by Lisa Suzanne
Does this mean I don’t get my answers about what’s in Maine?
“I don’t really know,” he says, his eyes flicking to the ground. “I guess we could just...end it here.”
“What will Kylie say?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I don’t know if I care what Kylie says. I’ll cover the costs of breaking the contract.”
I’m surprised at that. “And the trip to Maine?” I ask, even though I don’t have a right to be selfish right now.
“Go to Maine. I’ll pay for the flight. Find your answers.”
I don’t want to go alone, but I can’t continue to beg. I fire the last shot I can think to take. “What about Adam?”
He stares at me for a long moment, and then he shakes his head. “I think he’ll understand,” he says softly.
I have no cards left to play. He’s right. I nod as I try to ward off the tears pricking behind my eyes, and then I give him a sad smile as I brush one away after it escapes. “At least I won’t have to listen to country music or eat at McDonald’s anymore.” I say it to lighten the mood, but it falls sort of flat.
He grunts out a mirthless chuckle. “You already asked me to stop all that shit, and I did.”
What I wouldn’t give to share one more container of sweet and sour sauce while we each dip our French fries in it. I’d even listen to that song about the double wide again.
“For the record, Will, I’m sorry.” I’m sorry for the things I said in Sedona. I’m sorry I broke up with you when you were arrested and probably needed me more than ever. I’m sorry I couldn’t see a future before, but I can see one now. I stare at him across the small distance between us as I wish for the millionth time that things could be different. I want you back.
I scream the words in my head.
“You’ve already mentioned that.” He’s blunt, and in that bluntness it’s clear that he’s not ready to forgive me.
I heave out a shaky breath and then I ask, “So you’re really ready to end this trip? To let me leave without helping me find my answers?”
He grabs the ends of his hair again like he did earlier. “I wish I had a different answer for you, but I can’t fake this with you anymore. I can’t be with someone who ends things because of a stupid mistake, and I guarantee I will make more stupid mistakes.”
“I understand. But if you just let me try to prove—”
He holds up a hand to cut me off. “I can’t.” His words are laden with finality, and that’s it. “Come on. I’ll take you to the airport. You can look up flights on the way. Go to Maine if you want, or go back home. It’s your call.”
I don’t want to leave him. I want to stay here at this gas station an hour outside Cleveland in Ashland, Ohio, forever.
But I don’t have a choice. I can’t force him to take me along on his road trip.
The ride toward the airport is quiet, the air thick with tension. I’m wrestling with something—anything—to say, and I keep coming up short. I’ve got nothing.
I look up flights, and there are still a couple heading to San Diego tonight. I can’t go to Maine by myself.
Both flights left have two stops and will take me over twelve hours until I’m at my destination, but this is what he wants.
And instead of fighting him, instead of standing up for what I want, instead of being the strong woman he fell in love with...
I concede.
He wins.
CHAPTER 26: AMBER
I book my flight with his credit card and we sit in silence as we trek toward the airport. It’s only an hour, and it’s too short. It’s not enough time. I try to figure out what to say, how to get him to change his mind, how to admit that I think I love him, but I come up short.
So instead, I hold onto these moments, glancing over at his profile and memorizing what I see. His clenched jaw. The tightness in the crinkles at the sides of his eyes. The way his fingers grip the steering wheel.
He follows the signs toward departures and pulls up alongside a curb.
So this is really happening.
I guess a small part of me had hoped he wasn’t serious, that we’d just continue on our way and maybe I’d tell him we could listen to country music and make more silly stops and eat at McDonald’s.
But it’s not about any of that. He just doesn’t want to take this trip with me.
He gets out first, practically jumping out of the truck the second he shifts it into park. He grabs my suitcase out of the backseat as I stare out the windshield. Finally I force my legs to action and move out of the front seat. I stand on the curb, waiting for my bag. I’m fighting tears and trying to be strong. I don’t want to make this harder on him than it already is. I can cry when we part, but I won’t do it in front of him.
Tears aren’t part of the vocabulary of the strong woman he fell for.
He pulls up the handle on my suitcase and grips it for a beat. I’m anxious to get the hell out of here now that this is real, desperate to get away from him so I can find some bathroom stall to cry in until I compose myself enough to go to the desk and check in for the flight I just bought on his credit card.
I take a step toward him to grab my bag, but he’s still clutching the handle.
He glances at me then down at his hand, and then he tugs at the ends of his hair with his free hand again, still not letting go of the bag.
“Fuck!” he yells, a loud, guttural noise that fills the air and causes the people getting out of the car behind us to look in our direction. “Fuck,” he mutters again, a little more quietly this time. “I fucking hate this so much.”
I take another step, but this time it’s toward him, not toward the handle of the suitcase he’s still clutching. My vow not to cry in front of him breaks as tears start to fall down my cheeks. I move in toward him until there’s a breath of space between us. We aren’t touching. Not yet. He only has to say the right words to make me leap into his arms.
Because that’s what I want.
Fuck this shit about the future and him being too immature. The past couple days have shown me how things could be—and how badly I misjudged everything out of fear.
Hope blooms in my chest.
“What do you hate?” I whisper through the tears.
“I hate seeing you go. I hate being the one asking you to leave. I hate that you hurt me. I hate this fucking microphone,” he says, ripping his mic pack off and tossing it into the bed of the truck, finally letting go of the suitcase handle in the process. He grips the top of the truck bed, his face turning red with anger. “I just hate everything.” He grips his truck a minute longer, and then he makes a fist. I think for a second he’s going to punch the side of his truck, but he doesn’t. He knocks his fist gently on the same spot he was just gripping, and then he turns around.
He stares at me for a long second before he exhales. “I may regret this for the rest of my life, but I can’t let you go.”
Those were exactly the words I needed to hear...the words I never thought he’d say even though I hoped with everything inside that he would.
I launch myself into his arms, and he pulls me into him, his mouth colliding with mine in a messy and wet kiss where teeth clash and my tears keep falling and his tongue thrashes against mine. His fingertips dig into my hips as he pulls my body closer to his, his mouth hungry and his body hungrier.
He ends the kiss first by abruptly breaking apart from me after what feels like only seconds.
“Fuck,” he mutters. “I can’t do that, either.” He grips the truck bed again. “This doesn’t mean we’re okay. It doesn’t mean I forgive you or trust you. It just means that I’m not ready to kick you out of here. I guess it means that I want to finish what we started. I want to get you to Maine so I can be with you when you find your answers.”
“Okay,” I say in a meek agreement. I want to ask what else it could mean and whether there’s potential for us, but I guess I have a road trip in front of me that could lead me to more answers than I’d been expecting.
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He grabs my suitcase and tosses it back into his truck before walking around to his side. I’m still standing on the sidewalk in a bit of a daze as I try to comprehend what just happened.
Well, for one thing, he has a twelve hundred dollar charge for a flight on his credit card that no one will be taking.
That was a waste of money. This whole last hour was a complete waste of our time, too.
I slowly get back in the truck, back into the seat where my ass has imprinted over the last few days.
We drive in silence toward the hotel he booked, a Ritz-Carlton, and he pulls into the parking garage. Neither of us put our mic pack back on.
No words have been spoken between us since my okay on the sidewalk at the airport. He finally breaks the quiet when he pulls into a space. “Are you hungry?”
My head whips over in his direction in total surprise. “Are you serious?”
He looks confused for a second. “About whether or not you’re hungry? Yes, I’m serious.”
“Are we going to talk about what happened at the airport?”
He lifts a shoulder and his lips twist. “Maybe. At some point. But I definitely need some food first.” He pats his stomach like nothing happened, and now I’m the one who looks confused.
“So we’re just gonna pretend everything’s fine?”
“Look, Amber.” He leans his head back against his headrest and closes his eyes. “I can’t go round after round with you. You’re here, and I’m here, and we’re taking this trip, and that’s it. You didn’t want to leave, I couldn’t let you go, and let’s just leave it there for now because I don’t know what else you want me to say.”
“I want you to say everything’s fine,” I say. “I don’t want you to pretend.”
His eyes open and he slowly turns to look at me. He gives me a sad smile. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”
My stomach aches with that gut punch, but I have to wonder how long he’s going to punish me for breaking up with him...or if he’ll ever really be able to get past it.
CHAPTER 27: WILL
When I saw her about to walk out of my life, I knew I had to stop her.
Mark Ashton’s words from our Skype call the day after I was arrested kept flooding back to me: take care of her.
If I really did this, if I really left her there, I knew that would be it. There would be no turning back. There would be no recovering from dropping her at the airport in Cleveland and telling her to fly home.
I thought about what it would mean for Adam and my MFB family, but that’s not what pushed me into asking her to stay.
It was the overwhelming sense that letting her go would be the biggest mistake of my life combined with Mark’s words.
Would letting her go be taking care of her?
She needs answers. It’s the whole reason she came on this trip with me.
Still, forcing her out after we’ve come so far...it just felt wrong.
I want to be by her side when she rings that bell in Maine. I want to hold her hand when she finds out the truth—whatever that is. I want to celebrate with her if she finds something that makes her happy, and I want to cry with her if she doesn’t.
And to me, that’s love. I’m in love with her, and I have been for months, but telling her that and putting myself back in the position to be slaughtered by her all over again just feels stupid. It’s emotional suicide, and she already broke a part of me with what she did.
I’m just not ready to jump in to let her finish me off yet.
Instead, we find ourselves in this limbo. It’s confusing, but it is what it is. And what it is is something I’m not ready to sit around and chat about. Instead, I’m taking the baby steps required to get us to our destination. First, dinner. Then, sleep. Tomorrow, a shower. Then back in the car, and then by tomorrow night, we’ll be rolling into the town that might or might not hold a sister for Amber and Adam.
We check in and grab food at a restaurant in the hotel. As we chow, I ask, “What are you hoping to find when we get to Maine?”
She sighs. “I’m not really sure. I guess I hope it’s a lie, because if it’s true, I have no idea what that means for my family.”
“How do you think Adam will take it?” I ask. I pick up my beer and chug a few sips.
“I honestly haven’t thought about it. I need to know what we’re dealing with before I let my mind go there.”
That’s probably the ER nurse in her talking. She doesn’t make predictions until she has facts, and that speaks to the kind of medical professional she is, but also to the kind of person she is.
“It’ll probably be pretty late when we get to Maine tomorrow,” I say. “Do you want to go right to the address or do you want to check into the hotel first?”
She lifts a shoulder. “Let’s just see what tomorrow brings.”
I nod, and our food comes, so conversation shifts to lighter topics.
I can see it in the tightness around her eyes, though. I see it in the jerky movements and the shorter answers.
She’s terrified about what’s on the other end of the next leg of our trip, and I don’t blame her. What she’s doing is incredibly brave, and I’m suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude that I manned up and didn’t send her home. It wouldn’t have been right to come this far and take that away from her.
But it looms closer and closer, and that’s starting to take its toll on her.
I wish I could help her relax, but the things I’m thinking that would be relaxing will only lead us down a path I’m not sure I’m ready to go down.
When we’re finished eating, I say, “Let’s take a walk.”
Her brows dip down, and she looks at me like I’m a little crazy. “It’s cold out.”
“So?” I ask. “Walks are supposed to be relaxing. We’ve been cooped up in a car for days with all this tension between us, and we’re almost at our destination and I know you’re stressed about what’s coming. Let’s take a little walk, have a drink or two, and then call it a night.”
Her eyes narrow at me, but she relents. “All right. I could use a little exercise. I feel like I haven’t released endorphins since the night you—” Her sentence ends abruptly as she interrupts herself.
We both know the night she’s talking about.
The night we had sex.
And her bringing it up right now only confirms that we aren’t ready for my other ideas of relaxation. It would be unhealthy.
And so tonight, we only go for a walk.
We don’t hold hands. We walk close to one another, a signal that we’re together, but we’re not touching. I get stopped twice along the way for autographs and pictures, but only by a couple of diehard fans who recognize me in the darkness of a sidewalk in the middle of Cleveland without my signature long, curly hair.
And each time, Amber knows exactly what to do. She offers to take the photos. She waits beside me while I sign things the women hand me. She doesn’t look jealous when they toss their arms around me and tell me they love me.
I chalk it up to her knowing a little something about this lifestyle thanks to her brother, but something tells me it’s more than that.
It’s because she’s comfortable in her relationship with me, that she knows at the end of the day, I’ll be coming home to her because the rest of this is meaningless. It’s nothing more than a way to make fans for life, but what we have...what we had was more than that.
I grab for her hand on the way back to the hotel after our walk, my fingers linking naturally through hers without a second thought, and I realize that was why she broke up with me.
Because somewhere along the way, she fell in love, too.
She’s scared—terrified—of what the future holds for the two of us, and that realization helps lay one brick of trust in the house she tore through like a tornado a few days ago.
CHAPTER 28: AMBER
We have a long day ahead of us, so we get an early start. We grab breakfast to go and check out of the Ritz a little before eight,
and I mentally bookmark this place for the way back home—if we take the same route, I guess. It just seemed like something shifted here for us.
Maybe it was the fresh, cold air on our walk, or maybe I’m going stir crazy from our aggressive schedule driving across the country in five days as we journey toward a destination I’m terrified to actually get to.
But he seems...different today.
A little gentler.
A little kinder.
A little more understanding.
I don’t know what, exactly, changed, but when he took my hand in his, I had this sudden feeling deep down like everything was going to be okay.
Or maybe I’m just crazy. That’s actually probably more likely. He probably just wanted to fend off the fans who stopped him, so he took my hand to make them see he was with someone even if he’s not technically with me.
He tosses our bags in the backseat of the truck and pauses for a beat. I turn around, and he’s leaning on the tailgate, head down like he’s deep in thought or prayer, though I can’t actually imagine William Rascowicz praying.
He glances up and catches my eye, and I whip around, feeling a little guilty that he caught me staring.
He finally walks around the truck and slides into the driver’s seat, fires up the engine, and pulls out of the spot. I want to ask what he was doing or what he’s thinking, but I’m pretty sure that’s another thing I lost the right to when I broke up with him.
“Want to make any stops today?” he asks me once we’re on the highway.
I shake my head without a response. I just want to get to Maine. We’re so close to finding out the answers now, and half of me is ready to turn back home and forget this ever happened while the other half of me needs the answers.
I’m starting to regret not just looking them up online or writing back or using the contact info. But the more I consider it, the more I think going in person is really the only way to find the truth. I’ll be able to tell if they’re lying if I can look them in the eye. I’ll know if it’s true if they have more photos of my father and not just this one random wedding photo that could have been photoshopped.
