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Chapter 37

Sloan

♪Keep Your Head Up | Ben Howard

Zane brought DayQuil and NyQuil. I took the NyQuil. I needed to sleep. I needed to not think about what Jason had just told me. It was too enormous and far-reaching to even comprehend in my current state.

A decade.

This would be our life for the next decade.

I wouldn’t see Oliver grow up. I wouldn’t paint. I wouldn’t even have a home. What would be the point? We’d never be there for more than a few months.

And there was no other choice. I wouldn’t ever leave him. That was the most final thing of all. Our fates were bound—what happened to him happened to me.

The way my body cried for sleep after this news scared me because it felt like before, when I used to sleep through my depression. Only this time I hadn’t lost anyone but myself, swallowed whole by Jason’s career.

I waited until it was 6:00 a.m. in California, and I called Kristen.

“God, you sound like you have the black lung,” she said, when I launched into a coughing fit instead of saying hello.

“I know. I’ve been super sick.” I wiped my nose with a tissue. Tucker pushed his face under my arm on the bed like he knew I needed it.

She snickered. “Did Jason offer you the penis-cillin yet?”

“Uh, what?”

“Men think their penis is the cure for everything. I swear to God, I could have some terminal disease and Josh would be over here bouncing his eyebrows like, ‘Gurl, I know what you need.’”

My snort of laughter thrust me into another coughing fit.

“So how’s the groupie life?” she asked once I’d recovered.

I gave her the recap of the last week since I’d talked to her and told her what had happened this morning.

“Damn,” she said. “That sucks. What are you gonna do?”

“Nothing. What can I do? It’s his job.”

“The guy’s like a nomad. You’re just going to walk the Earth with him for the next ten years?”

“It won’t be the whole time,” I said defensively. “We’ll get breaks.”

“I should have known when you told me the dude lived in a trailer that this wasn’t a put-roots-down kind of guy.” Oliver fussed in the background. “You do not travel well either. Remember in the ninth grade when Mom took us to Coronado and your nose bled the whole time?”

I snorted. “And she kept saying, ‘This is truly unacceptable, Sloan,’ like I was doing it on purpose?”

We fell into laughter again and my mood lifted a bit.

“Look,” she said. “If this was Josh, then I’d go full nomad too. If you love him, do what you gotta do. But try and take better care of yourself.”

“I don’t even know how to take care of myself out here.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “And I miss you guys.”

She paused for a long moment. “We miss you too.”

We talked for a few more minutes and then the NyQuil kicked in. When I hung up with her, I did feel a little better.

Maybe she was right. Maybe Zane was right too. I had to figure this out. I needed more sleep. I needed to exercise and eat better.