Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
Eric
? It's Not Over - Daughtry?
I don’t want to think about a world without you in it.
Tyler’s words still echo in my mind and tug at something in my chest. She cares about me. She tries so hard to play it off, but she does. I fucking know she does, and it’s starting to drive me crazy.
I felt things start to shift when we were at my parents’ house over the break, but as soon as I felt her getting close, she pulled away again.
I checked with my lawyer, and if I can just get her to admit how she feels, we can amend the contract.
We can end this incessant torture and just be together.
A soft knock at the door pulls my focus from my phone where I’m in the middle of my pre-show ritual of scrolling social media.
“Hey,” Tyler says, stepping into the greenroom. “I’m glad it’s just you in here. I wanted to apologize about earlier.”
“Like I already told you, there’s no need. I lost my temper. I should be apologizing to you.”
“No,” she says, crossing the room to me. “This is your story. Your life. What you need is someone to listen. You don’t need someone to tell you how you should feel. I’m so, so sorry, Eric.”
“It’s forgiven, Sunshine,” I say. “I like that you care about me.” Her eyes dart to mine and I smirk. After just over four months on this tour, I’m getting sick of dancing around this, so I’m pushing. Maybe it’ll blow up in my face, but I don’t know how much more of this I can take.
“And it’s cute,” I say, lifting the braid she has pulled over her shoulder into my fingers and sliding them down the length, my knuckles barely missing her breast as my hand moves over the twisted strands. “The way you keep trying so hard not to want me.”
“We’re not talking about this,” she says. “We had a deal.”
“Well, maybe I’m no longer on board with that deal.”
“I refuse to be another notch in your bedpost,” she says, forcing a confidence to her voice, but I hear the way it wavers.
“Oh, but you already are,” I remind her with a wink.
“Yeah, well, I don’t make the same mistake twice,” she says. I tell myself she’s deflecting, but her words feel like a punch to the gut anyway.
“Is that what I am to you, Ty?” I ask, stepping closer. “A mistake?”
“Yes,” she says, holding my gaze.
I drop her braid and step back. Another knock at the door draws my attention over her shoulder and to the doorway, where Josh and the guys are walking past, already amped up.
“Let’s fucking gooooooo,” Josh shouts as he walks past the room and down the hallway.
“Good to know,” I say, looking back into her eyes. I step around her and out into the hallway where I follow the guys to the stage. I probably shouldn’t have done that before a show, but at least now I get to spend the next ninety minutes releasing my foul mood by pounding the shit out of my drums.
****
I slide into the booth across from Tyler and find myself having a hard time looking at her without my heart feeling like it’s being torn out of my damn chest. We’ve barely spoken to each other since she verbalized her regrets last night, and I hate the tension that exists between us now.
Hate that all the hope I was holding onto is now gone.
Vanished into thin air like she did the night we met.
She looks over her notes, apparently also unable to look at me.
“Tyler,” I say, watching as she flinches at the sound of my voice. “Look at me.” It takes a few seconds, but she slowly raises her eyes to meet mine. I open my mouth to apologize for going back on my word, but she cuts me off.
“I’m sorry,” she rushes out. “About what I said last night. It was needlessly rude and completely untrue.” She looks away for a second before looking back up into my eyes.
“You’re not a mistake. I could never think that.
You are…” she sighs, brow creasing as she searches for the right words.
“You are a lot of things, but a mistake is not one of them. I’m sorry if I made you believe otherwise. ”
“The walls aren’t necessary,” I say, calling her out.
“You don’t have to protect yourself from me. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She nods once, but doesn’t say anything before she unlocks her phone, fires up her app, and taps record.
“So, after the Grammys that year,” she says, taking control of the conversation. “What happened?”
I sigh, stretching my neck from side to side.
“Like I predicted, it wasn’t a one and done thing for her. And it got worse on the tour where I was forced to watch it escalate. I begged her to stop, begged her to get help, begged her to move in with me so I could get her away from her sister and help her through it.
“We fought constantly, especially when she was high. For about three months after the tour, it was all just fighting and sex. I realized about a week before the guys and I started our European tour that year that it was over. That it’d been over for a while, but neither of us pulled the trigger.
So, I did. I used the tour as an opportunity to make a clean break. ”
“How did she take it?” Ty asks.
I shrug.
“She didn’t seem to care. Like I said, we both knew it was over way before it was. Didn’t stop her from saying some pretty awful shit to me before I left, though.”
You think you’re so fucking special because you’re sober. So much better than me.
I shake her words from my head when I feel Tyler’s fingers wrap around my hand and squeeze. She doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t need to. Just her presence is enough to fill this void that’s been in my chest for the last five years.
“So you went on tour, and then what happened? How long were you gone?”
“Four months,” I say. “And when we got back, I kept myself busy visiting family and friends and writing new music with the guys. Six weeks after we got back, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. I almost didn’t answer it, but something told me I needed to, so I did.”
“It was Amy?” Ty guesses, and I nod.
“She was terrified. Screaming and crying. Telling me she couldn’t find her phone and didn’t know where she was.
All she knew was that she wanted to get out.
” I swallow the burn in my throat at the memory of her voice on the other end of the line.
How, despite everything we’d been through, it tore my fucking heart out.
I clear my throat. “I didn’t think, I just got in my car and started going to every place I knew her sister would drag her.
When I came up empty handed, I told her to try and find a land line so she could call 9-1-1.
It was the only way I knew to track her location.
“She finally found one and she kept me on the other line. When the dispatcher relayed the address, they told her they were sending emergency services, and she freaked out. She was so scared, Ty. Scared she was going to get in trouble. That her career would be over. That the people she was with were going to start shooting when the cops showed up. She thought she was going to die.”
“I remember when that news broke,” Ty says, her voice low, arms wrapped tight against her stomach, and eyes vacant. Like she’s imagining herself there with me.
“It was bad. As you know, they arrested everyone. It was an absolute shitshow.” I sigh and run a hand down my face.
“I didn’t make it to the house in time, and by the time I did make it there, they weren’t letting anyone near it.
So, I went straight to the jail and as soon as they let me see her, I told her I’d pay her bail and get her out if she agreed to go straight to rehab, and she did. ”
“And you never left her side,” Ty says, looking at me. “I remember that, too.”
“I didn’t. I was there every day. Some days she didn’t want to see me, but other days? God…it was like…it was like I’d finally gotten her back. The real her. The one I met that first night in the studio. The one I fell in love with.
“When they released her, she moved in with me. She made the choice to stop talking to her sisters to focus on her sobriety, and that decision tore her apart. Stella was constantly harassing her, and me, calling us every name in the book and threatening to replace her in the band. It got so bad that I had to get a restraining order on Stella after she showed up and smashed the shit out of my Porsche with a baseball bat before lighting it on fire.”
“I remember that, too,” Ty says. “What’d she come after you for?”
“She believed I was the one keeping Amy from them.”
“What an awful situation. Especially for someone who’s trying to do the right thing for themselves and get clean.”
Stella had no idea what she put her sister through in those first few months, and her inability to look in the fucking mirror made me the most irate. I hadn’t been the one who started Amy’s battle with addiction, but I was absolutely going to be the one who ended it.