The only problem was that I knew it the back of my mind that I’d cheated and broken up with him for a reason. Just because I was lonely didn’t mean I had to sell out and get back together with him. I knew I never should have kissed him. Doing that had just brought back hope that we could be together, and I knew in my heart that Ben wasn’t the guy for me. Of course, I was a little drunk and pretty vulnerable that night, so when I asked him to come home with me, I wasn’t exactly in my right mind.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel again what I’d felt with Zack – with Ben or anyone else. That had been an all-consuming love that had swept me up in a torrent of emotion that had been unimaginable until I’d experienced it. But it had been taken away from me so quickly that I’d started to think that maybe it hadn’t even been real. Maybe it had just been the newness of it all and the excitement that came with being with someone who was so different from me. Maybe it was falling in love in a strange place where normal rules didn’t seem to apply. Maybe that was why it couldn’t last in reality. Maybe real love was more of what I’d had with Ben all along – someone reliable who wouldn’t hurt me or leave me or do anything that would make me cry.
Or maybe I was just desperate not to feel so alone anymore.
Chapter Thirteen
Zack
I almost died once. I almost lost everything, but I didn’t realize how much I had to lose until it was nearly too late. It’s funny how you never see what you have when it’s right in front of you, but hindsight is of course twenty-twenty. I was feeling that way for the second time in my life as memories from the summer bombarded me – the sweet smell of her hair, the way she looked up at me and grinned like I was the only person in the room, her arms wrapped around my waist as we sped around the island on my Harley, her head resting on my chest and the way she’d just let me be when she knew I was breaking down inside.
Emily wasn’t supposed to be someone I thought about months later. She was supposed to be a fun distraction, like all the other nameless and faceless girls I’d hooked up with over the years. What we had was supposed to be casual, no strings attached, no commitments. It was what she’d wanted too – at first. She’d come to me having just broken up with her boyfriend of five years after she’d slept with me for the first time. She told me she didn’t want anything serious, she just wanted to have a little fun, be a little reckless. And I’d been more than happy to do all those things with her, thinking that at the end of the summer, she’d go back to wherever she was from, and I’d forget all about her. But then little by little, she’d fallen for me, and little by little, I’d started to realize she was more than just a nameless, faceless girl.
Now I was thinking about her and wondering where she was and if she ever thought about me. She probably hated me. I’d left her crying on her front porch. I was a bastard, and if she hated me, it was probably well-deserved. But I was starting to regret my impulsive decision to end things with her, even though it seemed like the only solution at the time.
I hate having regrets. I rarely regret decisions I make, but for the second time in my life, I was looking back and wishing I’d done things differently.
The first time this happened to me was nearly two years earlier.
See, when you’re the lead singer of a rock band who plays college venues almost exclusively, and you have a gift for writing music that connects to people, girls like you. They hover around the stage, they wait for you after the show, they’re willing to do almost anything to get some time with you. When this happens, you develop a little bit of a god complex, and without knowing it, your life can get away from you.
There are also temptations that find their way to you, that you sample, because you’re a rock star, and people scream your name, tell you they love you, and they make you feel invincible. You don’t ever think anything bad will touch you, so you do things that you might not do if hot women weren’t offering to give you blow jobs, because simply the fact that they’re offering is fucking cool. So you party with them, sample some party favors and add a little something to your system that makes said blow job that much more mind-blowing.
All too soon you find yourself with a new girl whenever you want one, a god complex and a recreational drug habit that numbs you to the fact that your life isn’t all that you hoped it would be, and you’re actually really depressed, but you live for the high that comes with the drugs and the girls, because for a short while, you actually feel happy. It’s not a good place to be.
The night I almost died, I was with Derrick. We’d played a show in Raleigh, and afterward four girls had offered to come backstage, hoping to score with the band. Leo had declined because Kristin Decker was there that night, and he was hoping they might finally leave the friend zone if he paid her enough attention. Kristin was a good girl, a minister’s daughter, so Leo had to play his cards just right with her. Andrew, our other guitarist had been battling the flu, and had barely made it through the set without passing out, so he’d headed back to Durham with our gear immediately after we’d packed up the van.
That left Derrick and me with four eager co-eds. We partied with them backstage for a few hours, sampling from Derrick’s plentiful stash and drinking the free beer that Mitch, the bar manager, kept bringing us. The girls, who seemed more than happy to remove those burdensome layers of clothing they we wearing, were more than eager to show off their skills with each other and with us. It was pure, reckless fun, and we loved it.
By the time we left the club at five in the morning, we were drunk, coked out of our minds and sublimely satiated. So of course neither of us thought twice when Derrick got behind the wheel of his Eclipse with me in the passenger seat. It wasn’t until the car was upside down, the windows popped out and my forehead was hovering inches above a concrete drainage ditch that I realized our mistake.
I don’t remember much from that night, but I know I was knocked unconscious and so was Derrick. I awoke to the sound of fire trucks screaming toward us, but Derrick was still out of it when a paramedic knelt down beside me and asked if I was okay. They got Derrick out of the car first, and he was still unconscious when they loaded him into the ambulance. The paramedic who’d first talked to me stayed with me until they pulled me out of the car. I was drifting in and out of consciousness as he explained that they were taking Derrick and me a nearby hospital and asked if he could call anyone for me.
I lost consciousness again while the paramedics were examining me on the side of the road, but I guess I gave him Jen’s number because when I came to, she was standing over me with tear-stained cheeks. Her hand rested on her bulging stomach, and she was downright livid with me.
“You’re alive!” she hissed, and I felt her kick the bed.
I looked at her with a mix of confusion and irritation. I wasn’t exactly sure where I was, and she wasn’t being very nice by yelling at me. I tried to sit up, but my head felt like it might explode, so I stayed put.
“Last time I checked,” I said sarcastically, wishing I could wipe the sandpaper feeling from my tongue.
I looked to my left and saw a pitcher of water. I went to reach for it, but my arm wouldn’t unbend. I looked down, and panic flooded through me, succeeding in waking me up all the way. My arm was in a cast that went up over my elbow. My eyes darted around the room. I was in the hospital. What the fuck was I doing in the hospital?
Then I remembered the accident, and a shiver coursed through my body. Derrick had crossed the median and driven across three lanes of traffic. He’d swerved at the last minute to avoid hitting a semi head-on, and he’d succeeded in rolling the car several times. Shit.
“Where’s Derrick?” I asked Jen, my thoughts full of panic. Was he alive? Where was he? I was in a small room, and there wasn’t anyone else besides us there.
“He’s recovering from surgery!” she hissed, and I was almost grateful she couldn’t launch the full capacity of her voice on me. “And he’d better hope he’s okay, or I might have to hurt him!”
&nbs
p; At least Derrick was alive, but I learned he was in much worse shape than I was. His spleen had ruptured, and he’d punctured a lung. Jen explained that I had a broken arm – a fucked up problem for a guy who plays guitar for a living – a gash on the side of my head from when it had smacked against passenger side window and shattered the glass, a minor concussion, two cracked ribs and about a thousand cut and bruises all over my body. I considered myself lucky.
“You are damn lucky to be alive, Zack!” Jen said, saying out loud what I was thinking. “Both of you are. What the hell were you thinking?!”
I just closed my eyes. I had no clue what we’d been thinking. We weren’t thinking. That was the problem.
Apparently Jen wasn’t looking for a response since she just kept ranting. I made out the words coke, drinking, tox levels, blood pressure, mother and five hours. At that, my eyes snapped open.
“My mother knows about this?!”
“Damn right she does,” Jen said, anger flashing in her eyes. “She’s on her way here.”
“Everything?” I asked, realizing the magnitude of what Jen knew. Was my mother in the loop too?
Jen narrowed her eyes at me and just said, “Yes. She knows everything.”
My whole body sunk, and I shook my head. “How long have I been out?”
“A few hours,” Jen said, and I wondered if she’d gotten woken up in the middle of the night. She hadn’t been sleeping well anyway, and I felt bad that she’d had to come down and deal with us on top of everything else. Derrick and I were assholes.
“I’m sorry, Jen,” I said, sincerely meaning it.
The she started sobbing. “Zack, you almost died! Do you realize that? Do you understand what that would have meant?”
I closed my eyes, not wanting to think about any of that. My first thoughts went to my mother. With my dad out of the picture, I was all she had besides her sisters, but one lived in Maryland and the other in London. They weren’t exactly close by. I was it.
Jen kept crying, and I realized that since she’d been living with us, and I’d taken to going with her to her doctor’s appointments, and listening to her read from her pregnancy book and talk through her fears of becoming a mom, I was all she had. Derrick loved her, but he just wasn’t dependable. Jen had come to rely on me, and I’d almost let her down – big time.
Shit. I could have died.
“Jen, I’m sorry,” I said again. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Damn right you weren’t thinking,” she said, wincing for a few seconds before she regained her composure. “You and my idiot brother just figured you were sober enough to drive after spending hours drinking yourselves into oblivion?! And what were you thinking doing coke, Zack? Huh? You just might be the dumbest smart guy I know. You are so talented. You can play and sing, but you can also write. You have a future in music, and you might have just thrown it away tonight. I hope your arm heals. I hope you can get back to playing.”
She said it so haughtily that a part of me thought that if I couldn’t play anymore, she felt I would deserve it, and that got me pissed. I opened my mouth to say something to her, but she beat me to it.
“And not even that! I need you. She needs you,” she said, jabbing her stomach with her thumb. “She needs her father!”
I froze the second she said that and had to shake my head a few times to register where her head was at. I noticed how heavily she was breathing, and I wished she’d calm down.
“Jen, come on. I know I told you I would be there for you, but I’m not Lily’s father. Jay’s her father. You can’t put this on me.”
Jen looked like I’d smacked her, and I knew I’d taken my role of caregiver too far. I had every intention of being there for her and Lily, but I planned to be a cool ‘uncle’. I wasn’t Lily’s father. Her father had walked out on her mother, and because of that, she would always have me in her life, but I wasn’t her dad.
My mind flew back to the night we’d named her. Jen had come home from work, and her feet had been aching, so I’d offered to massage them for her. She’d let out a giant groan, as if I was delivering the best massage in the world, which I knew was far from true, but for as swollen as her feet were, I’m sure it felt almost that good. I’d started throwing out names for girls as we’d been doing for the past few days, but she hadn’t liked any of them. ‘Lily’, I’d said, and from the way she smiled when she heard it, I knew it was the name her daughter would have.
Back in the hospital room, Jen rested her hands on her stomach and looked at me, and it was suddenly as if ice water had been dumped on top of me. Her look told me everything I needed to know. I closed my eyes as the anger boiled in my veins.
“I have to tell you something, Zack,” Jen said, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her.
“Go ahead,” I said, not bothering to open my eyes.
“There’s a chance that Lily is yours.”
“No, there’s not, Jen,” I said, shaking my head and looking up at her. “You’re due the first week of March. I did the math. It’s not possible.”
She swallowed. “Zack, due dates aren’t always accurate. All I know is that we got together at the end of May, and I missed my period two weeks later. Jay had been home the weekend before, and we’d slept together, but he’d been gone a lot that month. He took some networking trip with his dad to New York, and then he was in Virginia Beach with his family for two weeks. We didn’t sleep together outside of that one weekend.”
“You and I only slept together once,” I reasoned, and she winced again as if my words caused her physical pain.
She looked at me, as if waiting for the light bulb to turn on over my head. “Fifty-fifty shot, Zack,” she said, sounding slightly out of breath.
I shook my head, as if trying to wrap my mind around this bomb she’d dropped on me. No, this was not what I wanted. I couldn’t be a father. No way. I could not have a kid.
“Jen, tell me you’re not serious,” I said, getting angry at her all of a sudden. “Tell me you haven’t been keeping this from me all these months. Tell me you’re wrong!”
She shook her head and bit her lip. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I wasn’t sure how to. There’s a chance she could be Jay’s, but she might be yours. I figured I’d know when I saw her.”
“Shit, Jen,” I hissed, closing my eyes again and leaning back against the bed pillows. I couldn’t believe she’d played me like that after everything I’d done for her.
“I hope it’s you,” she said quietly, and I felt like I wanted to throw up. “In the beginning, when I first found out, I prayed she was Jay’s, but after everything happened – Zack, you’ve been so amazing these last few months.
I could see hope in her eyes when I looked in them, and I knew the severity of the pain I was about to inflict on her. We didn’t want the same things.
“Jen, I’m sorry, but I hope she’s not mine,” I said, and she started gasping for air.
I realized she was having a panic attack. I tried to get up to help her, but my whole body protested. Completely freaked out, I hit the call button for the nurse.
“Yes,” the speaker-box attached to my bed squawked.
“I need some help in here,” I said, the panic prevalent in my voice.
“I’ll send your nurse down,” the voice said in a somewhat bored response, but I didn’t have time to dwell on that.
Jen collapsed in a nearby chair and clutched her stomach as she bent over, trying to take in enough air to fill her lungs. I frantically looked toward the door, but the nurse wasn’t coming. No one was coming. Pulling all my strength together and wincing in pain the whole time, I pulled myself out of bed and crossed the small room, wheeling the tower my IV was connected to along with me, so I was standing in front of her.
Not sure what to do, I gripped her chin with my good hand and made her look at me. When her eyes connected with mine, I could see the fear behind them.
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m here, and you’re okay. You�
��re okay.”
She nodded quickly a few times, and I could tell her breathing was starting to steady as she listened to my voice.
“I’m here, Jen. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to leave you. I’ll always be here for you. I’m just freaked out, but I’m not leaving, okay? I’m not going anywhere.”
Over the course of the next few minutes, Jen’s breathing returned to normal, and my heart rate calmed down. Her eyes never left mine. It was as if I was her lifeline in that moment, but I knew, as well as she did, that what we had was longer lasting than just that moment.
“Okay?” I asked, never breaking eye contact with her. “Okay?”
She just nodded before she doubled over in pain. “Ow, fuck. Fuck!” she growled out, and I started to panic again.
Was something wrong with the baby? Had she not gotten enough air in the few minutes Jen had been gasping for it?
Before I could question her, Jen hissed out a defeated response. “Shi-it,” she said, long and slow, and I heard the dripping sound before I felt it on my bare feet.
Looking down, at the puddle forming around and under the chair, I looked back up at Jen realizing what had just happened. Then the nurse, finally, came in the room, and a look of confusion flashed across her face. I was the patient. Why was I out of bed, and why was there a woman in labor sitting in front of me?
“Ow!” Jen cried out again, and she grabbed my hand, squeezing it with everything in her. “Ow, ow, ow. Shit, shit, shit. Ow, shit.”
“Does it hurt?” I asked, feeling stupid for doing so. Of course it hurt. She was squeezing the shit out of my hand.
“How about I knee you in the balls repeatedly, every five minutes, and see how you feel,” she gasped, and I winced before covering my junk with my hand.
“Please don’t,” I said, smiling at her. She just glared at me.
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