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"They won’t forget me." She sets her lips together, but there’s a spark of doubt in her eyes.Good.
"Sure, there’ll be those who wait for your next album. But you and I both know, unless you find a way to stay in the headlines, it’s going to be an uphill struggle for you."
She rubs her temple. "Why do you have to be so logical?"
I smirk. "Just one of my many superpowers, baby."
She scoffs, "If you’re trying to convince me—"
"The beating at the hands of your brother’s men led me to the kink lifestyle."
She stills. "Excuse me?"
I step back from her, not because I want to put distance between us, but because it’s the only way I can avoid being distracted by her beauty. It’s the only way I can tell her what I should have shared a long time ago—rather than gaze at her beauty which, to be honest, would be my preference.
"After they beat me up, Knight and I got on a plane back home—"
"Wait, Knight was with you?" She frowns.
"He saved my life. If it weren’t for him, I might not have made it that night."
She looks stricken. "I’m so sorry about that. I had no idea it was that bad. I mean, I know your face was scarred"—she glances at my forehead—"but to think you may have—"
I hold up my hand. "The wounds didn’t seem that bad, but by the time the flight landed in London, I had collapsed. They rushed me to the hospital. They discovered I had internal bleeding. They had to operate on me urgently. I was in an induced coma for a week."
"Oh my god." She pushes her knuckles into her mouth. "Why didn’t you tell me?"
I raise a shoulder. "Seemed beside the point. The damage had been done. I came out of the coma and needed to have therapy, and I recovered all bodily functions. However…" I look away, then back at her. "It would seem, the blow to my forehead resulted in something called Emotional Blunting."
She lowers her hand. "What does that mean?"
"It’s when your ability to feel emotions and express them gets restrained."
"You’re saying your ability to feel emotions is—"
"Dulled. It makes it difficult for me to identify what emotion I'm feeling. It makes me appear as if I don’t care about things or other people, but that’s not true. I simply have difficulty showing it. I can feel the emotions, but often, I'm unable to connect with them or recognize them, so I'm unable to express them."
She stares at me, then realization dawns. "And you’re an actor. Your job depends on emoting, on being able to bring dialogues to life by showing emotions."
I laugh, and the sound is toneless. "You can imagine how much of a shock that was. It took me a year, and seeing several doctors, to get a diagnosis. Meanwhile, the inability to understand what was happening to me, combined with the scar on my forehead which, even after plastic surgery changed the way I looked and began limiting my roles, meant I was spiraling into depression.
"Knight and Cade were there for me. They saw me through it. I refused to meet them for months, and it was Knight who showed up at my place and pulled me out of my funk. He forced me to see a therapist who helped me through the aftermath. I learned how to understand the emotions I’m feeling and react appropriately. How to translate the emotions into expressions others can understand."
"Oh…" She opens and shuts her mouth. "I wish you’d told me that earlier."
"I didn’t want to share what I went through. Doing that seemed like it would break down yet another barrier between us, and I wasn’t sure I was ready."
"But now, you are?"
I nod.
She takes a step forward, and I’m sure she’s going to touch me, but then she seems to get ahold of herself. "And now you’re able to emote on screen?"
"That’s the easier part. It’s more of a science when you’re playing a role. You tap into specific emotions inside yourself and embody them. The writers give you the words to say, and that's why it was much more straightforward to rewire my brain. Turns out, giving voice to your expressions with people in real life is far more difficult to retrain because you have to put your feelings into words yourself. I’ve been largely successful, though I can’t say I’m completely the same as I was earlier."
She nods slowly. "That makes so much sense. I often wondered why you felt different—harder to reach, more removed from your feelings. I wondered why you often came across as unemotional, why you didn’t ever share how you felt about me and our relationship. I put it down to growing older and the experiences you faced getting where you are, and some of it down to your being a man. But now that you’ve told me what really happened, it’s so much easier for me to connect the dots."
"That incident with your brother’s men did change my life, and for a long time I was bitter about it. I wanted revenge. And when I saw you again that day at the restaurant, I knew it was my opportunity. Except, somewhere along the way, I realized it wasn’t your fault, either. And I must admit, it left me unsure of what to do next.
