“Talk to me,” he’d commanded. “Tomorrow, we’ll fix it.”
Early the next morning, Devonte was still passed out on the couch that looked comically tiny beneath him as Aish stood at his balcony doors, showered and drinking coffee he hoped the staff hadn’t poisoned, watching the sun peek over the top of Sofia’s mountain for what might be the last time.
Even if he could fix this for Sofia—no, he was going to fix this—even when he fixed this for Sofia, he knew she would never want to see him again. He would never be invited back to this kingdom that he’d begun to think of as a second home. He would never be embraced again by this community of people who showed him the value of honoring something bigger than personal ambition. He would never explore her mountains, hand in hand with her, finally getting to discuss the future and not the decade that had passed.
“Why won’t you let me apologize? Why won’t you let me try to make this better?” he’d asked her. Now he knew. There was no making this better. Now he understood the hell he’d put her through by coming here, by breaking her ground rules and insisting on intimacy, by forcing her to look at him, talk to him, touch him. Now he understood how truly brave she was, how much she was willing to endure for the sake of her kingdom.
“You told me it was my problem,” she’d said. “You told me to handle it.”
He put his hand against the glass to steady himself as nausea churned through him, but then quickly took his hand away from the warmth. He stepped just out of the rays of her rising sun; he didn’t deserve to feel anything but cold and empty.
“What time is it?” Devonte croaked from the couch.
Aish shrugged and then nodded at the steaming cup of coffee he’d already placed near him. They had work to do.
He continued drinking his coffee, let his manager spend a few minutes mainlining his, as he watched sunlight grow across vineyards he would never get to see ripen again. Then he sat in a chair across from Devonte, who was hunched over his cup in an undershirt and jeans.
“So how do we make me the bad guy of this story instead of Sofia?”
Devonte huffed humorlessly into his cup. “After all the motherfucking time we spent trying to make you look like a knight in shining armor,” he said, mournfully shaking his head.
Aish grabbed the nearby coffee pot to refill Devonte’s cup. “I looked like the douche in shining armor. Remember that metallic vest your stylist tried to put me in?”
Their chuckles had no laughter in them. Last night, he’d shared everything Sofia had revealed: the pregnancy, the miscarriage, her alone and bleeding in an American hospital believing Aish had turned his back on her. Devonte had needed a breather on the balcony after. Now, both of them understood how revolting their rock star display was when Aish first showed up in the Monte.
“You deserve your knocks but you know who the bad guy should be?” Devonte said. “John. He’s the one who stole the fucking songs.”
“I know,” Aish said, slumping back in his chair. “But I can’t get her off the hook by blaming a dead guy.”
Devonte looked at him funny.
“What?” Aish asked.
Devonte’s dark eyes narrowed. “When I said that John was the bad guy, you just said ‘I know.’ Like you just didn’t throw away the last year of your life and almost torpedo your career defending and mourning him.” Anger and a bit of hurt started to build up in Devonte’s broad forehead. “I told you about John making me pay off that family and you let me leave here without knowing if I had a job the next day, much less my friend.”
Aish shoved off the urge to blame shock or surprise. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You were never going to lose your job or your friend. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I’ve known for a while. John was a piece of shit.”
Devonte opened his mouth but no sound came out. Aish realized his leg was jumping up and down like crazy. He stood, circled behind the chair for a little room to walk. He had to be moving to tell the rest of this story.
“You know all those rumors, that I was involved in John’s death, that I somehow got him to kill himself.” He turned back to Devonte, put his hands on the back of the chair, and forced himself to face him. “They’re true.”
He had to press on, get it all out now, and finally deal with what he’d been pushing away for a year.
“I found out John had stolen songs. I confronted him about it in Memphis, told him I was going to tell you and the label. I knew the label would get squirrely, maybe even try to pay off the bands and suppress the info. But you...you would keep us on the straight and narrow.”
Devonte scoffed, and Aish knew it was self-mocking. Devonte had already known about the plagiarism, had already been manipulated by John to do something that went against his nature. And that was John’s gift wasn’t it? Using people’s weaknesses against them. Aish’s greatest weakness was his arrogance, the belief that he was perfect and would always remain so. It had made it so easy for John to do whatever he wanted in the gutters while Aish kept his head up in the clouds.
When he discovered the plagiarism—when he’d walked into that bar in Santa Rosa, near his uncle’s winery, and faced the lead singer who jumped off the stage snarling at him about how he’d stolen their song, when the singer played him an early recording and talked him through how they’d developed the song and showed him the cease and desist letters from Young Son’s attorney, an attorney Aish had never heard of—he waited a month to confront John. He didn’t want it to be true. Because, if it was true, then John had tarnished the fame Aish had traded in the love of his life for. Aish didn’t want to believe he had this darkness woven into a glow that he needed to be pristine.
Ultimately, though, it had been thoughts of Sofia that had forced him to confront John. She’d always demanded the best out of him; no way he’d ever get her back if he let this slide.
So, in Memphis, he told John that he knew and that he still loved him and that he understood the pressures of creating a hit and that he would stand by his friend. But they had to make this right.
“It was the first time I ever saw John cry,” Aish said. “He begged me to wait a week. Let him get his finances in order, tell his parents. The morning his week was up, you came pounding on my door.”
John’s body was never recovered from the Mississippi River. But a witness came forward to confirm she’d seen John jumping in. She’d been in too much shock to stop at the time, she’d said, too guilt-ridden later to come forward immediately.
The coroner’s pronouncement of death in absentia six months later—due to the suicide note, the clothes left on the bank of the river, and the witness—killed any hope that Aish had that he could make amends.
“So they’re not wrong,” Aish said, staring at the veins Sofia liked to caress on the back of his hands, thinking about the blood pumping through them. “My hands are all over John’s back. That’s the guilt I’ve been trying to hide from. That’s my fucking legacy: lead singer pushes best friend to commit suicide.
“I’d sit in my basement studio and think about that, think about how I owed him a whole life, and I tried to squeeze that debt onto a fourth album.” He huffed a humorless laugh. “No wonder I was a little blocked, right?
“And the funny thing is, now that I know what he did to Sofia, he wouldn’t have had to jump into that river.” He squeezed his hands into bloodless fists. “I’d have thrown him in myself.”
“Wait...what? What did he do to Sofia?”
Aish swung his head up, let Devonte see how far the last year and yesterday’s revelations and his own self-disgust had pushed him from that golden California rocker everyone loved. “Haven’t you figured it out, yet, man? That phone call Sofia said she made from the hospital? The guy she said she spoke to? That wasn’t me. I might be a fuckup in all ways, but I loved her. I never stopped loving her. That first year of Young Son’s debut, right on the heels of
our breakup, when ‘In You’ was this phenomenon and we went from playing bars to stadiums in six months and I should have been on top of the world, I was fucking miserable. If I’d known she needed me, if I’d gotten a chance to hear her voice again, I would have tossed everything away. John, the band, the songs, the tour...everything.
“John knew that. I thought he was taking care of me, the way he pushed girls and guys and booze and drugs on me to fix it.”
“And you two sounded so much alike.” Devonte looked at Aish, thunderstruck. “She was talking to John.”
Hearing Devonte give voice to the realization that Aish had woken up gasping to made his heart pound and his stomach roil, made fury build in his head and disgust burn in his soul. He’d been so willfully stupid for so fucking long.
“John would fuck with my phone. Steal it. Forward my number to his. He’d say he did it so I could concentrate on the music. Let me handle the creative side while he handled everything else. I let myself believe him. I let myself be grateful. And he told Sofia to handle the fact that she might die, all alone.”
“Holy fuck,” Devonte breathed.
She’d almost slipped away from him. She would have been alone and scared and so young and so undeserving of Aish’s actions and inactions.
Suddenly, his friend had a hold of his biceps. “You’ve got to tell her,” Devonte said, only the chair keeping his manager out of his face. “You’ve got to tell her, everyone knew you sounded alike when you were talking, you’ve got to explain to her—”
“No,” Aish said, shrugging out of Devonte’s hold and stepping back from the chair. “No, I’m not going to tell her. And you aren’t either.”
Devonte’s powerful arms fell to his side. “What the fuck?”
Aish stared at his friend’s bewilderment and had to shake his head. People had been giving him a pass for so long.
“I’m a thirty-one-year-old man who’s just come to the realization that I let my best friend manipulate me for the better part of my life. I allowed him to manipulate me and use the glow he got off me to hurt other people. My rich, good looking, and popular were his tools. Do you think he got to do that because I was too stupid to know better? You think he took advantage of me? ’Cause that’s a story we could go with and maybe I could keep making music. But it won’t get me back Sofia. She knows better. She’s been calling me on it since the second I showed up here. Called me a man-child who blames everything on others, and she’s right. John manipulated me because I let him. I can be pretty fucking wily when I want to be—ask Sofia—but it was a fuck-ton easier to let him push me where he wanted me to go than to plant my feet in the sand and take control of my own fucking life.”
Maybe he was shouting a bit, but it wasn’t at Devonte.
“Yeah, John pushed, fuck knows he pushed, but I chose to dive in. I chose to pick the music over Sofia and not do the work to have both. I chose to put ‘In You’ on the album and I chose to ignore the rumors about stolen songs and I chose to reveal Sofia on that video and I chose to come here even though she made it clear she didn’t want me.”
His words were heaving out.
“I’ve made choices and the worst one was to keep my head in the clouds. People got hurt because I’m a passive, childish, entitled, lazy asshole. I’m the worst thing that ever happened to Sofia. The only way I can make this right is by giving away the best things that ever happened to me.”
Devonte had sat back down on the couch during Aish’s diatribe. He stared at him now.
“You’ve changed this month, man,” he said.
Drained, Aish huffed. “Yeah? Losing your career and your one true love can do that to a guy.”
“I like you better now.”
Aish rolled his eyes. “That’s good. Since I’m probably not going to be able to pay you for much longer.”
Devonte shrugged those massive shoulders. “All I’ve got on my resume is representing a band that stole songs for a decade. Finding a new job’ll be easy.”
Christ. When Aish fucked up, he did it spectacularly.
But Devonte kept that wide and bright smile. “Okay, man, how are we going to fix this for her?”
* * *
By that evening, Aish’s suite looked—and smelled—like a dorm room, with plates and cups and bottles stacked on any available surface, notes spread over tabletops, and both laptops practically smoking from overuse. Room service begrudgingly brought drinks and albóndingas, little spicy meatballs, but no one had been back to clean anything up.
Aish knocked over a stray glass when he pressed send with a flourish.
“Got another one!” he announced, thrilled to have connected with one more media outlet who would be present tomorrow afternoon when Aish torpedoed his music career.
But Devonte hung up his phone with a frustrated grunt. “Goddammit,” he said, throwing his phone on the sofa and striding over to his bag in the corner. He started to pull clothes out of it. “She’s still not answering. I’m going to have to go track her down.”
Ready or not, Namrita and Sofia were going to have to deal with the press descending tomorrow for Aish’s press conference. Devonte had been trying to get through to the PR rep all day to let her know their plan, but she was ignoring him.
“You keep going through that list,” Devonte said as he began unbuttoning his shirt. He was apparently going to strip down right in front of Aish. That was no problem; Devonte had seen him just about as naked as he could be. “Get ahold of as many people as you can. Make sure they know hauling their asses to the Monte one more time is going to be worth their while.”
And it was.
For the first time in his life, Aish was going to stand alone in front of the media. He was going to open his mouth and lie his ass off. He was going to tell them that he’d known about the song thefts all along (which he didn’t) and that he was equally as culpable as John (which he wasn’t) and that they would relinquish all claims on current and future earnings of Young Son’s royalties to pay settlements to all the victimized bands. That last part was true. He was also going to claim responsibility for releasing the evidence on the flash drive, claim it was a ploy to lay the blame at his deceased bandmate’s feet that had misfired.
Sofia, he would tell the world, was the only one creating something real and authentic.
Manon had stopped by his room to see if there was anything he’d needed, and he’d told her a stripped-down version of his plan and asked her to share it privately with the interns, in case any in the group were holding Sofia at fault. She’d assured him that Sofia had all of their support.
Every song he’d written, every song he’d not yet gotten to, cried out at the thought of how he was about to aim a depth charge at his career. Writing, playing, and singing were the only things he knew how to do, the only things he wanted to do besides loving Sofia, and his life was going to stretch out long and lonely without either music or Sofia to occupy it.
Then he thought about how she’d held her niece and nephew and knew that this was a sacrifice he owed her.
“... But the thing I can’t figure out is who did share that flash drive?” Devonte’s monologue interrupted Aish’s thoughts as the man pulled clean pants over his stellar ass.
Aish shrugged. The focus on who had done the deed had gotten lost in the damage the deed had wreaked. “She said it’d been in a box. I think I saw the box, it was in her room, but I didn’t see anyone else as I was sneaking there to...”
Aish cut himself off as heat rose on his skin.
“Fuck?” Devonte finished for him. “Declare your endless love?”
Aish looked back down to his media list while Devonte put on his shoes.
“You’re letting her go too easily,” Devonte said.
Aish raised his head to glare at him. “I’m trying to do the first unselfish thing in my entire fucking life. Don’t ride me on t
his.”
Thankfully, Devonte nodded. It had been a long, hard day, and tomorrow was going to be longer and harder. Aish didn’t need Devonte reminding him of all he was going to lose when he gave Sofia her winery back.
Devonte slipped on a blazer, grabbed his phone. “Don’t wait up. You need your beauty rest if you’re going to be in front of a bunch of cameras tomorrow. Namrita is going to listen to me even if I have to shout through her suite door.”
Aish smirked at him. “How do you know where her suite is?”
Devonte snick’d back. “Businesspeople have business meetings. Get your head out of the gutter.”
As the door closed behind Devonte, Aish’s smile faded away. He desperately wanted to follow his friend. He desperately wanted to run through the halls and pound on his love’s door and beg, fucking beg, to get another chance.
He gripped his fist on the desk like it could tether him there. There was a very real chance that he would never see his love’s face again.
A knock sounded at the door.
“Did you forget your key?” he called, pityingly grateful for the distraction as he approached the door and opened it. But it wasn’t Devonte, as he’d expected.
It was Manon again. The French hotel executive now looked frazzled and anxious, not anything like the elegant and carefully coiffed executive he was used to seeing. She was standing next to a man wearing the Bodega Sofia uniform, a maroon polo and khakis. Brown hair, blue eyes, he smiled benignly at Aish. Behind him was a large laundry cart with a few linens.
“Aish, I just wanted to say how sorry I am about everything that’s happened,” she said, surprising him by moving into his doorway and putting her arms around him, pulling him into a hug. He stared at the hotel worker in confusion as he awkwardly bent down to return her hug.
“Uh...it’s okay, Manon...we’re figuring it out.”
Hate Crush (Filthy Rich) Page 27
