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How is this helping make me not want to kill myself?
Fifty-Three
Sergio
It had been a week since I left Cee in a hospital in D.C. Elle was keeping me up to date on what was happening. She was in an inpatient program and while I finally felt like I could take a deep breath, my heart was fucking broken.
I rejoined the band on tour, but not as their drummer. I was picking up the slack left by the absence of Elle, Silas, and Cee, relying on my hand injury to keep me off the stage.
“You doing okay, man?” Connor sat next to me in the living area of the bus.
“Yeah,” I lied.
Connor shook his head. “Let’s try this again. I’m sorry things are so shitty right now.”
“She’ll be okay. It’s just going to take time,” I said.
“But what about you? Because I’m pissed at her for what she’s done to you.”
“It’s no more her fault than it was Kyle’s fault when he OD’d.”
“Who said I’m not pissed at Kyle?” he snapped.
“I hate whatever it is that fucks people up so bad they think the world is better off without them. That makes them feel so lost in their own heads. But it’s not a choice either of them made,” I defended my friends.
Connor sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “I know. Logically, I know this. Emotionally, I’m pissed. I feel fucking helpless.”
I huffed. “I tried so fucking hard to help her.” Tears stung behind my eyes. I looked at the ceiling to hold them in. The one and only time Connor had ever seen me cry was at Kyle’s funeral. I didn’t want to add a second.
“I know. But you can only do so much. You got her this far. All we can do now is support her and hope for the best.”
“She wants nothing to do with me.” Just saying the words deepened the ache in my soul.
“I thought the same about Kyle for the longest time. Now I wonder if I hadn’t distanced myself, if he’d still be here. She needs space right now, but don’t let her go. You two were good friends before all of this.”
“That’s the problem, though. I don’t think I can just be her friend anymore. I fucked up and fell in love with her. And I know that’s fucked up. Eli died half a minute ago. I don’t expect her to be in love with me, but I don’t think I can be friends with her and not hope for more.”
“Probably not going to have the romance novel ending, no.” Connor chuckled. “But the alternative to not being her friend is not having her in your life. Is that what you want?”
I immediately started shaking my head. “No. Hell no. I need as much space as she does, just for different reasons. I know everyone told me I was getting too close, and I knew it was true, but it still hurts like fucking hell.”
Fifty-Four
Sergio
“We gotta add The Wrong Time to the set list and the next album. It’s fire,” Matteo said to me as we walked into the rehearsal space.
“No one was ever supposed to hear it to begin with,” I retorted with a sigh. “I’m certainly not going to add it to our first arena headlining tour.”
I shouldn’t have let anyone hear that song. Writing a song about Cee was supposed to be nothing but cathartic. A way to accept that we were never meant to be.
Turns out I fucked up twice because not only did the entire band hear me playing it a few weeks ago when I thought they had all gone out, but I am also far from over her despite not having heard a word from her in six months.
The longest six months of my damn life.
I wanted to ask about her every day. I spent the first month after the last tour trying to get the image of her unconscious on the hotel bathroom floor out of my head. Shit had gotten bad when my ex-girlfriend, Sofia, was drinking and doing drugs all the time, and I was worried about her enough that I made her get help, but it never escalated to a near-death experience.
At least, not in my presence.
