Chapter 17 #2
I know Kai, Markus and Adam love me. I know they love me and don’t judge me for my feelings.
Past or present. Because that’s what this is; I know I love them all still to this very moment.
But if Reis decides this is too much, that we can’t get past what he overhead or the anger that he holds, that he actually agrees with the venom those bitches thought…
then this is done. Because it’s not going to work if Reis can’t love me back.
I won’t rip them all apart. They’ve built this amazing life and career together, and they can find another girl together or separately to fill their hearts. I’m nothing special.
It will kill me, but I’ll let them go. For good.
I take a steadying breath and a traitorous tear falls down my cheek as I scrub it off angrily.
Reis' hands clench into fists at his sides, and his throat bobs as he swallows.
“Guys, please,” he begs, turning to face the others, “Please let me talk to her alone first.” Markus nods, slapping the arms of his chair to push himself up to stand.
Markus comes over to me, leaning over me to take a kiss. My cheeks are wet from my tears, but he says nothing of it. Just sweetly wipes my tears away before whispering, “Stay strong, Songbird. And give him hell.”
Kai is the next to leave, staring at Reis with a hard look before breathing heavily through his nose.
“Don’t fuck this up,” he growls at Reis, before turning to me.
“Remember how much I love you. Nothing changes that,” he whispers, giving me a soft kiss before walking out.
Adam stands still. He’s not moving at all as he looks at me, arms crossed as he waits for me to tell him I’m okay. I know right now that if I asked him to stay, he would plant himself between me and Reis and refuse to move.
I love this man so fucking much. He’s willing to go this far to protect me.
“It’s okay, Adam,” I say with tears in my eyes, holding my hand out for his to give him a gentle, reassuring squeeze. “It’s okay. I’ll be okay.”
Adam sighs roughly. “He so much as says one wrong word to you, and you call me. I’ll be in the other room, waiting .” Adam points the last part to Reis threateningly before kissing the crown of my head and leaving the room without even looking at Reis.
The air between Reis and I is awkward when they all leave the room.
There’s an unknown energy that fills the air; guilt and frustration, regret and revenge, love and desperation, all swirling around us.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what else to say. It’s…up to him now.
It’s up to him to not be a dumb-ass and start up again about how this entire fucking thing is my fault.
“Melody, I’m…” he starts to say before his voice breaks. Reis bites the inside of his cheek, and closes his eyes. “I’m so fucking sorry. God, I was so wrong, and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”
The air escapes involuntarily from my lungs as I choke on it. What… is happening?
My eyes widen in shock and my body freezes. I wasn’t prepared for that. For him to own what happened as his fault, for him to apologize.
Can I trust it though?
My gut tells me to. That I can trust what he’s saying, that he’s being honest, but my mind is screaming at me to remember all the shit he pulled. That the last seven years of agony was because he made it so.
Reis looks like a man being eaten apart with regret, though. He stands there, shoulders hunched, his hands restless—fidgeting, clenching, grasping at nothing, while his face, once so confident, is hollow with time and something deeper. Remorse.
It drips from him, thick and suffocating, pooling in the tired lines around his redringed eyes.
I see it now, in the way he stares at the floor, as if searching for pieces of himself he has long since lost. In the way his lips part, then press shut, swallowing words he knows are too late, but I wait for them to be said all the same.
“I know I fucked up. I realize it now. I didn’t before,” he says quietly, running a hand through his hair and pulling at the loose waves.
“I was so blinded by hurt and heartbreak that you’d say that—for any reason—that I just had to get away.
When Kai and I told Adam and Markus, they were devastated.
I preyed on that hurt, I see that now, and convinced them to move immediately to really give the band a shot, to get away from you.
With you out of the picture, there was nothing else in Haven for us. ”
“But you didn’t even ask me about it.” My shoulders tense up, drawn up just enough to betray the weight of what I’m feeling.
One hand hovers over my chest, fingers gripping the fabric of the shirt I’m wearing as if I could help my broken heart.
I try to grasp something for stability, while my breathing comes unevenly; shallow, then deep, then caught somewhere in between.
It’s like my body can’t decide whether to sob in release, or to hold it all in.
Like I don’t know whether to run away or stay long enough to hear an explanation.
“You overheard a conversation between me and a girl you knew wasn’t the nicest to me, and figured I’d bare my true feelings to her?
What a joke,” I say, trying to put on a strong tone, but it falls flat even to my ears.
“I was a dumb kid, Mel. I… I heard the girl that I was stupidly, longingly, irrevocably in love with tell someone that she didn’t care about me, about me or my best friends.
After all the time we’d spent together; the near kisses, the gestures, after all of it …
It tore me apart to hear that. I thought that you had just been using us.
Hearing those words from your own lips broke me into a million pieces.
Unfortunately, the piece that was the loudest was the anger and cowardice. ”
Reis rushes to me, holding me tightly by the biceps. His eyes wild with an edge of desperation.
“You have to believe me, Melody. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“Why do you care now, Reis? You had seven years, seven fucking years , to figure this out. If I hadn’t been given those tickets and crushed against the gate, you would still be out there hating me, thinking I was a vile human being.”
“I have more information now. I… I can see that my thinking was wrong and that I fucked up.”
“Did you even think about me twice after you left? Or was it out of sight, out of mind?” I shift my weight to the side, pulling back from him while I try to hold back from scream-sobbing.
I can feel it building. I know that if we keep going down this road, I’m going to lose it. The hurt’s been there for too long and it’s festered so much inside both of us that I don’t know how we can trust each other again.
“Melody,” Reis says brokenly. His hand reaches out for me, but I dodge it.
The agony in his eyes nearly breaks me. His voice is raw when he whispers my name. There’s a plea in it, a desperate kind of longing that shatters something inside me.
But I stay where I am, arms wrapped around myself, trying to hold together all the pieces he broke.
“I thought about you every single day for the past seven years. I wished you were here with me, with us, every single goddamn day for the past seven years. I’d wake up thinking about you and then be so fucking angry at myself because I thought you used us.”
“Be serious, Reis,” I sigh, rolling my eyes and tears fall.
He grabs my hands, not caring if I pull away. Not letting me move away.
“I am so fucking serious. Melody, I worked my ass off to become successful. All to become worthy of you. You, and you alone, are the reason why On The Edge rose to fame so quickly. Because every morning I thought of you. Because every show we played, I sang to you . Because every evening I thought about you, and thought about what else I could do to prove myself to be good enough for you . You’re…
You’re under my skin, Melody,” he says earnestly while rubbing my hands continuously.
He’s pulling at my hands so incessantly, it’s like he’s trying to remind himself that I’m right there in front of him.
Like a man who’s seen a ghost and doesn’t want it to disappear.
“You’ve always been under my skin. My every waking thought, in my dreams every night.
I was a young, dumb kid, so in love with a girl and I thought there was no chance anymore.
Navigating that emotional shit-storm was hard, so fucking hard, and I made a lot of mistakes.
I wish I would’ve known the extent of what happened…
I heard a few things here or there and I made sure to stop it there.
But what you’re saying… Melody, I had no idea.
If I had, I would’ve made sure they wouldn’t be able to walk away.
But more than that, I would’ve known that you were just trying to protect yourself by saying that.
Protecting yourself when we didn’t, even after we promised.
” He hangs his head in disappointment pointing inward, shaking it. “It would’ve been so different.”
“You were in love with me?” I ask breathlessly, my ears having perked up at that little tidbit.
“Oh god,” Reis chuckles with a small, embarrassed smile, “I was so fucking in love with you. The treehouse didn’t clue you in? That felt like a declaration to everyone. I… I got a–” A blush warms up his cheeks and my breath catches in my throat.
“A tattoo of it on your back,” I whisper breathlessly.
Reis nods, squeezing my hand gently.
I always dreamt of this, but never thought it would actually happen.
Reis was so good at putting space between us.
We’d get just a little closer and then he’d spend the next few days avoiding me emotionally.
But he never left . He never let me go without what I needed from him to feel safe, because of how he was feeling.
Until he did.
“You loved me?” I repeat, like there’s a chance my ears didn’t hear him correctly.