by Corri Lee
We attracted more attention as a couple than as individuals, and I found myself in the middle of a crowd of journalists and photographers. Why hadn’t the novelty worn off yet?
Still feeling out of sorts, I didn’t hear most of the questions yelled at me and stammered in response to the ones that I did.
“Miss Tudor, you look a little queasy. Can we expect a surprise announcement soon?” What? Oh, I heard that one all right. Trust a brain-dead columnist to make a scene over nothing.
“Absolutely not. Mr. Ryan and I practice sex so safe Alcatraz has been calling us for tips. Excuse me.”
Pushing my way through the laughing crowd, I practically sprinted towards a bathroom, needing the distance more than the facilities. I hated what my life had become; a media circus that had been far less audacious and subject to hilarity when I’d been thrown into Blaze’s big top. The candid shots taken of us on the streets and minimal interference had been a dream compared to what I was suffering now. I couldn’t even look a little pale without the New York media itching to twist it into news of a too fast and almost impossible to occur pregnancy.
I’d just reached the exit when a voice cracked out behind me and several sets of footsteps. “Emmy, wait!”
I groaned, resting my head against the glass of the door. “What now, Chase?” I was bone weary enough without round two of him. Turning around, I saw that the whole band was behind him with Calloway’s assistant, Matilda, flanking them.
Chase stepped towards me and gaped. “Calloway Ryan? Seriously? You bounced down on the rebound and landed on that?”
I felt my face turn maroon. Calloway didn’t have a reputation for being an attentive and sensitive partner, but I didn’t think I deserved all the disdain being thrown at me from four directions. “What cave have you been living in? Our relationship has been very public.”
“ ‘Relationship’.” Scott piped up with a snort, as contemptuous and self-righteous as I remembered. “Yeah, I’m sure sleeping next to his coffin is very satisfying.”
My shade of red deepened. “Why is this any of your business?”
“Because you deserve the best, Emmy. I’m not saying he’s a dick, but the man gets more pussy than a cat sanctuary. He’s probably cheating on you.”
I looked to Matilda for reassurance before I humiliated myself by defending Calloway’s honour, as much as he didn’t deserve it at the time. She lowered her eyes, lips pursed and gave a quick, barely discernible shake of the head. That was all I needed. The girl worked ungodly hours so her boss didn’t have to think for himself where scheduling and conference was concerned. If Calloway was cheating on me, she was probably booking the hotels for the rendez vous’.
So it was with conviction that I could get riled. “How dare you! You don’t know him and you don’t know shit about what goes on behind closed doors.”
Chase crossed his arms with a scowl, blatantly seeing past my vehement protest. “I know that whatever you think you have with Callo-want-my-own-way Ryan is really a farce.”
“That’s rich considering your last relationship wasn’t even fucking real.” He inhaled harshly through his teeth and let it go slowly. It was a low blow to bring up his dubious past and I knew it, but I didn’t care. There was no way I’d take shit from a man who could only get relationships through blackmail.
When he’d calmed, Chase lowered his hands and took a brave step towards me, which I countered by stepping back. “This isn’t you, Emmy.”
“What the hell would you know about me?”
“I know you’re settling for second best even though the ultimate is breaking his heart over you. He’s a fucking mess.”
A lump came to my throat. I’d managed to avoid anyone campaigning with Blaze’s sob story, but now I’d had it forced on me I felt no better for knowing he was suffering. Even with my reckless tendencies, I had no sympathy for self-inflicted woe. “I don’t care.”
A low growl left Chase’s throat. “I call bullshit. Your pain is written all over your face.”
“So why isn’t he here?” My fisted hands rose to my head and pounded on my temples in frustration. “My face has been plastered over magazines in the UK. If it’s so obvious that I need him, why didn’t he chase me here? Oh, yes, because it’s more important to inherit the estate of a woman he doesn’t even love.”
“Emmy...”
“You want me to go back there and play second fiddle to a bank account? You want me to go back to a life of only getting his weekends because he values the prospect of a big pay out more than time with me? How is that any better than what I have now?”
“No, Emmy! Is that what you think?” Chase rushed forward. I scrambled back at the same moment a searing pain hit my chest, sudden and sharp enough to put me on my ass on the floor. All the heat, panic and heart break I’d been trying to fend off caught me in that single second of lapsed concentration and choked me with it’s intensity.
Why hadn’t Blaze chased me to New York? Why hadn’t he inveigled my phone number or email address from Daniel or my parents and made a nuisance of himself if he missed me so badly? It had been two months and not so much as a cursory apology for wasting my time. It could have been so easy and yet he hadn’t bothered.
My eyelids grew heavy and the effort of holding them open for so long became overwhelming. I looked up at Chase and let myself cry before I surrendered to the need to put myself away from reality.
“Why wasn’t I enough?”
Trying to ignore the crowd of people around me in the green room, I rolled my eyes at the Monday’s Miracle medic as he pulled the blood pressure cuff off my arm. It said a lot about the stupidity of a group of men when they had to take a doctor on tour with them to deal with their many stage related injuries. He had a thick Liverpudlian accent and comically spiked orange hair, looking like the least likely person in the world to have gotten through any form of compassionate medical training, let alone a doctorate.
“Your blood pressure is very high, Miss Tudor. Are you on any kind of medication?”
“Uh...” I shot Matilda an imploring look and she discreetly scribbled down something on a scrap of paper. I was grateful for her tact and and help despite the fact Calloway looked like he’d swallowed an entire nest of wasps. He hadn’t spoken since Chase had scraped a semi-unconscious me up off the floor and had his security team forcibly remove everyone from the room. I’d heard his mutter that I was causing a scene and it pissed me off that he thought I was doing it intentionally.
The medic raised an eyebrow at the scribble. “That shouldn’t cause hypertension. I presume you’re not drinking on these—do you smoke?” I shook my head, embarrassed as hell to be getting my dirty laundry aired in front of my ex’s best friends. How the hell had it come to this?
Chase grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “So why did she pass out, AJ?”
“Hazarding a guess...” ‘AJ’, apparently, pursed his lips and studied Calloway for a long minute before he looked back at Chase and said, very pointedly—”Stress.”
“Shit.” Chase winced at me empathetically and asked both of us, “was it me?”
“Doubt it. It’s not unheard of for people to flake in highly stressful situations, but if she can survive a relationship with Blaze, it’d take more than a conversation about him to break her like that.”
Christ. I stared down at my hands, appalled. They were talking about me like I wasn’t even there, let alone acknowledging the fact that my new tightly wound boyfriend was in earshot, too. It felt like being back on the psyche ward, listening to the doctors tell my parents about all the ways I could have permanently fucked myself up with my anorexia. It was maddening.
“Off the record a temporary solution would be a big fat spliff.” Pulled from embarrassment, I clapped a hand to my mouth to muffle my laugh before Calloway heard. However stupid he’d made me feel, AJ’s lax attitude made me like him immensely. “On the record, try to remove yourself from whatever—” he shot another sour look at Callo
way, who returned it with suppressed violence—”situation has your blood boiling. You know what I’m saying?”
I did, but I didn’t consider it an option. As fractious as our relationship was, I didn’t want to split up with Calloway. It could be great at times and I treasured his company. He’d put a lot of time into ‘us’—time he could have spent working on himself. He seemed to need me and I knew only too well the value of having a crutch there just in case you fell. Plus there with the public implications of leaving him so soon after a reunion with Monday’s Miracle... I wouldn’t go back to London, but the media attention almost certainly wouldn’t be positive for anyone.
A short time later, the band pulled themselves away from me and their smartphones to go and sound check for the night, leaving me, Calloway and Matilda in an awkward silence. I stood, with a renewed sense of vigour after breaking down, and straightened out the skirt of my cheerleader outfit. If nobody else would interrupt the tense quiet, I wouldn’t, either. I was still feeling bruised over Calloway’s needlessly bad temper that had stemmed from something as stupid as me wanting to drive.
He caught me by the elbow, face stony but eyes anything but. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen quite so much suppressed emotion trapped in a single person. I wanted to tell him to get it out of his system, but I hadn’t really done anything wrong, so didn’t really see why I should deal with a barrage of moot criticisms.
After a moment, he sighed. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Feel better after that little wobble, do you?” Detecting the sardonic inflection, I ignored the question. I knew that he hadn’t heard the conversation because he’d been too busy show-boating in the green room, so who knew why he thought I’d collapsed? “This outfit is tacky.”
“Jesus, Cal,” I muttered, “tell me how you really feel.”
Irritation rattled in his throat. “Do you have to wear this jacket all the time?”
“I thought that was the idea.”
“I feel like a god damn sicko dragging around some teen bride.”
“Mr. Ryan,” Matilda cut in weakly, looking contrite when she noticed that I was still a little bandy-legged. “Maybe we should give Miss Tudor some time to unscramble her thoughts. She fainted due to stress.”
“Stress?” Oh my God. The conversation had happened less than five feet away from him and he’d been so self-absorbed that he hadn’t even heard it. He knew that he’d been a prick by not paying attention—it was written all over his face—but instead of acknowledging it and apologising, he retaliated with an acerbic sneer. “I don’t believe I pay you for your opinions.”
I yanked my arm free of his grip. “Hey. Step off. You’d be nothing without her inputting your commands.”
He bristled at my inference—the vein in his temples started to bulge. I didn’t want to point out that he’d refused one piece of advice and already looked like he was about to suffer a total core meltdown.
“Don’t tell me how to handle my life when you clearly can’t handle your own. You wouldn’t have this problem if you hired a god damn assistant, and burned off your stress in the gym.”
Again with the assistant! Did he seriously think that I needed someone to micromanage my life to function like a human like he did?
Bingo. He thought I was like him because we’d had the same kind problems before. He’d tarred us both with the same brush, believing that we both needed the same sense of total control and protection nasty surprises. He didn’t think that I could cope without outside support, and today had been his proof.
But I could. I’d handled my recovery differently to him, and damn it to Hades, I liked not knowing what lay around the corner. I didn’t need a crutch like he did and I didn’t need him trying to shove me into delegating my life and becoming being independent of her emotions like a robot.
And at that exact time, I felt strong enough to prove it. “You know what? I’m sick of this. I’m not something for you to pick at and ‘improve’. I’m my own person with my own hopes, standards and ideas, and if you can’t appreciate that I am who I am—all long blonde haired, caffeine dependant, crazy ass, anti-psychotic taking, non-gym going, self-driving, stupid fashioned sensed, British twenty-two years of me—it’s tough shit.”
He squinted meanly. “You forgot stubborn.” Honestly, I nearly fell back on my ass in disbelief. “Try and take the moral high ground all you want, Emmeline. It won’t detract from the fact that you strayed from my side twice today to bat your eyelids at some jackass with bad hair and a Napoleon complex.”
“Oh my God!” I threw my head back and laughed. Chase was an inch shorter than Calloway if that, and yes, admittedly wore some pretty heavy platform boots to tower over people, but he was far from vertically challenged.
“Your place was in here with me, not running around after pretty-boy rock stars with whom you share little more than a stupid accent!”
My laughter quickly ceased. There was so much wrong with that sentence I had whiplash from the recoil. I held up a hand and stepped back to make a quick mental list of all the issues he’d pushed at me over the last month.
Hair too long.
Glasses too geeky.
Can’t manage my own life.
Need to go to the gym.
Shouldn’t drive my own car.
Should tattoo over my cutting scars.
Work too much and too often.
No office.
Drink too much coffee.
Can’t dress myself well.
Had two brief conversations with another man.
Stubborn.
Dared to leave his side.
STUPID ACCENT?!
With the list of my flaws so extensive, what the hell was he doing with me? What was I doing right when I was doing some much wrong by rote.
And that’s when it clicked. I wasn’t the problem in this scenario. Calloway was because he gave no leeway or flexibility on his standards and ideals. I had to give him the whole three and a half thousand miles it had taken me to return his damn money clip but he couldn’t give me one fucking inch.
I turned back to him, seeing who he really was in amazing clarity for the first time. Like the other gorgeous men I’d met in my life, he was mixed up. That was fair enough. But he was so far beyond help I felt sorry for him. What the hell must it feel like to be co-dependent but hate the people you’re dependent on?
“You’re obtuse. And a chauvinist. And I’m embarrassed to be here with you when you’re secretly so insecure that you can’t handle me saying hello to a friend without displaying some kind of juvenile display of Neanderthal chest-beating. I came all this way to be with you, and sometimes you act like you’re glad that I did. Really glad. But you don’t even want what it is you have.”
“Because I don’t have you, do I? Sure, I have you here in person but I’m never going to have you completely, and I pray that if I pick away at an open wound long enough, you’ll crack and make some changes that will see the start of you not being the person that belongs to Blaze. You think I don’t see it. You think I don’t see that uncertainty over whether you’re betraying him somehow.” He snapped back so quickly it took a moment to process what he said. When it sank in, I lowered myself back down into the couch I’d been sitting on in shock.
The whole time. He knew the whole time just how much of a hold Blaze still had over me and he’d still been pushing past it. He might have even seen that I thought of Blaze at times I really should have been thinking of him. “Cal...”
Calloway sat down next me and took my left hand in both of his, toying with the emerald as he spoke. “I wake up every morning hoping this is the day you stop loving him. I know I can’t rush the healing process, but in the back of my mind, I’m thinking that if I stick with you through that grieving period, you’ll be grateful of my support and love me then. Even if it’s just out of gratitude.”
“Jesus, Cal.” He wouldn’t let me pull my hand back when I tried. “I’m sorry. It’s been
selfish of me to drag you through this with me. You don’t need my drama when you have enough of your own.”
“What I need—” He lifted his hands and eyes to my face and gave me a look of hopeless defeat that broke my heart. “—is the hope that I haven’t been tearing myself up over nothing. I can deal with the temporary damage to my sanity with hope.”
“You have it.” With shaking hands, I ran my fingers over the scars on his wrist and side. “Right here.”
The dynamic of our relationship changed that day. What might have destroyed others brought us closer. Something in our admitting our faults made us both individually and collaboratively stronger. Calloway stopped trying to mould me into something I wasn’t, while I stopped trying to disguise the fact that I was still seriously torn up over Blaze—even though I didn’t openly verbalise it.
Every day got a little better. We went on to the concert at Madison Square Garden and enjoyed the evening like two normal twenty-something’s. He hated the music and I made fun of him for it. We kept our distance from Monday’s Miracle, though neither of us missed the looks of hostile disappointment.
Calloway began to behave himself while I was working, resigning himself to the fact that it wouldn’t kill him to use the time at the weekends productively, too. I compromised on his love of exercise as stress belief by using the home gym he set up in one of his spare rooms. He dropped the driving argument and I agreed to use the office at The Seymour—which came with an assistant.
The give and take unfolded quickly, letting us step into a far easier and more comfortable life together. He was even completely understanding a week later when I explained why I couldn’t sleep in the same bed as him, and he offered me one of his guest rooms until it became a hurdle I was prepared to jump.
How grown up of him was that?
Every day, I took a picture of Central Park from Calloway’s balcony for my photo-journal. Little by little, the vista become a little more golden, living up to it’s promise of duty.