“You’re going to go out to LA without a job?”
I kicked at nothing on the carpet. “I want to play music. If I don’t go now, then I’ll never go.”
She said nothing, and when I looked back up at her, tears were in her eyes. She looked away from me, but she was furious, as if she was angry that she couldn’t keep the tears in.
“Blaire…”
“What about us?” she choked out, as if she already knew the answer.
“You know I love you.”
“Then, what. About. Us?” she bit out.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“I love you, Blaire. I want us to be together, but long-distance when I’m in LA and you’re here at Tech?”
She jumped to her feet and took my hands. Tears were streaming down her face now. “Then, I’ll go with you.”
“What?” I asked, aghast. “No! You can’t go with me. You have to stay here. You’re going to become a psychologist. You’re going to fix all the things that your mom screwed up. You’re going to do beautiful, amazing things.”
“I can do them in LA,” she said even though she had to know that wasn’t true.
“Blaire,” I said, pushing her hair back from her face and swiping at the tears on her cheeks. “I’m leaving. You’re staying.”
“I don’t accept this.”
And to my deepest regret and horror, I hardened. I had to leave. I had to fight for my music. I refused for her to give up on her dreams for my own. “You have to accept it. We’re over.”
Then, I crawled back through her window, sank into my truck, and cried all the tears I couldn’t show her.
“I know what happens when I leave,” I told my dad. “And I’m never going to put her through that.”
“For her sake…I hope you’re right.”
26
Blaire
“How’d it go with your dad?” I asked later that day when we finally left the party.
Campbell grimaced. “Not great.”
“I don’t think he likes me.”
“What? Why would you say that?”
“Intuition.”
He shook his head as he drove us back to his place. “No, not at all. That all has to do with me. Not you.” He grasped my hand in his. “There is absolutely nothing that anyone could dislike about you.”
“Well, he saw me coming out of a bathroom with his son. I bet he could guess what we were doing.”
“He did. But he’s more worried for you than anything.”
My eyes widened. “What? Why?”
“He thinks I’m love bombing you.”
I nodded slowly. “Actually, that makes perfect sense.”
Campbell blinked at me. “What?”
I dealt with a lot of girls with Blaire Blush who got love bombed by their boyfriends or latest Tinder find. Love bombing was a complex, manipulative tactic that was usually a form of psychological abuse. It was when a person showed excessive amounts of attention and affection in a way to make the receipt more dependent on them.
His father may not know that he’d helped me gain millions of new followers and was stealing all my time, but he was meeting me after assuming we’d only been together for a matter of weeks. It was perfectly reasonable to have that fear. Especially since Campbell was a celebrity and I was just a small-town girl. But that didn’t account for our past and the fact that we had a much deeper connection than what might appear on the surface.
“He doesn’t know the truth about us. So, he came to his own conclusions. Maybe you just need to have a real conversation with him about us. That way, we can all be on the same page.”
A smile tugged at his lips. “There’s therapist Blaire to the rescue.”
I laughed. “I promise that I am so much worse at diagnosing my own problems than everyone else’s.”
“Fine. I will talk to him,” he said with a sigh. “Again. It’s going to suck. He thinks the worst of me.”
“He loves you,” I assured him.
“Yeah, yeah.”
It wasn’t until we got back to his place and he was drawing me inside that I realized he had been waiting to say anything more.
“He actually was worried about what will happen after I leave again.”
I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “I also was wondering that.”
“Come with me,” he said, taking my hand.
My eyes widened. “What?”
“Not forever. But for a week…or two even. Last time I left for LA without you, it was traumatic, to say the least. I don’t want to leave you behind. So, come be with me there while I iron out what we’re doing for the album. We can decide the rest as we go.”
I opened my mouth to tell him all the reasons that I couldn’t leave Lubbock, but was that true? I could leave Lubbock. For a week or two. I didn’t have a traditional job. There was no college holding me back, as there had been last time. And hadn’t I been the one begging him to let me go to LA with him when he left in high school? Why had I been brave enough then and not now?