“I did,” I’m quick to say, stepping closer to him even as he shrinks. “Drew, I love you.”
“That’s the trouble,” Drew says, visibly grasping at straws, blue eyes growing darker and harsher. “I don’t believe in love like that anymore. I told you as much in my shop, and I meant it.” He drains the rest of his whiskey in an efficient gulp.
The romantic, rose-colored pipe dream shatters when Drew glances at my outstretched, upturned hand and actively chooses not to take it.
My heartbeat roars inside my ears, which have grown hot to the touch. “Then what happens now?”
He pauses for what feels like an eternity as my eyes well up. “I have to go. I don’t want to be the subject of think pieces where writers deconstruct how you hurt me and then I took you back anyway. I don’t want to be the playboy comedian’s latest conquest. You wanted the fame. I only ever wanted you.”
Even though his excuses sound flimsy, loss pounds its fists at the walls of my rib cage. “You can have me.”
“Not this way, I can’t. I won’t.” A fire takes up residence in his eyes, two eyebrows sloping downward right above. While collecting his coat and his shoes, he adopts the detached tone he used on that first day in his shop. “I told you I would help you, and I did. We tried, we failed, and I’m sorry. I–I can’t do it anymore. Goodbye, Nolan.”
The door shuts between us. Again.
I don’t call for him or run after him. He was pacing like a caged animal. Trying to keep him here, locked in this ivory tower he so openly detests, would’ve done no good for either of us.
Without him, I’m left with the mess of his mind. Papers. Crystals. Even the romance novel he didn’t read is on the floor. Milkshake must’ve gotten to it.
I want to sob, but I don’t get the chance, because I hear the doors to my private elevator sliding open. Jessalynn’s loud voice bounces off every wall. “Today’s the big day, superstar! Let’s get a move on.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
I’m perched in a swivel chair in my dressing room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music while a makeup artist named Hanson attends to me with careful precision. A playlist—curated by my assistant—loops across the room, giving the space a party vibe that couldn’t be more unwanted.
There’s a large fridge fully stocked with alcohol whirring across the way. A massive, faux-fur Lovesac takes up the other half of the room. Its cloud-like comfort brings me no joy. Every available surface is overrun with flower arrangements and cards wishing me luck, but it truly feels like my luck, if I ever had any, has entirely run out.
“Look up,” says Hanson, effortlessly applying my eyeliner.
A blond girl with rosy cheeks gives me a hand massage to de-stress, but I’m a pack of quaking nerves and live-wire emotions that no amount of pressure could resolve in the wake of Drew’s and my fight.
Across the room, a wardrobe assistant makes last-minute adjustments to my peacock-blue suit, reminiscent of the one I wore to CeeCee’s wedding but with black accents and more luxurious fabric.
It makes me think about the twenty-three-year-old I was before, and how he’d be pinching himself over this venue, the star treatment, and the distant thrum of the anticipatory crowd. But rightnow, even with the edits I made to the jokes, this means nothing. I feel hollowed out.
“This is why I told you not to get involved with him,” Jessalynn scolds again with so much I-told-you-so energy I could scream. “Anti-love on stage, anti-love off. It’s easier that way, darling. He hurt you once before. It was obvious he would do it again.”
I don’t have the energy to tell them how wrong they are. Drew never hurt me. Sure, the sight of him leaving the hotel room crushed every bone in my body, but I deserved that. I made a choice. I paid the consequences.
Here, now, those consequences have expanded, unfolded into a life so unrecognizable that I could almost imagine I was an actor in a movie. I wish I were because then I’d have more objective perspective. I could see a way out that the protagonist couldn’t.
But I can’t. I’m stuck. I’m alone. That’s that.
“You’re right,” I say, because maybe it was obvious. Just not in the way Jessalynn thinks.
Drew said it from the beginning. Our time together wasn’t about rekindling a flame. It was about returning me to the proper timeline. We had a mission. Feelings and kisses and sex clouded that mission, but it still had an end goal.
Admittedly, I thought the bond we’d fused this time around would be strong enough to withstand one setback, but it wasn’t a minor one.
Maybe at twenty-three, you’re willing to change your entire life for love, but at thirty, you have different priorities.
I wouldn’t know. I’m not fully grown up yet. Everyone realized that but me.
“I’m glad you’re finally seeing it my way,” Jessalynn says, slightly smug.
More than before, I wish I had Jessie the friend back. So I couldvent. So I could cry on their shoulder. So I could bomb tonight and it wouldn’t crush us both, financially and professionally.
But I’m to blame. You are who you surround yourself with. Jessalynn is a by-product of a different me’s bad decisions.
