“Ugh!” Chris kicked off his Vans and let himself fall on the bed. “How could I be so damn stupid?”
He fisted his hair with both hands and squeezed his eyes shut to prevent the tears from falling. Everything in his body stung. His temples were pulsing with violence. His heart was contorting. There was a pressure coiling from his stomach and up to his throat that made it so hard to breathe.
An overwhelming urge to tear his skin and bleed bit the back of his head. Chris pressed the mounds of his palms against his eyes.
Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.
Curling into a ball, another frustrated scream battered his lungs when he didn’t let it out. But this time it hurt, digging in deep. He wanted to get up and break everything around him. Shriek. Cry. Hear his knuckles crack as he punched the wall. Luckily for the owners of the hotel, he couldn’t move. The weight of it all was crashing, and like a riptide, it was pulling him back in against his will.
Chris had never been good at dealing with or expressing emotions, that much he could admit. He didn’t understand why. Aside from his unsupportive father, he’d been raised with love. His mother had always encouraged him to open up and be himself without worrying about what others would think. He’d actually become a tattoo artist because she had pushed him to do what he liked instead of forcing him to study business management bullshit like the old man wanted.
“If you don’t go to college and get a respectable degree, you’ll be a nobody your entire life.”
Fucking thank you, Dad.
But he simply couldn’t expose himself like that. Being a recluse in his mind was safer. What had happened today reinforced his logic. He’d come here, ready to undress his heart before Marc, only to find him kissing his ex. If the guitarist wasn’t all over the place before, that shit had turned him into a complete train wreck.
Chained in the depths of a hole he thought he had left behind, Chris felt trapped. Not only did he not know what to do with this ball of unbridled emotions, but he couldn’t leave until the following afternoon, when his train was going back to Munich. Or maybe he could. Who cared about a paid hotel room or a ticket? He had nothing else to do in this fucking city.
Still, something was tying him here.
As furious as he was, a part of him was dying to see Marc. Even if it was to punch him in his handsome fucking face. After accepting what he felt for his friend, Chris couldn’t hold the stream now. It was raging, and he needed to let it flow. Was actually debating whether to pick up one of his calls—the bassist had been trying to contact him non-stop for almost an hour.
However, it was fun torturing him. Petty and childish, he didn’t care. Marc deserved it for making him feel like he owned the world one day and the unworthiest of shits the next.
The phone went off again. It was on the desk with the rest of his stuff, yet Chris didn’t need to look at the screen to know who it was. Exhausted from the six-hour trip, he let it ring until it sent the bassist to voicemail for the tenth time and rolled onto his other side.
Chris shuddered, wishing he’d fall asleep, curled in bed like a whiny little boy instead of the fucking grown man he was. He wasn’t cold, but the emotional blow he’d suffered was taking a toll on him. Love was so overrated.
The phone vibrated again.
And again.
And again.
With all sorts of anger and discomfort shaking his nerves, Chris sat up, glaring at the evil thing and its flashing screen across the room. His jaw was ticking and there was this itch in his brain he couldn’t scratch that was annoying the shit out of him.
Fuck it. It’ll be expensive as fuck, but I bet I can get on the last train tonight.
As Chris stomped to the desk, he grabbed the damn phone. “What?”
He could answer, but nowhere in the rulebook did it say he needed to be nice.
Marc panted as if he had been running a marathon. Or fucking. Who knew? “Where are you?”
“Not like it matters. I’m leaving,” he said as he gathered all his crap.
When he’d arrived in Hamburg, before going to Marc’s family home to surprise him, Chris had stopped here to take a shower and the bathroom was still a mess. Funny how the bassist had been the one surprising him in the end.
“Are you at the station?”
“No.”
“Chris, cut the crap. Where the fuck are you?”
“You’re the one sneaking around with other people and still feel entitled to use that tone? Not good, Zimmer.”
“It’s not—fuck. Yeah, it was what it looked like.”
