Ana didn’t love me. Why was it only then, when she said that she didn’t, that I fully realized that I did love her? I loved her. How was that for shit timing?
If I’d clued in earlier, woken her up in the middle of the night in Mammoth and told her I couldn’t live without her, would that have changed things? But it was too late now. Now she’d rejected me, thrown back my ring, walked off and told me to have a nice life.
Why did everything get symbolic when you felt sad? The taxi stopped at a light and in the gutter I saw an old, discarded sneaker. Had that sneaker once been loved, part of a cherished pair? Had it been surprised when its time had come to an end? Had it expected it, a hole where the big toe had poked on through giving it proper warning? I bet it hadn’t. I bet it had been shocked as hell to find itself alone and forgotten in the gutter of life.
I knew I was being melodramatic, looking out at a battered sneaker in the rain and feeling kinship. But, damn it, I felt exactly like that sneaker. Cast to the side, laces untied, I’d come undone.
29
Ana
Through my tears, I heard a knock on my hotel door. I didn’t know why Lola hadn’t booked me on a flight until five. That seemed like an impossibly long time to wait to leave, and now I had company. It had to be Ash. Who else could it be? But I didn’t think I could handle seeing him again.
He’d looked so devastated when I’d ended things at the park. Of course, that was the whole plan. If he’d laughed it off and said “no problem, sweetheart” the whole thing would have been a waste. The world would have learned what it already knew: Ash Black was an asshole. I’d been the only one out of the loop on that.
A knock again. Keeping the deadbolt chain on the door, I opened it a crack. Connor.
I sighed deeply. “What do you want?”
“Hey, now. Is that any way to greet your old friend Connor?” He leered at me.
“How did you find out where I was staying?” Only Lola knew, and I’d only told her about an hour ago. She’d arranged for a car to come pick me up at three.
“Lola knew you might need a shoulder to cry on.” There was that grin again. It gave me the creeps.
“I’m not really in the mood, Connor. Sorry.” I moved to shut the door right in his face. Such rude behavior from the librarian! But I was long past worrying about offending Connor.
His foot jammed into the door quick and fast, stopping me. The chain still held it closed, though. Suddenly, I felt glad I’d left it on.
“Come on now. Ash is out of the picture. We can pick up where we left off.”
“What are you talking about?” This man was disgusting. And why was he so relentless with me? It couldn’t be because he found me irresistibly sexy. He surrounded himself with far more X-rated eye candy than me. No, he must get off on going after something that belonged to Ash. Ick.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember, luv?” Now he laid on the Irish brogue thick. “That night at the party. You were all over me.”
“I was not.”
“Let me help you remember. Unlock this door and let me in.” He gave me what I figured he thought was a charming smile. He was a rich and famous guy, so I guess it worked on lots of people. Not on me, though.
On me, it had the opposite effect. I got a cold chill down my spine and I remembered, clearly, when I’d seen that exact smile before. He’d been handing me a strange-tasting glass of punch at the New Year’s Eve party. It all came together.
“You drugged me,” I realized, out loud. “Didn’t you?”
“That’s quite an accusation.” He stepped back, hands up in surrender, feigning hurt.
“That night at the party,” I insisted. “You did, didn’t you?”
“Sometimes a girl needs help loosening up. It was for your own good.” He gave me a wink. “Am I right?”
I’d show him loosening up. In a move I later recognized could have gone very badly, I unfastened the chain on that deadbolt and stepped right into the hallway with him.
I looked him straight in the eye. “Connor? Fuck you.” And I kneed him hard in the groin. Thanks to the YMCA self-defense class my mother made me take before moving to the city, I got him right where it counted. He hunched down, cupping his balls with a sad yelp.
“You don’t drug women,” I told him, summoning my stern inner librarian.
He made a soft sound like a “meep.”
“And stay the hell away from me.” I took one last look at him, recognizing he posed no threat. None at all. And I headed back into my hotel room. Where were the cameras when you needed them? I would have liked them to have captured that shot.
A couple hours later, I found out where all the cameras were. The airport. Somehow they’d found out when I’d be leaving town. Thanks, Lola. Guys with cameras swarmed around me, asking for a quote. I was the heartbreaker now. Why had I done it? Had I left Ash for Connor? Inquiring minds wanted to know!
I kept my head down. I just needed to get past security. But then, I saw Ash. In a baseball cap pulled down low, he’d had the bad idea of meeting me there, too. He stood looking impossibly gorgeous and rumpled and distraught with his hands in his pockets. He hadn’t shaved and his stubble gave him a rakish edge. I knew how good it felt to kiss him with that rough scrape.
Click! About a thousand cameras went off, realizing they were getting two for the price of one. This couldn’t be happening. Was Ash’s appearance staged, too? I shook my head as he approached, trying to warn him off.
“Ana, just give me a second,” he pleaded.
“Why are you here?” I hissed, continuing to try to push my way through the throng. I didn’t have any bodyguards to help me. I did have my YMCA knee-to-the-groin trick, though, and I’d use it again if I had to.
“You won’t answer my calls. And Lola wouldn’t tell me where you were staying.”
“Great, she told Connor but not you?”
“She told Connor?”
“Yes, she told Connor. Your best friend. The date-rape king.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ask him.”
“Ash! Over here! Ana! Are you giving him a second chance?” Voices called out to us, making it nearly impossible to speak ourselves.
“Just give me a second?” he asked urgently. Pulling me over into a corner, he shielded me with his body. The way he had in Paris. I shouldn’t be thinking about Paris. I needed to think about the conversation I’d overheard at the cabin.
“Ash, you don’t need to pretend anymore.” I spoke as loudly as I dared while photographers still swarmed around us.
“But I don’t want you to go!” He spoke loudly, clear enough for them to get every word.
In frustration, I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him down so I could speak in complete privacy. I tried to ignore how good he felt against me, the way his smell made my knees go weak. “I heard you in the kitchen talking with Connor. About how rough these weeks have been with me. How much it’s sucked and how you can’t wait for it to be over so you can go back to how things used to be. So you can stop pretending. I know.”
I pulled away and he looked at me with a perfect expression of hurt confusion across his handsome features. “What? It’s not like that.”
“Cut it out, Ash.” This was getting cruel now. I knew he was supposed to play the part of the heartbroken, jilted lover but he had to know when to stop.
“Listen, I don’t know what you think you heard but—”
“What I think I heard?” I shook my head. “Ash, I know what I heard.” A man with a huge zoom lens on his camera even though he stood just a foot away jostled me with his elbow.
“You two gonna kiss and make up?” he asked, snapping away.
I turned my head and started pushing my way past him. Ash grasped onto my arm, trying to slow me down, but I’d had enough of manhandling and scenes.
“Let me go.” I had to yell it so he could hear. It came out sounding angrier than I felt, but maybe it was better that
way. If I let myself sound too sad it would open up the floodgates. I just needed to make it a few more steps.
Ash dropped my elbow. A TSA agent took his place, ushering me in past the cordoned-off section for passengers with boarding passes. I shouldn’t have, but I let myself take one last look behind me. It was almost like watching something sink into the ocean as Ash got surrounded, flooded, covered by fans and paparazzi. In seconds, I couldn’t even see him anymore.
I told myself that was for the best.
§
I blocked Ash’s number on my phone. There wasn’t any point in dragging it out. And it turned out, he seemed to agree. I heard absolutely nothing from him. Sure, calling and texting were off the menu. But there had been a time, not that long ago, when people had still managed to make contact with one another even without cell phones. Ash did not make that effort.
I heard from his attorney, Nelson, refreshing my memory about all the details in the NDA I’d signed. I couldn’t breathe a word to anyone about anything that had happened.
That was fine by me. The last thing I wanted to do was talk about Ash. And once it was clear that I wasn’t going to say a thing, and I wasn’t in Ash’s life any more, the paparazzi left me alone. Within a week back in New York my status officially returned to Not Interesting.
I wish I could say that I didn’t cry. Or maybe that I didn’t cry a lot. Or at least that I never ugly cried, with big fat tears and making the kind of face even your mother thought twice about loving. But I did all of that. For the most part I managed to save it for nighttime. But the walls in our tiny Brooklyn apartment weren’t exactly thick. My roommates knew, more than anyone, how torn up I felt.
At work, thankfully, I kept busy. Little kids kept you on the hop and I was grateful for all the distractions. January was the height of flu season. I had more than one kid throw up on me. It was hard to remember your heartache when you were cleaning up vomit. I may have been the only person in the world grateful for stomach bugs, but there you had it. That’s how low I felt.
We got word that our library branch wasn’t going to be shut down. That was all. No news about 20 years of funding or grand plans to start a whole-scale remodel. I didn’t know if Ash had kept his side of the bargain or not and, sadly, I didn’t have it in me to find out. I knew I could call his attorney and he might verify whether the fund had been established, but I just couldn’t handle it. I needed to move on.
And to move on, I needed to stay busy. I took on more piano clients, devoting Saturday afternoons to lessons. The few times one of my teenage students asked if it was true that I’d dated Ash Black, I was able to answer with complete honesty that it had all been a publicity stunt. There’d never really been anything between us.
Most Sundays, I spent up at my parent’s house. They had my back, as always. My father grumbled about rock and rollers and my mother muttered and threw salt over her shoulder, cursing the past and praying for the future. They assured me that Ash wasn’t worthy of me. This was good riddance, that’s what this was, and I was off to bigger and better things, preferably in the form of a nice, churchgoing Russian engineer ready to settle down and start a family.
My Aunt Irina took it the worst. She got mad, really mad, and if it wasn’t for her deathly fear of flying I think she might have hopped on the next flight out to L.A. and given Ash a piece of her mind. I feared for him the next time he did a show in New York. I had no doubt Irina could work her way past security if she set her mind to it.
I was grateful when the Super Bowl finally arrived. I didn’t watch much TV, but you never knew when a pop-up ad would make its way into a streaming service and announce The Blacklist, halftime spectacular! The few times I hadn’t managed to avoid seeing Ash’s image, it had felt like a slap across the face. Even though I knew every shot was staged, every photo the result of wardrobe and stylists and makeup artists and lighting crews, he still looked so goddamned hot. It wasn’t fair.
Apparently the show went well. Everyone loved them. I avoided the whole thing, declining the couple of invites I got to attend Super Bowl parties. On the day of the big game, I’d never been more grateful for my oddball roommates. Liv rejected everything about football, from the male archetype it propagated—whatever that meant—to the corporate branding across every frame. Jillian just wasn’t much of a sports fan. What she most liked was cooking up apps, and Liv and I were more than happy to eat her tasty concoctions while binge-watching Game of Thrones. Jillian declared the series too violent for her tastes, but I still caught her craning her neck to watch the naughty bits. Liv celebrated the death of every main character. And me? It kept my mind off of Ash Black, and that was saying something.
After the Super Bowl, I didn’t hear a word about The Blacklist. I certainly wasn’t doing internet searches, but I was 24. I had friends. I heard about shows, bands passing through. Nothing.
It was almost eerie how everything returned to normal. It was like those three and a half weeks with Ash had never happened. Everything returned to exactly the way it had been.
Until March. I was in our tiny kitchenette when I heard the song for the first time. In Ash’s unmistakable deep, growling voice, the haunting melody I knew so well gave me chills. It was the song he and I had played together so many times, first in Santa Clara, then in Paris, then in his mountain cabin, each time morphing it, growing it into what it was now.
The song was a complete departure from his previous work. Everything in the past had been straight-up RAWK. The kind of music that made you want to head bang and stick out your tongue KISS-style and quit your job just for the hell of it.
This was a love song. Heartbroken, stripped down, bare and raw. Critics went wild over his new sound. It was his first solo release, just Ash Black on piano with what sounded like percussion and maybe cello in the background.
The song was called “Undone.” His voice ached like he was bleeding into the music. In the refrain, deep and tortured, Ash sang, “I’ve come undone.” The longing need in his vocals gripped you fierce as he described the love he’d found and lost. How he’d had everything he’d ever wanted and then it fell apart, slipping through his fingers.
I tried to tell myself that I didn’t really know if the song was about me. He’d admitted he’d used ghostwriters in the past. Maybe this was all an engineered stunt by Lola to capitalize on his public heartbreak, just like Mandy Monroe had done back in December.
But deep down, I knew. And every time I heard it, it felt like Ash was calling out directly to me. Because the entire song was about us.
I heard the song a lot. The second Ash released it, it went straight to number one. The song was a bonafide, runaway, gobsmackingly huge mega hit. I heard it everywhere, at the deli where I went for a sandwich. From the earbuds of the person sitting next to me on the subway who was clearly going deaf from the volume of her music. Even in my own apartment, where Jillian set her iPad to Pandora. Sometimes none of us could get to it in time to stop the song from starting to play. Once the song started up while I was in the shower. Running out with soap in my eyes, I knocked straight into a stool. It slowed me down so much the song played all the way into the chorus.
“I’ve come undone,” Ash sang, playing the notes we’d created together, describing how he felt in such heartbreakingly raw terms. Expressing exactly how I felt going on two months without him.
Jillian met me breathless in the kitchen, finding me standing there in a towel with shampoo in my hair and a wet puddle at my feet.
“Maybe we should stop listening to music?” she offered, clearly not sure what to do with me.
“Or we could play a different station,” I suggested.
“It comes on every station I have!” she cried out, taking the iPad out of my dripping wet hands. “It’s a huge crossover hit!”
“I know.” The song was off, but I could still hear it, echoing in my soul.
“Do you think you should, you know, get in touch? He sounds, kind of, upset.”
&nb
sp; I shook my head. The way I saw it, it was at least a 50 percent chance the whole thing was just a publicity stunt. I’d spent enough time in Ash’s world to understand how it worked. Everyone used everyone else to get ahead. Chances were good that Lola and the rest of the team behind the Ash Black brand had orchestrated the entire release.
But what if it were more than that? What if that was how he really felt? I sometimes felt that it was, late at night as I lay awake and stared at the ceiling. And, yes, once or twice in the darkness I allowed myself to listen to the song. Pure and gritty, his voice hitting every note with growling intensity, he spoke directly to me.
At times like that, in the dark with just me and Ash telling me how deeply he felt for me, how devastated he was to lose me, I thought it had to be the most romantic thing I’d ever heard. If I allowed myself to slip into the fantasy, that song just about killed me. Word-for-word, it was literally everything I’d always dreamed he’d say, singing it out from his heart straight to me.
But that was just it, wasn’t it? If that was how he felt, wouldn’t he speak directly to me? He would get in touch. He could send me a letter or email or phone the library or deliver a dozen roses to my apartment or, hell, he could probably land a private helicopter on top of a nearby building and offer to whisk me off to any destination of my choosing if only I’d say yes.
Each day I heard nothing from him was another day I knew he didn’t really want to be with me. I told myself this, too, would pass. Even mega smash hit songs went away, eventually. Sure, they made their way into your DNA. Just as you knew you’d always be able to sing along with “Don’t Stop Believing” you knew you’d always remember that song. But it wouldn’t be so bad once it finally made its way off the airwaves.
In April, the song was nominated for the Billboard Music Awards. For a lot of things: Top Artist & Top Male Artist, Top Digital Song, Top Hot 100 Song, Top Streaming Song, Top Rock Song. That wasn’t surprising.
Undone: A Fake Fiancé Rockstar Romance Page 43
