Total pages in book: 36
Estimated words: 34054 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 170(@200wpm)___ 136(@250wpm)___ 114(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 34054 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 170(@200wpm)___ 136(@250wpm)___ 114(@300wpm)
Trevor rose, his face contorting in pain and something I couldn’t put my finger on. “They won’t be you. I’d rather die than be with anyone else.”
I was tired of all of it. “You’re being a fuckin’ baby. Rejection happens. I want to be your friend. Continue playing music. But you gotta accept that the rest isn’t gonna happen, and being dramatic about it isn’t gonna change shit.”
Trevor nodded. “I’ll be gone, and you’ll regret this.”
My eyes meet Cain’s. “I told him I didn’t want him. Two hours later, when we went to check up on him, we found him dead.”
Billie whimpers. I turn to her. She’s in tears, hand over her mouth. “All these years, I thought it was my fault. That I’d done something wrong. You’re a fuckin’ coward, Lars.”
Anger and shame are volatile emotions. They cloud your vision and force you into rash judgments that impede your happiness. But when the two emotions get twisted, they’re far more dangerous. They’re a ticking time bomb bound to explode, causing devastation and casualties in their wake.
Every part of me wants to fall on the ground ay Billie’s feet and tell her I’m sorry. Admit that I was a fucked-up kid with nothing who feared having even less. I didn’t know that losing her would be the worst thing I ever experienced. Withdrawing from Billie is the most brutal thing I’ve ever been through. For the first two years, I’d disassociated and spiraled into dark places.
But as I stand here with the opportunity to tell her my truth, I don’t. Instead, I say words to push her away. Again. “Yes. I’m a fuckin’ coward. So run, Billie. Run from me while you still can.”
Billie doesn’t look at me. Her palms glide down her T-shirt as if trying to cleanse herself of what happened in this room. “You’re going to finish this interview. Then I’m getting on a plane, going home, and I never want to see you two again.”
“Why bother with the interview?” I scoff.
Her eyes snap up, brimming with tears, and I hate that I’m the reason. “Because you’ve already taken too much from me, and I’ll be damned if you take anything else. I’ve worked hard for my career, and this interview is hard won.”
I nod and watch as Billie Richmond storms away from me again.
“You’re a fuckin’ idiot,” Cain says as soon as the door slams behind Billie.
I frown. “You could’ve told her what was up back then. Why didn’t you?”
“So many times I wanted to run to her and tell her, beg her to come back and forgive you, but you needed me more than she did. She had her father and her wealth. You had nothing and no one. I was sure you'd crumble if I didn’t stick by you, and there was no way I could live with myself. She was stronger than you, and I knew it. So I got stuck choosing between the two pieces of my heart.” Cain steps toward me and grabs the back of my head, bringing his forehead to mine. “You gotta make this right, man. You know how much it’s hurt us without her all these years. Make this right.”
“We don’t need her,” I whisper. My lie sounds pathetic to my own ears.
“You can lie to them,” Cain says, pointing toward the balcony. “You can even lie to yourself, but you’ll never be able to lie to me. The pain our fans love, that soul-crushing sorrow, is all from her. She’s in everything you do, in everything we do. The struggle to succeed came from her, to be someone worthy of her. Sure, we love the music and all the shit that comes with it, but her memory has fueled us these past ten years. Maybe we’ve used Trevor as an excuse because we’re terrified that our love for her could crush us under its weight.”
Every syllable of Cain’s words hits me like bullets from a firing squad, with dissemination as its goal.
“I hear you at night, Lars. When you think I’m sleeping, you take out your old guitar and play that song. A song that makes you irate when you hear it on the radio or in a bar. The same song you practiced at rehearsal because she was there.”
“I love that song.”
I turned and watched Billie enter the shack. “You’re like a cat, you know that?”
She smiled, and I swore the sun burst through the clouds, radiating heat. I sounded like a chump, but that was what Billie did to me. She turned me into a sentimental fool. “It’s a good tune.”
“Yes, it is. The lyrics are almost haunting. You can sense his pain.”
I strummed the guitar. “It’s about his parents. Their abuse of him and substances. I can relate. Knowing that your parent, who’s supposed to love you more than anyone else, loves a chemical more.”