Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 135517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135517 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
I’m sure she had no idea that it would drag on for three years or that most of those years would be just as hard on them and everyone else who had a hand in trying to get me back on my feet. A look at my watch told me that it was too late to call Sydney, who usually went to the recording studio rather early in the morning, and since she was in the middle of recording her own upcoming masterpiece, I decided that I would also call her the next day.
I was almost halfway to my room when I changed tack and headed up the stairs that had once led to servant’s quarters but had been turned into my own personal studio when I bought the place. For a split second, I was reminded of all the dreams I’d had for the space back then.
The many hours I’d spent here with him. I waited for the usual feeling of loss and despair to attack, but surprisingly this time, all I felt was anger with a little touch of hate. “Fuck him!”
Chapter 4
*Ryder*
I wonder what she’s doing. It’s only been a day since the interview, and there was no way for me to know how she was holding up since no one in her circle would even spit on me, let alone fill me in, but she’d looked bad, and it was worrying me.
I gave up wondering a long time ago when I’d stop thinking of her and when I’d lose this feeling of missing a limb or something else just as important and necessary to my existence. That’s after I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I’d done something horrible in a fit of anger and torn our lives apart.
Something that I could never take back, something that I will regret for the rest of my life. That saying is really true, the one about not knowing what you’ve got until you’ve lost it, and my major fuck up had cost me big. I realized it almost immediately, but by then, it was too late. The deed was done for the whole world to see, and there was no turning back.
I wanted to hurt her and ended up shredding my heart to pieces in the process. Now I’ve slowly been bleeding out ever since, and not having her by my side like the air I need to breathe was finishing the job of slowly killing me. Sometimes I find it very preposterous that I’d done this to myself. Not even my worst enemy could’ve taken me down this fast and this spectacularly if they tried. I am that other cliché so easily bandied about; I am my own worst enemy.
Now I have to lay in the bed I’d made, rumpled sheets and all. I took a drag from my cigarette but got no pleasure from it. Smoking was just something I’d done when I was younger to look cool, but I had never really had a love for it. Then it became an addiction that I couldn’t kick.
I can still hear her scolding me in that sweet southern drawl of hers about the dangers of smoking and what it might do to my golden voice in the future, the voice that had catapulted me onto the world stage before I knew and had the ability to understand the price of fame.
When did I get so old? How had I missed the years in between? And why is it that when I look back, my time with her is the only happiness I find? Not the stardom, not the roaring crowds chanting my name, and not even the millions I had in the bank. The women I’d foolishly messed around with when we were on breaks were now faceless mistakes that I never wished to recall and were just another tool I’d used to hurt her the way I was hurting.
Isn’t it odd that the one person who tried to help me was the one I wanted to hurt most? I know now that it was my sick mind, not to mention the recreational drugs I’d dabbled in long before I knew that there were even effects.
When I look back on life now, something I’ve had plenty of time to do in the last three years, give or take, the only light I see is her. The only voice I hear in my head when I open my eyes in the morning is hers. I can’t count how many mornings I woke up with a smile and reached for her, only to realize that she was not there.
Those days are the worst. Days when I awaken as if it was before, when she and I were together, spending every waking moment with each other, laughing, playing, being silly. It wasn’t just when the cameras were on either, not like I am now with my wife. What we had was real; it was so real that it sometimes scared me.