by Cimms, Karen
The look Kate gave him should have dropped the temperature at least twenty degrees. “I want to know what happened the night our son was born.”
He tugged at the cuffs of his sweater. His throat was dry, and he needed a drink. A real drink. “Like I said, Christa had been hanging all over me. She took me around, introduced me to all the big brass. Big names. People I’d heard of but never thought I’d meet. I’d gone from feeling sorry for myself to this amazing moment when I won and then right back to feeling alone again. But she just swept in and took over. She kept pushing the drinks, and I was getting pretty fucked up.”
Parts of that night were still hazy. He groped through the memories for Katie’s sake. Although at this point, things were unraveling fast and she was drifting farther away, not getting closer.
“It was crowded and noisy, and I was wasted. We were in some back room doing coke. I don’t think I even realized we were alone. It’s all pretty hazy. I was drunk and dusted, and I didn’t know shit.”
Kate was facing the window again, but by the way she hugged herself around the middle, he knew she was listening.
“We did a few more lines, and I guess I was—”
“Did you kiss her?” She hadn’t turned; she just kept staring out the window.
He wanted to vomit. “I don’t know. Maybe. I doubt it. But if you want me to be honest, Katie, I can’t swear to that.”
Her shoulders slumped, and his did as well.
He waited. Another nod from Liz.
“She found something that didn’t require any participation on my part, and that’s what happened. I didn’t touch her.”
The clock on the mantel ticked for close to a minute before Kate spoke again. Her words sliced through him. “Did you come?”
The blood in his veins turned to sludge; his outer extremities tingled like they’d fallen asleep. How the hell was this fucking conversation going to fix anything?
“Katie—”
She whirled around. “Did you come, Billy?” She took a step toward him, her hands balled into fists and her voice rising. “A simple yes or no. Did you come in that whore’s mouth?”
His heart lurched so hard it felt as if it had somehow stumbled. Why didn’t Liz stop her? Couldn’t she see this wasn’t helping? How could he answer that question? He was a guy, for fuck’s sake. His dick had a mind of its own.
“Katie, please—”
“God, Billy! I want to punch you. I want to hit you so hard!”
He bolted from his chair. “Go ahead. Hit me. If that’ll make you feel better, I want you to hit me.” He wanted her to beat the shit out of him if it would make her feel better.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Liz jumped to her feet. Now she steps in. “Nobody is hitting anybody.”
“It’s okay.” His eyes remained locked on Kate’s. “If you wanna hit me, Katie, go ahead. I deserve it.”
“Kate.” Liz carried a warning note in her voice.
Kate spun back toward the window.
Liz aimed a finger at his chair, so he sat. Helpless and nauseated, he stared at Kate’s back, wanting to go to her but afraid she would push him away for good.
The clock continued to tick.
“Kate,” Liz said finally, “do you want to continue?”
She didn’t answer right away, and when she did, she sounded broken. “I guess. That’s what we’re here for, right?”
Liz nodded at Billy. “Go on.”
“There’s not much more to tell. I pulled myself together, and I got the hell out of there. I walked for a long time, sick to my stomach, and not just from the alcohol. I was ashamed and disgusted, I threw up in the street. I hated myself.” His throat was as dry and sore as if he’d been swallowing daggers. “When my head was a little clearer, I called for my ride, and then I came home, wondering how I would ever face you, only to find out that while I was out fucking around, you’d not only given birth to our son, you’d almost died.”
It was as if someone had thrown a switch. The torrent of tears he’d been holding back for far too long burst forth. He couldn’t stop them; he wasn’t even sure he wanted to stop them.
Liz handed him a box of tissues, but Kate didn’t move. He could see she was watching him in the reflection in the glass, as grief-stricken as he was.
No one spoke for a long time.
“Is that why you bought the house?” she asked.
He nodded. “Pretty much. I’d been thinking about it, even though I thought it wouldn’t be good for you to live so close to your parents. But after what I’d done, I figured I owed you.”
He blew his nose and grabbed another tissue. “As for Christa, I fired her the next day. She kept calling me, and when I didn’t respond, she sent a message through Denny that I had better meet with her or else. So I did.” He balled up the tissues and tossed them onto the table. “She offered me my choice of two recording contracts, each one worth more than anything I’ve seen since. The deal was that she’d remain my agent, and I’d be at her beck and call until she grew tired of me. If I turned her down, she threatened to go to you.”
Kate shifted away from the window enough to meet his gaze. “I guess we know which option you took, since she never came to me.”
His anger at Christa was as strong as if it had been yesterday, and he had to restrain himself to keep from driving his fist into the coffee table. “That’s not what happened. I went to see Joey.”
“Joey?” Her head shot up. “Why Joey?”
“Because I needed his help. I told him everything, and then I begged him to get Christa to stay away from you.”
She snorted. “Joey would’ve never gone along with that.”
“He did. It took some convincing, but he did. He did because he loved you, Katie, and he didn’t want to see you hurt any more than I did. I told him I didn’t care what Christa did to me or my career, but he had to convince her to stay away from you. And he did. He may have hated my guts, but he did it for you. Christa promised to make sure my career stayed as dead-end as I was, and to her credit, she’s done exactly that.”
Kate turned, and he could see that her face was pale and strained. “How? What has she done?”
“No one in any of the big New York or LA firms will represent me, even the ones who’ve courted me. Whenever I get close to a contract, Christa gets wind of it, and they pull out. Sometimes her name comes up. Others don’t say anything, but I already know. Same thing with some of the gigs I audition for. If she hears I’m up for a job, she steps in and makes sure it doesn’t happen. I know it’s her because she calls me, and since I don’t take her calls, she leaves messages asking how it went.”
“So all these years, she’s made it her business to sabotage you?” Kate asked angrily. “Why would she even do that? She got what she wanted.”
“No, she didn’t. She wanted me. She never had me. She had five minutes alone with a shadow of me. When I cut off communication with her, she decided to get even. The afternoon of Joey’s funeral, she threatened to go have a little chat with you.”
“So why didn’t she?”
“Because I told her if she ever got within fifteen feet of you, I’d break her fucking neck.” Just thinking about that bitch caused the tension in his jaw to ratchet up. He forced himself to breathe through it.
When it started to subside, he spoke to Liz. “I have a problem with my temper. It’s one of the only things I inherited from my bastard of a father—that and my fondness for alcohol, but I’ve gotten a handle on both in the past year.” He lowered his voice. “I’m afraid to think what I might’ve done if she’d gone near Katie, though.”
Kate leaned against the window ledge, watching him.
“I can’t blame Christa completely for my career tanking—god knows I did enough damage of my own—but things might’ve been different without her working against me. But I take responsibility for myself now. I’ve learned to live with my choices and my disappointments.”
“What about the funeral?” Kat
e asked. “She left right behind you.”
He shrugged. “Knowing her, she probably did that so you’d think we were together. I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“So for twenty years, this woman’s been pining away for you?”
“Hardly. She’s just an evil, vindictive bitch.”
“I need to sit.” Kate nearly folded in on herself as she slumped onto the couch, her arms wrapped tightly around her middle.
“Are you okay?” Liz asked.
Kate nodded, but she still looked lost. “Nobody else?”
He shook his head. “No one.”
“But you kept me away,” she said. “In all the years we were married, I never went on the road with you. I rarely went to gigs, even if you were local. I hardly ever met the musicians you played with. You had a million excuses for why I couldn’t be there, and I bought all of them. Who were you trying to keep me away from, Billy?”
It was a difficult question to answer. “Me, I think. I love what I do, and there isn’t anything else I’d want to do. I’m a musician. It’s who I am. Regardless of what level you perform on—and I’ve been on the very top and the very bottom—the lifestyle is pretty much the same. Only the degree of decadence is different. When we first met, I was playing in clubs and opening for people on their way up or on their way down. The drinks were free, and everybody had pot and pills or coke. And there were always women. You saw that for yourself, right?”
She nodded.
“Multiply that ten times over and then some, and that’s what it’s like on the road. Only now, whatever you want gets handed to you. Some chick catches your eye during a show, you just signal the tour manager and she’s waiting for you backstage for as little or as long as you want. You see a few you like, no problem. And all the while, you’re onstage, the fans are screaming and loving what you’re doing, you’re loving what you’re doing, and you feel like you’re on top of the world. You think you’re a big fucking deal, and you want to be treated like that. And you are. Vendors line up before the show begging you to play their guitars, use their amps, their strings. To help convince you, they may have some of the finest Colombian weed or the purest white powder or the most beautiful women, just so maybe you’ll give that new guitar a try at your next gig. When you’re a rock star, every kid in the audience or buying your record or watching your YouTube video is gonna see you playing that guitar, and it’s worth it to them to make you happy.”
“So then I’d come home and there you were, you and the kids, and you were perfect—you were what really mattered. I didn’t want you anywhere near that lifestyle. My upbringing was pretty ugly, Katie, but with you, my life was perfect. The little house, the two kids, the dog, even the vegetable garden in the back yard. Life with you was like living in paradise. I wanted to protect you from all the ugliness. The problem was I wasn’t really living that perfect life with you. I was standing on the outside watching, like one of those living history museums, patting myself on the back for creating this diorama, totally unaware I wasn’t even a part of it. I was so afraid of becoming either of my parents that I didn’t become any type of parent at all. I left it all for you. Maybe it didn’t always seem like that, but I had you on a pedestal to keep you away from all the bullshit, especially the stuff I was shoveling.”
He tried to look as earnest as he could. “I was no angel, Katie. I’m the first to say that. When they were passing out the Jack and the coke or the weed, I was standing there with both hands out. But that’s where it ended. No women. And when it was my band on the road and I was the boss, there were no women backstage and sure as hell none in my room. I made one terrible mistake twenty-two years ago, and I never repeated it. I lived with that guilt every single day, and I never came close ever again.”
Their eyes were locked. It was as if they were alone. He knew Kate was weighing his words, trying to decide if she believed him. He couldn’t look away, afraid she would take that to mean he was lying. He was afraid to even blink. He followed the rise and fall of her chest, the sadness in her eyes.
As long as she was looking at him and not through him, there was still hope.
Chapter Forty-Three
They’d been at it for over two hours. If he survived this without falling off the wagon, Billy figured he could survive anything.
“How are you feeling, Kate?” Liz asked.
She blinked several times. “Gutted.”
“How are you feeling about what Billy’s told you?”
“Not good, but I guess it could’ve been worse.” Her lip quivered.
“What does that mean?” he asked, grasping at a granule of possibility.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure. I think when you told me you cheated, I assumed it was lots of women over the years. Not that a tawdry backroom blow job is any easier to swallow.”
Her eyes grew wide at the irony of what she’d said. Liz dipped her head to hide a tiny smile.
He didn’t dare smile. No fucking way.
Kate’s gaze dropped to the floor. When she shivered, he slipped off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. She wrapped her arms around herself, pulling the edges close around her.
Billy had been talking for most of the session. He felt like a dried-up husk.
“Can I have a drink of water?” he asked Liz. “Something?”
“Certainly. Kate?”
“No, thanks.”
“Are you okay?” he asked after Liz had left the room.
Kate’s lips spread into a thin line. Was that a yes? A no?
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You know I’m sorry, right?”
“Yeah.”
That didn’t mean she forgave him, though.
“Can I ask you something?”
Although hesitant, she nodded.
“After the shooting, you allowed me back into your life. We even made love a couple of times. If you were still so confused over us, why did you let that happen? Why let me come back at all?”
It was quiet for so long he thought she might not answer him.
“I’ve thought about that myself,” she said finally. “I think there was so much else going on that I needed to compartmentalize. While I was hiding in that bathroom, all I could think about was that I might never see you again. After the police found me, I wanted them to call you. I needed you. I wasn’t able to forgive you or even consider what you’d done, but I needed you.” She shrugged. “I don’t have a better answer than that. I’m sorry if it seemed I was jerking you around. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I can’t even say I was trying to survive. Maybe I was at first, but then . . . I don’t know.”
“I’m glad you wanted me. I wish I could’ve helped you.”
Before she could answer, Liz returned and handed him a bottle of water. He took several long gulps and screwed the cap back on.
“I have a question,” Kate said, “and you have to be honest with me.”
“There can’t be anything more difficult to say than what I’ve already told you.”
“Maybe.” She straightened up, as if preparing for another blow. “We’ve been separated for over ten months. For all you knew, I was never coming back.” She pulled his jacket tighter around her. “Have you been seeing anyone since I’ve been gone? I mean, it would be hard to blame you, not to mention I’m well acquainted with your, er—how much you like sex.” A pink flush rose from her neck to her cheeks.
“No. No one.” He lowered his head to meet her eyes. “Because in my heart and in my head, it isn’t over.”
The stiffness left her body. Did that mean she was satisfied with his answer?
“How’re we doing here?” Liz asked.
“I’m exhausted,” Kate said.
“Me too.”
“Do you want to end here and let some of this sink in? Kate? Are you okay with that?”
“Yeah. I’m drained right now.”
“That’s understandable. Normally, I’d ask that you put all of this away in some safe place unti
l we can bring it out and talk about it again, but I don’t think that’s feasible. If you need or want to talk more, see what happens. If it dissolves into fighting and more hurt, give me a call and I’ll try to squeeze you in. Otherwise, just try to process this as best you can, and give me a call in a day or two. Sooner, if need be.”
Kate slipped off Billy’s jacket, but he stopped her.
“Keep it.”
She murmured her thanks and slipped her arms into the sleeves. Her slight form swam inside it.
“Would you mind if I spoke to Liz alone?” she asked. “Just for a moment.”
“No problem.” He shook Liz’s hand. “That was hard, but thank you.”
* * *
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” Kate asked after Billy had left her and Liz alone.
“That would be hard for me to assess fairly. What did you think?”
“I think he was, but he’s lied before. I want to believe him, but that doesn’t change the fact that he cheated in the first place.”
Liz placed her hands on Kate’s arms. “The night of your friend’s funeral, he raped you, right?”
She shook her head insistently. “That was different. He didn’t know what he was doing. I told you what he said.”
“You did. And the night he cheated, what was different about that night?”
“It’s not the same.”
“No? Was he under the influence of drugs and alcohol?”
“When?”
“Both nights? Either night?”
“Yes.”
“What I’m saying is that you forgave him for doing something horrible because he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol. If you’re going to judge him for something he did more than twenty years ago, maybe you should use the same ruler.”
She made it all sound so simple. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, all she had to do was click her heels three times and she could go home.
“You’re saying I should forgive him?”
“No. All I’m saying is that you should apply the same rules. Is it unfair to excuse his behavior for one thing because he was on drugs but not for another? Think about what may be preventing you from applying the same logic to both incidents. Only you know what you’re capable of forgiving and forgetting, and only you know if you love him enough to bother.”