“Yes… Jace is kissing her, right now.”
And that was the moment the world shifted and I fell into the abyss.
12
JACE
She isn’t telling me the whole truth; I can see it in her eyes. She’s telling me the basics. The fact that she was out one night when she didn’t really want me to be, when I put her in a bad mood because I was unavailable again, and Luci told her that she saw me kissing someone else. Emma of all people.
“So, you just left?” I gasp out. “You didn’t even come and find me?”
“I didn’t want to see you kissing Emma. It would have killed me. I just ran.”
I rake my fingers through my hair. “So, you just believed Luci?”
“Why would my best friend lie to me? She wouldn’t, she liked you, she liked us together, she wouldn’t lie to me just to hurt me. Luci knew that it would kill me. She had my best interests at heart.”
I can’t argue with that logic. “I don’t think Luci would lie to you. She might have seen wrong…”
“Does that sound like a plausible excuse to you? I knew you’d try to spin it, that’s why I didn’t talk to you…”
“If you’d talked to me, then we could have solved it. We wouldn’t have lost six years…”
Addie makes a scoffing sound. “We wouldn’t have lasted anyway. The kiss wasn’t the only issue.”
I hang my head low. “Sorry, I know that I wasn’t the best back then. I didn’t mean to neglect you, I just got so wrapped up in the band stuff. I was so concerned with creating a good future for me. For us.”
“Then why the hell did you kiss Emma? I still don’t get it.”
“I didn’t. I never would. I was professional the entire time. I hugged Emma now and again, maybe that’s what Luci saw, I don’t know. But I didn’t kiss her, I wouldn’t have kissed her.”
Addie is silent, I can see it in her eyes. Now she’s looking back at everything, wondering if the fact that she has clung on to for years is as accurate as she first thought. I don’t know what Luci saw, but it wasn’t me kissing Emma. I was so in love with Addie, I always have been. I wouldn’t have done that to her.
If it had only ever been her then I wouldn’t have ever kissed another woman ever.
“I didn’t, Addie. I wouldn’t. I only ever wanted you.”
She shakes her head, wrapping her arms tighter around herself. I can see her truly struggling to come to terms with all of this. I hope she realizes through everything that I wouldn’t lie. Not about this. After all this time if I had kissed someone else I would just be honest and say that I made a mistake. It would be a terrible conversation to have, but I wouldn’t be dishonest, I wouldn’t restart things with a lie.
“But… but… you would have gone anyway. You would have left me. As soon as you got famous, everything would have changed, so… so what I did was good really. It did us both a favor.”
“You left me, Addie. You vanished. You just dropped out of college without a goodbye.”
“I didn’t drop out, I transferred. I couldn’t be around you any longer. I couldn’t watch you continue to grow in fame, to pull away from me, to kiss everyone else but me. I wasn’t strong enough.”
“That wouldn’t have happened,” I insist. “I would have kept us together. I would have done whatever I could to make sure that nothing tore us apart. The band stuff, the touring, the distance between us, any of it.”
“The women?” she cocks an eyebrow at me. “There have certainly been some women, haven’t there?”
“None like you, though. If you were around I would have kept away from all of them.”
“You couldn’t.” I reach out to her and she yanks her arms away from me. “You wouldn’t have. I don’t want to keep going round and round in circles, but we would have ended up apart.”
I step away from her too, left breathless by her words. My lungs are devoid of air because I know for sure that we could have made it work. If we’d both wanted it enough, we could have been together. We lost all of that time for nothing. It’s utterly heart breaking, my soul feels destroyed.
“Addie, you have no idea what you did to me. When you left, I mean. It was awful.”
“It wasn’t much fun for me either,” she snaps back. “I had to take my shattered heart and start again at a new college, doing new classes in a different way, no friends in the world.”