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I close my eyes, literally weak with relief. “Good,” I say. “Good. So you…”
But she interrupts me.
“I need to get off this stage,” she starts looking around for Ren. Immediately, he walks over, comes to stand by her side. “You have to finish your show, and these clothes are sticking to me like a second skin.”
Does she think I have not noticed? I have been blocking her from the audience with my body this whole time. I have been trying not to look at every curve in her body. I have been failing.
She tips her head up in the rain and right there, in a stadium filled with thousands of people, she opens her lips to taste the raindrops on her lips. The crowd quiets down as it waits for me to turn around. I don’t. No one else gets to see this but me. I watch her in fascination, absolutely mesmerized.
She is made of tears, raindrops and spotlight dust. She is magic.
She closes her eyes and savors it and I want to touch her so badly it physically hurts. I clench my hands into fists so tightly my nails dig into the skin, in order to restrain myself. I am not going to touch her just after she said she wishes she’d never met me again. And certainly not on stage in front of thousands of my fans.
She is standing two feet away, but she might as well be standing on the moon.
Is it too late to believe in God?
I finally have my answer. It is.
“What kind of sick trick is this?” I murmur, my voice clogged with tears. “This twisted game life is playing on us. On top of what happened to you, this is happening right now, and I can’t… I can’t…”
I can’t make sense of it. How could this be happening? It would have been so easy for me to know, for someone to have told me about her. But life had to drive the knife deeper, piling hurt after hurt on us both.
Why did this happen?
Why couldn’t someone have said something? Yes, everyone was supposed to know about it, it was old news, but couldn’t someone just have repeated the facts, just in passing? Why did everyone have to be so freaking discreet around her? Not one single person wanted to talk about it when she left the room?
I have all these friends, and not one asshole between them.
“Don’t you see?” Eden tells me, turning those honey eyes on me. “It was better this way. It was just us. No ugly news stories between us. And because you didn’t know, you did not treat me with pity. Everyone else does. Jude, Miki, Lou, Skye. They are good people, but I am sick of pity. Of people being careful with me. Kind.”
“Well, I was not kind, that’s for sure,” I say wryly and she smiles.
It’s the second time she’s told me that she thinks Jude and Lou are only pretending to be her friends because they feel sorry for her. I need to disabuse her of that notion, but I don’t know how. I have seen how they act around her, and if that isn’t enough to convince her that they genuinely like her, I don’t know what is.
I don’t know what I should say. I am so unqualified to help here.
“I wouldn’t have you any other way,” she says. “The way you acted… That was how you truly felt, right?”
“It. Was. Not.” The words come out in desperate gasps.
I never hated you, I want to say to her.I tried to, I truly did. I have the songs to prove how hard I tried to hate you, to forget you. But I never really did.But she’s already talking.
“So, I finally got my closure,” she says.
My legs threaten to give out.
“What did you say?” I whisper, but no sound comes out. The blood has drained from my face.
Closure.Did she say closure?No.No, please no. Anything but that.
“This is your best show yet,” she tells me. “And the rain too… I’ll bet someone was praying for you for all these miracles to happen at once tonight. That song was so brilliant… No one has ever written a song like that before. All that poetry, and the melody… It’s so wonderful I don’t deserve it.”
“Yes, you do.” My voice is barely audible, I don’t know if she even hears me. “Look, stop… Stop saying all these amazing things about me. Just call me a jerk, would you?”
She doesn’t.
“You’re the amazing one,” I whisper, “and I’m the jerk. Remember that, ok?”
