by James, Vicki
“You don’t ever get sick of hearing about them?” I asked with genuine interest.
“Nope.” She rested her chin in her palm and stared at me like I was the dream she’d finally caught up with. “They make my soul happy. Seeing them like they are… it’s beautiful, and I think people who do get sick of hearing about them are the ones who aren’t happy themselves.”
I scrunched my face up and groaned, taking a sip of my beer before dropping it back down to the table. “Not everyone is jealous. Some people just get sick of looking at it all the time.”
“You’re telling me you wouldn’t have what they have if you could?”
“No,” I lied. Outright. I just hadn’t realised it was a lie until the word had left my lips, and I’d felt that weird stabbing in my chest again.
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to.”
Julia smiled flatly, looking at me like she was trying to search for something she couldn’t get a grasp of, like one of those ‘find the diamond in a picture full of hearts’ puzzles that drove you insane.
“Keep looking, Jules. I’ve nothing to hide.” I winked.
“One day, I’m going to remind you of this conversation. One day, when you’re loved up, dopey-eyed, and drooling over your new supermodel obsession, I’ll pull you aside and say, ‘Hey, Rhett. Well done on that whole not falling in love thing. You’re such a winner, Romeo.’”
“Maybe I’ll remind you of the same when you have a nice little city boy from the Financial District of London on your arm.”
“Never going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“No way can I spend years around rockers and go home with some boring banker.”
“But could you go home with a rocker?”
She paused, her slow smile rising. “Maybe. If the right one came along.”
“Care to tell me what the right guy consists of?” I asked, leaning in a little closer.
Jules glanced down at the table, gathering her thoughts as she trailed her delicate finger over the top of it. “Honestly, I don’t know, but I like to think that there’s someone out there for all of us. I just don’t like to waste time on the wrong men. I’d rather not bother.”
Time. Time. Time. The word I was coming to despise all too quickly.
“If you don’t try things, you’ll never know.”
“But a decade passes by so quickly, Rhett. Too quickly. Look how fast the last three years have gone for us both. One minute you’re twenty-two and free. The next you’re thirty-two and stuck wondering how much longer you’ve got left to do all the things you want to do.”
“Like…?”
Her eyes shot up to mine. “Seeing the world without working. Taking risks. Settling down. Kids.”
“I didn’t have you down as someone who wanted a family.”
“You’re not the first person to say that.” Jules huffed out a laugh, as though to herself, before she folded her arms on the table and leaned into them. “I’ll tell you a secret. I always had a dream of taking a child of mine to Disneyland. I’d be sickeningly in love, obviously, and the father and I would each take a hand and swing our son or daughter in the air as we walked towards Cinderella’s castle. There’d be little Minnie Mouse ears on our baby girl, or Mickey ears on a boy. We’d be this brand-new family filled with nothing but love. All of us so young, happy, carefree, and caught up in a bubble of magic. I cling onto that dream some days. I still think of it often.”
I swallowed the dry lump that had formed in my throat, and I shuffled in my chair as my chest became tight.
“That doesn’t sound very rock ‘n’ roll, Jules,” I croaked, quickly clearing my throat.
“It doesn’t, does it?” She smiled sadly. “Maybe I would be better off with a banker, after all.”
“Could you really put up with the missionary position for the rest of your life?”
Jules sparkled as she held my gaze, but I saw the hidden longing in her eyes that she tried to hide.
“No.” She shook her head. “Perhaps not.”
“Something tells me you’ll get whatever the hell you want, anyway, no matter the journey you have to take to get there. You never fail at anything you set your mind to.”
“I like you like this.” She smiled. “More human, less robot.”
“I’m only a machine when it matters.” I smirked, earning a laugh from her that lit up my damn chest again.
We spent the rest of the day going through similar conversations. We talked about our friends, the things we’d been through, and the places we’d travelled. I was discovering so much about this woman I’d never bothered to pay attention to, and now I couldn’t get enough. But the more we talked, the more I understood that, while I was still learning all about her, Julia already knew me better than I ever realised.
She’d seen me from the start.
Without acknowledging it along the way, we’d already shared one hell of a life together.
After one last walk down the beach, we made our way back to her cottage. As we stepped into the back garden, I looked up at it for the first time. It had a thatched roof and was alight with well-placed, soft-glowing outdoor lights.
It was also painted the colour of a fucking sunflower.
I turned to her and scowled. “Your house is… yellow.”
“Isn’t it fabulous?” She sighed dreamily, admiring her own home. I guess her house could have been neon green at that point, and I’d have said yes just to agree with her. Her smile made the lie worthwhile.
Jules reached for my hand again and turned her face to me. I squeezed her fingers, feeling like the drunk, fucked-up boy in me was drifting away with the sea breeze, and the world was allowing the sober version of me to step inside a grown man’s mind for a while.
“You can stay again… if you want?” Her voice was a shy voice from a shy girl asking a not-so-shy guy for more.
“I definitely want.”
She smiled, pressing her red-stained lips together. My heart raced, making my chest feel tight again.
Jesus, I was starting to worry about those pains. I reached up to rub my left pec, and Julia’s gaze followed my movements. She slowly brought my hand to her chest. The heavy thud of her heart hammering against my palm matched the beat of my own.
“I don’t know why it keeps doing this,” she said.
“Thank fuck. Me, either. I thought I was dying.”
“I hope not,” she whispered before she guided me into the house and told me to make myself comfortable in the living room. It was quaint, with a huge antique rug in front of an open fireplace, and small, cosy couches making three walls of a square around it. On the rug was an old oak coffee table that held a few already-used church candles.
I slipped off my jacket and hung it over the back of a chair by the dining table behind the living room.
“I’m just going to check my phone,” I told her. “I’ll be back down in a minute.”
“Sure.” She smiled as she glanced over her shoulder and held a bottle of wine and two glasses in her hands.
I needed to go upstairs and get my arse back down… quick.
After a swift trip to the bathroom, I walked back into Julia’s bedroom to grab my phone. It was fully charged, so I swiped the screen only to see several missed calls from Hawk, Big D, and Presley. Disconnecting it from charge, I began to walk back down the stairs with a frown on my face.
There were two voicemails, and I hit play on both messages from Hawk.
“Hey, man. It’s me. Give me a call as soon as you get this. None of us can get hold of you.” Followed by, “Dude, seriously. Fucking call me.”
Hawk’s voice drifted through the speaker when I walked back into the living room to see Julia sitting on the sofa with her legs tucked under her bum. She had a glass of wine in her hand and one arm resting over the back of the couch as she watched me approach. I slumped down into a bed of soft cushions and showed her my phone screen.
&nb
sp; “What’s that?”
“The guys. Everyone but Coops has called. Hawk’s left two voicemails. Pres and D have sent messages asking me to call.” I looked up at her. “Have you heard anything from any of them?”
“No,” she answered quietly. Her face paled.
“They’ve called me and not you?”
She turned and looked at her wine glass before she sighed, raised the glass to her lips and took a long drink. I sat up straighter, a prickling of my skin and the twisting of my gut telling me something was definitely wrong… and Julia knew what that something was.
“Jules,” I said with a warning attached to it. “You’re hiding something.”
She lowered her glass and dropped it to the coffee table before she fell back in place and looked at me, deadpan.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I don’t know—”
She didn’t get time to finish. Hawk’s name lit up the screen of my phone, cutting her off, and I answered without taking my eyes off of the woman in front of me.
“Hey,” I said.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Hawk cried out.
“Busy.”
“That’s not good enough, man. We have a crisis.”
“I figured.” I swallowed hard, feeling everything that had softened over the course of the last twenty-four hours being replaced with hard, edgy, coolness again. Julia’s chest expanded as she sucked in a breath and closed her eyes.
“Have you heard?” Hawk asked, sounding rough.
“Heard what?”
He sighed heavily, stalling, which only pissed me off even more. “It’s Julia,” he began, dragging his words out.
Jules opened her sad eyes and stared at me, saying nothing.
“What about her?” I croaked.
“She’s… she’s quit the band, bro. She’s walked away. She told Dicky she can’t do it anymore. We’ve fucking lost her.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“Everyone is freaking the fuck out. Coops has gone into some kind of mourning and won’t answer the phone to any of us. Presley and Tessa are trying to get hold of Julia to convince her to stay, but she’s not answering to anyone. She’s gone completely off the radar. Big D thinks this is the end of the fucking band. Without her, we’re going to get some boring bitch who’ll set us up with really shitty promo and won’t know a damn thing about what’s best for Youth Gone Wild.”
Hawk droned on and on.
I didn’t say a word as he spoke. I just stared at Julia who had tears in her eyes, but she stared back with that same steely determination I was more than familiar with from tour.
We still have time…
That’s what she’d meant.
We had time before I found out she’d quit on us. On me.
“Rhett, you there?” Hawk asked sharply, making me swallow the betrayal.
“Yep.” I cleared my throat. “Still here.”
“So, what do you think?”
“Isn’t that the question of the moment?”
Julia closed her eyes, and I wanted to take her face in my fucking hands, hold her to me and ask what the hell was going on. I also wanted to get off the damn couch and walk away from the whole sorry mess we’d wrapped ourselves up in. The lie I’d let soften me when I should have known to stay hard.
“Why has she quit?” I asked Hawk. I asked Julia, too. Only one of them answered.
“No one knows. After she left us in America, nobody seems to know anything. Although…” He paused, unsure of himself before he spoke again. “Pres mentioned you might know where she was.”
“Why would I know anything about Julia Speed?” I practically spat the words, and her eyes opened to take me in again. “It’s not like I’m close to her or anything.”
At that, she uncurled her legs, got off the sofa, and walked around the back of it to the open plan kitchen behind us. I stared at the wall ahead of me. At the chequered country curtains. At the moonlight beyond the window.
“That’s what I said. Elvis thought differently.”
“Yeah, well, Presley doesn’t know shit.” I rubbed my forehead with my free hand. “Listen, I’ve got to go.”
“Where are you?”
“Somewhere I no longer want to be.”
I ended the call, stood up, and tucked my phone into the back pocket of my jeans. When I stepped around the couch, all I could feel was that damn tightening in my chest again. Only this time, it didn’t feel sweet in the slightest. This felt angry. Like betrayal had taken the shape of a sword and driven itself straight through my chest just as I’d let down my guard.
I’d been a fucking idiot.
Julia was standing by the kitchen sink with her hands pressing down on the counter, her shoulders hunched, and her head hanging low. My hands balled into fists by my sides. I felt taller somehow, lifted by my disappointment and the need for truth.
“So…” I started, not recognising my own voice.
“Don’t,” she breathed, barely loud enough for me to hear.
“Oh, I’m gonna.”
I took another step closer, but there was still so much distance between us. It felt weird after a full day of being hand-in-hand. After a full twenty-four hours of discovering one another. Julia spun around slowly, sniffing up and swallowing down as she leaned back on the counter, both hands still clinging onto the edge of it. She was a defiant little thing; I could give her that much.
We stared at each other. Her with her chin raised. Me through hooded eyes.
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve quit on us?”
“Yes.”
“Were you planning on telling me?”
“No.”
I raised both brows. “No?”
“At least… not until you’d left.”
I took another step closer. “You’ve brought me here, to your home. You’ve held my hand all day. You’ve told me to stop lying to myself every chance you’ve had. All while sitting there, knowing you’d done what you’d done.”
“I don’t owe you anything, Rhett.”
“Oh, yes, you fucking do, Jules.”
“I don’t,” she whispered. “You don’t owe me anything, either. You got what you wanted. I had fun. That’s all there is to it.”
“Why are you being like this?”
“Like what? Like you usually are?”
“Excuse me?” I frowned, taking another slow, controlled step towards her. Those chocolate brown eyes followed me, resting in the face of a queen, belonging to the unexpected villain of the moment.
“You heard me,” she scoffed, her huff of laughter catching in her throat. “You’re Rhett Fucking Ryan,” she mocked. “You do what you want, who you want, when you want. You don’t answer to anybody. You don’t listen to anybody. You’re angry with the world and you don’t even know why, but you know you don’t care who you take down in the process. Isn’t that what you tell us all? Isn’t that who you want to be?”
“Are you really standing there turning this around to be about me?”
“I told you to leave it alone. I told you not to come after me, but you kept pushing and pushing and pushing. Let me have you.”
“After you came looking for me first,” I reminded her.
“That was a mistake.”
“It seems like everything between us has been a mistake.”
“I always knew it would be.” She straightened her back and raised her chin.
“But you still wanted it, didn’t you?” I walked closer. There was only two feet between us now, and she was pressing her back into the counter to try and seem taller. Her breaths became heavier, and her eyes flickered all over my face. “You still needed it from me.”
“Stop it.”
“You still needed a taste before you chewed me up and spat me out. And you couldn’t get enough. You can stay if you want…” I repeated her own words back to her. “You wanted more. You wanted time. Admit it. You loved every filthy second
I gave you.”
She curled her lip in disgust. “This is who you really are. This is who Rhett Ryan is. This is what I see when I look at you.”
“And this is who Julia Speed seems to be. A stranger. Cold. Nothing. No one. Who the fuck knows? I sure don’t. Apparently, I’m not allowed to know the rules of this game you’re playing.”
“Get out,” she hissed.
“That’s not what you really want.”
“You don’t know a single thing about what I want.”
I leaned closer, and she looked up at me like she hated me. “Why? Tell me why you’ve quit on us. Tell me the truth.”
“Go, Rhett.”
“I thought we still had time…”
“So did I,” she whispered sadly. Her sadness was no longer hidden. It shone as the lights of the kitchen hit unshed tears. “But we don’t, and it’s over. I need you to leave. Now.”
I reached up to grip her chin, pulling her closer to me. She came forward, but her hands remained gripped to the countertop. I couldn’t work out if she looked scared, turned on, or heartbroken.
“It’s not over. I’ll go, but it’s not over, Jules. I won’t let you quit.”
“You don’t have a choice,” she whimpered.
“Darling, you should know one thing about this Romeo. He never gives up on his Jules. You can lie to me. Use me. Throw me under the bus. Kick me out. Tell me I’m worthless. Tell me you hate me. Tell me I’m nothing. Tell me I’m everything in the very next breath. Tell me I’m your biggest regret. I’ll take it all. But you will not quit on this band. You will not give up on Youth Gone Wild. You’ll not give up on your career. I won’t fucking let you.”
Julia closed her eyes on me for good.
“I. Won’t. Let you,” I breathed over her, before I turned and left her standing there without saying another word.