AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I shake my head, my hair flying around my face. “It’s too late for that.”
Jack narrows his eyes and I know he doesn’t accept my answer, not that I thought he would. There is so much history between us; we are tangled around each other like bramble. Our thorns prick anyone that stumbles into us.
“What do you want me to do? Beg?” he asks. “I’ll beg. I will get on my fucking knees for you.” He emphasizes those last words as if he’s doing me a favor, that I should be so lucky to have him on his knees.
That’s not what I want.
That has never been what I wanted.
“You should be begging Amber, not me.” I push the hair from my face. My knees are skinned, my skirt is soiled, and I’m wearing another band’s shirt, but he doesn’t seem to notice any of that. I look like I’ve been through a hurricane.
Maybe I am the hurricane.
He casts his eyes away from me and shakes his head. “She hates me.”
“She should,” I spit out. I’m not trying to be harsh, but nothing about this is okay for anyone. Jack has more than just Amber to think about.
“I never loved her the way I love you,” he confesses. I thought that’s what I would want to hear, but it only makes me sad. All of these years have gone by with us harboring feelings for one another, until the space was too small between us and everything blew up.
“Doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “You should be thinking about Hayley.”
“I did everything I could to keep my family together,” he says somberly. “I gave up you for her, and it still wasn’t enough.” The pain and anguish on his face were undeniable. Maybe if things had been different… If our timing was better.
“I don’t want you to give up anything for me,” I yell at him, putting my face in my hands, trying not to cry because I don’t want to cry in front of him. “I am not worth losing your family over.”
Jack grabs ahold of my hands and moves them from my face, his blue eyes burning into me. “You are worth everything to me.” He shakes me as if to try and drive those words deep into my soul, but they’re already there. They always have been. “You are in me, on me, and all around me.” He says those words with such conviction I think I actually believe them too.
Reality crashes back down on me. The magnitude of the situation is that Jack will always be selfish when it comes to me, and I can’t be the cause of any more destruction.
“Stop,” I beg and pull away from him.
“Mia.” His voice cracks, mimicking the crack in my heart. “Tell me you don’t love me.”
I lift my eyes to him. “I’m still married,” I tell him.
He steps closer to me, his tall frame imposing over me, but I don’t back away. “You think a piece of paper could ever come between us?” he asks darkly.
“I love him.” The words come out meek in comparison to how I actually feel, because if Jack is my darkness then Cash is the light that brings me home. Being around Jack dwarfs everything else. He is larger than life, sucking all the air from the space around me and I can’t breathe. I used to love that about him, but right now, it’s suffocating.
“You don’t love him the way you love me.”
“You’re right. What I have with him isn’t tainted. It didn’t break up a marriage and it didn’t destroy our band. You did that!” I point at his heaving chest, my finger making contact.
Jack scoffs, waving away my answer like it means nothing. “Where is Cash?” He motions to the empty parking lot. The sound slowly seeps out of the club, Ruin’s show still going on, and I can hear Keelin’s voice drifting on the breeze. “He’s not here with you; he’s not fighting for you. I am.” He pats his chest as if he’s some kind of hero, but he’s the villain in this story.
He’s right though. Cash hasn’t spoken to me since we got off the plane. The disgust and pain in his eyes the last time he looked at me stays in my mind. It haunts my dreams, and it’s the first thing I see when I wake up.
No drug can erase that. The only thing I hold onto is that he hasn’t served me with divorce papers yet. It is a little pebble of hope in a vast ocean, but I will cling to it as if my life depends on it.
“That’s not fair.” He doesn’t know anything about Cash and me. That is something he doesn’t get to know.
“None of this is fair, Mia.” Jack paces. “Fuck!” He curses at the moon and removes the fists that were covering his eyes.
“Do you remember when we first got to L.A.?” Memories flood me and I force them back. “It was just you and me,” he says. “I wish…” he stumbles over his words. “I wish things had been different,” he says softly.
We were so young and stupid, and then everything changed. We can’t go back.
“We’re not the same people who slept in that van, played at those clubs…”
