“My mom getting sick was the final catalyst that led to me leaving the band, but it wasn’t the full reason. I did move back here, but instead of putting the band on hold, we broke up because I wanted out.”
“Why?” she asked, concern knitting her eyebrows together.
I sighed, knowing this was the reason I’d wanted to bring her here. I wanted to tell her this. She actually sort of already knew. I’d alluded to my colorful past over the summer, and she knew how much I despised who I was, but she didn’t know the full story.
“Unfortunately, as great as the band was, it was also at the root of a lot of things in my life that I regret, but to understand that, I’d need to start from the beginning. Can I tell you my story?”
I watched Emily swallow hard before she nodded. “I hate secrets,” she said. “And I hate lies. Change my mind about you, Zack Easton, because I want to believe that you’re one of the good guys, but it’s hard because you lied to me twice – about two really important things – and you broke my heart.”
Hearing her say this cut me pretty deep, but I maintained my resolve. I knew I couldn’t change the past, and I couldn’t take back what I did. I could only hope to change the future.
“I’d love to change your mind, princess,” I said, taking a chance and using the nickname I rarely called her anymore.
It was a direct message, since she didn’t get the indirect message I’d sent at dinner when I’d sung her that song by The Proclaimers. She thought it was a joke, and I’ll admit, I was being silly, but now I was definitely not joking.
Unfortunately, she didn’t react in the slightest. All she said was, “Go for it.”
There was a challenging tone to her voice, and I took that as my cue to start talking.
“I guess to understand how I got to where I was when I hit bottom, you have to know where I started. And the best way I can explain that is to go back six years to when I met Jen and Derrick. See, all through high school, I’d been this loser kid who just wanted to be cool, but I could never quite figure out how to do that.”
Emily raised her eyebrow. I didn’t think she quite believed me, but she didn’t say anything.
I smiled, hoping I could keep things light. “Hey, you might not see it now, but believe me, back in high school, I was scrawny, sort of shy and wore a lot of black. I didn’t exactly have a lot of friends at my preppy high school, so I gravitated toward my neighbor Ray, who was this punk kid who didn’t really fit in either. We used to sit on his back porch and get high, because there wasn’t anything else to do, and I didn’t want to be at home because my parents were always fighting. Then, at the start of my sophomore year, after my parents had gotten divorced and my dad moved out, I started playing my guitar more and more, because it took me away from reality for a little while. Ray found out and asked me to start a band with him and this guy Lance who lived up the street from us.”
“Is that when the girls started flocking?” she asked, trying to hide her smirk.
I laughed, remembering all too well the guy I’d been back then. “No, definitely not. I mean, I kissed a girl here or there, but I went off to college a virgin. Then I met Derrick. He was my roommate freshman year, and he had a sister who was a year older than us, who I couldn’t stop staring at when she’d come over. She lived off-campus, but she’d stop by our dorm and hang out once a week or so. By that point I’d started filled out a little more, and I’d gained a little more confidence, but I never thought I’d be worthy of her.”
“That was Jen?”
“Yeah, it was. So anyway living with Derrick was interesting. He wasn’t all that great looking back then either, but he loved women and talked incessantly about how many girls he wanted to get with on a regular basis. He was a bit of a perv, as you well know since he hasn’t changed much since then, but he was a good guy, and he had aspirations of starting a band. When he found out I’d been in a band and could play guitar and sing, I was in. It was then that he introduced me to his friend Andrew who also played guitar, and I asked Leo, who was a junior at Duke at the time, to round us out since he played bass.”
“When did Jen finally notice you?”
“The first time she came to one of our practices. She decided, after looking at the four of us, that we needed a stylist. She stepped in and helped create our image. I still remember the day she took me shopping because we had a show coming up, and she wanted me, the lead singer to look bad-ass. So she put me in all these insane outfits, until she finally settled on jeans, a black graphic t-shirt and the Converse sneakers I’d worn that day. When I stepped out of the dressing room at Diesel, she said, and I’ll probably never forget this, ‘Okay, now that’s what I’m talking about. I’m a girl, and I’d totally want to fuck you if you wore that on-stage’. And I don’t know if it was the hedonistic power that came with a compliment like that or the fact that for the first time in my life a girl I was interested in wanted me, but I said back to her, ‘Oh yeah? Well I’m right here. Let’s just pretend I’m on stage with my guitar in my hand’. And before I knew what was happening, she was kissing me and pushing me back into the dressing room, and I honestly think we would have had sex right there had the sales associate not come back to check on us. But we sealed the deal later that night and then dated for the next three years.”
“Why did you guys break up?” Emily asked.
I thought I saw something akin to jealously on her face as she’d listened to me talk about sleeping with Jen. I took that as a positive thing.
“My mom got sick, and I started drinking a lot. After the divorce, my mom and I had gotten close, and the idea of her dying freaked me out, so I started taking solace in the numb feeling alcohol provided. Jen hated it. She also started getting really freaked out by my mom’s illness, not wanting to be around her and disinfecting my apartment after my mom visited. Cancer scared her, but I was dealing with so much already that adding her judgment and neurosis to the mix just didn't work. I let her go. From there word spread really fast that I was single, and suddenly, I was the popular guy girls fought over. If I truly wanted to, I could have brought someone home every night, but I exercised some restraint. It was still really stupid and reckless. I mean, some of the things Derrick, Andrew and I did back then were just downright idiotic. But for the first time in our lives, we were cool and the girls wanted us, and our music was taking off. We thought we were invincible, and I let it go to my head. It wasn’t until it was almost too late that I figured out how much I hated the guy I’d become. He was an asshole and a douchebag, and he wasn’t very happy.”
“How many girls have you slept with?” she asked cautiously, and I remembered her asking me the same thing over the summer. I’d dodged her question then, but I wouldn’t now.
I honestly didn’t know how many girls I’d been with, so I took a guess. “I don’t know. Fifty maybe. I was only really out there for about a year and a half and usually just brought girls home after our shows. When we’d just go out to a bar, or if I was bartending at Devil’s Hangout, I might have made out with a girl or let her come back with me to Leo’s office, but it was rare that we’d actually have sex. We usually just partied and smoked or sampled some of the harder stuff that Leo had stashed away. Then he met Kristin and went sober on us all of a sudden, so we had to find alternative methods of scoring drugs.”
I noticed that her hands were clasped in her lap so tightly that her knuckles were white. I had to remind myself that she was a good girl. My world was so dark compared to the life she’d lived.
“Am I freaking you out?” I asked, knowing I might have gone too far, shared too much. “Jen used to get pissed and give me shit for hooking up so much and doing drugs. I know it’s not very appealing. Do you want me to stop talking about it?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s fine. It’s your history, and I want to know all of it. No more secrets.”
“No more secrets,” I echoed, relieved that she was at least pretending to take this all in stride.
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br /> “So, if Jen was so against what you were doing, why did she sleep with you again?” she asked. “I know you guys were broken up for a while when Lily happened.”
I nodded. “Yeah, we’d been over for almost a year, and Jen used to bitch about what Derrick, Andrew and I would do all the time, but I think she was a little envious of the careless way we lived. She’d always been responsible and forward-thinking, and I think for one night she just wanted to cut loose – sort of how you were this summer when we met, but since she and I had a history, she didn’t stop at kissing me, and viola, the creation of Lily was forever cemented into our personal timeline.”
“God, what did you do when you found out Jen was pregnant?” she asked, angling toward me and resting her head on her arm that was draped over the back of the couch.
She looked like she was getting tired, but she made no mention of wanting to go to sleep, so I told her the story of how Jen had thought Lily was Jay’s baby, how he’d broken up with her and she’d come to live with Derrick and me. Then I told her about the accident and the night Lily was born and how I learned she was mine. I told her about the months after the accident, how I made the decision to leave the band and how Jen, Lily and I moved in with my mom, and then how Jen and Lily had moved back home, and I’d stayed, living five hours away from my daughter for over a year. I told her everything up to the point I’d met her, filling in the missing pieces I knew she wanted to hear. I talked for more than an hour, and Emily kept her gaze on me the whole time, just listening. She didn’t ask a single question.
“Lily is such an amazing little girl,” she finally said, shaking her head, and I fell a little more in love with her in that moment. It was one thing to love me, but to love my daughter was a whole different story.
“She’s perfect,” I said. “She’s inspired a lot of songs over the years – mostly due to her perfection, but I don’t really play any of them. They’re more for me, but she did inspire Jump.”
“Really? How so?” She yawned loudly then, and I looked at the clock. It was after one in the morning.
“Maybe we should continue story time tomorrow,” I suggested.
She shook her head. “No, I want to hear this. Tell me, and then we can go to bed.”
I fought the urge to imagine what it would be like if ‘we’ really were going to bed together, but she was sleeping in my room, and I was going to sleep with Lily in my mom’s room.
“Every new parent will tell you how hard it is in the beginning, but you never truly realize how much of a toll it takes on you and how hard day-to-day living actually becomes until you experience it first-hand. There are literally points you hit when you think you’re going to lose it. I wrote Jump one night at like three in the morning after having been up with Lily. She was probably only four weeks old, and she wouldn’t go to sleep and had been crying for hours. Jen and I had tried everything we could to get her to settle down, but she just wouldn’t sleep. It had been like that for a few nights, so we were both exhausted. When Lily finally closed her eyes, Jen collapsed into bed, but as tired as I was, I was also restless. So I went outside to get some fresh air.”
Emily was watching me intently, her teeth pulling her bottom lip into her mouth, so I continued.
“I sank down into one of the chairs on the back porch. I remember putting my head in my hands and thinking about how much my life had changed in just a month. I literally went from being Jen’s friend who would help her with her baby to being a full-time father, and I had no notice. I still had a hard time getting used to the idea that Lily was mine. I mean she looked like me, so I knew there was no question, but I never really had time to prepare for what being a father would mean. And right then, I found myself wishing things were different, that nothing would have changed.”
I looked up at her to gauge her reaction, waiting for the look of horror to appear on her face. I hated this part of the story, because I came off like a guy who’d wanted to reject his daughter, but it wasn’t like that. I was just exhausted.
“Zack, you’re not a bad person,” she said, proving she knew me pretty well. “I’m sure everyone has those feelings at some point. You shouldn’t feel like you have to apologize for that. It’s not like you walked away from Lily. You were tired, and that had to have played into your emotions.”
I nodded. “I know, but I felt guilty about it for a long time – that is until Jen told me she’d had a few moments when she felt the same way. We both agreed that having a baby was hard, and sometimes, even though we loved Lily, we really hated our situation. In the end, we had no choice but to push through. Lily changed our lives forever. We both knew we had no options but to jump headfirst into the fray and hope for the best.”
Before I realized she was doing it, she reached forward and took my right hand in hers. Aside from the night she was drunk and fell into me, it had been months since she’d touched me or looked at me how she was gazing at me now. She flipped my hand palm up and traced the lines on it, then slowly ran her fingers up my forearm until she got to the lyrics tattooed there.
“I wrote Jump as a reminder that I needed to keep things in perspective. I needed to keep moving forward. If I jumped, I would have control, but if I let what I was feeling eat away at me, I would free fall and lose any control I had over my life. I couldn’t let that happen.”
“I know the feeling,” Emily muttered, her fingers tracing the inside of my forearm with feather light movements.
The feel of her touch did something to me deep inside, and I noticed my breathing becoming shallower, as I watched her fingers move back and forth methodically. As much as I wanted to yank her forward and hold her against me, there was something more intimate about what she was doing, so I let her continue.
Then she did something that surprised me, and I started to protest but stopped when I saw what she was trying to show me. She’d let my hand go and pulled the sleeve of her sweater back to reveal her right wrist. She held it out to me. There, on the inside of what used to be her bare skin, was a tattoo of a colorful flower with words I’d written long before I’d met her encircling it. I realized that she’d permanently marked her skin with my lyrics, and I don’t think there was anything that could have affected me more in that moment.
“All you can do is jump,” I said, taking her hand in mine as I looked up into her eyes and recited the lyrics. Her beautiful brown eyes were somber as she watched me, but she didn’t pull away. “I thought you weren’t into tattoos?”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t, but I remember you telling me you’d never get a tattoo of something that wasn’t significant to you, and I remember thinking that was a good idea, and that if I ever got a tattoo, it would be significant.”
I ran my thumb over the flower, loving that she’d been thinking of me when she’d gotten it. Now our tattoos were linked together. Hers completing the thought that mine left open-ended, that I’d intentionally left open-ended, and now I was so glad I’d done that.
“And you chose lyrics I’d written?” I asked, fighting the urge to pull her closer, but I could tell she was still guarded. Her posture and the tension in her shoulders told me to be patient, wait until she was ready. I’d get my chance in time.
“I liked the lyrics,” she said simply, “and when I turned twenty-two back in September, I was going through a really rough time, and I think I needed to remember to jump forward, because I could have easily fallen backward if I wasn’t careful.”
And I wouldn’t have been there to catch you if you had fallen, I thought morosely.
Biggest. Mistake. Ever.
“I was the reason you were going through a tough time, wasn’t I?” I asked, a feeling of dread hitting the pit of my stomach.
She nodded, just a small, imperceptible movement of her head that let me know how bad I’d hurt her. Her birthday was September twenty-first, and it had been just over a month after I’d walked away from her, broken her heart, and she’d still been hurting. I hated that I’d done that to he
r, absolutely hated it.
“I’m sorry,” I said genuinely, because I couldn’t take it back. I couldn’t change the past. All I could offer was a future where I never let her down again.
I smiled a small smile as sort of a peace offering, as I turned her hand so our fingers were laced together and tried to pull her toward me, going after what I’d been thinking about all night. I really wanted to kiss her, and I hoped she’d let me.
“I should go to bed,” she said suddenly, ripping her hand from mine. “I – I’ll see you in the morning.”
She smiled briefly before she disappeared into my room, leaving me slightly stunned sitting on the couch wondering where I went wrong.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Emily
I sat on the edge of Zack’s bed getting my bearings, resting my head in my hands. What had just happened? It seemed like he’d wanted to kiss me, and I’d panicked. Why had I panicked? Because I believed he’d gotten caught up in the emotion of his story and seeing his lyrics on my wrist? I wasn’t sure, and now I had bolted from the room, so it wasn’t like I could just go back out there and say ‘Ha, ha. Just kidding. I’m back. Don’t you want to kiss me now?’ The spell was broken.
Out in the living room I heard Zack turning off lights, the floorboards creaking under his feet, and after a minute, the door to his mother’s room closed with a click, and I breathed out air I hadn’t realized I was holding in. A part of me thought, hoped even, that he’d knock on my door, ask me if I was okay, but he didn’t. Had we been alone, I might have been so inclined as to sneak into his bed so we could finish what he’d tried to start in the living room, but his daughter was sleeping not five feet from him, so that option was out.
With a huff, I flopped back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. It would probably take me hours to fall asleep. After what he’d just told me and what had almost happened, my mind was spinning. I now knew everything about Zack, and it was as if his life story was running on a loop in my mind over and over again. He’d been through so much in the past six years. It was unimaginable. No wonder he seemed so mature and at the same time so unstable. He’d been on a rollercoaster, and the ride hadn’t ever ended.
Broken Fairytales Series Box Set (Broken Fairytales, Buried Castles, Shattered Crowns) Page 55
