“I’m calling it off, Ash.”
To my left, I could see a guy down on one knee, getting the right angle, capturing it all on video. I knew I needed to keep my shit together. But what was happening?
“Do you not like the ring?” I held it, stupid, looking into her face. “I can get you another one? Maybe something smaller?”
She shook her head no, not a trace of her usual sweetness or humor. This Ana was all business. “I’m done, Ash. I don’t love you.”
My mouth fell open. It literally felt as if she’d taken a sharp knife and stabbed it directly into my chest. What was this kind of pain?
“Is this because I got drunk in Mammoth?” I tried. Was she jealous? “Nothing happened with any of those girls.”
She shook her head, dismissing me, refusing to engage. “I’d say I hope we can stay friends. But we weren’t ever really friends anyway.” She gave me a rueful glance, the first time she’d looked straight into my eyes. It felt worse, like she’d twisted the knife. And I still could think of nothing to say, standing there like a fish out of water gaping in the air.
“Good luck with everything.” She turned as if to start walking off.
“Wait!” I caught the elbow of her sweater, taking a step closer to her. “Ana, can’t we talk about this? Can we go somewhere more private?” Flashes blasted off all around us as paparazzi captured every word, every expression.
“What’s there to say, Ash?”
“I don’t want you to go.”
“You don’t get to decide that. I do.”
“But…” More flashes. Men clustered around us, one literally rolling along a huge movie camera. The whole thing had clearly been staged. I just hadn’t been in on it. Lola must have known. Was Lola behind all of this?
“Is this what you want, Ana?” I tried, desperate.
“Yes, it is.” So firm, so cold. I barely felt as if I knew her. Maybe she had been pretending all along. Maybe this had just been a carnival ride for her, a few weeks of backstage passes and a trip to Paris plus some hot sex thrown in for kicks. Now if I could just pay for the library and step out of her way, please.
“I’m…” I swallowed. Even the breakup that we’d supposed to do in a few days would have been better than this. That I would have expected, could have prepared myself for. This? This felt like a swift kick in the groin while the ref looked the other way.
“Let me go, Ash.” She spoke quietly, just to me.
“If it’s what you want.” I couldn’t help but look into her eyes, trying to get her to meet my gaze. But she wouldn’t.
She steadfastly looked down at the ground as she insisted, still emotionless, “It’s what I want.”
Had she faltered, shown any sign of confusion or wavering in her decision, I would have pressed. Sensing a fault line, I would have tried to widen the crack, break apart her certainty. But she didn’t show any sign of weakness. She stayed clear, crisp and direct.
Then she walked off. I stood there, a big jerk with the rejected engagement ring in my hand. The thought occurred to me that I should pull myself together. I shouldn’t stand there looking forlorn and dejected. But I felt trapped in a movie I definitely would have changed the channel on, the kind of melodramatic scene where it started to rain hard on the leading man because his heart had just been broken. And damn if I didn’t feel a drop on my shoulder, that San Francisco fog stewing into something thicker. Had Lola arranged for that, too?
Ana walked right up to the street and climbed into a waiting car. She’d planned all of this, right down to the camera angle. I should feel betrayed, even angry at her.
But all I could feel right then was a fist of pain curled tight in my chest. That’s what finally got me moving. Pain like this, it was mine, private, and I finally gathered my wits about me enough to swear at them all, shoving away a guy who’d come straight up into my face. Striding toward the street, I found a taxi to climb into myself.
Ana didn’t love me. Why was it only then, when she said that she didn’t, that I fully realized that I did love her? I loved her. How was that for shit timing?
If I’d clued in earlier, woken her up in the middle of the night in Mammoth and told her I couldn’t live without her, would that have changed things? But it was too late now. Now she’d rejected me, thrown back my ring, walked off and told me to have a nice life.
Why did everything get symbolic when you felt sad? The taxi stopped at a light and in the gutter I saw an old, discarded sneaker. Had that sneaker once been loved, part of a cherished pair? Had it been surprised when its time had come to an end? Had it expected it, a hole where the big toe had poked on through giving it proper warning? I bet it hadn’t. I bet it had been shocked as hell to find itself alone and forgotten in the gutter of life.
I knew I was being melodramatic, looking out at a battered sneaker in the rain and feeling kinship. But, damn it, I felt exactly like that sneaker. Cast to the side, laces untied, I’d come undone.
CHAPTER 10
Ana
Through my tears, I heard a knock on my hotel door. I didn’t know why Lola hadn’t booked me on a flight until five. That seemed like an impossibly long time to wait to leave, and now I had company. It had to be Ash. Who else could it be? But I didn’t think I could handle seeing him again.
He’d looked so devastated when I’d ended things at the park. Of course, that was the whole plan. If he’d laughed it off and said “no problem, sweetheart” the whole thing would have been a waste. The world would have learned what it already knew: Ash Black was an asshole. I’d been the only one out of the loop on that.
A knock again. Keeping the deadbolt chain on the door, I opened it a crack. Connor.
I sighed deeply. “What do you want?”
“Hey, now. Is that any way to greet your old friend Connor?” He leered at me.
“How did you find out where I was staying?” Only Lola knew, and I’d only told her about an hour ago. She’d arranged for a car to come pick me up at three.
“Lola knew you might need a shoulder to cry on.” There was that grin again. It gave me the creeps.
“I’m not really in the mood, Connor. Sorry.” I moved to shut the door right in his face. Such rude behavior from the librarian! But I was long past worrying about offending Connor.
His foot jammed into the door quick and fast, stopping me. The chain still held it closed, though. Suddenly, I felt glad I’d left it on.
“Come on now. Ash is out of the picture. We can pick up where we left off.”
“What are you talking about?” This man was disgusting. And why was he so relentless with me? It couldn’t be because he found me irresistibly sexy. He surrounded himself with far more X-rated eye candy than me. No, he must get off on going after something that belonged to Ash. Ick.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember, luv?” Now he laid on the Irish brogue thick. “That night at the party. You were all over me.”
“I was not.”
“Let me help you remember. Unlock this door and let me in.” He gave me what I figured he thought was a charming smile. He was a rich and famous guy, so I guess it worked on lots of people. Not on me, though.
On me, it had the opposite effect. I got a cold chill down my spine and I remembered, clearly, when I’d seen that exact smile before. He’d been handing me a strange-tasting glass of punch at the New Year’s Eve party. It all came together.
“You drugged me,” I realized, out loud. “Didn’t you?”
“That’s quite an accusation.” He stepped back, hands up in surrender, feigning hurt.
“That night at the party,” I insisted. “You did, didn’t you?”
“Sometimes a girl needs help loosening up. It was for your own good.” He gave me a wink. “Am I right?”
I’d show him loosening up. In a move I later recognized could have gone very badly, I unfastened the chain on that deadbolt and stepped right into the hallway with him.
I looked him straight in the eye. “Co
nnor? Fuck you.” And I kneed him hard in the groin. Thanks to the YMCA self-defense class my mother made me take before moving to the city, I got him right where it counted. He hunched down, cupping his balls with a sad yelp.
“You don’t drug women,” I told him, summoning my stern inner librarian.
He made a soft sound like a “meep.”
“And stay the hell away from me.” I took one last look at him, recognizing he posed no threat. None at all. And I headed back into my hotel room. Where were the cameras when you needed them? I would have liked them to have captured that shot.
A couple hours later, I found out where all the cameras were. The airport. Somehow they’d found out when I’d be leaving town. Thanks, Lola. Guys with cameras swarmed around me, asking for a quote. I was the heartbreaker now. Why had I done it? Had I left Ash for Connor? Inquiring minds wanted to know!
I kept my head down. I just needed to get past security. But then, I saw Ash. In a baseball cap pulled down low, he’d had the bad idea of meeting me there, too. He stood looking impossibly gorgeous and rumpled and distraught with his hands in his pockets. He hadn’t shaved and his stubble gave him a rakish edge. I knew how good it felt to kiss him with that rough scrape.
Click! About a thousand cameras went off, realizing they were getting two for the price of one. This couldn’t be happening. Was Ash’s appearance staged, too? I shook my head as he approached, trying to warn him off.
“Ana, just give me a second,” he pleaded.
“Why are you here?” I hissed, continuing to try to push my way through the throng. I didn’t have any bodyguards to help me. I did have my YMCA knee-to-the-groin trick, though, and I’d use it again if I had to.
“You won’t answer my calls. And Lola wouldn’t tell me where you were staying.”
“Great, she told Connor but not you?”
“She told Connor?”
“Yes, she told Connor. Your best friend. The date-rape king.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ask him.”
“Ash! Over here! Ana! Are you giving him a second chance?” Voices called out to us, making it nearly impossible to speak ourselves.
“Just give me a second?” he asked urgently. Pulling me over into a corner, he shielded me with his body. The way he had in Paris. I shouldn’t be thinking about Paris. I needed to think about the conversation I’d overheard at the cabin.
“Ash, you don’t need to pretend anymore.” I spoke as loudly as I dared while photographers still swarmed around us.
“But I don’t want you to go!” He spoke loudly, clear enough for them to get every word.
In frustration, I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him down so I could speak in complete privacy. I tried to ignore how good he felt against me, the way his smell made my knees go weak. “I heard you in the kitchen talking with Connor. About how rough these weeks have been with me. How much it’s sucked and how you can’t wait for it to be over so you can go back to how things used to be. So you can stop pretending. I know.”
I pulled away and he looked at me with a perfect expression of hurt confusion across his handsome features. “What? It’s not like that.”
“Cut it out, Ash.” This was getting cruel now. I knew he was supposed to play the part of the heartbroken, jilted lover but he had to know when to stop.
“Listen, I don’t know what you think you heard but—”
“What I think I heard?” I shook my head. “Ash, I know what I heard.” A man with a huge zoom lens on his camera even though he stood just a foot away jostled me with his elbow.
“You two gonna kiss and make up?” he asked, snapping away.
I turned my head and started pushing my way past him. Ash grasped onto my arm, trying to slow me down, but I’d had enough of manhandling and scenes.
“Let me go.” I had to yell it so he could hear. It came out sounding angrier than I felt, but maybe it was better that way. If I let myself sound too sad it would open up the floodgates. I just needed to make it a few more steps.
Ash dropped my elbow. A TSA agent took his place, ushering me in past the cordoned-off section for passengers with boarding passes. I shouldn’t have, but I let myself take one last look behind me. It was almost like watching something sink into the ocean as Ash got surrounded, flooded, covered by fans and paparazzi. In seconds, I couldn’t even see him anymore.
I told myself that was for the best.
§
I blocked Ash’s number on my phone. There wasn’t any point in dragging it out. And it turned out, he seemed to agree. I heard absolutely nothing from him. Sure, calling and texting were off the menu. But there had been a time, not that long ago, when people had still managed to make contact with one another even without cell phones. Ash did not make that effort.
I heard from his attorney, Nelson, refreshing my memory about all the details in the NDA I’d signed. I couldn’t breathe a word to anyone about anything that had happened.
That was fine by me. The last thing I wanted to do was talk about Ash. And once it was clear that I wasn’t going to say a thing, and I wasn’t in Ash’s life any more, the paparazzi left me alone. Within a week back in New York my status officially returned to Not Interesting.
I wish I could say that I didn’t cry. Or maybe that I didn’t cry a lot. Or at least that I never ugly cried, with big fat tears and making the kind of face even your mother thought twice about loving. But I did all of that. For the most part I managed to save it for nighttime. But the walls in our tiny Brooklyn apartment weren’t exactly thick. My roommates knew, more than anyone, how torn up I felt.
At work, thankfully, I kept busy. Little kids kept you on the hop and I was grateful for all the distractions. January was the height of flu season. I had more than one kid throw up on me. It was hard to remember your heartache when you were cleaning up vomit. I may have been the only person in the world grateful for stomach bugs, but there you had it. That’s how low I felt.
We got word that our library branch wasn’t going to be shut down. That was all. No news about 20 years of funding or grand plans to start a whole-scale remodel. I didn’t know if Ash had kept his side of the bargain or not and, sadly, I didn’t have it in me to find out. I knew I could call his attorney and he might verify whether the fund had been established, but I just couldn’t handle it. I needed to move on.
And to move on, I needed to stay busy. I took on more piano clients, devoting Saturday afternoons to lessons. The few times one of my teenage students asked if it was true that I’d dated Ash Black, I was able to answer with complete honesty that it had all been a publicity stunt. There’d never really been anything between us.
Most Sundays, I spent up at my parent’s house. They had my back, as always. My father grumbled about rock and rollers and my mother muttered and threw salt over her shoulder, cursing the past and praying for the future. They assured me that Ash wasn’t worthy of me. This was good riddance, that’s what this was, and I was off to bigger and better things, preferably in the form of a nice, churchgoing Russian engineer ready to settle down and start a family.
My Aunt Irina took it the worst. She got mad, really mad, and if it wasn’t for her deathly fear of flying I think she might have hopped on the next flight out to L.A. and given Ash a piece of her mind. I feared for him the next time he did a show in New York. I had no doubt Irina could work her way past security if she set her mind to it.
I was grateful when the Super Bowl finally arrived. I didn’t watch much TV, but you never knew when a pop-up ad would make its way into a streaming service and announce The Blacklist, halftime spectacular! The few times I hadn’t managed to avoid seeing Ash’s image, it had felt like a slap across the face. Even though I knew every shot was staged, every photo the result of wardrobe and stylists and makeup artists and lighting crews, he still looked so goddamned hot. It wasn’t fair.
Apparently the show went well. Everyone loved them. I avoided the whole thing, declining the couple of
invites I got to attend Super Bowl parties. On the day of the big game, I’d never been more grateful for my oddball roommates. Liv rejected everything about football, from the male archetype it propagated—whatever that meant—to the corporate branding across every frame. Jillian just wasn’t much of a sports fan. What she most liked was cooking up apps, and Liv and I were more than happy to eat her tasty concoctions while binge-watching Game of Thrones. Jillian declared the series too violent for her tastes, but I still caught her craning her neck to watch the naughty bits. Liv celebrated the death of every main character. And me? It kept my mind off of Ash Black, and that was saying something.
After the Super Bowl, I didn’t hear a word about The Blacklist. I certainly wasn’t doing internet searches, but I was 24. I had friends. I heard about shows, bands passing through. Nothing.
It was almost eerie how everything returned to normal. It was like those three and a half weeks with Ash had never happened. Everything returned to exactly the way it had been.
Until March. I was in our tiny kitchenette when I heard the song for the first time. In Ash’s unmistakable deep, growling voice, the haunting melody I knew so well gave me chills. It was the song he and I had played together so many times, first in Santa Clara, then in Paris, then in his mountain cabin, each time morphing it, growing it into what it was now.
The song was a complete departure from his previous work. Everything in the past had been straight-up RAWK. The kind of music that made you want to head bang and stick out your tongue KISS-style and quit your job just for the hell of it.
This was a love song. Heartbroken, stripped down, bare and raw. Critics went wild over his new sound. It was his first solo release, just Ash Black on piano with what sounded like percussion and maybe cello in the background.
The song was called “Undone.” His voice ached like he was bleeding into the music. In the refrain, deep and tortured, Ash sang, “I’ve come undone.” The longing need in his vocals gripped you fierce as he described the love he’d found and lost. How he’d had everything he’d ever wanted and then it fell apart, slipping through his fingers.
Undone, Volume 3 Page 15