Chapter 23 Truth
Truth
We cleaned up after that. Though we’d just done everything but have sex, I still felt shy around Grey, and he respected my privacy as I showered.
He’d given me a fresh change of clothes, including a pair of underwear.
I’d been reluctant to put them on at first, but the options were either Grey’s underwear or my own come-stained ones, so… it wasn’t really a choice.
As I showered, guilt knotted my stomach.
In the heat of the moment, it had been so easy to brush off how Carina might feel about this whole mess.
It was considerably harder once the clarity set in.
I tried to shove down the shame. The fact of the matter was, either Grey had a good excuse for fooling around with me while in a relationship, or he didn’t.
If he had a good excuse, though for the life of me, I couldn’t fathom what that could be, then there was no harm done.
And if he didn’t have a good excuse, well…
it wasn’t my job to protect someone else’s relationship.
Didn’t I attempt to do that for months to no avail?
The knot in my stomach twisted tighter. Yeah, feeling better about my actions wouldn’t be that easy.
Grey just better have an excellent excuse.
After my shower, Grey took his, and though my mind swirled with questions, I still managed to fall asleep before he was back.
I woke briefly when he joined me. Just enough to curl myself deep into his arms as he wrapped them around me.
My questions flitted across my mind, but I didn’t pay them as much attention this time.
We could talk about it when we woke up, just like he had promised, and whatever happened would happen.
For now, I would just enjoy drifting off with Grey holding me.
When I woke, the sun was already streaming through the window of his room.
Grey slept peacefully, his lips slightly parted as he breathed slowly.
He hadn’t moved an inch during the night.
God, he looked like an angel. Before I could stop myself, I reached over to peck him on the lips.
He blinked in surprise then smiled when he saw me.
“Good morning,” he said groggily.
“Morning.”
He sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. For a moment, he looked like a giant kid. It was hilarious and adorable, but as soon as his hands fell from his face, he reverted back to my Grey.
“How’d you sleep?” he asked.
“Like a rock,” I said honestly. I could still feel trace effects of the previous night’s drinking, but it was nothing coffee wouldn’t fix.
“Care for some coffee?” he asked as if reading my mind.
I grinned. Realistically, there was no way he could know what I was thinking, but I found it insufferably cute that we were so in sync in that moment. “Absolutely.”
We went out to his kitchen. The living area was as empty as it had been the night before. If Dae had come home at any point during the night, he’d managed to hide the evidence.
While Grey began pouring water into the coffee maker, my mind wandered.
To last night. To us in bed. Then to Carina.
And finally to the conversation in the stairwell.
The conversation that he’d promised to finish today.
I needed it finished. I was tired of the lack of answers when it came to Grey and Carina.
And I couldn’t wait any longer, especially after what we’d done.
“So,” I began, trying to keep my tone light as the coffee started to brew. “You said that you’d explain things to me.”
Grey shot me a wary look. “I did.” He rummaged through the cabinets, pulling out mugs for both of us. “Cream?”
He was avoiding the conversation, but I allowed it. I wouldn’t leave his place until he told me everything. “Sure.”
I waited while he finished making our coffee. Each move he made seemed long and drawn out, like he was intentionally taking his time. He might’ve been. But I was also being incredibly impatient, and I knew it.
Finally—about forty years later—he sat down with me at the barstools next to his kitchen counter. I sipped from the coffee the moment he handed it to me. It was delicious.
“Okay.” Grey sighed.
I could see him steeling himself, like he was about to endure excruciating pain. Maybe he was. Maybe the whole truth was more painful than I could imagine.
I took another sip of coffee as I waited.
“I told you about the fangirl who broke into my apartment last year,” Grey said. “But that wasn’t the end of the story.”
I blinked at him. “Things got worse?”
The corners or his mouth tugged down. “Yeah.” He took a deep, bracing breath. “So, after the fangirl broke into my place, I was obviously on edge. We filed police reports and put a restraining order on her, and I thought it was over. I was kind of right.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she didn’t bother me again. She stepped down as the head of my fan club and checked into a treatment facility.
So, that was that, I thought.” He paused, swirling his coffee in his cup before continuing.
“But after that… my personal information got out to the public. I’m talking email, phone number, the works.
I was constantly bombarded with people trying to contact me.
They’d send me nudes, harass me to go on dates with them, type the most disgusting things.
I tried blocking people, but that didn’t matter.
There were always more people sending me texts. I stopped carrying my phone with me.”
I listened, too afraid to speak, to tell him how sorry I was that he had gone through what he described.
That people thought they had some kind of ownership over him just because they liked his music.
Now that he was telling me the story, I didn’t want to interrupt, afraid that he might get spooked and stop sharing and I would be left with more questions.
“It was—” Grey cleared his throat. “It was a dark time for me. I got superdepressed. My grades fell. I stopped showing up to rehearsals. The other guys had fans, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t as bad for them as it was for me.
Even though Dae and the others felt bad for me, they didn’t exactly know what it was like to go through it. I’ve never felt so alone.”
I shuddered, picturing Grey sad and alone in his room.
With a sudden surge of emotion, I wished for nothing more than to have known him back then—to have been there for him when he needed someone the most. But the hurt Grey had experienced was all behind him.
And no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t protect him from things that had already happened.
Grey took another shaky breath. “Then, one night, after the band had played, I was having a drink—one drink—and the next thing I knew…” His breathing sped up, and when he spoke again, I could hear the emotions warring in his throat.
“Dae was waking me up in the bathroom stall of the bar. I didn’t know what had happened, but my pants were at my ankles.
I had flashes of two guys standing over me, but that was about it.
I couldn’t tell you what they did. Or even if they did anything. ”
Cold terror pooled in the pit of my stomach as I processed Grey’s words. “You were drugged?”
Grey nodded. He went to drink from his coffee but then thought better of it and set it aside.
“Dae swears he scared them away when he came into the bathroom. That they didn’t have time to do anything.
And he’s probably right. My underwear was still on.
I didn’t have any… injuries to suggest something else had happened.
But…” He trailed off and looked furiously at his lap, but the move didn’t stop me from seeing the tears in his eyes.
Slowly, I reached out to touch his arm. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.
” The words felt stupid and inadequate, but they were the only ones I had.
The cold feeling in my stomach had warmed into a thick cloud of emotion that sat in my chest and throat, threatening to climb farther and spill out of my eyes.
I fought it down, refusing to cry in front of Grey.
Knowing him, that would only make him feel worse.
We sat in silence for a moment while we collected ourselves.
“After that happened, something had to change,” Grey continued, sounding much calmer now.
“I quit the band for about a week, but I couldn’t keep that up.
” He smiled grimly. “I love music too much, and I’d be damned if I let those so-called fans keep me from pursuing it.
So we held an emergency meeting with the band and our friends to figure out what we should do.
A friend we’d all known for years suggested a plan. ”
I guessed who he was talking about before he said her name.
“Carina,” he said, “suggested that maybe, just maybe, the fans would cool off a little if they knew I was taken. She had numbers behind to support how parasocial relationships change when celebrities get significant others and whatnot. I can’t remember them anymore.
But none of us had any better ideas, so we decided that I would ‘date’ Carina. ”
I didn’t miss his air quotes around the word “date” despite the seriousness of his story, and my heart skipped a beat with hope.
“We started publicly dating.” He shrugged. “Even though she was more my bodyguard than my girlfriend. She kept an eye on fans at events and watched my drinks.”
I gaped at him. “She’s not your real girlfriend?” I asked incredulously before I could stop myself.
Grey let out a dark chuckle. “She needed to be for this plan to work. If people thought there was even the slightest chance we weren’t together and that they could have me, then there would be no point in us pretending.”
“Right.” I shook my head to clear it of indignation. “Sorry. Keep going.”