Paris.
I was in Paris.
I inhaled a nervous breath and slowly exhaled the brine. When that didn’t work, I started to fidget, adjusting the wig I wore that was long, layered, black with blue ombre, and had side bangs covering my right eye.
Going with the flow, I’d lined my eyes heavily with black liner and clipped the faux silver piercings to my nose and lip. I completed the look picked out for me with fishnet stockings, black jeans with holes in the knees, and a cropped tee.
Seeing my reflection now in one of the seventeen large mirrors made from three hundred and fifty smaller mirrors, I knew without a doubt who’d left the disguise.
The handwritten note asking to meet here and at this time made it clear too. I’d woken up this morning to both waiting for me inside my hotel suite at the foot of my bed that I’d slept in alone.
And now I waited with butterflies in my stomach for him to arrive.
It’s been two weeks since Berlin.
Two guilt-ridden weeks since the club and the sex that I wouldn’t allow myself to think about, but somehow, I always managed to think only about it. Houston and Loren had shamelessly poured their frustration into me while Jericho watched. They made me not just see but feel how much they needed me. I needed them too, but it wasn’t the same.
This wasn’t hiding fear and apprehension behind cruelty like before.
They’d lied to me.
How do we come back from that? How do I learn to trust them again? I keep waiting for some sign that may never come. And if it didn’t, what did that mean?
I was afraid to know the answer.
I wasn’t ready to accept the truth if it meant being without them.
When my phone pinged, I looked at the screen and frowned at the Twitter notification.
@Em_Anon: You’re going to die bitch
I rolled my eyes.
Death threats weren’t new to me anymore. I just wished they were more creative. Maybe describe how you plan to kill me?
I don’t know.
Just make it worth the tweet.
Peering around the crowded room from my spot inside the arched alcove, I searched for a distraction that shouldn’t have been hard to find. Perhaps in the vaulted ceiling painted to depict the history of Louis XIV? Or the chandeliers spanning the two hundred and forty feet length of the hall? There was a lot to marvel at and appreciate inside the famed Hall of Mirrors, the most notable room in the Château de Versailles.
It was kind of annoying. I’d dreamt of seeing this place ever since watching the TV show that had sucked me in only to cancel after three seasons, and now that I was here, my nerves kept me from enjoying it.
It wasn’t a coincidence that he’d chosen this place.
I’d made him watch reruns of the show with me after seeing the rants online a couple of months ago regarding rumors of it ending. Any excuse to close the distance he’d put between us at the time.
And now I knew why.
I just needed to understand the rest.
The crowd parted, and as if he’d heard my silent plea, Jericho appeared.
Unlike me, he wasn’t wearing a disguise, but everyone was too enraptured by the gilded hall to look past the hood of the sweatshirt shielding the drummer’s face and hair from view and the dark shades covering silver eyes. Jericho’s mouth set in a grim line, and the ring piercing his bottom lip drew my attention. I didn’t have to see his eyes to know that they were haunted.
Longer than I’d known him, he’d never been anything else.
My heart wept for him, even as I kept my expression neutral.
“Hey,” he greeted low when he finally reached me. His teeth toyed with his lip ring. Something he only did when he was nervous or deep in thought. At the moment, I was sure it was both. Together, we stood inside the alcove as everyone passed us by. It was a daring move when he removed his shades. I could see his eyes now, and he could stare deeply into mine. “Can we talk now?”
While many emotions assailed me at once, there was only one answer in my mind and heart. It was the one I let fall from my lips. “Sure.”
I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed hard and then looked away to search for words in the garden just outside the window.
“Do you still love her?” I blurted when I couldn’t take the silence any longer. The answer to that burning question plagued me when I was awake and followed me into my sleep. I had to know. But I wondered if it would change anything.
Jericho’s gaze flew to me, and the blatant alarm I saw inside weirdly soothed my aching heart. Slowly, he shook his head, but it wasn’t from hesitation. It was disbelief that I would ever think so. “No, Braxton. I don’t.” He took a tentative step forward, and when his hands found my waist, I let him keep them there. “I love you.”
“Why? Why me and not her? What did your wife do wrong that I did right?”
His eyes narrowed just before his hold on me tightened. It was my only warning before he slammed my back against the wall and trapped me with nothing more than his anger.
Sweet, sad, gentle Jericho was gone.
I was looking at Rich.
The forceful, vengeful reckoning he kept hidden from the world.
One smelled like berries, and the other set me on fire.
“Listen up, and God help you if you make me repeat myself,” he cautioned me. “My feelings for you have nothing to do with her. I won’t compare you because she doesn’t compare. You want to know why I love you? Fine. But don’t think for a second that I gave you my heart as a fuck you to her. Don’t diminish yourself when you set the standard. The girl I fell in love with would know better.”
“Rich—”
He shut me up with a harsh grip on my chin. “Have I made myself clear, Braxton?”
My mouth filled with cherries while my pussy throbbed and my stomach warmed and twisted itself. Yes. I understood him. I heard him loud and clear.
Apparently, admitting it to myself wasn’t enough, though.
The look he gave me warned me that I’d better speak up soon.
“Yes.”
Rich stared down at me for a long while, waiting for even the smallest sign that I was lying. I almost wished that I was when I felt my toes curl at the thought of getting more of what he gave me in Connecticut.
Shaking his head, he leaned in, bracing his forearm on the wall and caging me in. “I want to kiss you,” he gently confessed as he brushed my lip with his thumb.
Kiss me.
“But I can’t. I need you thinking with a clear head.”
“Cocky much?”
He never lost that serious expression when he dropped the hand that held my face to squeeze my ass through my jeans. There was so much possession in that simple gesture. It made me consider how far he’d come from the drummer I’d met nine months ago. The one who played the background and let his friends call the shots because he didn’t like making waves. To my heart, it was now painfully clear why he preferred it that way.
Because the waves Jericho caused were tragic on the soul.
They were one-hundred-foot tsunamis.
“No.” He let me go, took a step back, and slid his hands in his jeans as he looked at me. “When I’m not eager to fuck you, all I can process is fear. I’ve been wracking my brain since the moment I found out you knew about Emily. I didn’t think you’d ever forgive me, but then you did, and it gave me hope. I clung to that seed until I realized what I’d truly lost. Trust. You’d given it so easily, and I didn’t understand until this moment as I’m fighting for the words to get it back. If I’d known losing you would turn me this inside out, I would have told you about Emily. I would have told you the moment I wished that it had been you I’d given my name. I hadn’t even kissed you yet. Did you know that? I wanted to marry you long before I ever kissed you. So much that I filed for divorce the next day.”
While Jericho gathered his thoughts and I replayed everything he’d confessed so far, we stared at each other, longing for what could have been.
“I know you feel guilty for me loving you,” he said, “but there’s no reason for either of us to carry that weight. I stopped wanting Emily long before we met, and she has no one to blame but herself.”
His lips set in a grim line, and his brows dipped as he remembered the past.
“We were married for only four months before she cheated and then six before she ran away because I told her if the baby wasn’t mine, we were through. I don’t know if it was anger that spoke for me, but I know it’s been over four years. She won’t let me find her because she cares more about her power over me than she does me. She likes knowing that I’m chasing her and doesn’t care if it hurts. She doesn’t care if I’m driving myself insane over the moments I might be missing with my kid. My heart kept beating when she walked out the door, and now I know the reason. It’s because it never belonged to her. It was always meant for you.”
Versailles might as well have been a berry field instead of a seventeenth-century palace.
“If she’s truly so terrible, kid or no kid, how could you choose to stay with her?” I asked him.
“Because I was an orphan.”
I ached for him because he sounded so ashamed. It hadn’t been his fault. Didn’t he know that?
“I never had a family,” he continued. “I never knew what it was like to form a connection that couldn’t be broken with the stroke of a pen. Houston and Loren helped fill the gaps, but it was never enough. There was always something missing. Always a need for more. I met Emily, and I was drawn because she was damaged like me”—hesitating, the look in his eyes pleaded for me to understand—“and like you.”
I sucked in a breath. Was I just another Emily?
“The only thing she ever gave the world was both of her middle fingers, and I wanted to be right there beside her. I wasn’t…” He swallowed. “I wasn’t the same after I met her. I was reckless and spiraling too fast to stop on my own. I have memories that keep me awake sometimes because of the things she convinced me to do. Houston and Loren saw what was happening and tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t trust them. They don’t know this, but Emily made me hate my best friends long before Calvin, and I was too blind to see it. She’d cry and convince me that they didn’t want to see me happy, and I…” He hung his head. “I fucking believed her.”
His voice broke on that last, and suddenly, I was transported back to the show in Arizona after I was exiled from their bus and the lyrics I’d foolishly mistaken for Loren’s.
I heard Rich sniffle, and then he kept speaking.
“By the time I realized I’d mistaken a carefree spirit for someone who just didn’t care at all about anyone, including herself, it was too late.” He lifted his head and looked at me. “I’d married her. I thought I loved her, but I knew she didn’t love me, and I didn’t even care. She was the only one willing to pretend.”
“Rich.” I couldn’t help myself. I went to him. He was slow to wrap his arms around me, but when they did, I wished silently to myself that he would never let go.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” he whispered.
I forced myself to pull away, but only enough to see his face. “Why did you?”
I became so lost in the emotion swimming in his silver eyes that I’d forgotten I’d asked the question until he answered.
“I knew you’d let me go.”
“If you had been honest—”
He shook his head before I could finish. “Not what I meant. If I’d told you about my past, I knew you’d sacrifice your heart to let me do what I thought was right. You’d let me walk away, and I couldn’t handle that. Years of hoping for a family, and I was suddenly praying that her baby wasn’t mine. I was praying I wouldn’t have to give you up. I was living in a cloud of shame and confusion, and I didn’t know which way was up, much less right.” I felt his hand curl around my nape and the other slide through my hair. He’d never held me so tenderly. “But it was never my intention to deceive you, Braxton. Hurt you was the last thing I wanted to do.”
“But you did,” I told him as a tear fell. How could I make him see? My soul reached out for him, but my heart was a different matter. It was afraid of falling again. “After Emily, you should understand how much. Trust is fragile, Jericho. It’s rattled often and easily broken. You shattered mine. You can put the pieces back together, but it’ll never be as strong. I’ll never not see the cracks.”
I couldn’t describe the range of emotions that flashed in Jericho’s eyes in the seconds that followed. God, there were so many. It seemed liked hundreds and then…nothing—only utter defeat. Leaning down, he kissed me. Was that hope I felt? He smashed his lips against mine once, briefly, and then he pulled away.
Why did it feel like the last time?
“It’s okay,” he whispered to me as he dropped his hands. “It’s okay.”
“Jericho.” I reached for him, but he was already turning away. Desperation forced my voice to rise, and my pride and ego to flee. “Jericho!”
I didn’t care about the eyes I’d drawn as he walked away. I didn’t care if they looked too long and recognized him or me. I just needed him to turn back around. I needed him to fight for me.
He kept walking away.
If only Griff and Maeko were here to distract me from my heart with wine and angry music. They’d flown back home after our last show in Belgium.
I bet they knew this would happen. I’d known it too.
I stood on the balcony of the penthouse suite, staring at the full view of the Eiffel Tower lighting up the night but unable to appreciate its beauty. I’d banged on Jericho’s room door inside the suite the three of them shared for ten minutes, but he wouldn’t answer.
Houston and Loren had both sworn that he never came back. Feeling the need to lash out, I’d called them liars before storming out.
That had been five, maybe six hours ago.
I never heard the room door to my suite open, never questioned how he’d gotten the key. When strong arms wrapped around me and the scent of cloves from his soap and vanilla from my warped brain had washed over me, I knew who had intruded on my brooding.
“Is he back?” I inquired softly while staring straight ahead.
Houston’s tone was equally gentle and more patient than I’d been hours earlier when he answered, “No.”
I closed my eyes and squeezed them tight. “Please tell me where he is.”
“I don’t know, baby. I swear.”
“I’m not your baby,” I snapped.
As soon as I said the words, I burst out crying.
This wasn’t me. This was not me. What the hell had I allowed myself to turn into?
Houston turned me around in his arms and pulled my head back, using my hair as his handle. The wig I’d worn to meet Jericho this morning had been left discarded on my bed.
“Yes, you are.” Houston kissed my lips as if it would prove his claim. I shoved him away, and he yanked me back. When he pressed his mouth against mine again, I kissed him back, and we didn’t stop. “Have dinner with me,” he proposed after we ran out of air.
“I can’t.”
His brows dipped. “Why not?”
“I need to be here when Jericho comes back.”
“It’s being covered,” was all he said before forcing me back inside the bedroom whose balcony we’d stood on.
I pretended I didn’t, but I liked it very much when Houston didn’t take no for an answer. I also liked that he only softened for me. He was only warm and comforting for me.
Loren did whatever the hell he wanted and always encouraged me to do the same. That’s why he was my breath of fresh air, my ray of sunshine, my earthy spring breeze.
And Rich…oh, Rich. He was pure and sweet and good. Even when he was breaking my heart, he did it with the best of intentions.
Houston pulled me over the bed, and that’s when I noticed the red dress.
It was so fine that “gown” might have been a more appropriate term. It was short, silk, with a low-cut bodice and medium width straps. Next to it was a shoebox, and when I opened it, I found gold heels inside.
“You know my size?” I asked without looking at Houston.
Between Jericho ripping me in two and Houston attempting to piece me back together, I was afraid I’d just disintegrate altogether. I silently wondered what plans Loren had up his sleeve for me. Rich thought he’d failed to win me over, but he hadn’t.
I was the one who’d failed.
I should have told him the truth.
“I warned you before,” Houston said as he lifted my shirt over my head, “I never stop paying attention.”
Feeling my belly warm, I let him remove my jeans and stockings and then help me inside the fancy dress. He even pulled my hair into my usual messy top-knot, and I let him do that too. My ass hit the bed when he pushed me down, and then he removed the shoes from the box. I felt like a less innocent version of Cinderella when Houston slipped the first heel on my feet.
“Ready to go?” he asked when, at last, I was dressed for a romantic night with a man who was still my ex but held one-third of my heart in his palm.
I tried not to think about Jericho, who still possessed an equal share.
“Yes.”
I grabbed my jacket since fall had come to Paris. As I slipped it on, I noticed Houston’s apparel for the first time. His usual jeans, T-shirt, and double leather cords around his wrist were gone. The only familiar thing he wore was the pinky ring. Tonight, he wore dress pants and a white button-up with a gray knit sweater on top. He hadn’t gone all out as Loren had on our first date, but I knew he’d tried. For me. I also knew Loren must have helped him.
Security was waiting for us when we stepped from my suite and into the hall. I didn’t consider the implications of this date until Houston and I walked through the hotel’s front entrance, and the cameras began to flash.
It wouldn’t just be a rumor anymore.
With Houston’s hand holding mine, the world would know that I was fucking my bandmates. The names they called me and the assumptions they made—there would be no mercy.
And still, all I could think about was Jericho.
Where was he? What was he thinking? How could he just walk away?
Houston and I climbed inside the back of the black Suburban, and we were off with security trailing us in another vehicle behind. Neither of us spoke the five minutes it took to reach our destination.
I sucked in a breath at seeing the Eiffel Tower up close. It commanded your attention during the day, but it was even more breathtaking at night. With the golden lights, how could it not be?
I assumed we’d head straight for the top, but Houston had other plans. He took me to the second floor, where apparently, we had reservations. I didn’t have to be an expert to know that a place like this was usually booked weeks or months in advance.
Maybe he’d pulled some strings.
Or maybe he’d always known that he’d bring me here.
Had Houston been biding his time for our first date?
Ignoring the vanilla wafting in the air, I looked at him as he sat next to me in the white curved booth, pretending to peruse the menu. We both ignored the stares we’d drawn from the people who recognized us and even those who didn’t. With two guards hovering around, anyone would be curious.
“Why did you bring me here?”
“To eat.”
My chest tightened where a heart should no longer be. After all this time, after all I’d been through, I didn’t understand why I hadn’t just tossed the damn thing away.
“That’s it?”
He looked at me then, his somber gaze searching mine, and said, “No.”
I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. Our waiter came, and we ordered drinks, our food, and then we ate in silence. Immediately after, we left the restaurant.
We were both too on edge to linger.
It was chaotic as hell, but eventually, we made it to the top of the tower. It was there the tension that had been brewing all through dinner exploded.
He pulled me into his arms and kissed me, and we didn’t stop even when we knew we were being photographed and recorded.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered against my lips.
“No sweat,” I said as I swallowed the cherries. “I think the cat was kind of already out of the bag, you know?”
The look Houston gave me made it clear that I was provoking him. And then he sighed. “Fawn.”
“What are you sorry for?” I asked him with an evil smile. I already knew, but I needed to hear him say it.
“I’m sorry for not being a better man to you and a better friend to Rich. It wasn’t my place to tell you about Emily, but I should have fought harder to convince him.” Houston’s jaw tightened as he looked away, over the railing, and out to the city that promised romance beyond. “Even now, I’m conflicted. I chose him over you once, and I won’t do it again, but I ca—”
No longer indignant, I felt my legs tremble at the emotion in his voice and the words he couldn’t bring himself to say for fear of what they might cost us. Houston looked at me then, meeting my eyes, and I saw the decision not to lie to me again.
One by one, those shards pieced themselves back together.
The cracks were there, but I was no longer afraid of them. Instead, they served as a reminder that love wasn’t meant to be a pristine affair. It was meant to be messy and meant to hurt, but it would always mend if it’s true.
“I’m in love with you.”
It wasn’t what Houston had been trying to say.
But it was the truth his heart required.
Before allowing any others, he had to finally let that one free, and now my feet no longer felt like they were touching the ground.
“I need you to know that and for you to believe me. I need it because…I can’t pretend I’m not afraid of where he is and what he’s thinking. Jericho’s lived with this void, and once it has him, it…Loren’s looking for him right now, but…”
His fear mounted, making it harder for Houston to finish a thought, so why did I understand everything he was trying to tell me? Was it because I felt it too?
Did I really have to ask?
“Then let’s go,” I heard myself say to him. “Let’s go find Jericho.”
Houston’s surprise and his relief lasted for only a second before we were rushing hand in hand for the elevator to take us down. It seemed like an eternity passed before we reached the ground. Houston was on his phone checking for an update from Loren, and as we rushed outside and for the car, a new hour must have dawned.
Over my shoulder, I smiled up at the tower we had left behind as twenty thousand bulbs began to sparkle and wish us luck.
