Chapter 10 #2
Jack is quiet for a moment, his jaw working.
Then he says, “That’s not what I saw. I saw someone with real talent own that stage for the first half of that set.
The way you connected with the crowd, the way you moved, your voice.
That thing that makes people unable to look away.
I couldn’t take my eyes off you. Neither could anyone else in that room. ”
I turn to look at him, surprised by the intensity in his voice.
“So what if it didn’t go perfectly,” he continues. “It was your first time back on a big stage in years. These things take time.”
My throat tightens. “It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like I proved I can’t do this.”
“No,” he says firmly. “You proved you can get up there. The rest is just practice.” He pauses, glancing at me. “We can talk through what you were feeling. I don’t know if that would help, but maybe analyzing it would give you something to work with next time.”
I tense slightly at the suggestion. I could tell him about Brandon being there, but the shame of it stops the words in my throat. Two years after the divorce, and he still has that kind of power over me? After all my big talk about trying to move on. The humiliation is too much.
“I don’t really know what it was,” I lie, staring out at the darkness beyond my window. “Just general stage fright, I guess. It just… hit me all at once.”
He nods slowly, like he can sense there’s more I’m not saying, but won’t push. “Whatever happened up there doesn’t change the fact that you’re the real deal. You just need to trust that.”
A tear finally escapes down my cheek. “You know, for a fake boyfriend, you’re not half bad at the comfort thing.”
“I’m full of surprises,” he says, and his hand finds mine in the darkness, squeezing. “And I mean what I said. You have something special, Lark. Don’t let one rough night make you forget that.”
His thumb strokes across my knuckles. I want to believe him. I want to believe that tonight wasn’t proof of failure, that I really do have whatever he thinks he saw.
“You know,” he says, “my first professional race was a complete disaster.”
I turn to look at him. “Really?”
“Really. I qualified well, started in fourth position, and then proceeded to make every rookie mistake possible. Spun out, almost took out another driver on the restart, and finished dead last.” He taps his fingers on the steering wheel.
“The F1 press had a field day with it. There was this one headline—‘Midnight’s Career Over Before It Begins.’”
“What did you do?” I ask, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.
“I went back to the hotel, got spectacularly drunk, and swore I’d never race again,” he admits with a self-deprecating laugh. “Then I woke up the next morning, threw up, and realized that if I quit after one bad day, I’d never know if I could have made it.”
I smile, picturing young Jack on his own in Europe, thousands of miles from home, terrified but too stubborn to give up. “So you kept going.”
“So I kept going,” he confirms, nodding as we pass under a streetlight that momentarily illuminates his face.
“And the next race was better. Not great, but better. And the one after that was better still. And then I bombed again, and then I bounced back. That’s how these things go.
Ups and downs, good performances and disasters. Nobody’s consistent all the time.”
I turn to look at him, studying his profile. “How do you do that? Just decide something and make it happen?”
“Years of practice,” he says with a small smile. “And a healthy dose of delusion. It’s basically my superpower.”
That makes me laugh, breaking through some of the tension I’ve been carrying since I walked off that stage.
“Thanks for coming with me tonight,” I say after a moment. “Even though it was a disaster.”
“It wasn’t a disaster,” he insists. “And I wouldn’t have missed it. That’s what fake boyfriends are for, right? Showing up for the important stuff?”
The words settle warm in my chest. Because it doesn’t feel fake, him being here. The way he’s looking at me, the comfort of his hand still holding mine, none of it feels fake. But that’s territory I can’t let myself think about right now.
We drive in comfortable silence, and by the time we reach Dark River, the tightness in my chest has eased.
Part of me doesn’t want this to end. I want to ask him to come up, to keep talking, to let his presence chase away the lingering shame of tonight.
But that’s a terrible idea for about a dozen reasons, so I swallow the impulse down.
Jack walks me to my door, guitar case in hand.
He sets it down gently against the wall and looks at me for a long moment, like he’s trying to decide whether to say something.
Finally, he just pulls me into a hug. It’s warm and solid and I let myself sink into it for a few seconds before pulling back.
“Get some rest,” he says. “Tonight doesn’t define anything.”
I nod, not trusting my voice. He waits until I’m inside with the door locked before I hear his footsteps heading back down the stairs.
Once inside my apartment, I lean against the door, letting out a long breath. The night plays on a loop in my head. The good start, seeing Brandon, the collapse.
The embarrassment is bad enough, but what really twists the knife is how easily Brandon can still throw me off.
Two years of divorce, months of therapy sessions, boxing classes with Dominic, countless hours building my life back piece by piece, and that man can still get in my head with nothing but his presence.
Maybe I would have bombed even if he hadn’t showed up.
The stage fright was real before I saw him.
But seeing his face in the crowd, that familiar smirk, it was like all those years of him making me feel small came rushing back.
Him systematically dismantling my confidence one comment at a time until some part of me started to believe it.
I know intellectually it’s not true. Therapy taught me that. But sometimes it feels like his words took root somewhere deep in my bones, and no amount of rational thought can dig them out completely.
I push off the door and head to my bedroom, setting my guitar in the corner. Tomorrow I’ll think about next steps. Tonight, I just need to sleep and try to forget.