I’m not even thinking as I smash my fist into that little prick’s smug jaw. My head is empty. I don’t know what the Hell made him think he could come here. What, he wanted another jab at Layla? He wanted to make her life even more miserable? I saw how shook up she was the last time she ran into him. For the first time since the wedding, I’m glad she’s not with us today.
Donny stumbles back, clutching at his face, his eyes wide. “Woah! What the Hell was that for, man?! You could’ve broken my nose!”
I grab him by the front of his shirt. “You think it’s funny, do you?” I spit. “Making up lies about sixteen-year-old girls? Ruining their lives because they refuse to sleep with you?”
“What are you talking about!?” He shouts.
“Why are you here?” I demand. “Why the Hell would you come here!?” When he doesn’t reply, I give him a rough shake.
“I heard you guys were performing,” he babbles. “I just wanted to see Layla, and—”
I grab his shoulders and shove him back. He falls onto the ground, crying out. There are gasps in the crowd around me, but I can barely hear them through the ringing in my ears. “Stay away from her.”
Firm hands wrap around my arms, pulling me back. “Sir,” a woman’s voice says in my ear. “Step back. You need to leave.” I don’t move. I can’t. “Sir—” she repeats.
Donny writhes dramatically on the ground. There’s blood on his face. “Security! Get him the Hell away from me!” He screeches. I can hear the crowd talking around me, their voices muffled by the ringing in my ears.
“Zack, leave him alone!”
“What’s happening?!”
“Oh my God, are you filming this?”
I shake off the security guards and turn on my heel, pushing through the crowd towards the fire exit. Dimly, I hear Josh call my name, his micced voice reverberating around the room. I ignore it.
I don’t care. I don’t care about anything. All this stuff — the fans, and the podcast, and the sponsors — none of it means jack shit. I slam out into the corridor and follow it to the back entrance of the venue, yanking the door open and stepping into the cool outside air.
Letting the door fall shut behind me, I drop down onto the stone steps, trying to breathe. Dimly, I register that I’m sitting in a little alley. The narrow street is filled with bins. Bits of rubbish float over the cobblestones.
I don’t care. I’m going to puke. My skin is aching. I want to smash something. Everything. I want to pick up one of the loose bricks scattered across the ground and toss it through the nearest window.
I run a hand through my hair, yanking out my hair tie. For God’s sake, I don’t know why I feel like this. My whole body hurts, more than my goddamn leg did when I tore my ACL. It’s flat-out pain, but instead of coming from a muscle or a broken bone, it’s just radiating through me in massive, heart-stopping waves. I’m choking on it.
I barely even register when the back door behind me creaks open again. I watch the floor blearily as two shoes enter my line of vision.
“Oh, Jesus,” Josh says over my head. “Zack. Are you crying?”
I wipe my face, refusing to look at him. “Piss off.”
There’s a pause, and then he reaches into his pocket, fumbling around. His hand appears in front of my face. “Here. Will this help?”
It takes a second for my eyes to focus on what he’s offering me. There’s a small silver ring lying in the centre of his palm, gleaming in the grey light.
Anger roars inside of me. I lunge to my feet and grab the front of his shirt. “You had it?” I shout. My voice reverberates around the small backstreet, bouncing off the brick houses. “All this time, I’ve been looking for it, and you’ve had it?!”
Josh doesn’t move as I yank at the collar of his shirt, looking up at me calmly. “I only found it last night. I’ve not been hiding it from you.”
It takes a few seconds for his words to filter into my brain. Slowly, I loosen my grip. “You… you found it? Where?”
“The hotel,” he says, like I’m an idiot. “Where do you think I’ve been going every night, you twat?” He pushes my hand off his shirt. “Let me go, man.”
I slump back onto the stone steps, leaning against the back door. I’m breathing hard. My vision is flashing in time with my heartbeat. “The hotel? I already checked—”
“It was outside, in the grounds. There were those pictures of you dragging Layla into the gardens, and you had it around your neck in those, so I figured that’s where you lost it. It was in a tuft of grass.” His mouth twists wryly. “You’re lucky; they were planning on mowing today. It would’ve gotten ruined. I was gonna give it to you after the Con.” He holds the ring out again. “Go on, then.”
Slowly, I reach up and take it, closing my fingers around it. “I…”
He sighs, hiking up his pants and sitting down on the step next to me. “Don’t thank me. Just pay me back for the metal detector, and we’re good.”
My eyebrows go up. “You bought a metal detector?”
He snorts. “I walked up and down the lawns with a metal detector like a treasure-seeking lunatic, yeah. The staff thought I was mental, but I promised to shout out the hotel on Twitter, and they let me do whatever I wanted.”
Jesus. I close my eyes, rubbing my thumb over the smooth metal curve. I’ve been such a prat.
“I know I messed up,” I tell him, my voice rough. “I do. I know I hurt Layla. And I hate myself for it.”
Hating myself is an understatement. I haven’t slept in a week. Every time I close my eyes, I see her wet, wounded face as I pull away from her in the rose garden, and it makes me want to rip out my own heart and hand it over to her on a platter.
And then I remember that I probably lost Emily’s ring while I was balls-deep in Layla, and the guilt gets even worse.
“I assumed so,” Josh says drily. “You’ve never seemed completely brain-dead before.” He tips his head. “Why wouldn’t you admit it?”
I look flatly at the ring shining in my palm. I’ve had this empty feeling in my chest ever since the wedding. I thought finding the ring would fill that hole. But no. I still feel like crap. It still feels like something is missing.
“Do you remember what she looked like?” I ask eventually.
Josh goes very still. “Emily?”
I nod.
He shrugs a shoulder. “Yeah. We have pictures.”
“Not in pictures. Do you remember what she actually looked like? When she was talking, or laughing, or… I don’t know, tying her hair up?”
He shrugs again, his expression shuttered, and something in me dies.
If anyone would remember Emily, it would be Josh. The two of them were never super close, but they were friends, by proximity if nothing else. Both of them were usually round my house on any given day of the week. I know Emily thought Josh was kind of stuck up, and Josh was wary of how fast our relationship was going. I flip the ring over in my palm, remembering.
When I was seventeen, a couple months before our exams, I told Josh that I was going to propose to Emily, and he chewed me out. Told me that we were too young, and it was a terrible idea. I was so mad that we didn’t talk for a week. Then we had a parents’ evening at school, and his mum turned up looking all frail and red-eyed. I remember hanging back with my mum and dad, watching as Josh’s father barked at his wife, shouting at her in front of all the other parents. I remember Josh’s closed, blank, utterly emotionless face as people turned and stared at him.
I’d known Josh almost all my life, but that was the first time I really understood why he was the way he was. So reserved and closed-off and alone.
Josh is watching me intently. “You still love her,” he says quietly.
“I don’t even really remember her,” I admit, my voice cracking. “I can’t even picture her face anymore. I can’t remember her voice. I don’t…” My eyes suddenly blur. “When I die, my Wikipedia page will still be online. People can watch reruns of my matches. They can listen to the podcast. Emily has none of that. If I forget her, then she may as well not have bloody existed. And she was important. She was so much better than me, and I…”
My lungs collapse inward. I put my head in my hands and try to breathe through the waves of emotion slamming through me, but I can’t get the air in. Josh doesn’t say anything, waiting patiently as I fist my hands in my hair, yanking. “Dunno what’s happening with me,” I finally get out. “I don’t know why I feel like this.”
“You’re grieving,” Josh says, as if I’m a bit thick.
I kick the stone step. My bad knee jolts, pain radiating through the joint, but I don’t care. I want to smack my foot against the concrete. I want to hear the bones crack. “I’m not grieving. She died twelve years ago.”
“Does it feel like she died twelve years ago?”
“Feels like it was yesterday,” I mutter. “And a million years ago at the same time.” Pain shudders in my chest, and I shove it down. “I’m not grieving,” I repeat. “I don’t have the damn right to grieve.”
He frowns. “Of course you do.”
“I don’t,” I say into my hands. “I really, really don’t.”
“But—”
“You don’t know what I did,” I cut him off. “After I left for training. You don’t know what I did to her.”
