Rivers

I was a disaster years in the making.

Haunted by my mother’s death, I tried to drown myself in booze and drugs to cover the pain. But when I eventually lost Stella, I lost myself for good. Traveling through the past five years like a ghost, I don’t even recognize this life as my own.

As soon as the cab dropped me off from the airport, I threw my stuff in the back seat and took off to see her before I changed my mind. Two hours later, I shift my SUV into park, sitting in the driveway of my brother’s house knowing I’m going in there alone. I didn’t think showing up at her work unannounced would have her dropping her life to breathe life back into mine, but it didn’t exactly go as planned either.

Sometimes, I get caught up in the image I portray in my day to day. To the outside world, I’m the bass guitarist for a world-famous band. My face is on the cover of magazines, and I have the world at my fingertips. But they don’t see the dark I carry inside, the grieving I never do because the devastation overwhelms me. I’ve become a master of disguise, hiding who I am on the inside.

Smile for the camera.

Play for the fans.

Do the paparazzi dance, pretending nothing’s fucking wrong.

A week ago, I was at a party in New York City celebrating my band’s success. Surrounded by my brothers and bandmates, our producer, mentor, and idol—Johnny Outlaw—his wife who helped us launch a line of apparel, Holli Hughes, and our manager, Tommy. I dragged my hand along the glass edge that separated me from the street fifty-five stories below. The world at my fingertips. The toast of the town. All the money in the world.

Something inside me is unsettled. We’re unsettled because we never closed that chapter of our lives. We ended too fast, drastically, and without parting words to satisfy a broken heart to carry on and find someone new to love, but my heart is incapable of loving anyone but her.

Fame can’t heal a broken heart.

Money won’t fill a body missing its soul.

Only a soul mate can reconcile the two. And Stella is mine.

Six days, five interviews, four performances, and three cities later, I set my suitcase down in the living room and toss my backpack on a chair. Letting my jacket slide down my arms, I throw that and my hat on the chair. I look around the old house, not knowing what to do with myself.

I had gotten a text before leaving Vancouver this morning that my sister-in-law, Hannah, had the fridge stocked for me. Jet, my oldest brother, Hannah, and my nephew Alfie moved out of this house a few months ago when they made Los Angeles their new home. Since they had my niece a few months ago, the house here in Austin hasn’t been a priority. I’m taking advantage of the vacancy before it goes on the market. It will be a nice crash pad for the next ten days.

Dead tired, I drag my ass to the fridge and pull out a beer while taking a quick tally of the food inside. I’m pretty set while I’m here. I hold my beer up in silent praise for Hannah.

My stomach growls, so I take a pizza from the freezer and heat the oven.

It’s weird to be back in Austin, a place where Stella exists not but a few miles away. I was drawn to her the moment I heard her say my name again. That connection we had before was still there. I wanted to touch her, kiss her, and hold her again. It was painful to keep that distance between us, going against every fiber of my being.

She looked so beautiful, my pretty little mess, except she’s not mine. Her words come back like a vengeance and gut me once again. “I’m taken.”

Taken. Such a strange way to say she’s dating someone. Taken? Not I’m in a committed relationship. Not I’m seeing someone. Not I’m in love with someone else. But taken. Taken? She’s taken with some guy? She’s not available?

I shove the pizza pan in the oven and lean against the counter. Drinking my beer, I stare at the oven between gulps. I finish a can before the oven timer goes off and grab another. After seeing her, drunk is not a bad state for me to be in.

Eating.

Drinking.

Passing out.

I pound down the Totino’s pizza and five beers before I’m lying on the couch staring at a TV I’ve not turned on. The blank screen allows my thoughts to flow back to Stella five years ago.

My clothes are on the lawn, my textbooks flying through the air and landing at my feet when I show up outside our apartment. Stella’s yelling so loud that I make the mistake to try to quiet her before the cops are called. “Shhhh. Calm down, Stella.”

“How dare you tell me what to do! Screw you!” She flings a book in my direction, but it falls short from hitting me. “Where’s your new girlfriend, Rivers?” She disappears inside again, but I can hear her loud and clear, along with the whole apartment complex. “Or did you have sex with Naomi and actually think you could come back to me?”

When she steps out on the balcony, yelling for me to confess, I can only repeat the truth, “I didn’t cheat on you, Stella.”

“Really? What happened then?”

Her eyes are crazed, her mouth pressed so tight her lips pale. Her hands are bound in fists from her fury as she stares down from the second floor. My mind spins as I stumble between what I can tell her and what I can’t. I stupidly gave my word to Naomi to keep her secret until she’s settled. “Stella, I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because she asked me not to tell anyone.”

“Why would she ask my boyfriend to do something that he can’t talk about? You understand the problem with that, right?”

“I do, but I also need you to trust me when I say—”

“I can’t believe you did this to us. I can’t believe you would hurt me like this.” As tears run down her cheeks, she screams, “I hate you, Rivers.”

. . . Stuffed and almost drunk, I let my eyes dip closed, hoping I wake up with less pain than I feel in my chest. Just for a second . . .

A knock on the door startles me awake. I rub my brow and open my eyes. My wits are a little hazy as I try to manage the jet lag from flying half the day.

Another rap on the door rattles my head, and I stand. “Okay, I’m fucking coming.” I glance at the time before I swing the door open. “It’s eleven fucking fifteen, what the fu—”

“I’m sorry. I know it’s late.” Oh fuck. My pretty little mess . . . I’m wide-awake now.

She’s breathtaking. Stella’s hair is long, longer than she used to wear it. It flows over her shoulder with a slight wave that reminds me of when we used to sit on the banks of the Pedernales River watching the water flow over the rock bed.

Her face is clean of makeup like she used to be when she came to bed. Downplaying her great body, she’s hiding it beneath a pair of skintight fitness pants and baggy old white Hanes T-shirt that hits her mid-thigh. She always looked amazing in everything she wore, but when she wore my T-shirts was my favorite.

I used to read her so well, but now, I’m not sure what she’s thinking. I must stare too long because she asks, “Why are you back?”

“I live here.”

A car drives by, drawing her attention to the street behind her until it passes. She crosses her arms and keeps her eyes to the side. “I don’t understand.”

“You haven’t in a long time.”

When she looks back up at me, she licks her lips before tugging the bottom one under her teeth. “What does that mean?”

My heart beats hard in my chest, and I start to wonder if she can hear it. “Why are you here?”

“To know why you are.”

“Can’t I come home?”

“Yes, of course you can. As far as I know, you do regularly. But why did you come to see me?” She shifts and sighs, her arms falling back to her sides. When she pinches the bridge of her nose, she squeezes her eyes closed. The green pastures of her eyes find mine again. “You were in Vancouver this morning.” She was never afraid to broach a subject head-on.

“It was time I came back.” I could tell her I needed a break from being hounded by the paparazzi. These days, the band, my two brothers and our other guitarist, are generally stalked everywhere we go. With a successful album still hanging around the charts after a year, we became an overnight success story. Only took us eight years, but it’s a catchier headline to pretend our rise to fame was instant. “I wanted to see you again.”

“No.” Her tone is steady, her reply curt. “You don’t get to decide that on a whim when I’m still trying to recover from the last time I saw you. You screwed up, Rivers. Not me.”

I shouldn’t love hearing her say my name when it’s at the end of an accusation, but it sounds so good rolling off her tongue. I remember the way she used to say it as if I was her everything. When I was her everything.

I lost my anger over losing her without getting a fair shot to fix things a long time ago. Maybe it was selfish to come back without warning. But if I had, she wouldn’t be here now. So I get why she’s angry, but it doesn’t change the fact that I can’t live without giving us one last shot at redemption. “Is that why you came by? You had to get that off your chest?”

“There used to be so much I needed to get off my chest when it came to you,” she says, narrowing her eyes. “But that was all lost when I moved on. The real question is, why are you doing this to me now?”

“I’m not trying to do anything to you. I wanted to see you. It’s that simple.”

“Nothing’s simple when it comes to us.”

“You’re right, but I still wanted to check in on you and Meadow.”

Her head jolts back. “Don’t you dare pretend you care about me or my sister. And if that’s the only reason you came by, then let me put your concerns to bed. Meadow and I are doing just fine.”

I run my hand over my forehead and into my hair in frustration, not sure how to break through her barrier of anger. Her pretty eyes follow the motion of my hand, and the tension in her tight expression seems to falter. “Look, Rivers. You showing up at my workplace out of the blue was about you. Did you think about what I might want? Or how I would feel? If you showing up would be good for me?”

She makes a good argument, and as much as I want to blame the beers or the jet lag, I can only blame myself. A feeling of desperation, of losing her again, of her slipping away fills my gut and moves higher to my heart. “You’re all I think about.” I went about this all wrong, blowing this chance the minute I showed up not thinking this through and not putting her first. “I’m sorry, Stella. I knew you wouldn’t take a call from me.”

“You’re right.” When she backs away, I reach for her before I can stop the automatic reaction. When her eyes catch me, she stills. I slowly drop my hand to my side again. I fucking hate doing it, but I do anyway. Her voice is quiet, the fight weighing her down by the way her shoulders lower, and then she says, “You made your choice a long time ago—”

“You made it for us,” I reply, matter-of-factly, keeping my tone as neutral as I can, hoping she’ll stay. “I would have made a different decision.”

“No,” she says, raising her voice. “I may have thrown you out, but you left. I wasn’t worth fighting for then, so I’m not going to make amends now. Don’t waste your life waiting on something that will never happen.”

“You can’t walk away—”

“Watch me.” She challenges me with a tight-lipped smirk.

As much as she wants to be the one in charge of this fight . . . err, discussion, her body language—the way she peeks back at me, the look of curiosity in her eyes, and her hesitation to actually leave—tells me otherwise. I’m grappling, taking a risk by pushing a button, but she’s leaving me no other choice. “You sure you want to do that?”

She stops and turns back around. She doesn’t realize I think she’s stronger because she stays.

“You know me, Stella. Want to know how I know? Because I’m in your blood, baby. There is no you without me, and there’s no me without you.”

Her gaze stays locked on the chipped paint of the porch when she braces her hand against the column. I wish I could take away the pain she carries inside, and the uncertainty that should never cloud this beautiful woman’s mind. Her eyes flash to mine, grounding me to the spot, but then the fire inside dims. “Please don’t show up . . . again.”

She gets her message across with less edge this time, but it makes me curious what dulled her spirit. It would be quicker to read War and Peace than trying to read the myriad of emotions flickering through her eyes as she says one thing but still looks at me as if it was a question. I answer her the only way I know how—being upfront and direct. “You came over to tell me you didn’t want to see me again?”

She pauses on the steps and then without responding walks down the path toward her car.

Good or bad, if I didn’t cause some old feelings to rise inside her, she wouldn’t have bothered to stop by. “Hey, Stella?” With the car door open in her hands, she stops with one foot in already and looks back. “It’s damn good to see you again.”

Shaking her head and rolling her eyes, she gets inside the beige sedan that is just so wrong for her and slams the door closed.

The gears grind as she takes the corner down the street, causing me to chuckle. I wait out on that front porch until I can’t see her anymore and then head inside. The lock clicks, and I head to the bedroom not only feeling like a stranger in this house but also in this city that’s my own hometown. Is this a home if she’s not in it?

The bedroom is full of hand-me-downs and thrift store finds in need of a bonfire that somehow survived my older brother’s bachelor days. Jet and Hannah took what they wanted when they moved to LA over the summer and bought new stuff for a house in the Hollywood Hills.

Still wound up from the late night visit, I need to vent. I’d call and bug Tulsa, my youngest brother and the band’s drummer, but I’m pretty sure he meant what he said when we parted ways at the airport. “Don’t call me. I’m going to be indisposed for the next three days.” He clicks his tongue. “Buried deep inside—”

“Got it,” I said, cutting him off.

He’s still a newlywed, though it’s been a few months since he got hitched. He and Nikki, his wife, go at it like fucking rabbits. That reminds me, I need to text our band manager, Tommy, and tell him to stop booking me in hotel rooms next to theirs.

Although I flew home with a bandmate, Ridge Carson, I decide not to bug others with my fucking issues. He came back to Austin to have a break, not listen to me complain.

While mentally taking a count of the days until I have to be back in LA, I walk into the bathroom.

One month until the band has to be back in the studio.

Ten days before I head back to California.

Nine days to figure out the next chapter in my personal life. I start the shower. When steam starts filling the small bathroom, I undress with a grin lingering on my lips from my late-night visitor.

With my career on the rise, and my family settled in LA, it makes sense to relocate permanently. But I’m here to either say goodbye forever or be hers forever. And I won’t know the answer until I’ve given it my best shot.

Stepping into the shower, I wash my body—over the three crow tattoos that represent my brothers and me, then clean the skin where the star that is there for my once true north marks my skin.

My smile fades when I think of her earlier parting words.

Taken. I really fucking hate that word.