“Only if you leave all your Cherrys alone for a while,” I say, referring to the name he uses collectively.
“Welcome to fame, gentlemen,” Mick says, holding up his glass. “Now you know you’ve officially made it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Bristol
“Dino nuggets for the win,” I mutter to myself, taking any victory I can while Jagger goes through his picky eater phase—and a clean plate left behind is definitely a win.
I wash the plate, put it in the drying rack, and contemplate what I want to do with my night now that Jagg is asleep and the house has been tidied up.
I should finish going through the rest of my current LSAT study guide.
I should answer all the emails I haven’t gotten to yet.
I should text Vince . . . and say what? It’s not like he’s tried to reach out to me since I left.
But my open bottle of wine and a true crime documentary I’ve been wanting to see are winning out over everything.
A glass is poured and the remote is in hand when a knock comes at the door. It’s not unusual to have someone knocking at the door—the cottages in my complex look the same so people often get them confused—but not at this time of night.
I tiptoe to the door and look through the peephole only to jump back. Vince. What the hell is he doing here? How does he know where I live?
JAGGER.
My heart leaps in my throat, and I freeze momentarily as my body takes a second to catch up with my brain’s thoughts of simply pretending not to be home.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
“I know you’re in there, Shug. You were just standing in the window. I’m more than ready to stand here and knock all night until you answer the door.”
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Ignoring him is a more than valid option, but that means he’ll knock and knocking will wake Jagger, and then Vince will hear him and who knows what will happen . . .
I grab my phone that has the room monitor on it just in case he wakes, open the door, self-preservation my only thought, and step outside, closing it and my secret life behind me. “What are you doing here?”
I don’t ask how he knows where I live. I’m truly afraid of how much digging he can do.
“Hi.” His smile doesn’t reach his eyes as he holds up a twelve-pack of beer, two of them already missing.
“Hi. Is everything okay?”
“That’s subjective.” He helps himself to a seat on the concrete like a little kid with his back against the wall and his face to the sky. “Join me?”
Our eyes hold for a beat before I take up a similar position beside him. We sit like this in silence, the crickets around us and half a moon above us.
“Your car running okay?” He finally breaks the silence.
“It is. Thank you again for helping. I wish you’d let me repay you.”
“You haven’t been at work,” he finally says. “Everything okay?”
I nod, a motion I’m sure he can see in his periphery. “Had a few projects to do offsite. Ones I was on before you came on, that I had to finish.” I take a beer he hands me and take a sip simply for something to do. “I hear congratulations are in order. The song is huge, and it hasn’t even been released yet.”
He shrugs and gives a noncommittal sound. “It’s all relative.”
A car drives by. A few dogs bark somewhere down the street. A stink bug crawls oh so slowly up the side of the stucco.
“You want to tell me why you’re outside of my place at ten o’clock on a Tuesday night?”
He brings a beer to his lips and takes a long pull on it before placing the empty back in the box and grabbing another one. The pop of the cap has the stink bug freezing. “For a lot of reasons, I guess.”
“Like?”
“Like why you told me you lived a few blocks away when you really live here.”
My sigh is heavy. My heart even more so because something about this whole situation feels so final. Somber.
“Truth?”
“Always.”
I take a sip for courage. “Because I’m embarrassed that you’re you and I’m me, and this is all I have to show for it.”
“Christ, Bristol. Do you think that really fucking matters to me?”
“You wanted the truth.”
“I did. Doesn’t mean I have to like it. But why is the question. What happened to set you back? That’s what you’re not telling me.”
The beautiful part of you who’s asleep inside, fifteen feet away. The little boy who tilts his head the same as you. The one who got his first guitar from his grandpa yesterday and spent hours pretending to play it.
“Vince . . .” Tell him. Say it. The words are there but the finality in his tone, the regret woven in it, have me hesitating.
“It’s okay. You don’t owe it to me. I understand that.”
I close my eyes momentarily, uncertain if I’m relieved or upset when he doesn’t press. Probably a little of both. “Thank you.”
His head still against the wall, he turns to meet my eyes. “We all have secrets we don’t want to tell, Shug. It’s okay.”
Emotion lumps in my throat. “Is one of yours why you’re here?”
He shrugs and then starts playing with the label on his bottle. He looks like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. “I’ve fucked up in so many ways that I don’t know how to see my way out of it.”
I try to piece things together, try to understand what he’s talking about. “I doubt that.” His chuckle is a low rumble that has my heart hurting for him. “Is this about Bent? About—”
“For one.”
“You miss them.”
He snorts. “Next question.”
“Why not go back? If you’re so miserable being alone, why not—”
“Because I fucked up. See? Told you. Story of my life, right? I can’t hack it at home so I leave. I have this good gig that millions would kill to have where I get to hang with my best friends every day and do what I love with them, and I leave.”
“I don’t think you’re being fair to yourself.”
“It’s like when everything is at its best for me, he comes back and I have to leave.”
“Who are we talking about, Vince?”
He opens another beer and downs the entire thing in one long drink. “He’s dying of cancer.”
“Who?” I demand, freaked out and confused.
“My dad.”
“Oh.” It’s all I can think to say as I consider how to react. I don’t know how to feel about a man I’ve vilified for almost fifteen years. “I’m sorry,” I murmur.
“I’m not.” His words scream in the silence. His chuckle that follows mocks it. “That makes me a heartless bastard, doesn’t it? The fucker’s dying, and I feel absolutely nothing inside over it.”
I reach out and link my fingers with his, wanting to show support. “It makes you human, Vince.”
“It makes me weak. He always had a way of doing that to me. Making me weak. Tearing me down just when I thought I’d made something of myself or figured my shit out. Letting me know how little he thought of me. How little the world thought of me.”
“I understand why you might think it looks that way, but—”
“No wonder I need to stand on a stage and have thousands scream at me to feel a thing.” He runs a hand through his hair and sets his head back again to look at the sky. “He broke me in a way that I don’t think can ever be fixed. I’ve tried. Over and over, but it’s just no use.”
“You’re not broken, Vince.”
“Humph.”
His words eat at me. They weave into my soul. They explain things I’ve only ever assumed and never knew for certain.
“You never talked about him. I never knew or I would have . . . helped. I don’t know.” I shake my head. “I don’t know what I could have done. But from what I could see, I don’t think you owe your dad much at all. I’m sorry he’s dying of cancer—no one, regardless of the life they lived, deserves that—but I’m mostly sorry he hasn’t loved you like a father should. Dads are supposed to love and support their kids. They’re supposed to pick them up and dust them off when they’re hurt. They’re supposed to be a pillar of strength, not a barbed wire fence holding you back.”
“That night? The window? That’s why I had to leave. I couldn’t do it anymore. I feared what he had turned me into. That I’d snap and either become him or do something I could never take back.”