“Dino nuggets for the win,” I mutter to myself, taking any victory I can while Jagger goes through his picky eater phase—and a clean plate left behind is definitely a win.
I wash the plate, put it in the drying rack, and contemplate what I want to do with my night now that Jagg is asleep and the house has been tidied up.
I should finish going through the rest of my current LSAT study guide.
I should answer all the emails I haven’t gotten to yet.
I should text Vince . . . and say what? It’s not like he’s tried to reach out to me since I left.
But my open bottle of wine and a true crime documentary I’ve been wanting to see are winning out over everything.
A glass is poured and the remote is in hand when a knock comes at the door. It’s not unusual to have someone knocking at the door—the cottages in my complex look the same so people often get them confused—but not at this time of night.
I tiptoe to the door and look through the peephole only to jump back. Vince. What the hell is he doing here? How does he know where I live?
JAGGER.
My heart leaps in my throat, and I freeze momentarily as my body takes a second to catch up with my brain’s thoughts of simply pretending not to be home.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“I know you’re in there, Shug. You were just standing in the window. I’m more than ready to stand here and knock all night until you answer the door.”
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Ignoring him is a more than valid option, but that means he’ll knock and knocking will wake Jagger, and then Vince will hear him and who knows what will happen . . .
I grab my phone that has the room monitor on it just in case he wakes, open the door, self-preservation my only thought, and step outside, closing it and my secret life behind me. “What are you doing here?”
I don’t ask how he knows where I live. I’m truly afraid of how much digging he can do.
“Hi.” His smile doesn’t reach his eyes as he holds up a twelve-pack of beer, two of them already missing.
“Hi. Is everything okay?”
“That’s subjective.” He helps himself to a seat on the concrete like a little kid with his back against the wall and his face to the sky. “Join me?”
Our eyes hold for a beat before I take up a similar position beside him. We sit like this in silence, the crickets around us and half a moon above us.
“Your car running okay?” He finally breaks the silence.
“It is. Thank you again for helping. I wish you’d let me repay you.”
“You haven’t been at work,” he finally says. “Everything okay?”
I nod, a motion I’m sure he can see in his periphery. “Had a few projects to do offsite. Ones I was on before you came on, that I had to finish.” I take a beer he hands me and take a sip simply for something to do. “I hear congratulations are in order. The song is huge, and it hasn’t even been released yet.”
He shrugs and gives a noncommittal sound. “It’s all relative.”
A car drives by. A few dogs bark somewhere down the street. A stink bug crawls oh so slowly up the side of the stucco.
“You want to tell me why you’re outside of my place at ten o’clock on a Tuesday night?”
He brings a beer to his lips and takes a long pull on it before placing the empty back in the box and grabbing another one. The pop of the cap has the stink bug freezing. “For a lot of reasons, I guess.”
“Like?”
“Like why you told me you lived a few blocks away when you really live here.”
My sigh is heavy. My heart even more so because something about this whole situation feels so final. Somber.
“Truth?”
“Always.”
I take a sip for courage. “Because I’m embarrassed that you’re you and I’m me, and this is all I have to show for it.”
“Christ, Bristol. Do you think that really fucking matters to me?”
“You wanted the truth.”
“I did. Doesn’t mean I have to like it. But why is the question. What happened to set you back? That’s what you’re not telling me.”
The beautiful part of you who’s asleep inside, fifteen feet away. The little boy who tilts his head the same as you. The one who got his first guitar from his grandpa yesterday and spent hours pretending to play it.
“Vince . . .” Tell him. Say it. The words are there but the finality in his tone, the regret woven in it, have me hesitating.
“It’s okay. You don’t owe it to me. I understand that.”
I close my eyes momentarily, uncertain if I’m relieved or upset when he doesn’t press. Probably a little of both. “Thank you.”
His head still against the wall, he turns to meet my eyes. “We all have secrets we don’t want to tell, Shug. It’s okay.”
Emotion lumps in my throat. “Is one of yours why you’re here?”
He shrugs and then starts playing with the label on his bottle. He looks like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. “I’ve fucked up in so many ways that I don’t know how to see my way out of it.”
I try to piece things together, try to understand what he’s talking about. “I doubt that.” His chuckle is a low rumble that has my heart hurting for him. “Is this about Bent? About—”
“For one.”
“You miss them.”
He snorts. “Next question.”
“Why not go back? If you’re so miserable being alone, why not—”
“Because I fucked up. See? Told you. Story of my life, right? I can’t hack it at home so I leave. I have this good gig that millions would kill to have where I get to hang with my best friends every day and do what I love with them, and I leave.”
“I don’t think you’re being fair to yourself.”
“It’s like when everything is at its best for me, he comes back and I have to leave.”
“Who are we talking about, Vince?”
He opens another beer and downs the entire thing in one long drink. “He’s dying of cancer.”
“Who?” I demand, freaked out and confused.
“My dad.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can think to say as I consider how to react. I don’t know how to feel about a man I’ve vilified for almost fifteen years. “I’m sorry,” I murmur.
“I’m not.” His words scream in the silence. His chuckle that follows mocks it. “That makes me a heartless bastard, doesn’t it? The fucker’s dying, and I feel absolutely nothing inside over it.”
I reach out and link my fingers with his, wanting to show support. “It makes you human, Vince.”
“It makes me weak. He always had a way of doing that to me. Making me weak. Tearing me down just when I thought I’d made something of myself or figured my shit out. Letting me know how little he thought of me. How little the world thought of me.”
“I understand why you might think it looks that way, but—”
“No wonder I need to stand on a stage and have thousands scream at me to feel a thing.” He runs a hand through his hair and sets his head back again to look at the sky. “He broke me in a way that I don’t think can ever be fixed. I’ve tried. Over and over, but it’s just no use.”
“You’re not broken, Vince.”
“Humph.”
His words eat at me. They weave into my soul. They explain things I’ve only ever assumed and never knew for certain.
“You never talked about him. I never knew or I would have . . . helped. I don’t know.” I shake my head. “I don’t know what I could have done. But from what I could see, I don’t think you owe your dad much at all. I’m sorry he’s dying of cancer—no one, regardless of the life they lived, deserves that—but I’m mostly sorry he hasn’t loved you like a father should. Dads are supposed to love and support their kids. They’re supposed to pick them up and dust them off when they’re hurt. They’re supposed to be a pillar of strength, not a barbed wire fence holding you back.”
“That night? The window? That’s why I had to leave. I couldn’t do it anymore. I feared what he had turned me into. That I’d snap and either become him or do something I could never take back.”
“Vince.”
“The irony is now I’ve spent years doing things I can’t take back. Fucking up. Proving him right.” He flexes and unflexes his hand.
“I disagree. You’ve—”
“And now I’m desperate to prove him fucking wrong before he dies so I can give him the ultimate fuck you. So I can win. How sick is that? What kind of person does that make me?”
“A real one.” A broken one.
I rest my head on his shoulder and try to process all these things he’s throwing at me, that he’s been holding in, and I still don’t know how to help him. I don’t know if I can.
He presses a kiss to the top of my head and just leaves his mouth there, his thoughts so heavy I can practically feel them. “Do you ever wonder what could have been?” he murmurs.
“In regard to?” I ask when I already know the answer. The same question I’ve asked myself a million times, not just for myself but for the little boy tucked in his bed inside.
“Us.”
My exhale is even, my thoughts measured. “I did. For a long time. Then I didn’t.”
“Why’d you stop?”
Because I had to. Because you didn’t give me a choice. “Because we’re two different people now. We live vastly different lives.”
“But despite that, there’s still something there. There’s still something between us that we keep coming back to somehow.”
“The chemistry sure. But when the lust fades, when it’s not years in between that we’d see each other, but rather minute to minute or hour to hour, I’m not sure that there’d be much left of us.” I have to believe that. If I don’t then I’m left with hope for something that will never be.
“Is that why you left me in San Francisco?”
It’s my turn to look at the sky. To try and find any star that hasn’t been drowned out by the city lights. “It seems we’re better at walking away from each other than we are at actually being together.”
“Well, at least I can claim to be good at something, huh?” His laugh falls flat though.
“Still doesn’t make it hurt any less.”
He nods, his lips pursed. “Then why did you let it happen at all? You could have shut your hotel room door, stuck to your guns about McMann, and I would’ve had to suffice with my hand and my fucking misery.”
I smile at the image he paints, and it softens at the memory of us together. Giving and taking. Loving and letting go.
“I didn’t let it happen,” I finally say.
“Uh. I was there. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just me.”
“That’s not what I meant. It was inevitable, right? It was us.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“We’re like a match, Vince. We start out hot, almost violent in our need for each other, before burning completely out. The other night, we struck the match.”
“And now?”
“Now, there’s just smoke.” I shrug.
“But where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
“And where there is fire, things get destroyed. Devastated. Become unrecognizable of what their former self was.”
“Hey.”
I turn to look at him, really look at him for the first time in this conversation. “Hmm?”
He reaches out and runs the back of his hand down my cheek. Rubs his thumb over my bottom lip. Settles his hand on the curve of my neck so his thumb can idly move back and forth over my collarbone.
“What are you saying, Shug?”
You wear a bracelet I gave you, but you wouldn’t take my calls.
You permanently marked yourself with a tattoo of my nickname, but you never thought it was enough to tell me.
You look at me with love in your eyes, but it’s been over ten years since you spoke the words.
You love me from afar, but don’t think you can love me in person.
I reach up and cup the side of his face. Feel the coarseness of his stubble under my palm. Take in the heat of his breath on my skin. “I love you, Vince, but we can’t keep doing this. I deserve more than a piece of you every couple of years. No one’s to blame. Not you. Not me. It’s just the way we were probably meant to be.”
I lean forward and kiss him. I pour all the love I have for him into this simple connection as tears slide down my cheeks.
We rest our foreheads against each other’s almost as if we’re trying to let this “new reality of us” settle in. Almost as if it’s something we knew all along but now have to face.
And when I lean back to look at him one last time, the lone tear that escapes and slides down his cheek devastates me.
“I lied,” he murmurs.
Jagger flashes through my mind. So have I. “About?”
“About needing the stage to make me feel.” He clears his throat. “You make me feel complete too.” He drops his eyes for a beat before looking back at me. “But it’s not enough, is it?”
“No.” It hurts to get the single syllable out. He nods subtly as I stand, our fingers still linked. “Your different is your beautiful too, Vince. It always has been. It always will be.”
With that, I turn and go into the house.
I shut the door.
I lock it.
I let the dust particles settle back down in the darkness.
And then I slide down it, crumple on the floor, and cry until I can’t cry anymore.
I’m not sure what time it is when I go to bed, but when I peek out the window, Vince is still sitting there. Still staring at the stars. Still looking as broken as ever.
