UNBROKEN (Friends, Lovers, or Nothing Book 5)

by Jackie Chanel

  “Aiden,” Pastor Hodges said before Sunny could answer. “Why is moving so important to you?”

  I didn’t even have to think about my answer. I had thirty messages in my inbox from some stalker-fan that confirmed that I didn’t need to raise my children in this city. Just last week alone, over thirty websites had a picture of me and Shay at one of her performances and were questioning whether I was cheating on Sunny or not. I can’t even take my daughter to the park without it being swarmed with paparazzi. Summer’s sick of it. I’m sick of it. Sunny used to be sick of it but I don’t know what changed.

  “I don’t want my children to be raised in a fishbowl. Here, these people have no boundaries. LA is a bad place because we can’t live our lives in peace. Both of us came out here because it would help elevate our careers to where we wanted them to be. We’re there. We made it. Neither one of us said this would be permanent. Look,” I said to the pastor while looking at Sunny. “I don’t think it’s wrong to want our children to be able to go out in public without security. I know plenty of celebs who have kids who left LA for that very same reason. I didn’t say let’s stop working, buy a farm in some hick country town, and isolate ourselves from the rest of civilization. I said we should move back to Atlanta where people know us and are more respectful of our privacy. She was born in Atlanta. I don’t see why the mere suggestion of leaving Los Angeles is such a problem.”

  “It’s a problem because you’re only thinking about yourself and what you want!” Sunny yelled.

  The most selfish person I’ve ever met in my life was calling me selfish. At that point, I’d had enough of her, of marriage counseling, and whatever else she wanted to say. This wasn’t about her being unreasonable about a possible move. Sunny was back to her usual stubborn and selfish ways and I’m done dealing with that.

  I stood up, patted my pocket to make sure I had my phone and keys then said, “You don’t have to move to Atlanta. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I’m going. Alone. And this marriage counseling is bullshit. We don’t need marriage counseling. We’re not getting married. I’m done you and all of this. Peace.”

  Chapter 25: Love Hangover

  WHEN I LEFT SUNNY’S, I had no idea where I was going. I just knew that I had to be out of her presence. This is so frustrating. She’s so frustrating. Why can’t she see that I’m trying? I’m really trying not to be the same person that I was a year or two ago.

  Even though it was only around fifty-seven degrees outside, I dropped the top of my convertible and drove around Los Angeles. My phone rang off the hook until I turned it off and tossed it on the backseat. There was no one I wanted to talk to. There was no one to talk to about this.

  The mildly cool temperature of southern California in January felt good, especially when I ducked a couple of paparazzi people and hopped on the highway. I opened the center console and was surprised to see a full pint of Absolut. I didn’t remember putting in there. Usually I don’t drive around Los Angeles with bottles of alcohol in my car, not with the way I drive. That’s a recipe for disaster.

  My head wasn’t clear. My mind wasn’t in the right place when I popped the top off the bottle and tossed the little metal top out of the car while taking a long swig of the warm liquor. By the time I reached the exit for Calabasas, the bottle was empty. It too went flying out the window as I sped down the street in search of a liquor store. Maybe getting drunk wasn’t going to solve my problems with Sunny but it’s what I need right this minute.

  Malibu Liquor was on my left so I swung a left into the shopping center and parked in a handicapped spot. I was only going to be a minute. I threw on a pair of shades and grabbed my phone from the backseat before I walked into the store. I was in and out before the cashier could recognize me. All I wanted was a bottle of Grey Goose.

  Five miles down the road, I saw The Anza Hotel so I pulled into the parking lot and parked. I needed somewhere to drink and I didn’t want to be in public. Checking into the hotel was more of a problem because I had to check in under my real name. Tonight, I didn’t really care. Dealing with the paparazzi was better than dealing with Sunny.

  I gave my American Express, got my room key, and disappeared from the world for the rest of the night. I sent my little sister a text to let her know that I wasn’t missing in case anyone cared. I didn’t go into any details and erased all of Sunny’s voicemails and text messages without listening to them or reading them. I needed a night, just one night to decide if I was serious when I told her that I was done.

  “Man,” I said to myself as I stared at the three cubes of ice melting in about four inches of vodka. “How can you be done with Sunny? It’s Sunny.

  With all the curtains in the room open and my Hendrix playlist playing as loud as the room’s little speaker system would allow, I sat in a chair drinking and watching the sun set over the city. I don’t know how to fix whatever is wrong with me and Sunny. I’ve tried. I swear, I’ve tried. Nothing would make me happier than for us to have a marriage like my mom and dad’s or even her mom and dad’s. I thought we were getting there.

  I know she’s worried about the baby and I understand that she’s frustrated but I’m not at fault. I’ve been doing everything that I can to make her more comfortable. But it’s never been tit for tat with Sunny and the warnings from Joey, Kat, and Pastor Hodges all hit me at the same time. Maybe I’m not the kind of man that Sunny needs. No matter how much I love her, maybe I can’t give her exactly what she wants.

  My phone began to vibrate on the table it was sitting on. I stumbled around the bed and picked it up to see who it was. My eyes automatically rolled to the back of my head when I saw Ramey’s name.

  “What’s up?” I slurred.

  “Oh my God, are you drunk?” she demanded.

  “No. What do you want?”

  “Why are you in a hotel in Calabasas?”

  “You stalkin’ me, Ramey?”

  “No, Aiden. My friend, Kara, just checked you in at The Anza. Why are you out here? Are you stalking me?”

  I totally forgot that she moved to Calabasas after the Wine King kicked her out. This isn’t a big city either. No wonder she knew where I was.

  “Why would I be stalking you? You don’t have anything that I want.”

  “Precisely. And you are drunk. I can hear it in your voice. What happened?”

  “I broke up with Sunny,” came pouring out before it even registered to whom I was speaking.

  Ramey started laughing so I hung up the phone and flung it on the bed. A few seconds later, it rang again.

  “Now you’re stalking me,” I snapped.

  “No, I’m not,” she giggled. “But for real, what happened? Did you really break up with Sunny?”

  “You can take the smile out of your voice when you ask that question. Why do you have to be a bitch about everything when it comes to her? It’s been four years, Ramey. Get over it.”

  “Oh honey,” she chuckled. “I’ll never get over that. So, what happened?”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “I may be drunk but I’m not stupid. I’m not talking to you about me and Sunny. Bye, Ramey.”

  After hanging up, I turned my phone off again and turned the music down to a more reasonable volume. The front desk had my name. Any kind of disturbing the neighbors would definitely be reported to TMZ. I took off my sweatshirt and lay across the bed in my jeans and wifebeater looking at pictures on my phone of my daughter.

  She deserves so much more than what Sunny and I have been giving her. She deserves a happy and loving household with parents who don’t argue every time she’s not in the room. All the toys and luxuries that little kids desire can’t make up for a missing parent. That’s exactly what I’d be if I left Los Angeles. It’s one thing to be on tour because she knows that I’m coming home whenever I can to be with her. She can go on the road with me too. But if I live in another state, it will be just like it was before Sunny told me she was mine. Summer would see me when I got a break
and on birthdays and holidays. That’s it, but that’s not the kind of father I want to be.

  I’m at a point in my career that I can take a few years between albums and between tours. I don’t have to go out on the road every summer and every winter. I’ve surpassed all expectations I had when I became serious about my music. I could raise Summer and Winter myself while Sunny travels all over the world for fashion shows and tries to become the black Rachel Zoe if that’s what she wants to do with her life.

  However, no judge in their right mind is going to give me custody of two children while they have a perfectly fit mother. I’m not the kind of asshole who would even attempt to take the girls away from Sunny. But I’m not going to be one of those fathers who only pay child support and that’s it.

  “Damn,” I sighed. “This is a big fuckin’ mess.”

  I was about to pour another drink when I thought I heard someone tapping on the hotel room door. I turned down the music just to make sure it wasn’t something in the song and heard the tapping again.

  “Who is it?” I shouted before walking over to the door. I didn’t get an answer so I walked over to the door and looked out of the peephole. Whoever it was had their finger covering the hole.

  “Get the fuck away from my door!”

  “Oh, don’t be like that. It’s just me.”

  The finger moved. Ramey was standing out in the hallway holding a bag from Taqueria Las Virgenes and smiling like we were old friends. Stupidity unlocked the door and let her in.

  “Figured you were probably too wasted to drive so I decided to be a nice ex-wife and bring my inebriated ex-husband something to eat so that he wouldn’t get a DUI.”

  I stood by the door and watched in utter confusion as she shrugged off her jacket and threw it across the bed. She began unpacking the bag of tacos and made herself comfortable as if she was my invited guest. I wanted to put her out but my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten all day and had just drunk half a bottle of vodka. No wonder my head was spinning. I sat across from her at the table and grabbed a steak taco.

  “Yo, how many times a week did we eat this?” I asked with a mouthful of food.

  “In the beginning?” Ramey pursed her lips together and thought about it. “At least four or five times. There was that one taco truck that used to park in the shopping center around the corner from my condo. We used to walk there all the time.”

  “With paparazzi following right behind us asking where we were going!” I laughed. “They used to hound us while we did the dumbest shit.”

  “We were the hot couple. The supermodel and the rockstar. They certainly loved us.”

  “What do you mean by in the beginning?”

  “Exactly what I said. In the beginning when we tried to spend all of our time together. In the beginning when both of our managers hated us because we were inseparable. That beginning,” she said.

  “We were inseparable until my accident,” I countered. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Ramey sat her fork in her burrito bowl and looked up at me. “Is that the Grey Goose talking or do you really think of our relationship that way?”

  “You don’t?

  “Absolutely not. We had maybe a month where we up under each other all the time. Granted, it was a great month, but that shit didn’t last. We were very separated up until we divorced.”

  I shrugged nonchalantly. “That’s not how I remember it.”

  “Then you’re remembering it wrong,” Ramey said and picked up her fork again. “You had just signed on to do the Calvin Kline campaign when we hooked up. Then right after that, you got the American Express deal. Then you went on tour.”

  “But you weren’t just sitting at home waiting for me,” I argued. “You were in Paris and London and Thailand while I was on tour.”

  “Now you’re remembering it right,” she laughed. “We spent more time apart than we did together, Aiden. That was one of the problems.”

  “You were one of the problems,” I laughed and finished off my second taco. I got up and poured Ramey a drink but she shook her head when I tried to hand it to her and pointed at her bottle of water.

  “I don’t drink anymore,” she informed me.

  “What?” I was totally taken aback.

  “I’m a mom now, remember? Plus, I’m technically still in recovery. I guess I always will be.”

  Recovery? That’s new. I never thought Ramey’s problem was serious enough for her to be in rehab. Sunny had mentioned on a few occasions that Ramey had been in and out of rehab but I never knew her to be into any hardcore drugs. She popped Xanax daily but she was in a high stress industry. All I wanted while we were together was for her to eat more.

  “How long were you in rehab?”

  Ramey looked up from her food sharply as if she was horrified that I’d asked that question.

  “Relax,” I kissed. “You don’t have to answer that.”

  “Aiden, I wrote all about that in my book. You haven’t read it.”

  I snickered. Half a bottle of vodka made me not care if she was upset about me not even glancing at that dumb book.

  “I haven’t had time.”

  “Damn it, Aiden. But I should have known. But you are signing the release papers right?

  “Yeah. So how long were you there?”

  “Well, my manager made me go to this place in Pompano Beach but that lasted all of ten minutes. That was right after we divorced. Then after I got pregnant, I was still on like four or five ‘scripts so Gio made me go to Passages for thirty days. I did well but after I had Gia, that post-partum shit that I thought was made up actually hit me. I was back on Xanax and Oxy and drinking heavily by the time Gia was six months old. I checked myself into the Betty Ford Clinic right after her first birthday.”

  “So what was it like?”

  Ramey raised her eyebrows but didn’t look up from her food. “Rehab?”

  “Yeah.”

  She was very slow to answer. “Lonely,” she finally said. I immediately noticed a change in her demeanor. She looked sad.

  “Detoxing is hard but that only lasts a few days. It’s every day afterwards that sucks. I was in a place with no communication with the outside world and all the counselors and therapists wanted us to do was think about why were there and the choices we’d made to land us there. That was hard because you don’t even realize how many bad choices you make until you actually start to think about them and how they affect other people.”

  I sat my glass down and reached across the small table to touch Ramey’s trembling hands. Ramey and I weren’t friends before we hooked up. We didn’t have many very deep and personal conversations while we were together. I wouldn’t say what we had was superficial because it wasn’t. We were two people that didn’t open up because neither of us was mature enough to do that with one another. A lot has changed in five years.

  Looking at the woman across from me, Ramey was very much the same girl I fell for, yet she was very different. There was sensitivity in her voice when she spoke and calmness in her ice-blue eyes that could be attributed to either not popping Xanax and mollies every five minutes or becoming a mother. Either one was enough to change a person for the better.

  “I thought about you and me a lot,” Ramey interrupted the silence. “You, and my daughter, and Gio.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because I couldn’t think about Gio without thinking about you. You two are so different, opposite in every way imaginable. Gio and I married quickly after we divorced. He immediately wanted children. You and I never even talked about having kids. With you, there was no way I was going to give up modeling but for him, I pretty much gave up my career, moved to wine country, and started trying to have a baby. But having a kid with a man who only wanted me to be his trophy wife and whom I didn’t actually love didn’t help my marriage. When I had Gia, she became my entire world. Gio threatened to take her from me if I didn’t get clean. So here I am, clean and sober.”<
br />
  “Good for you. But you didn’t really answer the question.”

  While Ramey was contemplating the meaning of life at Passages, my dad died and I became a father. I certainly wasn’t thinking about Ramey Hall.

  “I don’t know, Aiden. My marriage to Gio was completely different from ours. We were at the prime of our careers. Everybody wanted to know about us. I wasn’t used to being out of the spotlight. Plus, we were great together.” She stopped talking and smiled. “You know we were.”

  “I don’t dispute that. So that’s why you showed up at my show when you came home?”

  “Yes, and you’d know all of this if you had read my book. It was perfect timing too. Gio was shagging some Romanian slut, you and Shay broke up—”

  “And Sunny had moved out,” I finished.

  “Exactly. But you know what I learned from all those two a.m talks was that you could pretend very well. You are very good at pretending to be happy, especially when you’re single. But then you started pretending that you were in love with Sunny’s best friend and were marrying her because you actually loved Erica. That’s when I realized that everything you’ve done, from running around LA bedding every model and starlet who’d let you to marrying me then proposing to Erica...you did all of that to get Sunny’s attention. Now that you finally have it, you’re telling me that you threw it all away. I don’t get it.”

  I remained silent like I was being interrogated by the cops. Even though she might be right, coming clean to Ramey was out of the question for a number of reasons. The main one being that Ramey doesn’t like Sunny. I’d never reveal any of Sunny’s faults to someone that can’t stand being in the same room with her. Ramey got up from the table and started gathering up our garbage. When the table was clear, she picked up the room service menu.

  “You wanna share a banana split while you contemplate if you’re going to tell me how you wrecked the one thing that you’ve always wanted?”

  “No and don’t you dare call room service. The last thing either of us need is some server bringing ice cream to my room and seeing your face.”