Shaking his head, he leaned in, bracing his forearm on the wall and caging me in. “I want to kiss you,” he gently confessed as he brushed my lip with his thumb.
Kiss me.
“But I can’t. I need you thinking with a clear head.”
“Cocky much?”
He never lost that serious expression when he dropped the hand that held my face to squeeze my ass through my jeans. There was so much possession in that simple gesture. It made me consider how far he’d come from the drummer I’d met nine months ago. The one who played the background and let his friends call the shots because he didn’t like making waves. To my heart, it was now painfully clear why he preferred it that way.
Because the waves Jericho caused were tragic on the soul.
They were one-hundred-foot tsunamis.
“No.” He let me go, took a step back, and slid his hands in his jeans as he looked at me. “When I’m not eager to fuck you, all I can process is fear. I’ve been wracking my brain since the moment I found out you knew about Emily. I didn’t think you’d ever forgive me, but then you did, and it gave me hope. I clung to that seed until I realized what I’d truly lost. Trust. You’d given it so easily, and I didn’t understand until this moment as I’m fighting for the words to get it back. If I’d known losing you would turn me this inside out, I would have told you about Emily. I would have told you the moment I wished that it had been you I’d given my name. I hadn’t even kissed you yet. Did you know that? I wanted to marry you long before I ever kissed you. So much that I filed for divorce the next day.”
While Jericho gathered his thoughts and I replayed everything he’d confessed so far, we stared at each other, longing for what could have been.
“I know you feel guilty for me loving you,” he said, “but there’s no reason for either of us to carry that weight. I stopped wanting Emily long before we met, and she has no one to blame but herself.”
His lips set in a grim line, and his brows dipped as he remembered the past.
“We were married for only four months before she cheated and then six before she ran away because I told her if the baby wasn’t mine, we were through. I don’t know if it was anger that spoke for me, but I know it’s been over four years. She won’t let me find her because she cares more about her power over me than she does me. She likes knowing that I’m chasing her and doesn’t care if it hurts. She doesn’t care if I’m driving myself insane over the moments I might be missing with my kid. My heart kept beating when she walked out the door, and now I know the reason. It’s because it never belonged to her. It was always meant for you.”
Versailles might as well have been a berry field instead of a seventeenth-century palace.
“If she’s truly so terrible, kid or no kid, how could you choose to stay with her?” I asked him.
“Because I was an orphan.”
I ached for him because he sounded so ashamed. It hadn’t been his fault. Didn’t he know that?
“I never had a family,” he continued. “I never knew what it was like to form a connection that couldn’t be broken with the stroke of a pen. Houston and Loren helped fill the gaps, but it was never enough. There was always something missing. Always a need for more. I met Emily, and I was drawn because she was damaged like me”—hesitating, the look in his eyes pleaded for me to understand—“and like you.”
I sucked in a breath. Was I just another Emily?
“The only thing she ever gave the world was both of her middle fingers, and I wanted to be right there beside her. I wasn’t…” He swallowed. “I wasn’t the same after I met her. I was reckless and spiraling too fast to stop on my own. I have memories that keep me awake sometimes because of the things she convinced me to do. Houston and Loren saw what was happening and tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t trust them. They don’t know this, but Emily made me hate my best friends long before Calvin, and I was too blind to see it. She’d cry and convince me that they didn’t want to see me happy, and I…” He hung his head. “I fucking believed her.”
His voice broke on that last, and suddenly, I was transported back to the show in Arizona after I was exiled from their bus and the lyrics I’d foolishly mistaken for Loren’s.
I heard Rich sniffle, and then he kept speaking.