26
Dillon
“Ineed you to understand everything is about you,” I explain. “Every lyric I have written from the moment I met you is all you. And there are far more love songs than hate songs, because even when I wanted to hate you, I couldn’t. Writing songs was a way of bleeding my emotions, of venting my anger, but I never hated you. Not in the true sense of the word.” I take another swig of my beer before I stare her straight in the eyes. “It was impossible when I was so completely in love with you. I didn’t want to be, because you were with him, but my heart refused to be swayed.”
“Why didn’t you fight for me?” She pins me with glassy eyes. “I paced the terminal at Dublin Airport for hours, silently begging you to come and claim me. I waited until the very last minute to get on the plane, and you didn’t come. You just let me go.”
I shake my head, moving closer despite my earlier self-promise. I need to be closer to her when I admit this truth. “But I didn’t, Viv. I came after you. I flew to L.A. to beg you to come back to Dublin with me.”
Shock splays across her face, and her eyes pop wide. “What?” she splutters.
“I was going to get on my hands and knees and beg for forgiveness. I was going to lay it all out on the line. I was prepared to quit the band and stay with you in Dublin. I would have agreed to anything as long as you agreed to be mine.”
Her brow creases in confusion. “I don’t understand. How didn’t I know this?”
I drink more beer, briefly squeezing my eyes shut. Even now, it hurts to relive this memory. “I arrived at my hotel in L.A. around two. You’d gotten in a few hours earlier. Ash gave me your US mobile number, and I tried it repeatedly, but it was either switched off or it had powered off.”
“I’d forgotten to charge it,” she explains. “I was too heartbroken on the plane to remember to do it. It died sometime after Reeve picked me up.”
“I didn’t want to leave a voice mail which might be misconstrued.”
Confusion crosses her face. “It’s so weird I never saw any missed calls.”
I don’t think it takes much to figure out what happened. “I’m guessing Reeve deleted them from the call log.” He was determined to keep me away from her and obviously willing to do whatever it took to ensure she didn’t come back to me.
“I can’t believe he’d do that, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense.” She rubs at her temples. “If I had seen those calls, it might’ve changed everything.”
I nod because there are so many things that could’ve ended up differently if we had all reacted differently. But there’s no point dwelling on it now.
“What happened after that?” she asks.
“When I couldn’t reach you, I turned on the TV to waste some time, and that’s when I saw the coverage of you with him. I saw you together on the balcony. I knew you were naked. I knew what that meant. And I knew he was sending a message to me. It wasn’t just the statement he gave to reporters. It was the way he used his arm to cover your tits, just like I’d done in the photo we sent him the day of your birthday. I know he was shielding you too, and maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I got the message loud and clear anyway.”
Setting my bottle on the table, I bury my head in my hands. Pain slices across my chest, like it does every time I recall that image. It’s forever imprinted on my brain, and I have wished so many times I could scrub it out. “How could you run straight back to him?” I lift my head, staring at her through stinging eyes. “You told me you didn’t know where he was. Was that a lie?”
She vehemently shakes her head. “It was the truth. I had no idea he would show up to collect me from the airport. I’d had no contact with him since my birthday. All I knew, from Audrey and my parents, was he was working on stuff to make up for his mistakes. But no one told me what he was doing because Reeve wanted to explain it to me himself.”
“But you slept with him.” I scrub a hand over my prickly jawline as an invisible weight sits on my chest. “That fucking killed me. Especially when it was over a year before I could even kiss anyone else.” I didn’t understand how she could do it. That realization drove a lot of my anger. That had me believing she had outplayed me. That made me question every fucking moment we shared.
She worries her lower lip between her teeth and tucks her hair behind her ears. “It wasn’t planned, but I was so heartbroken, and he was there. Reeve has always felt like my home. He was always the one comforting me when I was upset.” A shuddering breath escapes her lips, and she’s on the verge of tears again. “I didn’t want to hurt you back then, and I don’t want to hurt you now, Dillon.”
“You don’t?”
“I think we’ve hurt each other enough.” That sentiment lingers in the air, and it carries so much weight. “But you’ve got to understand something about me,” she continues. “It was never a competition between you and Reeve. I loved both of you in different ways. You shattered my heart into a million pieces, Dillon, and I was even more heartbroken flying home than I’d been fleeing L.A. When Reeve showed up, I was happy to see him because he’s always been the air I breathe. He explained everything he’d done to rectify his mistakes. He said all the right things, and when he kissed me, I didn’t fight him because his love meant I forgot the pain of losing you for a few moments in time, and I clung to that. I needed it because I was more broken and lost than ever before.”
She takes a big gulp of her wine, averting her eyes. “I wasn’t proud of myself after. I broke down in tears because it felt like the biggest betrayal.” She rubs at her chest. “I felt so bad for doing that to you, but then I remembered how cruel you’d been and how you’d let me leave like I meant nothing to you. I believed you were thousands of miles away in bed with Aoife, and that helped to lessen my guilt.”
“We really fucked up, didn’t we?”
She exhales heavily. “I don’t see it like that. I can’t. That would be like admitting the life I shared with my husband and my son should never have happened. There are things I regret, but I won’t regret that.”
“I would never ask you to. And I don’t begrudge you that time even though I was miserable as fucking sin without you for all of those years.”
“Is that the truth?” She cocks her head to the side.
“It is. I didn’t want to love you, but I did. I do.”
“What about other women? I know you weren’t celibate. Nor would I expect you to be,” she rushes to add. “But I’ve seen pictures of you with tons of beautiful women. You never had feelings for any of them?”