“I thought you just straight out wanted to kill me. All that motherfucking not good enough for her stuff.”
Abel sighed. “If you weren’t already family, we’d have cut you and never looked back. And some of what you said was right. We’ve taken Evie for granted for so long we didn’t see it. That stops right now. She should always get to choose how she spends her smarts.”
Never make decisions for someone else. A wizard once told him that. “There’s something we agree on.”
“And throwing punches like that, we were all dickheads. Like we were dickheads not to sort things out between us all ten years ago.”
They were still dickheads, but at least they weren’t trying to smash each other.
Abel grinned. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Auckland?” He was meant to be on stage in seventy-two hours. “Evie chose to let you sit here all day, didn’t she?”
Jay nodded. His teeth ached and his stomach was in rebellion. Evie was going to have to open that door to let Abel in. He was less nervous about releasing a new album next year for which he was four songs short.
“I still think you’re done, mate.” Abel knocked and the door opened so quickly, Evie had to have been listening. She was in pjs that hung off her shoulders, her hair was greasy, her skin pale with dark smudges under her eyes. Jay didn’t have time to stand before she said, “It was all just a dream, Jay. We were never real.”
He scrambled to his feet. Fuck that. They were the realest dream he’d ever had. “Evie, I’m sorry. I should’ve known better. I love you and I’m begging for a chance to prove it. I don’t have any excuse. I can’t take it back, but I’ll never force my feelings on you again.”
“Really,” she said. “Hard to believe since you’ve sat outside my door all day like a stalker when it had to be abundantly clear I didn’t want to see you.”
Jesus suffering fuck. He took a step back and caught Abel’s grimace, a weird kind of lifeline. “You’re right. I can’t force an apology on you.” He held onto to the unexpressed sympathy of that grimace, of the acknowledgement that their backstage fight was the kind families had, if a little over the top given the way all of them came off stage thinking they were superheroes, and that the Tice’s could be his family again.
He found Evie’s eyes and his stomach stopped clenching. There was nothing about her appearance that could give him confidence. Her glare could shave his cheeks. She was furious with him. It was entirely appropriate, and it grounded him. Loving her had taught him how to fight for what he wanted.
In twenty-four hours the heat on him from management would be so severe he’d have trouble holding out. Shortly after that someone would file a law suit against him for breach of contract. The list of someone’s was long. Might even be his own band members. Could end his touring career. “I’ll wait the rest of my life for the chance to earn your forgiveness, Evie. I’m not leaving the country until you tell me I’ll be dead before that happens.”
Her frown was so intense she used her hand to shield the full effect of it from him. She didn’t tell him to take a long walk. Neither of them moved. At some point Abel had slipped inside the apartment. “You’ll know where to find me if you want to talk,” he said, a half-formed plan in the back of his head made of nostalgia and desperation.
Evie didn’t respond. Not when moved down the hall to the elevator. Not when he called it or stepped inside and turned to face her, but she didn’t look away either and that was the thing he carried with him all the way to the Grumpy Fiddler. It was best place he could think of to hide out and the only place she’d know to come looking for him.
> To say the motel’s management were surprised when he booked every room and paid for the existing occupants to stay in more the more salubrious surroundings of the brand name hotel down the road was an understatement. He put a substantial cherry on top to encourage them to shut the heck up about him being there and then he turned his phone off, ate a stale convenience store-bought sandwich and slept for the first time since he blew his own world up.
It took eight hours before he heard Evie’s bike pull up outside the room and fifteen agonizing seconds before she knocked on the door.
He opened it to find her with that same skin-prickling glare on her face. His breath snagged. She filled the gut-clenching silence with, “You shouldn’t be here.”
“This,” he gestured from himself to her and back again, “is the only place I should be. Waiting for you.”
“You have a tour.”
She looked like she needed to sleep for days. She looked conflicted and it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up from the fear of that. “I have a life and I want you in it.”
“You’d blow off your tour for me?”
He nodded, intent on her eyes where her deepest truths would show. Nothing he had was worth choosing over Evie. He didn’t see her hand move. She hit him. A thump to his chest.
“You’re a freaking numbskull. You need to go right now.”
“I’m not going anywhere, wild thing, until you and me are okay.”
“Great.” She patted his chest. “We’re okay. Now go.”
“That’s not the way this is going to go down.”
“Yeah, it is. You can’t throw your whole career in a dumpster for me.”
“I built my whole career on losing you, seems fitting I’d risk it to get you back.” More lessons from a wizard. It only comes when you risk.
Evie groaned. “No, that just proves I’m the numbskull for working up to forgiving you.”