We stand behind velvet ropes while lights flash in our faces and Jenna answers a dozen questions about how she feels and if she knew this was coming—the last of which, at least, she can answer honestly. Someone asks me how it felt to be up there as part of the band, and I actually give them a thumbs up like I’m fifteen and smile and say, “great,” like my command of the English language is significantly worse than an eight-year-old kid I happen to know.
I turn my phone back on and I see messages from Gabby. For a moment I’d forgotten she was there in the audience, with Will and Anna-Marie and Josh. She saw. She knows what happened, and I’m sure she can imagine what it’s doing to me. Every message is some version of Oh my god, are you okay?
No. I am not. But I know what she’s really asking.
Still clean, I respond, though I imagine it’s the next few hours she’s concerned with. Keep your phone on? I’ll call if I need you.
You better, she responds.
While Alec is talking, Jenna looks back at me. I lean past Leo, still keeping him mostly between us. I don’t know if I’m supposed to come back to the house—if they’re even going back to the house or if Alec plans to spend the night in some honeymoon suite filled with champagne and rose petals. I taste bile in the back of my throat.
I’m staying with them. That’s the official story. “Do you guys need some time tonight?” I ask. “I can steer clear.”
Jenna’s eyes widen in panic before snapping back into character. “No, you can come home. If you want to.”
Even through the act, I can see her begging me to want to, and I nod. I will. I hope she knows I will.
“All right, folks,” Phil calls. “No more questions.” And then Jenna and Alec wave to the crowd and kiss in front of the open door of the limousine waiting to take them away. Then they climb in and the door closes and they’re gone.
Twenty-four
Jenna
It took everything in me not to look back at Felix when Alec proposed. I couldn’t, or I’d give it all away. I couldn’t look back at Felix, I couldn’t say hell no to Alec, not there on stage in front of all our fans and the world. I couldn’t do anything but hold onto the mask, the story, and pretend to be happy, even though I am anything but.
Through the encore and the publicity and the whisking away hand-in-hand with Alec into the limo, I force myself to cling to that mask—the ecstatic, giddy, newly-engaged-and-oh-so-happy-about-it mask the fans want to see, that the story demands, now that Alec fucking proposed on stage—
Keep it together, I tell myself. Brian, the limo driver, is still watching.
I try to calm my breathing, to settle back into the smooth leather seat and Alec’s arm around my shoulders, but all I can see is Felix’s torn-up expression. All I can feel is my heart slamming against my ribs, and this twisting in my stomach.
And the desire to leave a massive princess-cut-shaped indent in Alec’s face.
I unclench my fist and squeeze Alec’s knee, in what hopefully looks to Brian from the rearview mirror like a loving gesture, but is hard enough to make Alec wince.
“Congratulations, you two,” Brian says. He’s our usual post-show driver in LA, and normally we chat we with him for a bit, catch up on how his kids are doing, or his latest grievance with his mother-in-law.
There’s no way I can handle small talk right now, but Alec steps in. “Thanks, Brian. I’m a pretty lucky guy.”
He’s lucky I have a low predilection for murder, is what he is.
“We both are,” I say as sweetly as possible, beaming up at Alec and squeezing his knee harder. “Brian, you mind if we have a little privacy?”
Brian chuckles. “Of course! There’s some champagne in the back. You two kids celebrate.” He winks at us and then the partition slides up. The second it’s locked into place I jump away from Alec like I’ve been burned.
Because I sure as hell have been.
“What the fuck was that?” I growl.
Alec rolls his eyes up to the limo ceiling in this sort of weary “oh, here we go” look that makes me even more furious. “It was a pretty damn romantic proposal, I’d say.”
I don’t want to hear anything about what Alec thinks is romantic. “You had no right!” I say, my voice creeping into a yell. Alec shoots a pointed look at the partition, which is probably soundproof enough, but I’m rapidly losing my ability to care what Brian hears. “You had no right to do this without talking to me first!”
“Yeah? Is that what we’re going with?” Alec’s voice is snide, like he’s so justified he can’t be bothered to get worked up about this. “You had no right to move in with our cellist, but you didn’t care what the hell I thought about that.”
“That’s my personal life. It’s different.”
“Is it?” Alec’s blue eyes are cold as ice. “It affects me, too, doesn’t it? You didn’t even bother asking me if it was okay if he lives with us.”
There’s a flicker of guilt, but I’m so mad at him, it’s not hard to quash. “It’s my house, bought and paid for by me,” I say, even though I hate myself a little for playing that card, petty as it is.
But after what he did . . .
“Do you think I love living in my ex-girlfriend’s closet? Trust me, that’s not exactly the dream,” Alec says. “But I do it for the band. For our future. Something you could stand to think about more often.”
My body flushes. I have been thinking about the future, but not in the way he means it.
I see Felix’s expression again in my mind, angry and gutted, and my heart aches. He had to know my reaction wasn’t real. He had to know I had nothing to do with this.
But what if he decides that all this isn’t worth it? That having to deal with Alec, and this whole messed-up situation, is too much?
I can feel my eyes burning, and blink away the tears furiously. “So, what, I don’t consult you on our roommate situation and you do this . . . as revenge? Because we didn’t stick to the damn rules, you go ahead and—”
“Oh my god, Jenna. Seriously. That’s what you think of me?” I think the wounded look on his face is sincere—Alec isn’t great at faking emotions, ironically—but it doesn’t mean it’s not true, that this isn’t some spiteful way to get back at us.
“I wouldn’t have before, but given what you just did—”
“What I did?” Alec’s eyes flash. “You’re the one who seems hell-bent on throwing everything away on some guy you just met!”
I should tell him I’m not just throwing everything away, that if I was, I sure as hell would have said no on that stage and been done with all of this. But what comes out of my mouth instead is, “He’s not just some guy, Alec. I’m in love with him.”
“In love with him.” He shakes his head, glaring at the ceiling. “God, Jenna, you barely know him.” The judgment in his tone knifes me. I know he doesn’t understand. I know he doesn’t really believe something like this, so soon, is possible. But I know Alec, and there’s more than that to his judgment—he’s thinking I’m falling back into old patterns, being irresponsible, rushing headlong into self-destruction.
My heart squeezes, but I remember the feel of being in Felix’s arms, of how natural and pure and right it feels every time I’m with him, like I’ve finally found this person I didn’t even know I was desperately searching for all along.
What I feel for Felix isn’t like the past, not at all. It’s a future, one I want with all my heart, for me and for Ty.
Not that I’m going to tell Alec that.
“Okay, fine,” Alec says, running a hand through his hair. “Sure. You’re in love with him. Like you were in love with me.”
I’m not even going to get into how different things are with Felix, especially because there’s no nice way to say that to Alec. “I am,” I say firmly. “And he’s in love with me. And, god, Alec, did you even thin
k about what that must have been like for Felix, seeing that? Did you even—?”
“Felix?” Alec laughs incredulously. “Felix signed on for this! Felix joined our band knowing he was going to have to watch us pretend to be in love.”
My mouth opens and closes helplessly. He’s not wrong about that—Felix and I have talked about that, and how difficult it might be. But this is different, somehow, and not just because we were caught completely off-guard by it.
I’m not sure how to put to words what line it crossed beyond just the personal betrayal of Alec throwing me under the bus like that. But my eye catches the glint of the big-ass diamond on my finger, and I feel queasy.
“Look,” Alec says, leaning forward. “You guys aren’t going to last four years. He admits it. Are you going to deny that? Especially now that you’re in love with him? Our plan isn’t going to work anymore, is it?”
I take a deep breath, the guilt back. I should have brought this up with Alec sooner, sometime in the last day or two. I knew I needed to, but the anxiety of it, of letting him down after all he’s done for me . . .
Though if I’d known he was planning a proposal, I might have felt a lot less conflicted.
“No.” I look down at my hands, and then away again.
Alec nods. “So we need to escalate the story, get out of it faster. Which means we need to be building to an ending. This will be our engagement tour, and when it’s over, we’ll figure out what’s next—cold feet or something. A story that lets us both get out with what’s left of our dignity.” He holds his arms open wide. “It’s not as good as the other plan, but I’m not the one who decided to abandon it.”
The fury from before has settled into a cold pit in my stomach.
“You still should have talked to me about it first,” I say.
“Maybe,” Alec says. “Would you have agreed?”
We’d needed a new plan, and though I don’t love this one, it’s hard to say how I would have taken it had Felix and I actually been given the option. But we weren’t, and now it’s done.
“I guess we’ll never know,” I say.
He glares at me and then looks out his window, and I look out mine. There’s nothing more I want to say, not right now and not to him.
Felix, though . . . I think of the way he asked if he should come home tonight, like he actually thought I might not want him there after what just happened. My heart aches and my hands tremble as they clutch my knees. And I can only hope this connection, this possible future, is still worth it to him after all this.
Twenty-five
Felix
I sit in my car in the private back lot to the stadium, staring at the barbed wire fence separating it from a junkyard full of bent and twisted cars. Some of the staff are clearing out, though the lot is still crowded with the cars of the techs who will spend the next several hours packing up equipment.
I tighten my hands on the steering wheel. I stare at the fence, my eyes counting metal wire diamonds in groups of one, four, nine, twenty-five.
The muscles in my arms are tight, which is the only reason they’re not shaking. The tremor instead travels up to my shoulders, my neck, where all my muscles twitch. There’s a scream coming from somewhere in the back of my mind, so loud I can’t hear anything else.
I can’t get high holding onto the steering wheel. If I don’t let go, I can’t start the car. I can’t drive to my friend Izzy’s house in Anaheim for a hit. I got paid today, and I intended to use the money to buy Gabby’s couch and start paying my dad back, but I know exactly how much heroin that money would buy and it’s enough to get through the pay period—maybe more since I won’t need as high a dose.
Not that I’ll have a job next week if I shoot up. Walk the mile, I tell myself. Walk it through to the end.
But I can’t put two thoughts together that aren’t made out of fear and pain and desperation. This is ridiculous, and I know it. Jenna isn’t marrying Alec. Nothing has changed between us. But I’m pissed and scared and confused, and my body knows how to fix it, how to make it all instantly go away, and I’ve been clean long enough now that I know damn well how good it would feel. Maybe I could even get back to the magic of the first time, when all the weight I didn’t even know I’d been carrying lifted off me, like I’d suddenly discovered what should have been obvious before—human beings weren’t meant to be tethered to the ground. It became completely unfathomable how I’d forgotten I was meant to fly.
My fingers are aching, but I hold on tighter. I haven’t had a craving like this since the first weeks of rehab. My body is screaming at me just to find a damn hit already, and most of my brain agrees. There’s only one small part of me that stands between them, holding them back with what little strength I have.
But my body doesn’t get to decide what I do, and neither does most of my brain. And unless I’m unlucky enough for a dealer to come knock on my window in the backstage parking lot, it doesn’t matter how much most of me wants to get high.
I’m standing in its way.
I try to breathe—to my stomach, the way I was taught by my therapist.
I am not going to get high.
Even if a dealer did knock, I don’t have cash on me. I never carry cash on me. Forget the job, if I fail a drug test, I will break Jenna’s heart, and she’s been through enough pain and heartache. I think about Jenna and Ty, about Gabby, about my sister Dana and Ephraim and my parents and the band. I think about Katy, and people I don’t even know yet that I might hurt if I throw away fifty-six days of sobriety. The last few have been easier, but I earned most of those the hard way, fending off the wolves with nothing but a stick.
It doesn’t matter what Alec does, or even Jenna, for that matter. I make my own choices, and I choose not to get high.
I watch the dashboard clock. It takes another thirty minutes before I’m ready to pry my hands off the wheel.
When I get home, I can hear Jenna and Alec yelling before I even open the door. From the sound of it, they’ve circled through these arguments before and are back for round two, maybe three.
I’m not sure if my presence will help or hinder this conversation, but I open the door. Jenna looks over at me, a mix of anguish and relief on her face. I hate myself for making her sweat it so long. Alec doesn’t even glance at me as he continues.
“At least he had the decency to admit to my face that you guys had abandoned the plan,” Alec says. He points at me, but keeps his eyes fixed on Jenna.
Jenna takes a deep breath. “Felix,” she says.
Alec’s face clouds over. He’s not thrilled I’m here now, and that Jenna’s attention has shifted.
“That was a dick thing to do, Alec,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice even.
Alec turns to me, and he shakes his head like a disappointed parent, which must take some nerve. “Like I told Jenna, we need to escalate the story. You guys want out sooner, so we’ll get you out sooner.”
Jenna stares at him coldly, and I have to admit Alec has a point. Even if he is being a dick about it.
“You should have talked to us about it first,” Jenna says, I’m sure not for the first time.
Alec looks at me, like he’s expecting me to yell at him. And as much as I still want to punch him, I find I have nothing else to say. Alec must realize we’re not going to commend him for his fine tactical decision, because he storms up the stairs and leaves us alone.
I’m glad to see him go.
Jenna wilts against the wall. She’s taken off her boots, and she looks so small standing there, barefoot, curled in on herself. “Felix,” she says, and I see tears shining in her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I understand if you don’t want to be caught up in—”
I cross the room and wrap my arms around her and kiss her before she can say any more. Her body tenses in my arms, and she kisses me back frantically, like she�
�s afraid I have one foot out the door.
I pull back, pushing her still-glittery hair back over her ear. “Does this change anything?”
She looks me in the eyes. “It doesn’t for me. Not even a little bit.”
I’m ashamed of how much relief I feel. I should have known that. I think I did, but it feels so good to hear her say it. “For me, either.”
She lets out a relieved sigh, and I feel a bit better. I’m not the only one who was worried. “Are you sure?”
I wrap my arms around her, and she presses tight against me. “I’m sure. You think I’m going to walk away because of Alec?”
She laughs, but it sounds nervous. “I suppose when you put it that way.”
I kiss her again, and this time she relaxes in my arms. We’re okay, for the moment.
I wish I could make Alec stop harassing us, but I don’t know what else I can say to him. After a few minutes, Jenna takes my hand and leads me over to the couch and curls up in my arms. My craving for heroin all but fades away, and as much as I don’t want that to be about her, I know it is.
“I had no idea he was going to do that,” she says.
“Clearly. And I wish he hadn’t, but he did.”
She shakes her head. “The look on your face . . .”
I groan. “Did I give the whole thing away?”
“I doubt anyone will be scrutinizing your reaction, and if they do, they’ll just figure you have a crush on me.”
I smile. “And who doesn’t?”
“Leo,” Jenna says. “I hope.”
“Given the way he was dancing with Roxie, I’d say you’re in the clear.”
“But it bothered you,” Jenna says.
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