I’D NEVER HAD A SINGLE INTENTION OF TELLING CLAIRE ABOUT DYLAN. It didn’t make sense to lay my trauma and grief at her feet. But I couldn’t let her fall asleep tonight without at least explaining why I’d behaved the way I had.
She refused to come back to our room, and as much as every fiber of my being wanted to haul her over my shoulder and force her, I didn’t. She was pissed, and I had to respect that, so I pulled her down beside me on the end of the guest bed.
“For what it’s worth, I did check on you. Every time I looked over, you were talking and laughing with the people at your table.” I scrubbed at the side of my head. “You seemed okay, and…I don’t know. I’m not used to having someone I even want to check up on.”
Claire wasn’t interested in hearing that. She barely acknowledged me with a twitch of her lips.
“Chelsea is Dylan’s mother.” I hadn’t told anyone this story, about my past, my kid, any of it, since I met Marta. And even then, it only came out over a blunt and a bottle of tequila. It could be said I wasn’t much of a talker anyway, but about this, I barely knew how to formulate the words.
“I met her back when I was coming up, just getting famous. Back in my The Hype days. We were friends who sometimes slept together, but we weren’t ever more than that.” Leaning forward, I steepled my hands under my chin. “I was only twenty-four when she told me she was pregnant. She wasn’t one-hundred-percent the kid was mine, but she was pretty sure.”
Claire sat as still as a statue, her gaze stuck somewhere around my knees.
“I was basically a kid myself. Didn’t want to be a dad. But once he was born, he was mine. I looked at that wrinkled old man baby face and knew. I had two weeks with him. Chelsea got really overwhelmed at first, so it was just me and the kid a lot of the time. Then she came home one day and told me Dylan wasn’t mine after all. He was my bandmate, Eric’s. They were going to be a family.”
“She took him?” Claire whispered.
“She took him, and I let her. The Hype broke up, I checked out of life, cut everyone off. It was over three years before I pulled my head out of my ass and saw him again. When it came down to it, Eric wasn’t very interested in being a father, but Chelsea stepped up the mom game. Dylan was cool as hell. He called me Dom, I called him kid. I taught him how to play guitar, and we wrote songs together.”
Her fingertip trailed along my knuckles. “You loved him.”
“Of course I did.” I pounded the heel of my hand into my forehead. “I loved that boy like he was mine. He was mine. Though, it took me years to acknowledge that, until he got sick and we knew he wasn’t going to get better.”
“The hospital…in Houston?” Her index finger hooked with mine.
“Yeah,” I breathed. “Chels took him there to be treated by a specialist. She moved there with him. My denial was so fucking thick, I kept working, doing concerts, putting out albums instead of soaking up every last minute I could with him. I failed my boy.”
“How old was he when he…?”
“Eleven. He’d be eighteen this year, but I can’t picture him that way. All I see when I think about him are his first breaths and his last. It’s like…” I stabbed at my chest, “everything else became eviscerated the moment he died.”
“I’m sorry.” She wrapped her soft arms around my middle, resting her head on my shoulder. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Honeysuckle enveloped me, thawing some of the hollow ice in my chest.
“Yeah.” I kissed her hair, nuzzling my face in her waves. “Chels and I don’t have much in common anymore. Our kid was the one thing tying us together. Grief sent us on our separate ways. We see each other once a year at the gala. What you saw between us was two parents missing their boy. And on the terrace—” I had to stop, breathe, figure out how to say the words.
“You don’t have to tell me anything else, Dominic. This is so much.” Her palm flattened on my cheek. “I don’t want you to hurt.”
What she didn’t understand was I deserved the pain. I had loved that baby, but the second I was presented with an out, I took it and walked away from him. Chelsea would have shared Dylan with me. She wasn’t a monster. But it was easier for me to walk away entirely than deal with my heart being cracked in two again and again seeing him with his real dad.
My selfish decisions cost me years with my boy. If I could relive any choice I’d ever made, it would be that one. I’d still be a grieving, broken man, but at least I’d know I did right by him.
I inhaled more of Claire’s goodness, breathing out the black, black tar of regret filling my chest.
“Chels is pregnant. She’s only twelve weeks, but she did all the testing and knows it’s a boy. That’s what she was telling me on the terrace. And I’m fucking sorry I touched her that way. I’m sorry you saw it and—”
Claire cut me off with a tender press of her lips. She hummed, stroking my hair and holding me. I hadn’t cried since Dylan died. That part of me had been shut off. But being held by this sweet, entirely too young and too good woman, had me on the edge. Claire made me want in every way. For a crazy second, I thought about what it would be like to heal this gaping wound in my soul so I could really, truly have her.
But even the thought of trying to keep her threatened to send me spiraling. I didn’t keep. Life was too fleeting for me to consider anything as more than temporary. No matter how much I wanted it. Or how utterly vital it became.
“I don’t understand how she can want to go through it again.”
“Through what?” Claire asked.
“Loving someone, loving her new baby, while knowing what it’s like to have that kind of love ripped from her.” I shook my head. “I could never. Never.”
“I don’t know.” She rubbed my shoulders and kissed my cheek. “I guess she weighed the risks and decided it was worth it to have that kind of love again. She’s brave, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t because you don’t want to take the same risk.”
I sucked in a ragged breath, reaching for Claire like a drowning man. Even considering what it would mean to let myself feel, to allow myself to love someone the way I’d loved Dylan, pulled me under like a pair of lead boots.
My fingers tangled in the back of her hair, firmly gripping her so we were face-to-face. “I need to know you’re okay. I hurt you, I know that, but I didn’t want to.”
“I’m okay.” Her big brown eyes were wet with tears I’d put there, but they were open and true, so I believed her. “I wish you would have told me what I was walking into, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Thank you for telling me about Dylan. I’m so sorry he’s not here anymore. I know you took the best care of him, though. It’s who you are.”
Panic swirled in a cyclone inside me, and the only way to squelch it was to shut down. If Claire kept saying things like that…no. I couldn’t do this anymore.
I leaned my forehead on hers. “Will you come to our room now?”
“Of course I will.”
We left her bag there to deal with tomorrow. Once we were back in my bedroom, I breathed easier, then easier still when tangled up under the covers. We caressed bare, warm skin, and though I was hard, there wasn’t anything sexual about it. We were finding our way back to each other—back to where we so easily fit—where our lives outside of this tour didn’t exist. It was only us, only this.
“I have Chelsea’s song tattooed on me, don’t I?” she asked with a hint of a grin.
My mouth ached to smile with her, but my muscles didn’t cooperate. “I wrote it with her in mind, but it’s about picking up when it seems impossible. I think it’s your song now too.”
She snuggled against my chest, yawning. “I don’t mind sharing a song with her. She liked my dress.”
“I liked your dress.”
“I like you.” Sleep weighed down each word.
“I like you too, Claire.” Too damn much.
If I could have, I would’ve put some space between us. Instead, I stood in the middle of the tracks, a train barreling straight for me, with full knowledge I’d be flattened on impact. That was an ending I knew.
It was the unknown endings I wouldn’t stick around for. Because nothing lasted forever, no matter how much I wished it wasn’t true. I’d done my share of hoping for forever, and those days were done for me.
