“You’re welcome to try. But the weather has picked up. Everybody else was smart and didn’t come up. All my staff left. Because it was the smart thing to do. You were the only fool that decided to make the trek up.”
“And I can make the trek back down.” She turned around and started to head for the door. She pushed it open, and the wind just about blew it back. She shoved it, and headed back out into the night. Fuck all this, and him too. Him specifically.
Maybe there was a song in this.
That was the real problem. She couldn’t think of a song. And she didn’t want anyone to know that. She was completely dried up. She had written the greatest breakup album of all time. With a song that had reached into people’s souls and taken hold of them. Had taken on a life of its own. She had done the same writing the song about her dad. She knew how to grab on to pain. She knew how to grab on to pain and turn it into something real and relatable.
And now she was famous and successful and...
And she was still sad. Because it had given her money. It had let her buy a house for her mom. But it hadn’t given her a relationship with her dad.
And she was alone. And she couldn’t figure out how to trust people any more than she could before.
Hell, it was even worse. Because the only person she had ever trusted was Flint. The only person that she had ever hoped might be more than he seemed was Flint.
And he had proved that he wasn’t. And then she had gotten famous. And her ability to trust people had become even more compromised because people could actually get things from her. They actually wanted things from her, and that? That made everything feel fraught. It made everything feel impossible.
And now it felt like there were no more songs. Because all she had was old, lingering pain that she didn’t want to keep writing about, and the thrill of a success story that she couldn’t quite access. It made her feel ungrateful. It made her feel small and sad. To be standing in the spotlight and still feeling like she was shrouded in darkness. She was beginning to feel terrified that it would all go away. Because the only thing worse than the idea of staying in the spotlight, bombarded with all the fame, was what would happen if it went away.
Because one thing was sure. It was exposing to write a song like she had about her and Flint. But it gave her a way to expel some of that pain. It gave her a way to talk about it. She didn’t have anyone in her life that she could talk about it honestly. The only person had been... Flint. And then it had ended. So she had written songs about him instead. And talked to the world about how he had let her down. There was a catharsis in that.
She battled the wind and walked down to her truck, forced the door open. All of her bags were still inside. The door to the hotel opened, and she saw Flint, up the stairs, looking down at her, backlit by the lights from the inside.
And he came down the stairs, heading out after her, the wind whipping the T-shirt he was wearing, tightening it over what she knew was a very firm body. And she did not need to be looking at him right now; she was trying to run away from him.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “You were lucky to make it up here okay—you are not driving back down in this.”
“You lost any right to have an opinion on what I do,” she yelled back.
“Did I lose it, or did we agree to dissolve it?”
Well. There was the rub. With the wind and the snow blowing between them, and ferocity and fear burning in his blue eyes.
“I was protecting myself. If you were worried about anything other than your own feelings in that moment, you would’ve known that.”
“You should’ve said it all to me,” he said.
The song. That was what he meant. That she should have said all those things to him, and not the world.
It hurt, because it wasn’t unfair.
“What would it have changed?” she asked.
She was breathing hard, and so was he.
“Nothing,” he said, his voice rough.
It was hard to hear. For one moment she’d forgotten. For one moment she’d hoped. But this was the reality of it, of them.
“Okay then. Don’t lecture me. Don’t lecture me on what I should’ve done. Don’t lecture me on what the right thing to do would have been when I told you that I might be having your baby and you looked back at me and said you didn’t want it.”
“If you had...”
“You never even texted me back.”
“Because you said that you weren’t.”
“I wasn’t. Or maybe I was. But I lost it either way. I never took a test.”
“I’m sorry. If you had been...”
“Is this what you do? Tell yourself if I’d been pregnant you would have handled it well? You didn’t handle anything about it well. What makes you think you would have been better if there was a baby? You’re rewriting the story.”
“We all get to write our own stories, Tansey, you of all people should know.”
The words hit hard, and he stood there, blue eyes blazing.
“I’m leaving.”
“Don’t,” he bit out. “It’s too fucking dangerous. You’re not leaving just because you don’t like me.”
“I have to leave.”
She just had to. She couldn’t stay, not with him. It was too much, too real.
Nothing had been real like this since him.
And she couldn’t stand it.
