The twilight was glorious that morning. The sun nearly kissing the stars. I wanted him to watch it, but I didn’t want to wake him up. I settled for taking a picture with his phone. He’d see it when he woke up.
Later that morning, we snuck into the Mercedes. Harry and Hamish met us in the living room. Alex’s family stood in line like soldiers by the door—Jim, Louisa, Carly, and the three boys, from tallest to shortest—staring at us through the lens of regret and tragedy.
Alex patted the boys’ heads and ignored the adults altogether. He bent forward to speak to them, his voice hushed. “Be good. I’ll come back soon and give you stuff. Meaningful stuff, I swear.”
Sadness pierced my soul as Alex’s house became smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror of the SUV. The silence, choking and suffocating, was loaded with so many words I didn’t want to say in front of these strangers. I took his hand in mine and squeezed.
“I’m sorry I made you do this.”
“I’m sorry for thinking with my dick and doing this,” he shot back, his words not malicious or angry, but simply frank. “And also for the black eye.”
Jenna: I heard Alex had a little accident with your eye. A dozen Ray-Bans will be waiting at the hotel. Make sure you wear them until the black fades. Oh, and don’t worry about the paparazzo who photographed you. We paid him well to destroy the photos.
To live in Alex Winslow’s world.
We stopped at a little café and had a full English breakfast, then zipped straight into London. It was close to eight o’clock in the morning—still far too early for the local shops to open—when we stopped in front of a fancy-looking building on Piccadilly Circus. Alex jumped out of the SUV and helped me out, and we both walked under an arched entrance leading to the back of a block. Someone buzzed us inside, and a second later, we stood in a red-carpeted foyer.
“Close your eyes,” he croaked.
“Why?”
“Because everything is so much more beautiful when you can’t see it.”
I bit my lower lip, allowing my eyelids to flutter shut. Alex took my hand, not gently—the way he did everything, with the kind of coarseness I’d grown to love—and ushered me a few feet until I heard a door opening and closing.
“Open.”
I was spellbound before my eyes were fully wide. Fabrics. Hundreds and hundreds of fabrics. Lace. Satin. Velvet. Chiffon. Organza. Colors. So many gorgeous colors, swirling together like a carnival of beauty. Merlot red. Electric pink. Paradise blue. Metallic silver. Rich and soft and inviting, I wanted to roll inside them like a caterpillar. Swim in them. Live in them. Love in them. I ran to a corner where the velvet sat in long rolls, stocked on neat shelves in the vast, old-school room.
“This is perfect,” I exclaimed. “This is everything.”
“You’re everything,” I heard him say, still standing at the door.
I turned around. His hands were stuffed inside his pockets. His gaze was a little warmer than his usual indifferent face. To some, it may look like he had melted and yielded to what we were. But I knew better than that. There was fire in him, and it was going to consume him one day. One day soon. That was why I’d written him the poem that morning.
The poem I knew I would give him someday.
Someday soon, when we said goodbye.
Someday soon, when I’d need to forget.
The lads didn’t join us until Paris.
Which was a good fucking thing, because every minute alone with Indigo “Indie” “Stardust” Bellamy, I felt like I could breathe deeper. It wasn’t that I didn’t like my mates. I did, in my own screwed-up way. Despite everything they’d done—and maybe even because of it—I knew they always had my back. But I also acknowledged that I wasn’t in the best state of mind.
I needed to be tamed.
So they’d tried to tame me.
And that’s when the monster inside of me came out.
Spending time with Indie, the monster was tucked in. Sure, Stardust watched over me, but she wasn’t them. She was fresh, pure. We weren’t stuck between the walls of the past, a foundation that had been steadily crumbling with every hushed phone call and white lie meant to save me.
By the time we boarded the plane to Paris, after my Cambridge Castle gig, I wasn’t even pissed off at Blake and Lucas anymore. That elusive feeling of contempt, one that cannot be bought, purchased, abused, and monitored with measurements of lethal powder or amber liquid, was strange to me. I was happy, but I couldn’t control it.
It came to me in small, steady doses, not all at once, with a rolled note and a few sniffs. It came to me as all good things should be experienced—in time, and in effort, and with caution.