Pretty Words: An Enemies To Lovers Rock Star Romance (River Valley Rebels)

by Gabrielle Sands

  Frustration and anger rose in my chest. “I’m trying, okay? Give me a break. I can’t fall in love with someone on command.”

  “You can’t fall in love because your heart still belongs to Oliver. A man you’ll never have.”

  I knew she was right. I knew that whatever hope I had of rekindling things with Oliver should have burned out when months passed, and he never committed to seeing me in person. I knew that the texts we’d exchanged over the past two years were a poor excuse for a friendship, let alone a relationship.

  Was there anything worse than logically knowing I should have moved on ages ago but being emotionally unable to do it?

  Zoey reached over the counter and covered my hand with hers. “Are you still texting him?”

  Shame filled me as I nodded. Zoey had told me to block his number more times than I could count, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  She sighed, shaking her head. “I’m not going to lecture you on that point again, but maybe if you’re not ready to get closure with Oliver, you can start by getting it with Jamie.”

  I didn’t feel like I needed any closure with Jamie until she said it. The image of him pale and unresponsive on that stretcher flashed inside my head. The way he’d practically begged me to take him to the hospital. I didn’t care about the lead singer, not really, but some part of me was curious to see what had happened with him. Had he really managed to turn his life around? If he had, maybe that meant there was still hope for me.

  “I guess…” I still wasn’t fully convinced.

  “C’mon, Ivy. There are plenty of good reasons to meet him. Do you really want to be the kind of person that makes someone’s recovery more difficult? Think about what ignoring his request says about you.”

  I groaned. Zoey was a master of the guilt trip. I’d been intimately familiar with this superpower of hers for years, but it still made me squirm.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Now, I’m going to spend all night thinking about what it says about me.”

  She grinned. “Or you can just set up a fifteen-minute coffee meeting in a public place, and then move on with your life.”

  “Goddamn it, Zoey.” I sighed. “Fine. I’ll set up a time to meet.”

  8

  JAMIE

  As I sat in the midday rush-hour traffic, amidst long rows of honking cars, I was beginning to better appreciate my new habit of being early for things.

  For many years, I was never early for anything. In fact, I built such a reputation for being late, that the record label had to actually hire someone whose sole job was to make sure I showed up for the shows.

  How things had changed in the past two years. Now, I woke up before the rest of my sleepy neighborhood, went to the gym, and if Google Maps told me that driving to my destination that day would take thirty minutes, I gave it an hour. I felt no urge to honk. It was a futile attempt at changing the reality of the situation. No, I was blissfully at peace in the leather seat of my car on a blisteringly hot LA day, blasting Queens of the Stone Age on the stereo, and knowing that I was safe in my few square feet of space from any temptation to drink.

  That was the thing with recovery that I’d initially failed to properly appreciate. A relapse could be one trigger away, and the triggers were everywhere. The bottles that clinked as I walked past bar patios in Venice, the glint of a cocktail glass in a hotel when I went out of town, the sound of young women giggling at something late at night—all these things and so many more managed to rouse the cravings.

  The pull of the drugs turned out to be easier to overcome. After the band broke up, I didn’t have a reliable dealer and never craved it enough to try find another one. The seductive promise of alcohol, on the other hand, was as potent as ever. I yearned for the dullness of mind a bottle of Stolichnaya would bring, some days more than others. But so far, my craving to live, to survive, was turning out to be stronger. I hadn’t relapsed since I’d gone cold turkey after my OD.

  Getting onto Santa Monica Boulevard, I drove down the palm-lined street and checked the GPS on my phone. I was five minutes away, but the meeting wasn’t for another thirty.

  I’ve had a lot of these meetings in the past few months, yet they never got easier. It was easy to hurt people. It was much harder to look them in the face and acknowledge the pain I’d caused. Some were gracious, letting me off the hook easily. The women I barely remembered sleeping with would smile and tell me how good I looked. How happy they were that I was doing well. Sure, I’d never called them back, but they hadn’t really expected anything different. “You were Jamie Berg, for God’s sake”, they’d say with a laugh, as if I’d ceased to be him after the band broke up. In many ways, I had.

  Parking in an empty spot outside of Verve Coffee, I pulled up Ivy’s message for the hundredth time.

  “K. Two pm at Verve Coffee on Santa Monica Blvd. Thursday.”

  I don’t know why I kept reading it. It wasn’t as if the terse, factual words gave any hint to how this meeting would go down. If her goal was to keep me on edge, she’d succeeded. And if I had to guess, she wouldn’t be one of those who’d let me off easily.

  That heart-shaped face flashed in my mind. It’s funny how despite meeting her at a time when I struggled to remember much of anything, I’d never forgotten her face. In fact, I thought of it often. Sometimes, when the cravings felt strong enough to drive me insane, I’d think of her face twisted in that disgusted expression as she called me a liar. Ivy wasn’t the first one to call me that, not by a long shot, but for some reason, her words had managed to penetrate my drug and alcohol-induced haze and land with impact. Whenever I recalled that encounter, my desire to not be that guy anymore overpowered the need to numb the pain.

  I got out of the car and walked into the shop twenty minutes before our appointment. It wasn’t busy, but as was typical in LA, there were a few aspiring something types hunched over their mugs. I walked up to the counter and ordered a black coffee, my current vice. It was safe because I never drank coffee when I was still using, so it had no association to my old life.

  I picked a two-person table in the corner by a tall window. It wasn’t exactly private, but it was far enough away to be out of the earshot of the other patrons milling about. My coffee was half finished when the door swung open, and she walked in.

  Yellow T-shirt, jean cut-offs, and a pair of long, sun-kissed legs. Purple streaks peeked out of her black shoulder-length hair that looked like it would be silky soft to touch. She removed her tortoise-shell sunglasses with a graceful flick of her wrist and looked around the coffee shop. Unsurprisingly, her gaze slid right over me and moved to the other tables, but even that lightning-fast flash of her face was enough to throw me off-balance.

  The full lips I had once kissed were pulled into a guarded pout. Her cheekbones had sharpened, and her thick dark brows brought out the hazel of her eyes. Despite the typical LA outfit, there was nothing typical about her. When I’d first met her, she was seventeen—I’d never forget that fact after having it screamed at me by her brother—and by my calculations, she’d recently turned twenty. Even back then, she was beautiful, but now she was entirely something else.

  The back of my neck prickled with shame just as my dick decided to wake up. I hadn’t touched a woman since I’d gotten clean, and I still hadn’t figured out when I would allow myself to do so. I’d done enough mindless fucking to last me a lifetime, and I wasn’t ready for a real relationship. So what the fuck was I doing ogling her? I’d come here to apologize for accosting her in that dressing room when she was underage. I’d probably terrified the poor thing. The past two years had all been about proving, mostly to myself, that I was better than that. Well, here was my chance, and I wasn’t about to blow it.

  Ivy was now looking in the opposite direction from where I sat. I waited for her to turn back around and raised a hand. When she saw me, her gaze narrowed, and her forehead wrinkled in obvious confusion. I waited for her to connect the dots.

  There was the hairc
ut, and the short beard I’d been meaning to shave, but it was my body that really took me from different to unrecognizable. My weight had nearly doubled since the last time we’d met. Looking at pictures of me from two years ago still made my chest hurt. I’d been so desperately unhealthy. I couldn’t believe I’d allowed myself to get that bad.

  Seconds ticked by. A part of me worried she’d turn around and leave, but then she finally moved in my direction. Her expression hardened with each step, and I sat up straighter as my anxiety spiked.

  When she stopped on the other side of the table, I rose from my seat. “Hey.”

  She squinted at me. “Jamie?”

  Her voice rushed through me like an electrical current. Memories from that wretched tour flashed before my eyes—her back pressed against the dressing room lockers, my hand pulling open the door to the bedroom on the bus, the sting of her palm on my cheek as she tried to keep me conscious… Goosebumps erupted across my skin and I forced myself to swallow past the dryness in my throat.

  “Yeah. Thanks for meeting me, Ivy. Have a seat.” I motioned for her to sit. She did, keeping her eyes glued on me.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” she said in a low voice. Her gaze flickered across my chest, to my arms, then back to my face.

  “I get that a lot these days.” My lips curved into a half-smile.

  Her eyes widened, and she looked away. An awkward silence stretched between us until I could no longer take it. “You look great,” I complimented her before I could think of something more appropriate to say. Jesus, what was wrong with me?

  Her gaze jumped back to me. She didn’t seem offended, but she certainly didn’t seem friendly. I wished I could read her thoughts. Had she ever thought about me? Had she wondered what happened to the guy whose life she’d practically saved? I ran a self-conscious hand over my jaw, and the frown on her face deepened.

  “Do you want me to get you a coffee?” I offered. “I got here early and already got mine.”

  “I’m fine.” She clasped her hands in her lap. “I don’t have much time, so whatever you want to say to me, you should probably start.”

  “Sure.” I bit on my tongue, hard enough for it to hurt. Well, here went nothing. “First of all, thanks for meeting me,” I began. “I appreciate it. You don’t owe me anything, so the fact that you showed up means a lot.”

  “You already said that in your message,” she said flatly.

  “I did.”

  “If you’re just going to repeat things I’ve already heard, maybe this meeting wasn’t such a good idea after all.” She crossed her arms.

  I shifted in my seat. All right, she was still angry with me. That was fine. She had a right to be.

  “No, I do have other things to say. I don’t know how much you’ve heard about what happened after you left the tour—”

  “I heard you quit the band.”

  “Yeah. After the OD, I realized I didn’t want to stick around on a path to an early death.” I cracked my neck. “So I left the band and checked myself into rehab. You could say I took the advice you gave me that night to heart.” Her expression told me she knew exactly what night I was talking about. “It was a ninety-day residency program on the outskirts of LA, and it really helped. I’ve been clean ever since.”

  “You never considered returning to Ritual Disruption after that?”

  Her question surprised me. “No.” I shook my head. “I didn’t.” There was a multitude of reasons why being in the band and being clean were mutually exclusive, but few people were privy to them.

  “So you broke up the band,” she concluded in a tone laced with disapproval.

  I rubbed at my cheek. This was a sore topic. “The band broke up after my departure. They could have chosen to keep going.” Had she read any of the articles that came out after the breakup was announced? The media had been confused about what happened with Ritual Disruption. On one hand, I was the lead singer, but everyone considered Oliver to be the real talent. He’d made sure to emphasize in nearly every interview he’d ever done that he wrote our music. But if I was just a crooner with a nice voice, why hadn’t he found a replacement?

  Of course, the media didn’t know the full story. Not even half of it. But setting them straight wasn’t my current priority.

  “Hard to do when you’d pitted most of the industry against one of their members,” she snipped.

  A cold sensation spread through my chest. That detail hadn’t gotten out to the public, so how the hell did she know about it? Had she kept in touch with Oliver long enough for him to tell her?

  “Who told you that?” I asked.

  Something tense passed across her face. “Never mind.”

  I held back the urge to pry. Whatever had happened between her and Oliver in the aftermath of the tour wasn’t my damn business. I needed to stay focused on doing what I’d come here to do.

  “All right. Look, I’ll get right to it. That tour was the lowest point of my life. I don’t remember much of it, to be honest, but I do remember you and how I behaved. So first, I want to thank you for helping me that night. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t for you.”

  Color spread across her cheeks, and she looked down at the table. “All I did was get you an ambulance.” A few purple strands fell into her face, and I fought a sudden urge to brush them back behind her ears.

  “You really helped me, Ivy,” I said earnestly. She’d helped me more than she would ever know. “Even when I’d done nothing to deserve it. Which brings me to my apology. I was completely out of line when I came on to you in that dressing room while you were all alone. I can’t imagine how scary that was for you. I’m ashamed of my actions and I’m very sorry.” My T-shirt was sticking to my back. I always sweated buckets during these meetings, especially when it came to seeing their reactions.

  She lifted her face to look at me, and her brows pinched together. “Huh?”

  She seemed…confused. Despite preparing myself for a wide variety of possible reactions, this wasn’t one of them. For a moment, panic gripped me. Did I mix something up? Was it another girl in that dressing room? Compared to the average person, I had a lot less confidence in my own memories, but this level of fuck up seemed too high, even for me. At a loss of how to respond, I cleared my throat.

  Ivy leaned across the table, and from this close, I could make out light freckles sprinkled across her nose. They were cute—an observation that I certainly shouldn’t be making at the moment.

  “Let me get this straight.” Her voice was scary. “You wanted to meet so that you could apologize for the kiss? That’s what you wanted to say you’re sorry about?”

  Now it was my turn to be confused. “Yes?” Had I done something else to her that I could no longer remember?

  “Are you serious right now?” Her hands were wrapped around the edge of the table, and judging by the whiteness of her knuckles, there was a good chance it’d snap at any moment. “The kiss is the least terrible thing you did to me.”

  I pulled at the neck of my shirt. “It was?” Jesus fucking Christ. I was sure that when it came to her, I’d managed to remember everything important.

  Her laugh was disbelieving. “You lied to me about Oliver, and I was dumb enough to listen. You made me doubt him, and that was the beginning of the end. You ruined what at the time was the best thing to ever happen to me. Do you understand? That’s what you should be apologizing for.”

  She jerked back into the chair, raising her chin high while I tried to make sense of what she’d just said.

  “You think I lied about Oliver?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

  “I know you did,” she shot back.

  I frowned. After all this time, did she really still believe Oliver was the man he’d pretended to be with her? By now, the illusion should have worn off. I knew he was furious at Ivy for calling the ambulance that night. He’d screamed about it as soon as I’d gotten discharged from the hospital. I couldn’t believe he’d been a
ble to hide all of his anger from her, and if she knew of his ire, wouldn’t she at least suspect something about him didn’t add up?

  My prolonged silence obviously irritated her. “Well? Don’t you have anything more to say?” she asked.

  “I’d apologize if I’d done something wrong, but I didn’t lie about Oliver. Everything I said to you that night is true.”

  She scowled. “You’ve got to be kidding me. So first you tell me you don’t remember most of the tour because you were screwed out of your mind, yet on this matter, you’re absolutely certain?”

  It’s not that I couldn’t see things from her perspective. She didn’t trust me—people rarely trusted addicts—but the fact of the matter remained. Given the history Oliver and I had, I could confidently say I understood him better than anyone, and right from that night at the club when he and Ivy first met, I’d seen how he looked at her, and I knew what his game was.

  That game only had one winner, and it sure as hell wouldn’t have been her.

  “I may not remember the exact words I used,” I said, “but I remember the gist of what I told you. I said Oliver was manipulative, and that he was using you. I stand by those words.”

  Her face quivered with so many emotions I didn’t have enough time to parse them out before she sprung up, her chair scraping loudly against the floor. “You are unbelievable.”

  “I didn’t lie to you about Oliver, Ivy,” I insisted, my voice rising. “Trying to keep him away from you was probably the only good thing I did during that tour.”

  She slammed her palms on the table. Her eyes swam with anger and pain, and fuck, it hurt to see that. “You meddled in other people’s business when you had no right to. Take your dumb apology about the stupid kiss and shove it up your ass. You may have gotten sober, but you haven’t really changed one bit. You’re still a goddamn liar, and I never, ever, want to see or hear from you again.”