“What did you do?” I ask, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.
“I went back to the hotel, got spectacularly drunk, and swore I’d never race again,” he admits with a self-deprecating laugh. “Then I woke up the next morning, threw up, and realized that if I quit after one bad day, I’d never know if I could have made it.”
I smile, picturing young Jack on his own in Europe, thousands of miles from home, terrified but too stubborn to give up. “So you kept going.”
“So I kept going,” he confirms, nodding as we pass under a streetlight that momentarily illuminates his face. “And the next race was better. Not great, but better. And the one after that was better still. And then I bombed again, and then I bounced back. That’s how these things go. Ups and downs, good performances and disasters. Nobody’s consistent all the time.”
I turn to look at him, studying his profile. “How do you do that? Just decide something and make it happen?”
“Years of practice,” he says with a small smile. “And a healthy dose of delusion. It’s basically my superpower.”
That makes me laugh, breaking through some of the tension I’ve been carrying since I walked off that stage.
“Thanks for coming with me tonight,” I say after a moment. “Even though it was a disaster.”
“It wasn’t a disaster,” he insists. “And I wouldn’t have missed it. That’s what fake boyfriends are for, right? Showing up for the important stuff?”
The words settle warm in my chest. Because it doesn’t feel fake, him being here. The way he’s looking at me, the comfort of his hand still holding mine, none of it feels fake. But that’s territory I can’t let myself think about right now.
We drive in comfortable silence, and by the time we reach Dark River, the tightness in my chest has eased. Part of me doesn’t want this to end. I want to ask him to come up, to keep talking, to let his presence chase away the lingering shame of tonight. But that’s a terrible idea for about a dozen reasons, so I swallow the impulse down.
Jack walks me to my door, guitar case in hand. He sets it down gently against the wall and looks at me for a long moment, like he’s trying to decide whether to say something. Finally, he just pulls me into a hug. It’s warm and solid and I let myself sink into it for a few seconds before pulling back.
“Get some rest,” he says. “Tonight doesn’t define anything.”
I nod, not trusting my voice. He waits until I’m inside with the door locked before I hear his footsteps heading back down the stairs.
Once inside my apartment, I lean against the door, letting out a long breath. The night plays on a loop in my head. The good start, seeing Brandon, the collapse.
The embarrassment is bad enough, but what really twists the knife is how easily Brandon can still throw me off. Two years of divorce, months of therapy sessions, boxing classes with Dominic, countless hours building my life back piece by piece, and that man can still get in my head with nothing but his presence.
Maybe I would have bombed even if he hadn’t showed up. The stage fright was real before I saw him. But seeing his face in the crowd, that familiar smirk, it was like all those years of him making me feel small came rushing back. Him systematically dismantling my confidence one comment at a time until some part of me started to believe it.
I know intellectually it’s not true. Therapy taught me that. But sometimes it feels like his words took root somewhere deep in my bones, and no amount of rational thought can dig them out completely.
I push off the door and head to my bedroom, setting my guitar in the corner. Tomorrow I’ll think about next steps. Tonight, I just need to sleep and try to forget.
CHAPTER 11
JACK
The Black Lantern is dead for a Monday night. Just three regulars huddled at the far end of the bar arguing loudly about the upcoming football season and me at the other end, watching Lark check her phone every thirty seconds like it might spontaneously combust in her hands.
She’s been on edge since Friday’s performance, her usual confident attitude replaced by this nervous energy that has her constantly fidgeting with everything—her phone, the bar towels, the edge of her apron. Her black hair is pulled back in a bun, a few strands escaping to frame her face, and she’s beautiful in a way that makes it physically hard to look anywhere else.
“You’ve got to stop looking at that thing, it’s unhealthy,” I say, reaching out and tapping my finger against her phone screen to get her attention. “Take it from someone who has entire Reddit threads dedicated to analyzing his facial expressions during post-race interviews. Trust me, you don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.”
“I can’t stop checking,” she says. “It’s become a compulsion at this point. I keep expecting someone to have posted a videowith a title like ‘Local Woman Forgets How to Sing, Traumatizes Audience.’ Or ‘Musician’s Career Dies On Stage, Witnesses Still in Therapy.’”
I laugh, shaking my head. “You really do have an incredibly creative mind, I’ll give you that. But trust me, nobody filmed it. We never posted about it on social media beforehand, per your very specific request?—”
“Thank godI had the foresight to not draw attention to it until I knew if it would work out or not,” she interrupts, putting her phone down on the bar only to pick it right back up.
I roll my eyes. “Yes, yes, you’re very wise. The point is no one filmed it, so at some point you’ve got to stop torturing yourself with imaginary scenarios.”
“No, I’m actually a masochist,” she says. “I enjoy the pain of reliving my humiliating failures over and over in vivid detail. It’s my hobby.”
“In that case there are much more effective methods.” I grin, raising my eyebrows. “Repeatedly checking your phone for nonexistent videos seems like an amateur approach to self-torture. Since no one filmed it, you’re not even getting your money’s worth.”
