chapter eighteen

 

Every day feels long as I’m tasked with a million details, but as I look back, four weeks passed in a flash. I manage to fit in souvenir shopping at every destination, from a mini replica of the St. Louis Arch, to a little windmill from Oklahoma, to a cowboy hat with the state flag of Texas on it. In Phoenix, Colorado, and Utah, I find a vintage print of the Grand Canyon, a tin cup with Pikes Peak on it, and a little stuffed bobcat in ski gear with a shirt that says Salt Lake City on it.

I keep my head down and focus on my job when we’re in Vegas. We have another short tour break, and I stay at Mark’s Vegas penthouse. I order in food and work from there, and even though I’m wondering what my friends—former friends—are up to and how FDB is doing, I’m doing my best to respect their separation from me.

I’m shocked they haven’t reached out at all in the six months I’ve been gone, but I’ve learned to live with the consequences of my actions. I’ve been too busy worrying about Vivian to focus on that, anyway. When the time is right, we’ll find our friendship again. I’m sure of it.

I grab her a Christmas ornament in Vegas since it’s December and the holiday is a few weeks away. It’s a glass slot machine that’s colorful and totally obnoxious, so against her style it’s laughable and for some reason I have to have it. For her.

Our last stop before we head back to California is Washington, where I pick up a Starbucks cup for her from the very first Starbucks store ever opened in Pike Place Market.

Our last two shows are in California on a Friday and Saturday night, and while it feels good to be back in my current home state, it hurts knowing she’s so close yet so far. The last show brings the house down in Inglewood, a mere half hour from Los Angeles, and I have to work all Sunday morning and into the afternoon. As we wrap the tour, there are hundreds of things to do to settle accounts, cash out the crew, and get the gear back to where it belongs.

And then, once all the details are tied up in a neat little bow, I think it’ll be time to get my own place. It’ll be time to decide if I’m going to stay at Ashmark long term or if I want to venture out on my own to try something new, something just for me.

As I look toward the upcoming new year, I can’t help but think how ready I am for a fresh start. As I start to close the books on what I might even call the worst year of my life, I realize how ready I am for some independence.

By the time I shower at Mark’s place and sit down to text Vivian, it’s a little before four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

Me: I’m back and I need to see you.

Her reply comes immediately, which leads me to believe she’s as desperate to see me as I am to see her.

Vivian: I’ll be home in an hour. Do you want to meet me there?

Fuck yes I do. It’ll only take me about forty minutes to get to Tarzana. I glance at the mess of shopping bags on my bed and wonder what the hell I was thinking. This is over the top—even for me. I have souvenirs from seventeen of the eighteen states we visited on our twenty-one show tour. I haven’t picked up my California souvenir yet, but I’ve already decided I’ll get her a fresh bouquet of poppies, the state flower, on my way to meet her.

Me: Text me your address. I’ll be there.

She does, and it’s a Santa Monica address—which is nice because it’s much closer to me, but it’s the opposite direction of Tarzana...where I thought she lived. I think back to my coffee shop dinner in the middle of her city as I thought she’d come walking in at any minute.

Me: I thought you lived in Tarzana.

Vivian: I did. I live in Santa Monica now. By the beach.

I smile as I think about how that was exactly what she wanted. My heart fills with hope as my first thought is that she moved out of the house she shared with her husband. I could be completely off base, or I could be setting myself up for everything I’ve dreamed about for the last six months.

Me: I’ll see you in an hour.

I empty my duffel bag and fill it with the gift bags on my bed along with a few things I wrote about my feelings for her when I was on tour. I grab her sweater from my closet, and then I hop in the BMW Mark’s letting me borrow, punch Viv’s address into the maps app on my phone, and set off to get my girl.

It’s a little under twenty miles to get to her. With a stop for the flowers, I’m a little late when I pull into her apartment complex.

My heart pounds a little harder as every mile brings me closer to her, and by the time I pull into the driveway lined with thousands of fresh flowers leading to her apartment complex, the pounding of my heart matches the throbbing in my head.

I realize I’m nervous. I wasn’t expecting to be nervous.

I’m never nervous. I’m always in control. Disciplined. Precise.

But this girl knocks me completely off my game. Always.

I leave the BMW with valet, grab the duffel and the flowers, and head into the lobby, and she’s just coming off an elevator. Our eyes meet across a lavish lobby, and I swear I can smell her from this distance.

The throbbing in my head recedes as just the sight of her calms me a little, but my pounding heart starts racing. I’m ready to run toward her, to pull her into my arms, to claim her as mine...but I can’t. She’s not mine, not yet, not until we talk.

When she rushes through the lobby to get to me and throws herself in my arms, I immediately know the truth. She can’t possibly be married anymore, not by the way she’s holding onto me like I’m her lifeline, not by the way she ran to me like she needed to be in my arms just the same way I need her there. I hold her—cling to her—despite the awkwardness of hugging someone with a bouquet of flowers in one hand, a sweater in the other, and a huge bag slung over my other shoulder.

We must embrace in the lobby for a full minute before I break the silence. It feels right, like all the fears lift right off my shoulders because I’m breathing in her rose scent again.

“Hi,” I say softly into her shoulder. I force myself not to drag my lips across the skin of her neck. Despite the texts that have brought us closer over the past few weeks and despite the feeling that this is right, I need her to tell me there’s no one else before I get my hopes up too high.

“Hi,” she says. She pulls out of our hug, and I hand her the bouquet.

“What are these for?” she asks, putting her nose into them and inhaling.

“I missed you.”

Her lips tip up in a small smile, and then she nods to the bag on my shoulder. “A little presumptuous, don’t you think?” she says.

I chuckle. “It’s not what it looks like.”

She shakes her head with that same old lemon-face of disapproval I can’t help but love. “Never is, is it?”

I grin. “You’ll like it. Promise.”

She shakes her head then ducks it as she tries to hide her smile, and then she motions for me to follow her to the elevator. Her eyes fall on the sweater in my hand. I brought it with hope in my heart I’d see it again after today. “Is that mine?” she asks on our ride up to the tenth floor.

I nod and hand it to her. “You left it at the FDB office. I thought you’d want it back.”

“You held onto it all this time?” she asks softly.

I nod. “I looked at it and thought of you every day we were apart.”

She stares at me in wonder, and then the doors slide open, and she leads me to her apartment.

The place is nice—very nice, but decorated in a minimalist style with just the essentials. A black kitchen table with just two chairs, a small couch, a coffee table. A sad looking Christmas tree without lights and just a small smattering of red ornaments sits in the corner. My chest aches as I recall her once telling me that Christmas is her favorite holiday. How could someone love the holiday and barely decorate for it? 

It’s cold and nothing like I’d picture Vivian’s place. The red ornaments on the tree are about the only thing that make me think of her, which has me curious.

“You live here?” I ask.

She nods. “For now.” She heads into the kitchen to set the flowers in a vase. I walk over toward the huge patio doors that look out over the beach and set the bag on the floor next to the couch.

“And it’s just you living here?”

She keeps her eyes on the flowers as she focuses on arranging them in the vase. “Yep.” She finally looks back at me. “What’s in the bag?” she asks.

“You’re not even gonna expand on that living here alone comment?”

She clears her throat. “We have a lot to talk about.”

My chest tightens. “I assume you mean more than Ashmark’s analytics.”

She presses her lips together and nods.

“Before I tell you what’s in the bag, I have to know something.”

She raises a brow.

“Can we work this out?”

She pinches the bridge of her nose and squeezes her eyes shut before she says anything, and I find myself rooted to the floor, hanging on the hope I still have like it’s my lifeline. She has the ability to cut that off with a single word, or she has the ability to give me everything I’ve hoped for.

“I don’t know.”

I force a smile. “That’s not a no.”

She shakes her head as she continues messing with the flowers. They’re fine as they are, but it’s clear she’s avoiding this conversation.

I sigh as I wish I could read her better. “Vivian.”

She looks up at me, and I’ve been so overcome by just being here with her that I didn’t notice it before.

She’s terrified.

I see it in the wideness of her eyes, in the pucker of her mouth, in the stiff set of her shoulders.

I walk across her apartment until I’m standing beside her. She doesn’t move from her task of fluffing up the flowers in the vase, and I finally take her hands in mine and turn her toward me. I pull her into my arms, and suddenly the world is right again. The loneliness, the anger and the fear, the sadness and frustration...it all disappears when she’s in my arms.

I bury my face in her neck and breathe in the light scent of roses, nerves zipping up my spine at our proximity after everything that’s happened. I never really held her like this before. I never got the chance—it was all ripped away from me because of the single omission on her part that was just too big for me to overcome. But, God, I love her so goddamn much, and I need to tell her. I need to tell her that I can get past the omission, that we can make this work if we can be honest, that I can’t live another day without her. That I want to claim her with my mouth, with my body, that I want to hold her in my arms just like this for the rest of my life.

Our mistakes are in the past, and we both made plenty—but I’m ready to leave that behind us.

This could be our fresh start. She could be sitting beside me at the next Fox family dinner. Our heads could be bent close as we laugh over some inside joke that’s just for the two of us. Our fingers could be twined loosely together as we greet my family. Our eyes could meet across the room as we both search the other out in the midst of love and chaos.

But I still don’t even know if she’s available to be mine.

“Talk to me,” I say softly into her neck. I don’t look at her when I ask my next question—the very one I’ve been waiting months to ask. “Are you still married?”

She clears her throat. “No.”

I pull back but keep my arms locked around her waist. “You aren’t?” My voice is filled with hope, and I’m afraid I’ll be so overly eager I’ll scare her off.

“I’m divorced. It was just finalized this past Thursday.”

My brows furrow. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She clears her throat and pulls out of my arms, and I feel an immediate sense of loss. “Because I wasn’t divorced until three days ago.”

“But we sat twelve inches away from each other for weeks. Why didn’t you talk to me?”

She sighs. “Trent has been less than amenable about the whole thing.”

“What does that mean?”

She walks over to her kitchen table and sits. “I told him I had an affair the minute I got home from Vegas. I didn’t say with who or how it happened. I just told him I cheated on him and I wanted a divorce. He said there are laws about infidelity and divorce and he would take everything from me if I didn’t do exactly what he wanted.”

“Oh my God, Vivian.” I sit across from her even though I want to kneel on the floor between her legs and rest my head against her chest while she talks.

“My lawyer advised against talking to anyone about the divorce, but he specifically mentioned you.” She glances away when she says the last part of the sentence, like she’s ashamed of what she did. Of what we did. “I wanted to call you, Brian. It killed me that I couldn’t, and when Mark called me for the job at Ashmark, I had no idea you’d be there. None. I had to fight against myself every single day not to tell you, not to fall into your arms and kiss you and just fix it. I wanted to explain, but I was scared of what Trent would do, and since my lawyer told me not to, I had to just get through to the end.”

“California is a no-fault divorce state, isn’t it?” I only know that because one of Mark’s friends went through one a few years ago.

She nods. “It is, and the court had little to do with the negotiations of assets. They just approve or deny the dissolution of marriage. But I gave him what he wanted so I could get out of a dead-end marriage and be done with him. I never expected him to take advantage of that.”

I glance around at the minimalist décor of this apartment and wonder what kind of asshole takes advantage of a woman’s guilt that way.

I wonder if I would have a year ago...hell, a few months ago.

“Did he leave you with nothing?” I ask softly.

She shakes her head. “No. We carefully divided our finances, but I definitely made sacrifices just to speed up the process.”

“Then why haven’t you made this place more like home?”

“It’s not my place to decorate. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to land once I moved out of the house I lived in for nine years. My aunt and uncle own this place. They usually rent it to tourists, but they said I could stay here for a while.”

“Your aunt and uncle...Vick’s parents?” I ask.

She nods.

“So is that why you were hesitant to take the job at Ashmark?”

“I didn’t know what the job was specifically for when Mark called me. When you walked in and I saw you for the first time in months, I had no idea how I’d work beside you and not confess everything. Every day I woke up excited to see you, and I hated every second I sat beside you and felt like I was forced to hold back the truth from you. I was scared what Trent might do if he found out I was anything but completely professional. He’s a well-respected physician, and I’m the one who broke our vows.” She lifts a helpless shoulder as if to say if it came down to word of mouth, he’d win and she’d lose. “I’m just relieved it’s legally over now.”

I can’t help my smile at those words. “I think it calls for a celebration.”

She raises a brow. “Oh you do, do you?”

I press my lips together. “You know, I had everything ripped away from me. I was honest with my friends and then I lost the girl, my friends, and my company all in the span of a few days.”

“I’m sorry for my part in that.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I got exactly what I deserved. I just wish you would’ve been honest with me from the start.” I reach across the table for her hands, and she places them in mine. “I’ve been cheated on before. It hurts like a motherfucker, and I would never willingly do that to someone else.”

“But, and I mean this in the least insulting way possible, weren’t you sleeping with Jason’s girlfriend?”

I nod and look out the window. “I regret that. But she assured me they weren’t together and they wouldn’t be getting together. I know now that doesn’t make what I did any better, but I also know we’ve all made mistakes in this. I’m just ready to put it all behind me.”

Her voice is low when she says, “All of it?”

My eyes lift to meet hers, and while she still looks scared, I see a warmth there that was missing before.

She lets go of my hands and traces a circular pattern onto the table in front of her with her fingernail, something to focus on other than looking at me as she talks. “I know leaving out the fact that I was married was a huge mistake on my part, and I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have been honest. But I was just trying to be professional, to check my feelings at the door. I figured the less I told you about my personal life, the better. And honestly, Brian, my marriage was over long before I started working with you.”

“Then why did you tell me you weren’t sure if you were going to leave him that morning?” I ask.

“Because I wasn’t sure that morning. It all happened so fast. When you’ve been married to someone for eight years, looking to a future without that person is, frankly, the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.” My heart aches at the thought of the pain and the fear she faced alone as she finally confesses everything I needed to know that morning. Maybe she would’ve told me back then, but I jumped the gun, made assumptions, and kicked her out before she had the chance to. “Well, it was the most terrifying thing until I realized if I stayed with him, I could never again experience anything like what I had with you.”

I’m about to ask her if she wants me or if she wants something like what she had with me when she continues.

“I tried to fight it. I tried so hard, but my feelings for you were like this force I couldn’t fight against.” She looks up at me and lowers her voice. “I never had a choice when it came to how I felt about you. It started as passionate hatred, but that line between love and hate blurred until I couldn’t see straight.”

“For me, too,” I say with a chuckle.

She smiles sadly. “I know. But then you kicked me out. All the things I was feeling and experiencing—they were things I needed to talk about. With you. They were things you could’ve helped me with. But you didn’t allow that. You wanted to kick your feet and throw a tantrum and be mad, just like the night you ditched me at that AceStar Gala.” She stops to draw in a breath, and I can tell from the look on her face I shouldn’t interrupt with a defense as to why I did those things. I don’t have one, anyway.

She heaves out the breath she drew and says the words that are as hard for her to say as they are for me to hear. “I want this so badly, Brian, but I’m scared. I don’t know if I could be with someone who throws tantrums and only tells the truth when he’s up against a wall.”

“I know I’m not perfect,” I say softly. “But I’ve changed. Because of you. You make me want to be a better man.”

“I’m sure you have, but it’s not just that.” She lays her hands flat on the table in front of her, and my chest aches at the clear symbolism of that single motion as I prepare for her next words. “I’ve been legally single for less than seventy-two hours. The ink is barely dry on the paperwork.” She stares down at her hands, and I watch as redness creeps up her neck and into her cheeks. It’s not a blush. It’s emotion. It’s pain and hurt. It’s need and desire, but it’s also quashing those feelings at the root. “I just need a little time to figure myself out before I can commit to anything.”

“I never stopped loving you.” I don’t know why those are my words. It’s my desperate attempt at getting her to change her mind and tell me she wants to be with me.

She shuts her eyes tightly and squeezes them for a beat before she responds. “I never stopped, either.” She says the words softly, and then she opens her eyes and looks at me. They glisten with tears. “Of course I still love you. But that doesn’t magically fix everything.” She rubs her chest like it hurts. “I want this to work with you. I’ve never felt anything like this, not with Trent, not with anybody else, but I don’t want you to be the rebound I cling to because my marriage ended.”

I nod as if I understand, but I don’t. I don’t get why I can’t be the one who helps her through this, why I can’t stay by her side and hold her close through the night as she talks and I consume her fears and doubts for her. That’s what people do when they’re in love, when they see a future together.

But they also respect the other’s wishes. They believe in the institution and know when the time is right, everything will land just as it should.

They let go when they need to let go.

And she’s telling me she needs me to let go right now. Not forever...but for now.

I blow out a breath and stand. “Vivian, you fill my entire heart to the point that it hurts. The only relief I’ve felt since I asked you to leave my house six months ago was when I took you in my arms down in the lobby and again right there.” I point to the spot in the kitchen where we stood. I hold my hand over my heart. “And I will wait until you’re ready for me.” I turn toward the door and twist the doorknob to show myself out.

“I can’t ask you to do that,” she says behind me. The emotion in her voice breaks my heart.

I shake my head, the bag of gifts forgotten for now on the floor of the condo somewhere. I don’t turn around. “You’re worth it, and I’ll be here. I promise.”