete opposite of me—more like my parents. He flourished at social gatherings. If there was a party, Alex was there on center stage. When it came to having a twin, self-discovery almost seemed impossible because everyone compared you with your literal other half. Yet I never really struggled with that when Alex was involved. Even though we were best friends, we were extremely different in a million ways. While he was the extrovert at gatherings, I was the observer.

  Alex preferred to engage in groups, while I loved to study them from afar. I knew I was a people person, but I worked best with them on a one-to-one basis. Crowds overwhelmed me, because the energy of the space always felt chaotic. Even though my brother and I never fell victim to thinking we were less than one another, the world had its own opinions of us both.

  Alex and I were a musician duo, Alex & Oliver, who’d found more success than we probably deserved. With every pair of siblings in the spotlight, there was one who people preferred over the other. It was even worse with twins. People loved to compare us all the time in the media. From our looks and our personalities, to the way we dressed and handled interviews. Alex was extremely charismatic through and through. He could meet a stranger in the subway station, and after five minutes, they were seemingly the best of friends.

  Me, on the other hand? I took my time getting to know a person. I didn’t open up right away, which sometimes made me appear cold. It was truly the opposite, though. I wanted to know what made a person tick. I wanted to not only see them in the sunlight, but I wanted to see their rain clouds too.

  I didn’t care who their favorite football team was or how they celebrated New Year’s Eve with friends. Who were they on their worst days? How did they treat animals when no one was looking? When they were dealing with depression, how dark were their overcast skies? Unfortunately, we lived in a world where going deep wasn’t very common anymore. People lived on the surface level, showcasing the happy highlights of themselves. It sometimes took years to discover someone’s shadows, and most people didn’t stick around me long enough to go that deep.

  Therefore, even in the duo, Alex and I had different fanbases. The Alexholics were the life of the party. They were the ones in our crowds who brought the
energetic energy that my brother had. The Olives—their fan-name choice, not mine—were much more subdued. They were the ones who wrote handwritten letters and sent me long messages on social media, describing to me how our songs affected them.

  Both the Alexholics and Olives were the best. Without equal parts of each, Alex & Oliver wouldn’t have been celebrating our third album release with our record label.

  That evening, the nightclub was packed with the music industry’s finest to celebrate the release of our new album, Heart Cracks. The room was crawling with talent, egos, and implausible wealth. Everyone who was anyone was there—at least that was what was being alleged across the internet.

  All I wanted to do was go home. Don’t get me wrong: I was thankful for everything that had come my way. I had more than enough gratitude for my record label and my team, but after a few hours of me being “on,” my energy craved solitude. I wasn’t very much into parties of any sort. I was much more interested in going home, putting on sweats, and binge-watching documentaries on Netflix. I had an odd obsession with documentaries. Did I ever plan to be a minimalist? No. Would I watch a documentary on it? Hell fucking yes.

  There were so many people at the party that night. So many people who smiled in my face but probably didn’t truly know me. People who laughed and made plans to meet up again, even though they were certain they never would commit to those future plans. People who were shoulder to shoulder in conversation, chitchatting about drama within the industry.

  Alex was to my left, socializing like no other. He was being the Prince Charming he’d always been, and there I was, grazing the table filled with food, stuffing my face with too many crab bites.

  The only things Alex and I had in common were our taste in music and our looks. From our curly, dark-brown hair to our caramel eyes, which we didn’t get from our parents. Dad often joked that Mom must’ve run off during their relationship. For the most part, though, we looked identical to our father, a well-built Black man with welcoming eyes, a rounded nose, and a wide, impressive smile. If our parents weren’t smiling, they were laughing; if they weren’t laughing, they were dancing. Most of the time, they did all three actions at the same time. We were raised by two of the happiest, most supportive people in the world.

  While I cruised the appetizers table, I tensed up when I felt someone place their hand on my shoulder and thought I had to put my socializing cap back on. Turning around quickly, I breathed out a sigh of relief as I saw Alex standing behind me. He was wearing all black, with a Hermès gold buckled belt, which I was almost certain he took from my closet. His shirt collar was pressed and smooth, and the sleeves of his button-down shirt were rolled up to his elbows.

  “You need to slow down on your socializing, brother. People are afraid you’re going to hop on a table and start dancing,” Alex joked, grabbing my fiftieth crab bite from my hand and popping it into his mouth.

  “I said hi to Tyler,” I offered.

  “Saying hi to your manager isn’t really being social.” He glanced around the space and rubbed his hand against the back of his neck as his necklace swayed back and forth from him hitting the chain. It was half of a heart necklace—I had the other half. Mom gave it to us years ago, when we went on our first tour. She said she was leaving her heartbeats with us.

  Corny as hell, but then again, that was our mother, corny as hell. Sweetest woman you’d ever meet, and a big crybaby. The woman still couldn’t watch Bambi without tears flooding her eyes.

  There wasn’t a day when we took off those necklaces. I was thankful for the reminder of home.

  “I’ll go talk to Cam. How’s that?” I offered up. Alex tried his best to hide his grimace, but he suffered from a lack of poker face. “You can’t hold a grudge against her forever.”

  “I know. I just don’t appreciate how she did that interview and threw you under the bus in an attempt to get exposure. That’s not how your girl should be acting.”

  When my brother and I formed our duo, we performed in a lot of small venues. It was then that we crossed paths with small-town Georgia peach Cam—the up-and-coming country star.

  Even though we were both different kinds of performers—I was the soul/R&B musician and she the country singer—we found common ground. It wasn’t every day you came across two Black people who found success in an industry where we were the minority.

  Even though we were both successful, Cam’s rise to fame had happened within the past year. She was finally getting the credit she deserved for her talents, and I loved to see it. The only problem was, with success came ego. She glowed in the spotlight, but the same glow seemed to become addictive to her. Over time, it was clear we were growing in different directions, which I knew for a fact when we went out for lunch one afternoon and she reached out to the paparazzi to have us photographed together.

  The fame became all she craved. More, more, more. It was never enough for her, and her need to be at the center of the spotlight damaged her common sense. She made rushed decisions without thinking of the consequences of her actions. She trusted the wrong people. She acted out of character from the sweet woman I’d met years before.

  Still, I knew she wasn’t all bad. I’d been in the limelight for the past few years; I knew how that could mess with someone’s head. When we first met, we connected in the deep ways that I loved. She was a young girl with a dream, and I was a boy with the same. I knew that goodness had to still live inside of Cam. Success had come so fast for her over the past year, so I was certain she just had to find her footing. Sometimes when I looked in her eyes, I still saw innocence. Other times I saw her fear. So what kind of asshole would I have been to turn on her when she was just figuring it all out?

  When she went to do an interview a few weeks ago and spoke about our personal relationship—something I never wanted the public to be involved in—Alex got pissed. Cam knew that I didn’t want our relationship in the public’s grips, because we’d watched time and time again how the media ripped apart people for entertainment. Cam told me she meant no harm and the interviewer had tricked her into answering the questions about our relationship. I believed her. Why wouldn’t I?

  “She didn’t mean any harm,” I muttered, looking at my highly annoyed brother.

  He shrugged. “Of course not. But she did mean to use it as a way to get clout. I know you both have been together for a long time, and I don’t want to say that she’s using you—”

  “Then don’t,” I said through gritted teeth.

  He frowned. “All right. Dropping it.”

  “Appreciate that.” I knew he meant well. He was an overprotective brother, and when it involved who he was dating in the past, I was the same way. We just wanted the best for one another. I pushed out a smile and patted him on the back. “My introvert senses are tingling, so I think I’m gonna head out.”

  “Leaving your own celebration early? I wish I could say I was surprised, but . . .” He smirked. “Cam going with you?”

  “Yeah, we came together. So I’m going to go grab her.”

  Alex patted me on the back before grabbing a meatball on a stick from the table. “Sounds good. Text when you make it home, all right? Let me know if you need anything. Love you.”

  “You too.”

  “Oh, and brother?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Congrats on yet another album. Here’s to fifty million more!” Alex exclaimed, his eyes glassing over like Mom’s. Emotional ass.

  “It’s only the beginning,” I agreed, pulling him into a hug and patting his back. I blinked a few times to keep my eyes from glassing over too. Emotional ass.

  I guessed being emotional ran in the family. But hell, we’d worked hard over the past fifteen-plus years to build our career. Some people tagged us as an overnight sensation when our track “Heart Stamps” hit the Billboard charts, but what the media seemed to miss was the countless years of struggle that had come before.

  I grabbed one more crab bite before moving in Cam’s directio
n, and my thoughts began racing to acknowledge that I’d have to greet the people she was interacting with. My socializing tank was nearing empty. The nerves began to work up my throat as I grew closer and closer, but I tried my best to push them down.

  If there was one known fact about Cam, it was that she was stunning. Everyone in their right mind could agree on that concept. She looked like a goddess with her light-brown eyes, long, straight jet-black hair, and curvaceous body. She moved like music, and her smile could make any grown man crave her attention. It was that wide grin that captured my attention all those years ago.

  That night she wore a tight-fitted black velvet gown that looked as if it’d been sewn directly on her body. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail, and her lips were painted crimson as she stood tall in her red-bottom heels.

  Tonight, I placed my hand on Cam’s lower back, and she melted into me a bit before looking over her shoulder. “Oh, Oliver! Hi. I thought you were someone else.”

  Who else would be touching her on the back like that? Who else’s hand would she be melting into?

  “Naw, just me.” The two men she was engaging with nodded and smiled my way, and I gave them the same basic greeting before turning back to Cam. “I was going to head out. I figured you’d want to come, too, since we rode together.”

  “What? No. The night is just getting started. Don’t be a buzzkill,” she seemingly joked before turning to the two men. “Oliver’s always a buzzkill at these things.”

  They all laughed as if I was the comic relief of the night. My chest tightened, and I dropped my hold before I moved in to whisper against her earlobe. “You don’t have to do that, you know.”

  “Do what?”

  “Perform all the time.” She was putting on an act in front of those people to appear light and playful, but in turn, she was throwing me under the bus, just like Alex said.

  Cam’s eyes locked with mine and a flash of disgust flew across her face before she recovered and gave me a fake smile and softly spoke back. “I’m not performing. I’m networking, Oliver.”

  There she is.

  The woman I no longer knew. The side of Cam that I didn’t like very much. Each day I longed a little more for the Cam she used to be.