As I went up to bed after talking with Seth, just before dawn, I felt kinda better, in a way. And yet… worse, somehow.

There was just so much pain in Seth’s past—in all of our pasts, when it came to him, and Jessa—that I understood why the guys just wanted it to go away. Why they wanted Seth to just go away.

They believed he’d hurt their girl, their collective little sister, and they couldn’t stand for that. They felt betrayed by him. And that betrayal hurt all the more because they’d loved him.

Maybe, deep down, they still loved him.

After sitting with him tonight and talking with him, looking into his eyes and listening to him talk, I knew I still did.

I wandered into my bedroom, the room where I always slept when I stayed here—the largest of the guest bedrooms, overlooking the cliffs and the ocean beyond. I tossed my phone on the bed, more or less dreading actually looking at it, and headed into the en suite bathroom. I took a hot shower, trying to let the tension of the day roll off, and thought through what Seth had told me.

After hearing what he had to say about Jessa, I could understand that Brody or even Jesse wouldn’t want to hear it. But I still wasn’t sure what to believe myself.

I didn’t feel like Seth was lying to me.

But I’d learned, living in and out of the spotlight, existing in two somewhat separate but parallel realities—my rock star life and my real life—that there were two sides to every story.

And one side didn’t necessarily have to be wrong for the other side to be right.

Take me and Jesse.

We were both in that relationship together. But I was in love. He wasn’t.

Our breakup, for me, was heartrending. For him, it was probably more of a relief.

There were definitely two sides to that story, and on the best of days, they didn’t gel.

After my shower, I slipped into a robe, dried my hair, and forced myself to check my phone. Predictably, calls had started rolling in from everyone and their dog. By now, they all knew Seth was here with me. Probably Jude, who would’ve heard about it from Flynn, had told someone—Jesse?—and the news had spread, like it did in the Dirty world—like a fucking virus. And they all wanted to know what the hell was going on.

Jesse included. But I didn’t call him back.

Brody had called, three times, but I didn’t call him back, either.

What the hell would I say?

Jude himself had checked in, and I texted back to let him know everything was fine. Flynn would be keeping in contact with him, but I knew he’d appreciate hearing back from me personally. The last thing I needed was to sound the alarms with Jude and have him flying out here to raise hell. But I did have one question for him.

Me: Why did you let Seth into the audition?

His response came within a minute.

Jude: Because he asked.

A typical Jude response.

I noticed, though, that he didn’t ask me why I’d brought Seth to Hawaii.

He didn’t ask me anything at all.

Jude and I weren’t exactly close enough that I felt the urge to dig any deeper… or explain myself. Best not to crack open that can of worms over text message. Keeping the members of Dirty safe and secure was Jude’s job; a job he’d done, and done well, for a decade. But he was also Jesse’s best friend, which meant I wasn’t all that comfortable having him all up in my personal business.

For the most part, he respected that.

I turned off the lamp and sat down on the bed in the dark, listening to the soft roar of the ocean through the open windows as the sky began to lighten, totally unable to sleep… and eventually, I decided to return Dylan’s call. It was still early in L.A., though not as ungodly early as it was here. He’d probably be asleep anyway…

But he answered on the first ring. “Hey. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “How’re you?”

“What’s going on? I heard Seth’s with you.”

I took a breath. “He is.”

“Why?”

“Because…” How to answer that, exactly? “I invited him to come to Woo’s with me.”

“Uh-huh. Why?”

“Because I wanted to talk to him and this is where I was headed. So here we are.”

“Elle. Everyone’s worried. The guys. Ash… Everyone wants to know what’s going on.”

“I know. But there’s no need to worry, okay?”

“Elle…”

“You can tell them I’m fine.”

Dylan was silent a moment. “You think he’s fine?”

I wasn’t even sure how to answer that. “Uh, yeah. I think so. I mean, he probably knows everyone’s gonna be upset that I brought him here—”

“Okay,” Dylan said. “But I was talking about Ash.”

Oh.

“You think he’s okay with this?”

“I didn’t ask him to be okay with this, Dylan. I don’t need his permission anymore than I need yours.”

“You’re not seeing me, Elle.”

“I’m not seeing him, either.”

“Since when?”

I sighed. It wasn’t like I’d expected Dylan not to find out about me and Ash. I never told him that we’d hooked up at Jesse’s wedding or that we’d been hooking up, casually, ever since. But I also never explicitly asked—or expected—Ash not to tell him. And even if Ash didn’t say a word, Dylan was close enough to both of us to figure it out on his own.

“Yes, Ash and I had a thing,” I admitted. “But it’s over now, and it wasn’t a real thing anyway.”

Silence again.

Then: “Does he know that?”

I didn’t respond to that. Of course Ash knew it was over. It had been dying for a while now.

But did he know it wasn’t real?

“I’m gonna go, Dylan. I’ve got messages coming in.” It was true enough; my phone had jingled with incoming texts while I was talking to him. The calls and texts would probably be flooding in all fucking day.

I felt weary just thinking about it.

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine. And I’ve got Flynn.” I felt the need to say it, to allay his worries.

“Okay. Take care of yourself,” he said. “Call me for anything.”

“I will.”

“I’ll check in later.”

“Great.”

I hung up from that conversation feeling even worse than before.

I didn’t love anyone in the band worrying about me. Normally, I’d find it annoying, like they were playing big brother and getting nosey, and I hated that shit. But Dylan was different. Dylan didn’t worry about much, and he knew me; he knew I took care of myself, he knew I had my shit together, that I had a whole team of people to help me keep my shit together, and he knew I didn’t need or want him to worry.

But I could hear it over the line. He was worried about this.

I checked my new messages, grudgingly, and found a couple of texts from Maggie.

Maggie: Call Brody. He’s freaking out.

Maggie: Let me know if u want to talk. Off the record.

Shit… If Maggie said Brody was “freaking out,” things were not good.

I sent her a quick Thank you for the off-the-record offer. Maybe I’d take her up on it in the future. Not right now, though.

Right now, I still hadn’t figured out my own take on the whole Seth situation. I wasn’t ready to discuss it with anyone else.

Me: How’s Jesse?

I sent the question to Maggie, like I had many times this past year when I was concerned about him, or curious, or whatever, but didn’t want to speak to him directly.

Maggie: Not sure. Katie says he’s been out all night drinking with Jude and before that he was pacing a lot.

Maggie: Whatever that means.

Maggie: It’s a shit storm over here.

She punctuated that with a smiling shit emoji.

I cracked a smile.

Me: Sorry for causing the shit storm.

Maggie: Not your fault.

Maggie: Men.

She sent another smiling shit emoji.

Then a call came through. The pop-up on the screen read: Jesse.

Wonderful…

I took a breath and answered the call. “Hi.”

“Hey. How you doing?” He sounded tense. Really tense.

Drunk?

“Good.”

“You at Woo’s?” His voice was clipped, gruff.

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“A few days. Maybe a week. Why?”

“Seth there with you?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“What do you want, Jesse? I’m on vacation, okay?”

“With Seth Brothers?”

“As it turns out.”

“And how did that turn out…?”

“Jesse. I really don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“Like hell you don’t.”

“Jesse—”

“You better start explaining to someone, ’cause Brody is climbing the fucking walls—”

“And I’m sorry Brody’s upset. But this has nothing to do with Dirty.”

It didn’t. Not right now.

Right now, it had to do with me and Seth Brothers and that was about it.

“Then what the fuck does it have to do with, Elle?”

“Honestly, it’s none of your business.”

Jesse huffed and said, “You gonna call Brody?”

“Soon.”

“Make it sooner.”

“Goodbye, Jesse.” I didn’t wait for him to say goodbye. I hung up.

This was nothing new, exactly.

So Brody was losing his shit. And Jesse was pissed at me. As usual, everyone had a reaction to every fucking thing I did. An expectation of me. A demand.

Everybody wanted something from me, whether they had a right to or not.

But there was one person I hadn’t heard from yet. The one person who actually had a right to demand to know what was going on here, if anyone did.

So I called Jessa Mayes myself.

No big surprise, Brody picked up. Once the auditions wrapped, he would’ve been on the first plane home to Vancouver to be with her. Though he sounded remarkably calm when he told me, “The band knows Seth is there with you.”

“And let me guess. They’re not happy about it.”

“I’d say they’re confused, Elle.”

“We’re just talking,” I told him. “You don’t want to talk to him, and Jesse doesn’t want to talk to him, but I do, Brody.”

“And you think this is the way to go about that? There are ways to handle this, Elle. Formal channels. You shouldn’t even be speaking with Seth Brothers, much less jetting off to Hawaii with him, without a written contract beforehand to protect yourself.”

“I don’t need a contract to have a conversation with an old friend,” I told him.

There was an ugly silence, at the end of which he said, in a low voice, “You need to think about protecting the band, Elle.”

“This isn’t about the band.”

“Then what the hell is it about?”

“Can you please put Jessa on?”

“She’s busy.”

“Is she there with you? I called to talk to her.”

“Brody!” I heard Jessa, somewhere in the background, and I could just picture her: standing there with her hands on her hips as Brody held her phone out of reach.

I took a deep breath and forged on, forcing out the words I did not particularly want to say, but had to. “Brody, don’t you think that if I’m sitting here with a man who raped Jessa Mayes, that I have a problem with that, and maybe I need to hear it from her if that’s not the case?”

I heard some fumbling and then Jessa’s voice again, muffled. “Jesus, Brody!” There was more fumbling, then Jessa was on the line. “He didn’t… Is that what Brody told you? That Seth raped me?”

“No,” I said, relieved to have her on the phone. “Not directly. But that’s what he said to Seth when he broke his nose, right in front of the band.”

“Oh. My. God. You broke Seth’s nose?” That was muffled, and clearly aimed at Brody. I heard him grumble a reply, but I couldn’t make out the words.

“We, uh, all heard him say it,” I told her. “So you can imagine how that’s left us all… disturbed.”

“Um, yeah. I’d say so.” Jessa did not sound happy. Clearly, she had no idea what actually happened that night. Had no idea what Brody had accused Seth of in front of all of us. “Seth Brothers is not a rapist, and he didn’t do anything to me. So if you hear Brody or my brother say any such thing, you can tell them to—oh, God. Yuuuck.”

I sat up, alarm spiking through me. “You okay?”

“Ugh… The baby just rolled over. I swear, it’s like having an alien inside you.”

“Oh.” I exhaled. “Sorry to be calling you with this, Jessa, really. I know it’s bad timing.” It was. Clearly.

“It’s fine…” But there was a groan of discomfort in her voice.

“I’ll let you go. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just really need to know… Are you okay with me talking to Seth? He’s here with me, in Hawaii. We’re at Woo’s place.”

“Elle, you don’t need my permission. You can talk to whoever you want to.” Then she whispered into the phone, “Brody’s pissed, though.”

“I noticed.”

“I’m sorry, I should really go. The baby’s all kicky in the morning and Brody’s gonna pop a knuckle squeezing his stress ball. I need those hands to massage my hips and my swollen feet or I won’t get any sleep. I barely slept all night.”

“Of course,” I said. “Tell him, for what it’s worth… I’m sorry. I know he doesn’t want you upset right now.”

“I’m not upset, Elle. Just…” Her voice softened. “Be careful, okay? Addicts can be… unpredictable.”

“I will.”

I didn’t know for sure if I could believe her, that she was one hundred percent okay with me talking to Seth. But whatever problem she might’ve had with it, she clearly wasn’t going to try to put it on me.

And at least now I knew, for sure, that the man in the cottage outside wasn’t a sex offender. So that was something.

A rather large something.

“Brody says he’ll call you later,” Jessa said. “Take care, Elle.”

“Take care of yourself, and that baby.”

When she’d hung up, I flopped back on the bed, relieved.

And yet…

Even though Jessa herself had just adamantly stated, right in front of Brody, that Seth had never abused her like Brody seemed to think he did… I did not see everyone just doing a massive one-eighty and welcoming him back to the band tomorrow with open arms.

I tossed my phone aside and groaned aloud.

What a fucking mess.

I still couldn’t blame Brody, though. He was, as usual, trying to protect the band. He was trying to protect me. And of course, he was trying to protect Jessa and their baby.

He’d gotten her pregnant, accidentally, sometime after Jesse’s wedding. Basically, as soon as they started sleeping together, as far as I knew. But despite what had happened today, I had never seen Brody happier. Jessa and that baby were everything to him.

She was almost seven months along, and given that she was a slim girl to begin with, she’d gained a lot of baby weight. It was a big stress on her body and she’d confided in me that she was having a lot of joint pain and discomfort. Nothing terribly unusual, according to her doctor, but I’d be disappointed in Brody if he wasn’t worried about her.

I didn’t love adding stress to his plate with all that he was already dealing with, and I knew, no matter how devoted he was to Dirty, his family—Jessa and that baby—would always come first.

But as I shrugged off my robe and slipped in under the covers, and I thought about how this day had ended, I knew it in my heart: I wouldn’t change a thing.

There was something compelling me to talk things through with Seth. To try to get to the heart of the matter.

Maybe because I’d never been able to believe, no matter what had gone down between Seth and Jessa, that he could’ve done any such thing as force himself on her, either physically or by manipulating her.

And if Brody’s accusation really was unfounded, as Jessa herself had just told me, then the band had no reason to condemn Seth for preying on Jessa. She was young when they got together—they both were. But could he really be blamed, a nineteen-year-old young man, for screwing around with a sixteen-year-old girl?

Not in my world.

When I was sixteen, I’d dated a twenty-two year old, and none of my friends had bat an eye. Even my parents had been fine with it, once they met him.

All that left, really—if Brody and Jesse could put aside their bloated male egos and forgive Seth for having a relationship with Jessa at all—was the fact that Seth had done drugs with Jessa behind our backs.

Maybe that was a much more difficult trespass to forgive.

Because in the end, maybe that drug use had driven her away from us.

Away from Brody.

And as I considered that, I knew… Brody would have a hell of a hard time ever forgiving that.

As I lay here, alone, unable to sleep, my thoughts turned to Seth, alone in his cottage. In my thoughts of him over the years, he was always alone. I could never picture him any other way. A lone wolf; that’s how I’d always thought of Seth.

But there was something about him tonight… something I’d sensed while we spoke. Something I recognized in myself: a discontent.

Not that he seemed unhappy, exactly. Maybe, now that he was clean, he was content with everything about his life, except for that one essential thing that was missing: Dirty.

I was definitely happy with my life, except for that one thing that was missing.

That incredibly crucial thing.

And I wondered, was Seth lonely, like me?

He didn’t seem lonely. Not like he had when I first met him… years ago, when he was living more or less on the street and couch-surfing, selling pot, with little more than the guitar on his back. He still had a rare, cool kind of confidence, just like he’d had back then, despite all he’d been through. But now, he seemed more like a man who’d grown into his own skin, who was deeply comfortable with who and what he was.

But nobody would think I was lonely, either.

From the outside, I probably looked like I had the perfect life. Like I had it all figured out and then some.

Yet Seth had straight-up asked me if I was lonely. It was one of the very first things he’d asked me.

I just didn’t know why he’d think that.

People were always swarming around me. All day, they were in my space, in my face, even touching me… but yes… at the end of the day, I was alone.

Even when I was messing around with Ash, I went to bed alone.

Sure, if I asked him to, Ash would probably hop on a plane right now to fly out here and put his dick in me. He’d probably even hold me afterward if I wanted him to. But that wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same as being with someone.

Or being in love…

Because even when Ash was in my bed, in my body—especially then—I still felt alone.