I’d tell myself whatever I needed to, to convince myself to keep away fromhim.
But in the meagre hours since we’d rolled out of Vancouver on this tour, I was already considering many more interesting ways I could douse thatfire.
Or stokeit.
Everything just seemed so different away from home. Maybe it was like the Vegas thing; like whatever we did here, on the road, somehow didn’t count orsomething?
Or maybe that as just anexcuse.
It counted. I knew itdid.
Because what Zane and I did in Vegas changedeverything.
There was no taking it back. No pretending it didn’thappen.
Even if we got a divorce today, Zane would never let me forget what I’d done, and he’d probably never stop digging to find out if it meant more to me than I’d told him itdid.
In the days and weeks that followed our wedding, when it sank in for Zane how mad I was that the whole thing was real, he’d accused me of being full of shit. I’d told him that even if the marriage was legal, it still wasn’trealbecause I didn’t know what I was agreeing to when I said thosevows.
When he refused to agree to an annulment or a divorce, and I was the angriest I’d ever been with him, I’d told him that none of it matteredanyway.
The marriage didn’tmatter.
But it did matter, and we both knewit.
No matter how much we fought about it, no matter how much we disagreed, no matter how much I told him I wanted a divorce and he denied me, no matter how many times he slept with other women… itmattered.
All of it mattered, because we were friends. We were coworkers. Our lives were intertwined in our shared passion forDirty.
And we cared about eachother.
We were still married, even though we weren’t living like a married couple. And the truth was we were still married because we both still wanted tobe.
Because neither of us was willing to let itgo.
Which meant that whatever we did on this tour would matter. Alot.
If I let myself cross the line with Zane, I’d just be giving him another glimpse of the truth. Sex revealed my attraction to him, but more than that, it let him closer to my heart and all my fucked-up feelings forhim.
It made me vulnerable to him, which should’ve made me hellbent on staying the fuck away fromhim…
He wrote a song forme.
I grabbed my phone and opened my music app. I pulled up “I’ll Go,” put my earbuds in and listened, really listened, closer than I ever hadbefore.
It was a song of longing and devotion. Of wanting someone who was far away, out of reach… yet so close you could taste it. Someone who was standing right next to you, but you couldn’thave.
I’ll go where youare
gray eyes, sofar
with you (come withme)
I’ll go there (withyou)
wherever youare
And hearing Zane sing those words, knowing they were about me… I got a giant lump in my throat as the familiar, dangerous longing flared to life in mychest.
