nnor? Fuck you.” And I kneed him hard in the groin. Thanks to the YMCA self-defense class my mother made me take before moving to the city, I got him right where it counted. He hunched down, cupping his balls with a sad yelp.
“You don’t drug women,” I told him, summoning my stern inner librarian.
He made a soft sound like a “meep.”
“And stay the hell away from me.” I took one last look at him, recognizing he posed no threat. None at all. And I headed back into my hotel room. Where were the cameras when you needed them? I would have liked them to have captured that shot.
A couple hours later, I found out where all the cameras were. The airport. Somehow they’d found out when I’d be leaving town. Thanks, Lola. Guys with cameras swarmed around me, asking for a quote. I was the heartbreaker now. Why had I done it? Had I left Ash for Connor? Inquiring minds wanted to know!
I kept my head down. I just needed to get past security. But then, I saw Ash. In a baseball cap pulled down low, he’d had the bad idea of meeting me there, too. He stood looking impossibly gorgeous and rumpled and distraught with his hands in his pockets. He hadn’t shaved and his stubble gave him a rakish edge. I knew how good it felt to kiss him with that rough scrape.
Click! About a thousand cameras went off, realizing they were getting two for the price of one. This couldn’t be happening. Was Ash’s appearance staged, too? I shook my head as he approached, trying to warn him off.
“Ana, just give me a second,” he pleaded.
“Why are you here?” I hissed, continuing to try to push my way through the throng. I didn’t have any bodyguards to help me. I did have my YMCA knee-to-the-groin trick, though, and I’d use it again if I had to.
“You won’t answer my calls. And Lola wouldn’t tell me where you were staying.”
“Great, she told Connor but not you?”
“She told Connor?”
“Yes, she told Connor. Your best friend. The date-rape king.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ask him.”
“Ash! Over here! Ana! Are you giving him a second chance?” Voices called out to us, making it nearly impossible to speak ourselves.
“Just give me a second?” he asked urgently. Pulling me over into a corner, he shielded me with his body. The way he had in Paris. I shouldn’t be thinking about Paris. I needed to think about the conversation I’d overheard at the cabin.
“Ash, you don’t need to pretend anymore.” I spoke as loudly as I dared while photographers still swarmed around us.
“But I don’t want you to go!” He spoke loudly, clear enough for them to get every word.
In frustration, I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him down so I could speak in complete privacy. I tried to ignore how good he felt against me, the way his smell made my knees go weak. “I heard you in the kitchen talking with Connor. About how rough these weeks have been with me. How much it’s sucked and how you can’t wait for it to be over so you can go back to how things used to be. So you can stop pretending. I know.”
I pulled away and he looked at me with a perfect expression of hurt confusion across his handsome features. “What? It’s not like that.”
“Cut it out, Ash.” This was getting cruel now. I knew he was supposed to play the part of the heartbroken, jilted lover but he had to know when to stop.
“Listen, I don’t know what you think you heard but—”
“What I think I heard?” I shook my head. “Ash, I know what I heard.” A man with a huge zoom lens on his camera even though he stood just a foot away jostled me with his elbow.
“You two gonna kiss and make up?” he asked, snapping away.
I turned my head and started pushing my way past him. Ash grasped onto my arm, trying to slow me down, but I’d had enough of manhandling and scenes.
“Let me go.” I had to yell it so he could hear. It came out sounding angrier than I felt, but maybe it was better that way. If I let myself sound too sad it would open up the floodgates. I just needed to make it a few more steps.
Ash dropped my elbow. A TSA agent took his place, ushering me in past the cordoned-off section for passengers with boarding passes. I shouldn’t have, but I let myself take one last look behind me. It was almost like watching something sink into the ocean as Ash got surrounded, flooded, covered by fans and paparazzi. In seconds, I couldn’t even see him anymore.
I told myself that was for the best.
§
I blocked Ash’s number on my phone. There wasn’t any point in dragging it out. And it turned out, he seemed to agree. I heard absolutely nothing from him. Sure, calling and texting were off the menu. But there had been a time, not that long ago, when people had still managed to make contact with one another even without cell phones. Ash did not make that effort.
I heard from his attorney, Nelson, refreshing my memory about all the details in the NDA I’d signed. I couldn’t breathe a word to anyone about anything that had happened.
That was fine by me. The last thing I wanted to do was talk about Ash. And once it was clear that I wasn’t going to say a thing, and I wasn’t in Ash’s life any more, the paparazzi left me alone. Within a week back in New York my status officially returned to Not Interesting.
I wish I could say that I didn’t cry. Or maybe that I didn’t cry a lot. Or at least that I never ugly cried, with big fat tears and making the kind of face even your mother thought twice about loving. But I did all of that. For the most part I managed to save it for nighttime. But the walls in our tiny Brooklyn apartment weren’t exactly thick. My roommates knew, more than anyone, how torn up I felt.
At work, thankfully, I kept busy. Little kids kept you on the hop and I was grateful for all the distractions. January was the height of flu season. I had more than one kid throw up on me. It was hard to remember your heartache when you were cleaning up vomit. I may have been the only person in the world grateful for stomach bugs, but there you had it. That’s how low I felt.
We got word that our library branch wasn’t going to be shut down. That was all. No news about 20 years of funding or grand plans to start a whole-scale remodel. I didn’t know if Ash had kept his side of the bargain or not and, sadly, I didn’t have it in me to find out. I knew I could call his attorney and he might verify whether the fund had been established, but I just couldn’t handle it. I needed to move on.
And to move on, I needed to stay busy. I took on more piano clients, devoting Saturday afternoons to lessons. The few times one of my teenage students asked if it was true that I’d dated Ash Black, I was able to answer with complete honesty that it had all been a publicity stunt. There’d never really been anything between us.
Most Sundays, I spent up at my parent’s house. They had my back, as always. My father grumbled about rock and rollers and my mother muttered and threw salt over her shoulder, cursing the past and praying for the future. They assured me that Ash wasn’t worthy of me. This was good riddance, that’s what this was, and I was off to bigger and better things, preferably in the form of a nice, churchgoing Russian engineer ready to settle down and start a family.
My Aunt Irina took it the worst. She got mad, really mad, and if it wasn’t for her deathly fear of flying I think she might have hopped on the next flight out to L.A. and given Ash a piece of her mind. I feared for him the next time he did a show in New York. I had no doubt Irina could work her way past security if she set her mind to it.
I was grateful when the Super Bowl finally arrived. I didn’t watch much TV, but you never knew when a pop-up ad would make its way into a streaming service and announce The Blacklist, halftime spectacular! The few times I hadn’t managed to avoid seeing Ash’s image, it had felt like a slap across the face. Even though I knew every shot was staged, every photo the result of wardrobe and stylists and makeup artists and lighting crews, he still looked so goddamned hot. It wasn’t fair.
Apparently the show went well. Everyone loved them. I avoided the whole thing, declining the couple of
invites I got to attend Super Bowl parties. On the day of the big game, I’d never been more grateful for my oddball roommates. Liv rejected everything about football, from the male archetype it propagated—whatever that meant—to the corporate branding across every frame. Jillian just wasn’t much of a sports fan. What she most liked was cooking up apps, and Liv and I were more than happy to eat her tasty concoctions while binge-watching Game of Thrones. Jillian declared the series too violent for her tastes, but I still caught her craning her neck to watch the naughty bits. Liv celebrated the death of every main character. And me? It kept my mind off of Ash Black, and that was saying something.
After the Super Bowl, I didn’t hear a word about The Blacklist. I certainly wasn’t doing internet searches, but I was 24. I had friends. I heard about shows, bands passing through. Nothing.
It was almost eerie how everything returned to normal. It was like those three and a half weeks with Ash had never happened. Everything returned to exactly the way it had been.
Until March. I was in our tiny kitchenette when I heard the song for the first time. In Ash’s unmistakable deep, growling voice, the haunting melody I knew so well gave me chills. It was the song he and I had played together so many times, first in Santa Clara, then in Paris, then in his mountain cabin, each time morphing it, growing it into what it was now.
The song was a complete departure from his previous work. Everything in the past had been straight-up RAWK. The kind of music that made you want to head bang and stick out your tongue KISS-style and quit your job just for the hell of it.
This was a love song. Heartbroken, stripped down, bare and raw. Critics went wild over his new sound. It was his first solo release, just Ash Black on piano with what sounded like percussion and maybe cello in the background.
The song was called “Undone.” His voice ached like he was bleeding into the music. In the refrain, deep and tortured, Ash sang, “I’ve come undone.” The longing need in his vocals gripped you fierce as he described the love he’d found and lost. How he’d had everything he’d ever wanted and then it fell apart, slipping through his fingers.