by Lisa Suzanne
She blows out a breath and stands up. I just watch from my spot on the couch. She paces nervously and wrings her hands together.
“Talk to me, babe.”
Her anxiety is giving me anxiety. My knee starts bouncing up and down.
She clears her throat and stops walking. “I have something I’ve wanted to say to you since I told you about the baby. I didn’t expect to get caught up in you the way I have when I started this whole thing.”
My brows draw down in confusion. “What whole thing?”
She throws her arms out wide to indicate everything around us, and then she finally looks me in the eye. “Everything. It’s all a lie, Ethan, and I can’t do it anymore. Not after tonight, not after almost losing you.”
“What’s all a lie?” I ask carefully, schooling my voice to calmness when everything inside of me is suddenly tumbling around in chaotic pandemonium. I wrap both my hands around my glass of whiskey.
“My entire life.”
“Care to expand?” I ask coolly, taking another sip of whiskey to try to dislodge the ball of fear in the pit of my stomach. Does she mean the baby? She’s really pregnant, isn’t she? It’s really mine...isn’t it?
She wrings her hands again but stops pacing, and then she draws in a deep breath before the words come tumbling out of her. She squares off to face me. “I was born Daniella Mayne. I went to North Chicago High School. I was a good girl who once kissed an older boy, the bad boy, in the school hallway. I had a mad crush on him, and I knew he’d fly off to success once he left NCHS.”
She pauses, and I want to ask a million questions. I knew it. I fucking knew it all along. No other girl has ever made me feel the way Dani Mayne did—until Maci came along—and I didn’t even fucking know her. I’m essentially the same unchanged douchebag I was twenty years ago, but Maci is so different from how I imagined the sweet and innocent Dani might’ve grown into an adult.
Before I get the chance to respond, she keeps talking.
“I sang in front of him one day, heard him make a nasty comment about me to his friend, and it killed me. Absolutely fucking killed me.” She rests her hand protectively over her still flat stomach, a clear sign she’s pregnant, so at least that’s not a lie. I assume she’s talking about me, but I have no idea what nasty comment I made that supposedly killed her. “So I ran away. It’s what I do. Or it’s what I did, I guess, because I’m not running now. I’m facing this, owning it, conquering it.”
I wait for her to continue. She sits on the couch beside me just out of my reach—too far away, a foreboding sign of what’s to come.
“I reinvented myself. I dropped the innocent act. I lost weight, changed my hair, got myself some blue eyes. I studied music under the best instructors, learned how to read and write music, learned music theory. And I did it all because of what you said.”
My heart squeezes in my chest. “What did I say?”
She looks away from me and swipes under one of her eyes. “God, the words are so burned in to my memory that I can’t even say them out loud without crying.” She sniffles. “Do you remember the party right before Christmas? You were a senior. I was a sophomore. We sang a song from our Christmas choral concert, and afterward you and Mark were talking. I was just behind you, and I heard him say he thought I sounded good. You told him I was a talentless pig.” She throws air quotes around the final two words of her sentence, and I wince. The pain of those words describing this absolute angel sitting beside me hurt far worse than the burn on my arm.
I shake my head. “I wouldn’t have said that about you, Mace.”
A tear tracks down her cheek, and my chest feels heavy. I did that. I made her cry twenty years ago, and she’s still so affected by it that she’s crying today. “But you did.”
“I loved you back then. I barely even knew you, but you were so young and innocent, so different from everything I knew. I wanted to be the one to corrupt you.”
“Then why’d you say it?” she whispers.
“I don’t remember saying it. I remember being embarrassed I had these feelings for a sophomore, my sister’s friend, when I was a big shot tough guy senior who acted like he didn’t care about jack shit.” I shake my head. “I remember being an asshole back then. Some things never change. If I said it, it was a lie and a mistake to cover up my own insecurities and I’m sorry for saying it.”
“You can’t come back at me twenty years later with an apology for something you don’t even remember when those words changed every facet of who I am,” she sobs.
I shift to move closer to her, to try to comfort her from the tears shaking her body, but she backs away from me and holds up a hand to halt me. She draws in a deep breath and swipes under her eyes again. “There’s more.”
“More?” What the fuck more could there even be? I don’t know why, but suddenly I brace myself. I get this strange preemptive notion like whatever it is she’s about to say is going to fuck me sideways.
“I picked a college where I could be classically trained so I could tap into the purest potential of my voice. I thought I had talent in there somewhere, that it was just untrained and that’s why you didn’t hear it. I made choices for my life because of your words, and those choices led to a lot of terrible things. My mother was killed on her way to visit me. If I hadn’t been at that college...”
She trails off, but her implication is clear.
“You blame me for your mother’s death?” I ask.
“I—um...” She glances around the small forward cabin of my bus. “No. Not exactly. If it was her time, it was her time. But if she hadn’t been coming to visit me at the school I chose when I was trying to reinvent myself in order to get away from your words, she’d have never been on that road that night.”
“So you do blame me, then.”
She shakes her head, but it’s slight and unconvincing. “It doesn’t matter. It’s in the past. She’s been gone a long time now, anyway.”
My arm pulses with pain. I’m not sure where all this new information leaves us. I thought she’d admit to being Dani...but I had no idea the depth of emotion she still associates with her past. With me.
“Why are you telling me all this now?” I ask.
She starts to cry again. “Because I almost lost you tonight. I’ve been on a quest for revenge for almost twenty years, Ethan. It’s over now. It has to be. I can’t live with secrets and lies between us anymore. I love you so much, and tonight just proved to me that I want to leave it all behind me and move forward to a future with you.” Her hand falls on her belly again—the belly where a baby just a few weeks old resides. “With us.”
My brain gets stuck on one phrase. “Your quest for revenge? What quest for revenge?”
She looks down at the ground. “It was all because of you. My whole life since that night, I’ve been working toward this.”
“Working toward what?” I’m still confused, but something clicks in my mind as anger starts to bud in the confusion’s place. And when I’m angry, I can’t control my mouth. “Fuck, Maci. Are you saying you got pregnant on purpose?”
“No!” she exclaims. Her eyes are pleading with passion. “No. I wouldn’t have done that.”
“Is it even mine?” I ask the same question again because the shit she’s saying doesn’t add up.
She flinches like I physically put my hands on her. “Of course it’s yours, Ethan. The baby...it was a byproduct of everything else.”
“What else?” I ask through gritted teeth.
“I was in love with you, Ethan, and you shattered me.” Her eyes are full of desperation and I hear it in her voice. She gulps in a breath of air as she finally reveals whatever she’s been bottling up this whole time. “I wanted to do the same thing to you. I wanted to make you fall for me, and then I wanted to break your heart the way you broke mine. I never expected to like you, I never expected my love for you to be completely reignited, and I really never expected for you to knock me up.”
My brows fu
rrow and my chest feels tight. “Your big plan for revenge was to get me to fall for you so you could just...” I make two fists and quickly throw my hands in the air and open them. “Poof! Disappear again?”
She lifts a shoulder weakly. “I was hurt, and I held onto that hurt silently for twenty years. I let it fester inside of me until it became this living, breathing thing. I never told anyone about it because I think deep down I knew how stupid it was and I figured someone would try to talk me out of it. But I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I wanted to find you and make you pay for what you said behind my back all those years ago.”
I shake my head as I pretend like I don’t literally feel my heart cracking in half. This woman in front of me built her entire life around getting back at me for an offhand comment I didn’t even mean and I don’t even remember saying.
She’s certainly not the Dani Mayne I thought I might fall in love with if I had the chance, and she’s definitely not the Maci Dane she pretended she was to get me to fall for her.
Her web of deceit is so tangled that it hurts me to even look at her.
I stand, and she looks up at me from her spot on the couch. No matter how hard I look, I can’t see that same sweet girl that once lived inside the lying manipulator staring back at me. “Well, I think you can call your plan a success.”
She opens her mouth to say something, but I ignore her as I head toward the bunks. “Get the fuck off my bus,” I hiss, and then I disappear through the curtain and head for my bedroom just to get the hell away from her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MACI
I stare at the box. It’s wrapped in black paper with white polka dots, and I still haven’t opened it. He gave it to me just two nights ago, but so much has happened since then. So much has changed. Ethan almost died. I confessed I’d been living a lie. He kicked me off his bus.
I hate that I hurt him. It might have been a better idea just to keep the secret, but I’m glad he knows. I can stop living the lie I’ve lived for so long now because the one person I was trying to keep the truth from knows. It’s freeing at the same time it’s completely unsettling. He’s angry, and that’s understandable, but he just needs some time to cool off. At least I hope that’s all this is.
I open the box he gave me the night he told me he’s in love with me, and it’s filled with puzzle pieces. I’ve never been good at puzzles, but something tells me that this is the most important puzzle I’ll ever put together.
I’m in some fancy hotel room in New York in the heart of Midtown. Times Square lights up the street outside my window, and all I can think about is how Ethan should be here with me. We should be making love after an accident that could’ve been so much worse. Instead, I’m sitting alone as I stare at a gift given to me a couple days ago by a man who I’m without right now. I pushed him too far this time. I just hope he doesn’t do anything stupid. When a man’s life is threatened, he reacts in one of two ways—he either holds those he loves closer because it made him realize life’s short, or he lives life even more spontaneously because he realizes he has the ability to cheat death.
Based on what I know about him, I’m terrified Ethan’s more likely to fall into the second category.
I don’t know what that means for him or for us. My heart aches with the reminder that what I did was so utterly stupid. I was blinded by this need to get back at him, to hurt him, and I was so blind that it took me until it was too late to realize I’ve never needed anyone the way I need him.
I get up from the bed and dump the puzzle pieces onto the desk near the window. There must be five hundred pieces here, and they’re all small. I sigh as I think about calling Griffin and asking him to do this for me, but I can’t. My gut tells me this is something I need to do, and I always listen to my gut. Maybe that’s my problem.
I search out the corners first. I don’t have a picture to guide me here, so I have no idea what this thing is supposed to look like when it’s done. I just know I need to finish it. I glance over at the clock. It’s a little after one, and I should go to bed. I have a phone interview at six and a studio interview at eight, both only a few short hours away. But this feels more important than sleep.
I flip over all the pieces first to make sure they’re right side up. I see words written in Ethan’s messy scrawl. Some words catch my eye, crazy, dog, bed, heart, shit...but many of them are split off and I have to find the puzzle piece that fits with it to make a complete word. My best guess is it’s a note to me from Ethan, but I’m not sure why he’d write me a note and make it into a puzzle.
At two o’clock, I snap one corner into place. At three, I’ve made some progress on the middle section. At four, I lay my head down for just a second and fall asleep.
I have this hotel another night, and an hour of sleep is better than none at all. I abandon my project for the moment and decide I’ll come back to it when I can tomorrow. I will finish it before we leave New York for Pennsylvania. I’m just not sure what I’m going to do with it once it’s all put together since it’s not exactly easy to move a completed puzzle.
My six o’clock phone interview does not go well. I’m awakened by pounding on my door a little after five, and I open it to find Griffin standing there.
“Morning wake-up call,” he says with a chipper grin as he holds up a cup of coffee, and I think about punching him before I just open the door and let him walk in.
“Thanks for the caffeine, but pregnant women are supposed to avoid it.”
“I read an article about that. You can have one cup safely a day, but this isn’t coffee. It’s tea and it doesn’t have caffeine.”
I make a face that says tea is gross, and he chuckles.
“You’re welcome.”
“Thanks,” I say, our conversation completely out of order.
“Interview in less than an hour. We need to leave immediately after for the radio studio interview since we’ll be fighting Friday morning rush hour.”
I nod.
“You okay, Maci? You look tired.”
“I didn’t sleep.”
“Why not?”
I glance over at the half-done puzzle. “I was trying to put that together.”
“A puzzle?”
I shrug like it’s normal.
“I’ve never seen you do a puzzle before in all the time I’ve worked with you. Do you want some help?”
I shake my head. “It feels important that I’m the one who does it.” I lower my voice. “Ethan gave it to me.”
He nods. “Need anything else?”
“Tell me something good.” I don’t want to talk about what happened with Ethan. I need something to be going well for someone else since my life has taken this strange and uncontrollable spiral into stagnation while I await Ethan’s full reaction.
He clears his throat and looks awkwardly down at the ground.
“Johnny Griffin,” I say teasingly. “Are you in love?”
He laughs. “No. Not yet.”
“But maybe in the future?” I prod.
“Let’s just say things are going well.” His face burns red.
“Well now I’ve seen it all.” I shake my head with a twinkle in my eye. “Who is she?”
“I’m not ready to talk.”
“Asshole,” I mutter. He laughs, and I change the subject to something that will make him more comfortable. “Did you get the interview questions ahead of time?”
He nods and hands me a sheet of paper.
I push it back toward him without reading it. “Hold onto it. Let me take a quick shower and while I get ready, I’ll have you read them to me and you can jot down my answers so we’re ready to go.”
He wanders over toward the windows and I head to the shower. I turn the water as hot as I can, and then when I’m done, I blast the cold for a second to shock me awake. It helps a little, but now I’m just really fucking cold.
I get dressed and call Griff into the bathroom, where he reads me questions and I fire off answers.
It’s a standard interview with no surprise questions on the prep sheet, but that doesn’t mean they won’t throw something crazy at me while we’re live.
I think back to the interview in New Jersey when Ethan confirmed something was going on between us. I’m sure people would love to know more, but right now, nothing actually is going on between us—well, except I’m carrying his child and he’s not talking to me. I guess that’s something.
When they call Griff’s line—because I never give my number to anyone—for the interview, I’m lying in bed, somewhere between awake and asleep, and Griff has to shake me to get me to sit up. Caffeine would help, but I guess I’m off that for now.
He puts the phone on speaker so he can hear the questions and my responses. Ever since I called that rapper an asshole in a candid interview, he and Bridget both insist he listens in on my interviews so he can get me back on track if he needs to. I’m not going to say anything stupid here, though.
At least I don’t think I will.
We get through the first few questions okay, but my big mistake was lying in bed. I feel Griff shaking me again and realize I drifted off in the middle of the question. He forces me to sit up as he points to the paper in front of me at the question that was just asked, and I shoot him a grateful—albeit sleepy—look. He nods and suppresses a chuckle as he shakes his head and I answer the question.
But then comes one off-script. The first part is on the paper in front of me, but the second part is clearly impromptu.
“Tell us about touring with Vail. Is Ethan Fuller as hot in person as he looks on television?” the interviewer asks.
“Hotter,” I murmur.
“What?” she screeches.
Griffin shoots me a warning look, but I ignore it, obviously. “He’s way hotter in person. He’s got these abs of steel, like they’re cut from the very marble of the gods or something.”
“And you know this because you’ve touched them?” she asks.
Griffin shakes his head furiously.
I clear my throat. I don’t care what Griffin thinks. If Ethan could tell the media something was going on between us back when I was mad at him, well, maybe this is my chance for him to hear what I need him to hear. “Yes. And the way his blue eyes fall on me so expressively show me how much he cares.”
