“I don’t want to leave you.” My voice is barely more than a whisper. “But I can’t live in your universe, Logan. If there was any way I could, I promise I would.”
He leans his forehead against mine and shuts his eyes tight. “Don’t do this, Devi. What can I say or do to make you not do this?”
It rips me up inside because it feels like he’s asking me to answer honestly, and I want to. So much. I want to tell him the solution that’s already staring him in the face. In the same way he asked me to “make porn” with him all those weeks ago, I want to plead, “Don’t make porn with me.” Don’t make porn. Just be with me.
But I know better than anyone that if he doesn’t see that answer, it’s because he doesn’t want to. And it’s not something I’m ever going to ask him to do. I’m not as vain as Cassiopeia to believe I would give Logan a more beautiful life than the one that he has, no matter how much I wish it were true.
“I have to go,” I say, pushing out of his arms. Don’t look back, I tell myself as I head through the open gate of the pool area to my car.
“Devi?”
Despite my self-coaching, I turn. Because I can’t not turn when he says my name.
“You should study stars.”
For a second I think he’s being sarcastic. Like he’s referring to himself—a porn star. That he’s suggesting I study another porn celebrity the way I studied him.
But he glances up, gesturing to the sky with his eyes.
Oh. Stars. “Yeah. Maybe that’s what I’ll do.”
This time when I turn to go, I don’t look back. I don’t stop. I step blindly off the cliff into darkness like the fool, and hope, eventually, I’ll land on solid ground.
21
I almost do it. I almost let her walk away from me. Because I’m so stunned. Because I’m so hurt. Because I can still taste the fire and heat of her kiss, and how could she kiss me like that and then just walk away?
But my feet move before my mind, and I’m jogging through the gate right as she shuts the door of her old VW Bug. She starts the engine but she leaves the car in park as I run over to her.
She rolls down the window, and on her young face is an expression of pain so poignant I can barely look at it.
“You’re hurting,” I say, bracing my hands against the top of the car’s window frame so I can lean down to see her better. “And I’m hurting. Devi, it doesn’t have to be this way; we don’t have to be hurting right now. Come inside, and we’ll talk. We’ll figure this out.”
“There’s nothing left to figure out,” she says quietly. “I can’t be with you when you can’t be with only me.”
I slam my hands against the window frame, rocking the tiny car and making her jump. Anger like hot acid fills my words when I speak. “You know it’s not like that! My heart would be with only you, so why the fuck does it matter where my cock is?”
“It matters to me,” she answers, her voice trembling slightly.
I’m still furious, my hands clenching the window frame now, and I want to tear this car apart, rivet by rivet, until she agrees to stay. “You knew what you were getting into,” I accuse. “You knew exactly what it would mean to date a porn star. It’s not fair for you to change your mind now!”
Tears catch on her eyelashes as she shakes her head. “I can’t be in this porn world anymore, Logan. I can’t be in your world.”
“It’s our world,” I insist, her tears thawing my anger into a messy, guilty regret. “We both live in it, and we both love doing porn.”
“No, you love doing porn.” She takes a deep breath. “And that’s why I’d never ask you to stop. I love you exactly how you are, and part of who you are is porn. Doing what you love. Do you think I’m so cruel that I would ask you to give that up?”
“But…”
I don’t have anything to follow that word, though. I just know I need to struggle against this, fight for this, salvage something, anything, because Devi is the one thing I can’t afford to lose…
Except she’s right about me. I can’t afford to lose doing what I love either. If I’m not Logan O’Toole, World Famous Porn Star, then who am I?
“It just never occurred to me,” I finish lamely. “That anyone would want to quit porn. That porn would be an issue. I thought we both were on the same page. I thought we both loved each other.”
A tear finally falls down her cheek, a shimmer racing down her perfect face. “I do love you. More than you love me, and that is why I have to go—and why I’m going without asking you to come with me. Goodbye, Logan.”
She puts the car in reverse, and I have to step back so my foot doesn’t get run over. And it’s not until her taillights vanish around the corner at the end of my street that I manage to whisper, “Goodbye.”
* * *
Gutted.
I’m fucking gutted.