“And what about Jessa?” Elle asked me after a long, but not uncomfortable, silence.

She was still sitting in the window seat, still on guard, but as we’d sat in Woo’s kitchen, talking, it felt like we were gaining ground. Millimeter by millimeter, maybe. And it seemed to me that the world outside was falling away. That nothing was more important than this conversation. Right here, right now.

Me. Elle.

Answering her questions and chipping away at the bullshit that time and hurt feelings and too many stupid mistakes had layered between us.

I had no idea, though, how to answer that particular question.

“What about Jessa?”

“She’s with Brody now,” she said, studying my reaction.

I didn’t really have one. I’d accepted, long ago, that Jessa Mayes wasn’t mine. That she’d never loved me the way I hoped she would. That her heart had always been out of my reach, because it belonged to someone else.

And the fact that she was with Brody didn’t surprise me. It only surprised me that they weren’t together from day one.

“Yeah,” I said.

“It doesn’t bother you?”

“Why would it bother me?”

“I don’t know. You two dated.”

“Yeah. I guess you could call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“Jessa and I had a relationship,” I admitted, treading carefully. I had no idea what Elle knew, or believed, or how she felt about that relationship. “It wasn’t exactly… conventional. We were both kind of… lost, back then.” I didn’t know how else to put it. “And it wasn’t out in the open. But you know that now.”

“We all know,” Elle said. “But it’s not like we didn’t have a clue back then. At least, I did. I saw how you were with her. I just thought…” She trailed off, hugging her knees tighter. She looked down at her feet and picked at her nail polish. And it hit me, as I watched her face change—that Elle felt… guilty? For what happened between me and Jessa? “I just thought you had a crush on her.”

“I can imagine,” I said, carefully. “I can imagine what you saw.”

“Brody didn’t want to see it, I’m sure. But you did like her.” She looked up at me. “And as far as I could tell, she liked you, too.”

“Yeah, I liked her.”

That Jessa liked me too, at some point, was beyond question. But how much and for how long, I really couldn’t say.

“Always?” Elle asked me, her gray eyes searching my face.

“Not always,” I said. “After a while. And until she wanted out. Or sometime thereafter.” I shrugged. “I was young and more than a little dumb. It might’ve taken longer than it should’ve to get the message.”

Elle’s eyebrows twisted together. “I’m not particularly young, Seth,” she said softly. “And I’m not dumb. But it took me a long, long time to get the message.”

Jesse. She was talking about Jesse.

I did not know what to say. But it definitely wasn’t lost on me that she’d just shared something incredibly personal with me.

“So… when did you get the message?” she asked.

I thought about that. It wasn’t exactly clear to me, a specific moment in time, when I’d realized Jessa was done with me—and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. If it happened like that, I couldn’t recall it.

“The last time I saw her, maybe. At that party at Brody’s place. The break in the first tour.”

“I remember that night,” Elle said. “Great party.”

Yeah. But not for me.

“Jessa and I had been at odds a while,” I said. “We’d stopped sleeping together.” I watched to see how she’d take that, but she showed no reaction. Her guard was still way up, her expression carefully neutral, but not neutral. I didn’t know what it was; I didn’t really know how to read Elle all that well. I probably never did. “I wanted to get back together with her but she told me she wouldn’t. Said she was in love with Brody.”

I’d been so hurt by her words, and so messed up by that point—and so fucked on coke—I’d called her a whore. I remembered that, vividly. I was so crushed over losing her, and I’d wanted to hurt her.

I was beyond caring, at that point, about hurting myself.

But I didn’t mention any of that to Elle.

There were some things I was still too ashamed of to share with most people, and calling Jessa Mayes a whore for breaking up with me and being in love with Brody definitely qualified.

“Was that the worst it got?” Elle asked, her gaze on me steadfast.

“No,” I admitted. “When she first broke things off with me, before that, it got pretty ugly. It was just before we wrote ‘Dirty Like Me.’ We weren’t really talking for a long time after that.” I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Had almost forgotten. “I don’t think anyone knew about that, exactly. But Brody got into it with me one night.”

“Got into it?”

“With his fists.”

“Oh.” Elle didn’t sound all that surprised. But then again, she’d been there when Brody hit me, back in February; when he accused me of raping Jessa, in front of the whole band. “You mean… that mysterious fractured eye socket and chipped tooth of yours?”

“Right,” I said.

That was almost nine years ago now, but I remembered it. Brody had confronted me, asked me if I was sleeping with Jessa. And I’d been just delusional enough at the time to think maybe I could still win her over, that the two of them might give up on each other. Brody had been dating someone else anyway, on and off. I’d managed to convince myself, for a while, that maybe he was just gonna let me have her.

That, and I was probably incredibly high to think that would ever happen.

“And what happened after that?” Elle pressed.

“I kept my distance from her for a while. But after Love Struck came out, I tried to get back together with her. The night of her high school grad thing, I showed up outside, wanted to drive her back to Brody’s for the party he was having. She said she wouldn’t go with me because I was wasted. That was the first time I remember her really having it out with me. She pretty much begged me to get clean, but I was nowhere near doing that. I couldn’t even understand what she was going on about. We argued about it. She slapped my face. I don’t even know what I said to push her to do that. But I tried to grab onto her when she walked away from me. I caught her shirt and the strap ripped. She cried. It was… awful.”

That moment between us was, actually, the worst moment I could remember, because it was the moment when it really got through to me—that I was bad for Jessa. That she deserved so much better than me. That I was just gonna drag her down.

She was beautiful and talented and kind, and she’d just graduated high school. She was barely eighteen. And there I was, twenty-one, trying to drive her to a party while I was fucked up on a cocktail of drugs and booze, trying to talk her into coming back to me, when all she wanted me to do was get my shit together and, probably, leave her the fuck alone.

It was a low, low moment.

But those days, I had a lot of low moments. Most of the time I just tried to annihilate them with drugs.

Got a problem? No worries. Just drink and snort it away.

That night, though, I didn’t get any more fucked up than I already was. The argument with Jessa had kind of shocked me sober, or at least sober enough to put her in cab so she could get to Brody’s party intact. It was the only time I’d ever come close to putting my hands on her during an argument. She’d hit me first, but that shouldn’t have mattered. Loving her and wanting to hurt her; those shouldn’t have gone along together. I knew that much.

“That must’ve been… painful,” Elle said, and there was some sympathy in her voice as she studied me. I wasn’t sure I deserved it, but there it was. “God knows there was a lot of… well, drama in my relationships back then. Still is, sometimes. And Jessa… We all knew she was struggling. She raised a lot of hell for Jesse back then. For Jude and Brody… all of us. I probably would’ve too, though, if I was in her shoes. Losing her parents so young. Being raised in the middle of this rock ’n’ roll circus…” She trailed off.

I had no idea if she meant every word of it, or if she was just trying to encourage me to open up, tell her more about my relationship with Jessa. Baiting me, maybe. Wanting me to feel safe to talk to her, confess my sins, as she measured my responses. I could see it in her eyes. Like a little scale tipping back and forth, weighing the validity of my words. My sincerity.

But on this, I was nothing but sincere.

I had no reason to lie about what went down between Jessa and me.

The damage had already been done.

And it was never me who wanted our relationship kept a secret. It was Jessa who insisted on that.

“Jessa Mayes is a beautiful girl,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “But I saw the ugly side of her. That’s the worst thing you’ll ever hear me say about her, and I don’t mean it as an insult. Whatever darkness she had in her, whatever she struggled with, I struggled with worse.”

Elle didn’t respond, but after a moment she nodded her head, like she wanted me to go on.

“My memories aren’t exactly… clear. At least, some of them aren’t. Some of them are. Some of them don’t even exist. But I know I never abused her. Brody accused me of that… of raping her.” I shook my head as I spoke. I would never be able to stomach that accusation. “I know I tried to push her in the end, to want to be with me. To love me. To not leave me. But I never pushed her for sex, Elle. I know she was younger than me. But we were both teenagers when we got together.”

We were. I was nineteen, she was sixteen, and she instigated sex with me. I remembered, clearly, the first time it happened. We’d taken ecstasy together, and the ecstasy was mine. There was a group of us who’d taken it when we’d gone out clubbing. I didn’t intend for me and Jessa to end up alone, in bed, that night. But by then, I liked her. A lot.

I knew how it might sound if I tried to explain that to Elle, so I just said, “I know that doesn’t make it right.” Because it didn’t.

“So what do you think she said? To Brody?” Elle asked me. “To make him think you did that to her?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what she said. But I know Brody, and I saw what it was between them.” I did see. That was a big, big love, probably long before I ever came around. “I think, no matter what she said, it’s easier for him to believe I forced myself on her or manipulated her into sleeping with me than to think she actually wanted me, even if it was only for a moment in time, and maybe, for the wrong reasons.”

Elle cocked her head, considering that. “What wrong reasons?”

I took a breath and said, “Maybe I gave her something at the time that no one else would.”

That much was true enough, though I had no idea if Elle would understand what I meant.

Jessa and I had spent a lot of time together writing songs, at first, and that had been our first bond. And I knew she felt comfortable with me. I didn’t judge her or have expectations of her or enforce the same rules on her that her brother and the other guys did.

Over time, though, our relationship was definitely fueled by our mutual drug use.

But I wasn’t about to go telling Elle, or anyone else, that Jessa had asked me for drugs. That she’d asked me several times before I smoked up with her the first time. And every other time, she’d asked. Including the time we’d first done ecstasy together. She didn’t ask me for ecstasy in particular, but she’d wanted to get high.

It seemed irrelevant. And dirty, somehow, to put it on her like that. It felt too ugly, that I’d given Jessa drugs, no matter that she’d wanted them, no matter what my motivations were.

Maybe Brody would always believe I got Jessa high so I could take her to bed. But he was wrong about that. I knew that. No matter how sketchy my memories, no matter what anyone else accused me of, no matter that I was attracted to Jessa. No matter, even, if Jessa remembered it differently.

Elle was silent. She sipped her coffee and seemed to be considering what I’d said.

Did she think I was a creep? A total fucking asshole?

I really had no clue.

Elle had always been kind of a mystery to me. Something unknown, and far above me. Kind of like the stars in the sky were a mystery to your average man; you might understand the basics of how it all worked, but that didn’t mean you could stand there in the light and the beauty of it all and not feel small, awestruck and even unworthy.

All I could really do was wait for her to pass judgment on me. She was gonna make up her mind about me one way or the other. There was little I could do about it now but tell the truth. My truth; the only truth I knew.

“Would you do differently, if you could?” she asked me after a while.

“Hell, yes.” I didn’t even have to think about that one. “Spent a lot of years angry about it, wishing the past away, wishing I’d never taken that first hit, never tumbled down that rabbit hole.”

“I mean, would you do differently with Jessa?”

That, I did have to think about. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about it, either.

“No,” I admitted. “Probably not. If I was sober, maybe. But as long as substances were involved… I spiraled around a sinkhole for years with my addiction, and until I quit using, there was nothing I could’ve done differently.”

Elle was silent again. And I wondered how well she understood that. Or didn’t.

“What about you?” I asked her. “You ever drift down that rabbit hole?”

“No,” she said. “Not entirely. I did a little coke, you know, back in the day.” She smiled wryly; made it sound like we were old, that comment. But really, it wasn’t so long ago that we were just stupid, naive kids rocking our way to the top of the charts… without a parachute. “I did a little ecstasy. I tried some other pills, some speed. I guess I just dabbled, socially. But after a while, it occurred to me I didn’t really enjoy it. Everyone around me seemed to be getting fucked up to escape their lives. I didn’t want to escape my life.” She shrugged. “My life is pretty damn good.”

“Yeah. That’s one way to look at it. But some people can’t handle their lives, even when they’re good, you know?”

“Yeah. I see that,” she said. “I guess… I prefer a clear head. Most of the time. I still like pot, sometimes. I like a little booze. I like my sleep. I guess I’m the nun of the group.”

I shook my head as the sense of awe I already felt in her presence intensified. “You’re strong,” I told her, and I meant it. “It takes a lot of strength, and character, to stick to what you like, what works for you, when everyone around you is doing something else. And expecting you to partake.”

Elle just shrugged that off. “Did the drugs ever work for you? I mean… did you ever enjoy it?”

“Yeah. Hell, yes.” It was true. It was so fucking sad, but it was true. “You always love it right before you hate it. And even when you hate it… there are moments when you truly believe you might come to love it again. Right up until it almost kills you.”

I watched the troubled look flicker over her face, and I could only guess that she was remembering, all those years ago, when I’d OD’d. When she saw me after I’d OD’d.

Jude had told me about it afterward; that it had been Elle who’d found me, who’d held me in her arms until the medics came to scrape me off the tour bus floor.

And I wished I could remove the burden of that particular memory from her, but I couldn’t.

“Do you think… I mean, honestly,” she asked me, “do you think if you hadn’t gotten involved with Jessa, you still would’ve ended up where you did? You know… if you didn’t have your heart broken?”

I didn’t answer; I wasn’t sure how to answer.

Despite the things I’d said to Jessa when she confronted me at that cafe back in February—defensive, bitter things—I wasn’t sure Jessa had broken my heart.

“That’s why you overdosed, right?” Elle said. “That’s why you went so far down the rabbit hole.”

“It wasn’t just Jessa, Elle. It was a lot of things.” I shook my head. “It was me. Overdosing… getting kicked out of the band… that was all me. In the end, it had shit all to do with her.”

But Elle just cocked her head and stared at me, a small, thoughtful frown on her pretty face, like she wasn’t sure that was true. As if it was the first untrue thing I’d said to her tonight, and she was trying to make sense of it.

“You must’ve loved her,” she said softly, her gray eyes on mine. “A lot.”

I thought about that, like I had so many times over the years, with a kind of question in my heart that I had never really been able to answer.

I knew I’d held onto that idea for a long, long time. That I’d loved Jessa; that she’d rejected me. It was part of the story I’d told myself, about myself, to make it okay to keep hurting myself. To fuel the bitterness and resentment I still felt toward her for abandoning me, toward the band for abandoning me; a bitterness I’d only managed to truly put behind me this year. After they left me again—and I decided to put the past to rest.

To let it go.

It was a new day. I was a new man.

But it wasn’t that simple, was it?

You could stop using drugs and get clean, but you couldn’t just wipe the slate clean and leave it all behind. Not when it had all become a part of you, changed you, shaped the whole new you that you believed you’d become.

All the pain I’d been through would always be a part of me, etched into me, along with all the mistakes, the regrets. If for no other reason than to inform the choices I made going forth. So that, hopefully, I would never make those same mistakes again.

In life… or in love.

“I must have,” I said, finally.

But the truth of it, the truth I was most ashamed of, was that I didn’t wholly remember.