CHAPTER ELEVEN
GOOD AUGUST
WELL, SHIT
Iwant to die.
I can’t believe that just happened.
In front of him.
God, I wish I could disappear.
August’s eyes on me feel worse than everything he’s just witnessed. It’s like he knows—he knows I’m a fuckup now.
It was nice playing along for a bit. Pretending I could actually help him. But Jon’s right, so he may as well find out now. No job, no education, no maths skills, and no dignity.
“Impressive.” My eyes fly to him. That’s roughly the last word I’d expected to hear from his mouth right now, and it doesn’t sound at all sarcastic.
I peel the back of my head off the door long enough to confirm I heard him correctly. “Sorry?”
“Not many of us could manage to pull a rockstar. Told you, you’re gorgeous.” There’s a rakish ease about his shoulders when he turns away and cracks the top on his weird breakfast Coke.
Funny how fast that lifts my heart, that he’s already shifted the whole ordeal into one of his sweet compliments. But I should correct him. “No, it wasn’t like that. He just… I don’t know why he liked me.”
“Likes,” he corrects me, the steady stream of black fizzing into a mug, as though I don’t own glasses.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You don’t own a mirror?”
“Yeah, I do, but…” I need to learn how to not blush. He’s going to see how pink I am.
The door slams on the microwave. “You know he treats you like shit, right?”
And my stomach’s back through the floor. Of course he saw it. Of course he understood. “That’s why I broke up with him.”
Why is the microwave on? What’s he?—
“How long were you together?”
Crap. Here it comes. “‘Together’ is relative, I guess. Years. On and off. Sometimes I’d go on tour with him. Sometimes he didn’t want me to. Sometimes, even now, I’ll get a call from New York or Paris, or god knows where, when he says he needs me. I always went to him when he called me like that.”
“That was ‘travelling?’”
“That was ‘travelling.’”
“That’s what you threw it all away for?”
Fuck.Did he mean for that to feel like a blade between my ribs?
I guess I must look like I’ve been stabbed, because he instantly adds, “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No, you’re right. That’s it. That’s what I didn’t want to tell you.” I drop into the armchair because it’s better than standing here, where the guy I exploded my life for just kissed me in front of the guy I was starting to like. “I fell in love with a rock star and he used me, and I blew through the money. All of it. Hundreds of thousands of pounds on flights, and hotels, and bus trips, all to be with him. Because I thought he loved me back. So all those nice things you said to me last night about me being smart, now you see?—”
“You are.” He snaps it out, angry. I feel like he should be angry at me for what I’ve done, but something about his choice of words isn’t gelling with that. Maybe he’s just being nice. Why is he always so nice? Still trying to make me feel better even in the face of this idiocy.
The microwave beeps, and though he moves away from me again, he mutters, “The only stupid thing you did was to not make him pay for the flights.”
