Page 7 of I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life

I watched as Kameron backed away, clearly surprised by my outburst. Thankfully, it was enough to get him to stop talking to me, even though it reopened the wound in my heart. I hated how my emotions slipped out around him. I hated that he still had any kind of effect on me. I hated how he was able to act like everything he had done didn’t actually matter..

Clearly, Kameron wanted to fix things. But if he thought there was any chance of us reconciling, it had to have been destroyed by now. I wasn’t interested in seeing him again, and if he didn’t get the memo by now, I didn’t know how else to get it across.

Chapter six

Kameron

She hated me.

I should’ve expected it, considering how badly things had gone wrong back in the day. Jack claimed he hadn’t titled the song until the live show, but I'd never quite believed him. And after he announced it? There was nothing I could do.

Or at least, that’s how it felt.

Hindsight was 20/20. We could’ve hired her security; we could’ve put out a statement to leave her alone. I could’ve talked Jack out of releasing that hit piece of a song before we ever performed it live. I’d been caught between the two of them, insisting I was Switzerland and wasn’t going to pick a side in their breakup. Which was a joke, in the end I did. I chose Jack.

I needed to apologize, but it felt completely disingenuous at this point. I knew she’d say it was too late, and she'd be right. In fifteen years, I’d never even tried. I'd always told myself she didn’t want to see me, and if there was one thing I'd learned upon returning to Briar Hill, it was how true the thought had been. But it didn’t stop the fact I still needed to. Jack did too, but that was even less likely; he’d never apologized for anything in his life. I looked at my phone, Nalini’s phone number taunting me. My number was likely blocked, or hers had changed. Realistically, it was probably both. And yet, even though it was a terrible idea, I texted it anyway.

Kameron

Hey, can we talk?

Nalini

How do you have my number?

Wait… how do I have YOUR number?

WHY DO YOU STILL HAVE THE SAME NUMBER FROM HIGH SCHOOL?

To answer your question. No. Don’t text me again.

Everyone had assumed, incorrectly, we'd changed our numbers after we got famous. But the assumption led me to have a strange emotional attachment to this one. There was always the hope Nalini might reach out first, that the line of communication might open back up. I hadn’t planned on texting the apology; it needed to be done face-to-face, but I wanted to check that her number was still the same. That I still had a line to her, even if she didn’t want it to be there. There were so many texts I’d left unsent. Ones inviting her to my wedding, celebrating Cassidy’s birth, even about Julia’s illness. All of the milestones I’d wanted my best friend there for. Years of me missing her, when it was obvious Nalini hadn’t missed me in the slightest.

My phone started ringing, and for a moment I found myself hoping she’d called — even if it was just to yell at me more. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

“Hey, Noah,” I said to my brother. I'd been expecting this call — my younger brother was always one to think things through before making any kind of decision. Where Jack was passionate, Noah was logical. Their strengths always had them butting heads, but their differences were part of the reason we’d worked so well — before everything went wrong.

“So… RaineFall,” Noah said, immediately getting to the point, “Where's your head at?”

“Jack has a really good point from a business standpoint. The nostalgia aspect would mean instant success. We’ve already seen it proven with other groups,” I admitted, “but the rest of it…”

“Yeah, we were terrible bandmates,” Noah agreed. “I really don’t want to get that toxic again; losing you two was rough.”

The official story Mel put out was RaineFall broke up over creative differences on an unreleased album. It sounded less dramatic when you took out the fact the album was one month away from release, actively being advertised, and had one single out already — and it was taking over the charts. As soon as you put all the facts together, our breakup was one giant mess.

But it was so much more than that.

When we broke up, neither of my brothers understood having a wife and toddler meant I couldn’t stop and do everything for them at the drop of a hat. They insisted I should've gotten a nanny, and it'd solve all of my problems. I never told them how many of Cassidy’s firsts I'd sacrificed for RaineFall, but with every video of my daughter I was sent, my resentment of my brothers grew.

The songwriting sessions were strained, to the point every single song ended with a fight. The single I wrote, and we released, was generic, which seemed to be the only reason we agreed to record it in the first place. The rest? The fights over our sound got so bad, we compromised and decided each of us would write four songs for the album.

There was no cohesion; Noah’s first attempts at songwriting were so basic an elementary schooler could've done better, while Jack went with a hard rock angsty sound, completely at the opposite end of the spectrum from the love songs I was writing. In the background, Jack’s drinking spiraled out of control, Noah’s focus was split between the album and his first movie, and I was desperately trying to force back the feelings we had back when we first started

Then Jack disappeared for three days.

His security guard had no idea where he went, calling the police went nowhere, and Noah, Mel, and I called hundreds of people for any clue to where he might've been. When Jack finally turned up again, he insisted we’d overreacted. He’d been so out of it, he’d thought he’d only been missing a few hours, not a few days. To this day, nobody, Jack included, seemed to know what happened during his missing time, and it led to an ultimatum: Jack went to rehab, or we left RaineFall.

Jack didn’t take it well. He ran to the nearest computer and deleted all the files we’d recorded, unilaterally deciding to cancel the album. He pulled out every single perceived slight against him, and it quickly turned into the three of us yelling over each other, throwing out accusations big and small, real and ridiculous. I was so fed up, I stormed out of the building — and I didn’t hear from either of them for years.