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This was a fucking love story. I loved her. That made it a love story. Even if she used me, she couldn’t deny that we buried ourselves into each other’s souls while making love. Every single time we met, we made love just by looking at each other, and it was so fucking beautiful it scared me.
“Cat, baby, all you want to remember is the hurt. You’ve let it stain the rest of your memories. Don’t you remember how good we were together? How much we loved each other? God, I remember coming home every night to find a beautiful woman waiting up for me in bed even though she had early classes the next morning, and how we danced to old music in the kitchen while waiting for the onions to fry, or how we’d get the bus out to Boars Hill just to stand at the top and yell at the valley. Don’t you remember how much fun we had together, how perfect it was? You were my whole fucking life, and you fucking vanished.”
Shit. There. I said it again. It was an accusation this time, but it needed to be said.
Even if I was the one who’d messed up by letting Goss fuck with me, giving him the benefit of the doubt, I didn’t destroy her flat, and I didn’t make her leave.
More silence, more rapid beats of my poor, worn-out heart, waiting for her to speak again.
“You never tried to find me, Max.” Her voice was so quiet that it broke something inside me. “You just let me go.”
“I did every single fucking thing I could to find you!” The words exploded out of me before I could stop them because she didn’t know the terror of losing someone. She hadn’t lost her parents; she still had her family. She didn’t lose all sense of perspective by being woken up one morning to a knock on the door followed by, “I’m sorry Mr Rider, there’s been an accident.” Then the same thing happening a year later when the person you thought was your whole life disappears without a word. “Your friends! Your family! I even stalked your fucking brother! I did everything I could, and you know what I got? Do you know where the next time I saw you was? It was in the fucking celebrity news a month later when your mum took you all to a premiere. There you were, smiling away like nothing had happened.”
I tried to breathe, but it came out like a broken cry as my fucking bleeding heart galloped on. “You were fine. You were fucking fine. Nothing happened. No car accident or heart attack or whatever bullshit reason I could make up for you vanishing!” I forced my mouth shut, refusing to go on.
That pain of realising she’d left me, cutting me out without a blink of an eye, it still pounded through me in the middle of the night when my obsession for her was at full pelt. Back then, instead of fighting for her, I let Goss fill me with lies. I wasn’t doing it again.
I wanted her to rage at me, to shout at me for hurting her, hit me, scream, anything other than this lifeless stare. It was what I’d wanted from the beginning, for her to pour herself into me, to take everything she had for me.
I edged forward, sitting next to her, and took her hand. She flinched, but the crease in her brow showed me she wasn’t as numb as she wanted me to believe.
“What about this, us, here, now, together? The way we’ve been playing, touching, holding each other? Isn’t that something worth fighting for? Come on, baby, we can talk about this, talk about everything we’ve done to each other. We can move past it.”
She shook her head, trying to pull her hands away. “I don’t want to do this.” She looked at our clasped hands, still clenching her phone tightly in the other. “Not when you’ll lie to me whenever it’s convenient for you.”
“Cat.” I pushed my free hand against my mouth, rubbing my lips. What was I meant to say to that when she had already told me she’d never trust me? How was I meant to know if I’d ever get to touch her again after I left her bed? I’d just wanted more time with her, in case she vanished again, like she was now. “Don’t run away from this. Please. Don’t run away again.”
“What are you talking about?” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “You’re the one that hid this from me, made love to me instead of telling me what was happening.”
“I wanted more time with you. I didn’t know if this was only going to be one night or if you were finally ready for something more.”
I didn’t want this tabloid shit taking away our time together. I didn’t want to have conversations about our future the moment we started something new. I wanted to be free to be myself and watch her come undone with me.
“That’s not the point!” Her fingernails bit into my skin. “You just did what you wanted, again. It’s always been about you. You only think about yourself. You made a choice without thinking about me for one second or how it might affect us.”
I let out a pained laugh. She had no idea what she was talking about. “All I think about is you. Every single fucking second I’m awake, my mind is filled with you. I don’t have any space to think about me because it’s all you, all the fucking time, and I can’t make it stop.”
“You’re lying.”
“Why would I lie about this? Why would I pretend to be so in love with you I can barely breathe without you? This isn’t like before. I was an idiot to pretend I was anything but obsessed with you.”
“You were the one who left!” Her hand trembled in mine. “You chose to sign the contract. You chose fame rather than staying with me.”
It felt like such a crazy thing for her to say, considering her family and lifestyle and the way she encouraged me to go to London so we could be together. If that was the way she wanted to play it, then fine. I hated having to wade through this murky territory, but the pain was out in the open. I wasn’t trying to hide. It was digging the knife deeper, but we were getting somewhere.
I took a breath. “You could have called me,” I said, completely sober, not backing down now.
“What?” She finally met my eyes again.
“Ten years ago, when I left and you found your place trashed, you could have called me, asked if it was me, or tried to find out what was going on. You assumed the worst and cut me out without even trying to talk to me. You vanished and didn’t ask for an explanation. Did you even want one?” It wasn’t important. What mattered was this. “You’re doing it again, now. Cat. Baby. Why won’t you try for this, for us?”
“Trying for us!? Tell me you’re joking.” She swallowed, her chest heaving. “All I did was try for us. I did everything I could for you. I thought that’s what you wanted. I gave and gave, and you pulled yourself away from me until I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong! You used that bloody contract to get away from me. I don’t care that you promised we wouldn’t change; we’d already changed. You’re asking me why I didn’t speak to you? You had months to talk to me. You had all the time in the world to be honest with me.”
Back then, I’d felt so guilty about leaving that I’d pulled back from her because as soon as they offered Clutch a contract, I’d signed without thinking of how I could make it work with Cat.
“I guess I thought you would be here forever, or I assumed our love was so strong that nothing could break us apart.” Even though I let Goss pull me into those stupid conversations where I talked about her like she was anything less than a queen. “I wanted — I want — to spend my life with you. Tell me what I can do to show you I’m sorry.”
She turned her head away from me, her jaw tight, every bit as regal as I remembered her to be. “Do you know what it’s like to walk into your home, the place meant to keep you safe from the rest of the world, and find it desecrated?” I never knew how bad it was, not until she told me. All I found when I returned was an empty flat with no sign she’d ever lived there. “And then I hear the voice of the person I trust more than anyone in the world planning how to take my money, bragging about what a good fuck I was. Talking and laughing about how to get rich and get laid. You’re asking me to forget about that, to move past it so we can have some kind of future together.” Her voice grew softer as pain seeped in. “How can I trust you when it plays on repeat like a broken record? You’re honestly saying I’m poisoning the memories I have of us? You poisoned them, Max. You poisoned them by treating me like a whore.”
