“We had a big argument just before I left for London. Vil was pissed I was ditching the band.”
“You didn’t have a choice,” I remind him.
“He didn’t care. Said I could get emancipated.”
“New York doesn’t have a statute for emancipation. Remember we researched it when our parents told us we couldn’t see one another anymore? You can only file an emancipation motion in conjunction with another case.”
“I told him all that. Said if it was an option I’d have done it so I could stay with you. That’s when he started threatening me. He said he was going to steal you away. He swore before the year was out you would be his.”
“What a dick.” I rub at a tense spot between my brows. “He was always jealous of you. You were talented and clearly going places. He hated you were more popular than him at school.”
“He was in love with you,” Jared says.
I shake my head. “He just wanted what you had.”
“I saw the way he looked at you. I think he only got with Cayenne to make you jealous in the hope you’d ditch me for him or to stay close to you.”
I clear my throat and admit something I should have told my boyfriend back then. “He hit on me a few times.”
Jared’s spine stiffens, and a muscle pops in his jaw.
“I always shot him down.” I rush to reassure him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks in a gritted tone, scrubbing his hands down his face.
“Because I didn’t want the band to break up over me. I knew it would start World War Three.”
“You still should have told me.”
“I know.” I hug my legs tighter. “I should have done so many things differently, but I was a lost, scared kid trying to survive.”
“I was in so much pain after he sent that picture. For years, I tortured myself imagining you with him.”
“I swear it was only that one time, and if I’d been sober, I would never have gone there. I despised the guy.”
“I believe you.”
His words wrap around my heart like a comfort blanket. “Thank you, and I’m sorry for the pain it caused you. I hate that I fed into his scheme to hurt you.”
“I looked him up about five years ago,” he says. “He’s working a day job in insurance and playing shitty bars at night with his equally shitty band. Got some girl knocked up at eighteen, and he married her.” A frown creases his brow as bile swims up my throat. “He looked miserable as sin in all the photos online, and I got satisfaction from it. Petty maybe, but he did me dirty. He knew what fucking you would do to me, yet he had to drive the knife in deeper. He knew that photo would gut me, yet he still sent it.”
“I am really sorry, Jared.” Now I know he wasn’t cheating on me, I feel even worse about sleeping with his ex-friend and bandmate. Although I hated I had sex with Anvil, I remember thinking at the time I hoped Anvil would tell him. I wanted Jared to hurt as much as I was hurting. But I had it all wrong. So wrong. “If it helps, I was disgusted with myself, and I made sure to avoid him. It got easier after I was expelled from West Lorian.”
His eyes almost bug out of his head. “You got fucking expelled?”
“Yeah. Wasn’t my finest hour. As punishment, Dad sent me to the public school around the corner.” That’s when my descent into anxiety and depression really took root. If Dad had wanted to save me from myself, he should have sent me anywhere but there.
He winces. “I can’t imagine you there. It was rough as fuck.”
“It was hell on earth, and it only made things worse.”
“Go back to the beginning again,” Jared says, and I’m glad we have moved past Anvil. It’s one of my biggest regrets, and I don’t want to dwell on it. “I need to understand things from your perspective.”
“Like I said, I was trying to reach you, but I thought you had tossed me aside almost immediately. I sank into a deep depression.”
That’s putting it mildly. I should tell him about the baby, but it’s only going to hurt him, and what good will it do now? We can’t rewrite history. Jared is expecting a baby with another woman. Engaged to another woman. There is no benefit in sharing this truth—it would only be painful, for both of us, and he’ll get closure without it—so I work around it.
“I was a mess without you,” I truthfully admit. “I was crying all the time, and then I just wanted to blot it all out, so I started doing drugs and drinking myself into a stupor. My grades dropped. I got expelled. I got arrested for shoplifting a couple times. Dad was so mad. He told me continuously how much of a disappointment I was. Stopped me from going to art class. Forced me to attend the public school where I fell in with a shady crew. I barely graduated. I only attended NYU, to study languages, ’cause Dad pulled strings. Spent the first couple college years in a drugged-up-drunk haze until I almost overdosed, and it brought me to my senses.”
