Chapter 11
I hadn’t slept in a proper bed in over a year, and yet, without her next to me, I tossed and turned for the rest of the night. At eight a.m., I finally called it quits and went down to the hotel's gym, where I ran six miles on the treadmill and then lifted weights for an hour. When I had sufficiently punished my body, I went back upstairs and took a shower. Then I grabbed my keys, my wallet, and my coat and went back down to check out.
I could stay in a room for as long as I wanted. I could even rent an apartment somewhere, but that meant they would definitely find me. That was if they hadn’t already. I took advantage of the continental breakfast the hotel offered, and as I sat eating a plate full of scrambled eggs, waffles, bacon, and cut-up fruit, I took my phone out of my zippered coat pocket and connected it to the WiFi. Sure enough, a text had come in the day after I had used my card to get Jessa the hotel room. It was from my manager, and it said, “I swear to god, if you don’t tell me that was you using your card and not someone who stole it off your body that was dumped somewhere, I am going to call the police. Jace, this is bullshit. I get it. You’re grieving, and I’m so sorry, but how long are you going to just avoid your life?”
Fucking Gordon, I thought to myself. He had always been an asshole—an asshole I loved and appreciated. I typed back a quick, “It was me. Don’t call the police, you idiot. And don’t tell the boys either. Leave me alone. I need more time.”
Three seconds later, I got back a text that read “Too late,” which made my heart kick up a notch.
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“I told the boys that you used your card, but I didn’t tell them where.”
I felt the eggs I had just swallowed fighting to come back up. I took a long sip of water to wash them down. If the boys knew what state I was in, they would stop at nothing to find me, and then I would lose the slice of peace and quiet that I had built here. Maybe it was time to move on so not even Gordon would know where I was. The thought of leaving so no one could find me was easy, but the thought of leaving and never seeing Jessa again stung a little more than I liked to admit.
My phone buzzed with another text from my cranky manager. “Get a phone number so I don’t have to wait for your WiFi to kick in every time I need to talk to you, and I’ll stall them for a bit.”
I sent him back a “Fuck you” text, but he knew he had won.
I did two stupid things before going to play music. I went to a wireless store and activated my phone, and I went back to Kafe to busk instead of choosing from multiple other suitable locations. I knew I liked to torture myself; that much was clear from my sessions in the gym and my fascination with boxing without my gloves on, but watching Jessa interact with customers with her boobs bobbing behind her green apron was a new form of abuse.
I played my heartbreak playlist today, which always got me a lot of tips and usually had multiple women hitting on me. Today was no exception.
So far, I had gotten through “Breakeven” by The Script, “Let Her Go” by Passenger, “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver, “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty, and “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. I was singing “Fix You” by Coldplay when Jessa stepped out for her break. I knew the minute she saw me see her, just like the moment when we first met.
She leaned back against the brick wall behind her and lit up her cigarette. As she sucked desperately on her dopamine stick, I continued to sing.
She had her hair down today, and half of her curls fell over her face as she curled over her cigarette, blowing out smoke every so often. She always seemed so perturbed that she was smoking. She did it with jerking movements and never took the time to savor the experience—not like how she drank her coffee or how she had kissed me. No, she smoked like she was mad that the nicotine tempted her day in and day out. I wondered if she knew how much she hated it.
I completed the song just as she finished smoking. The crowd around me dispersed, and she walked toward me holding two cups.
“This is cold,” I said as she handed me the latte.
“It is.” She nodded.
“It’s cold outside,” I told her, as if she couldn’t feel it.
“It is cold outside.” She hummed “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” as she took a sip of her drink. I followed suit and was hit with a taste so delicious that I couldn’t put my finger on.
“This tastes like Christmas.” I realized as I wiped the cold foam off my lip and took another gulp.
“It should.” She giggled. “It’s an eggnog fluff cold brew.”
I waited for her to tell me how she made it, just like she always did.
“It’s a simple cold brew base. Then, you add in four pumps of toasted white mocha sauce and one pump of cinnamon dolce syrup. The kicker is adding eggnog into the cold foam and sprinkling on cinnamon dolce topping.” She did a little dance as she drank more of her coffee.
“I will keep that in mind when I order my coffee at another coffee shop,” I teased her. Her eyes widened, and she stomped her foot.
“You wouldn’t dare cheat on me.”
We both fell silent at the other ways what she just said could be interpreted.
“Are you gonna answer my questions today?” She just smoothly changed the subject. I didn’t think that she’d be leading the conversation in the direction of what happened last night any time soon, so I just nodded, fiddling with the strings on my guitar.
“Where are you from originally?”
I considered lying for a brief moment before I told her the truth.
“California.”
Her eyes lit up.
“I’ve always wanted to live there!”
“Well, why don’t you? It’s cold here, which kinda sucks.”
“I can’t leave Myles, and it would be too hard to move him there.”
I nodded, realizing more and more how much her life and her choices were so tightly wound up in Myles and his addiction.
“Dogs or cats?”
“Definitely dogs,” I confirmed. She seemed satisfied with my answers because she began to walk away without saying goodbye.
“Hey,” I called after her. She turned. I lifted my phone up.
“Can I get your number?”
She walked back closer to me.
“You have a phone?” She seemed surprised.
“I reactivated my phone today.” I shrugged it off like it wasn’t a big deal.
She took my phone and keyed her number in under the name “Coffee Girl.” I called her and hung up when I saw my number flash across her screen. She swiped into her phone and saved it in her contacts as “Music Man.”
“Use it if you need it,” I told her.
She grinned, showing me her dimple, and said, “I’ve never really needed anything, music man.”
It felt like she believed that.
I looked down at my drink to see if she had left me a note. She had and it said, “I like your tattoos.” I had to fight a smile when I read it. I knew she had said just one night. I had heard it, and I wouldn’t fight her on it either, but her note gave me hope that maybe eventually she would change her mind.
I had so many more things that I could do to her. So many more ways to make her come. So many more sounds I wanted to drag out of her. Having her so close to me just a moment ago without touching her had been torture. I sighed as the front of my pants swelled, and I placed my guitar strategically in front of me to hide it until I could get myself under control. Now that I knew what she sounded like when she came. Now that I was aware of what she tasted like. Now that I could summon up the memory of her curves below mine, I had a feeling my body would be on constant alert around her from now on. The experience we had shared last night was not one I could ever erase from my memory.
Now that my phone was reactivated and I had logged into all of my apps, my old messages and photos had downloaded onto my phone. Just like I feared they would. I had packed up my guitar, mic, and speaker for the night and had driven to the gym, where I sat outside in the parking lot. Before I could chicken out, I pressed play on one of the voice notes she had sent me. Her voice filled my van, and I clenched the steering wheel as pain erupted in my chest.
“Hi, Jacey baby,” she sing-songed. “Come home. I have a surprise for you.”
The voice note was followed by a selfie. Her blonde hair gently cradled around her face, her deep brown eyes and long lashes filled the screen. I remembered exactly what she had told me that night.
“Fuck,” I yelled to the empty air. “Fuck,” I whimpered. The grief clawed its way up my throat, threatening to choke me. Why isn’t it getting better? I thought despondently. I am going to be broken over this forever.
I let it all out at the gym. My muscles screamed from having already been used during my workout this morning, but the truth was that I reveled in the pain. The pain reminded me of all I had lost, and it was a way for me to quantify the emotional agony. I turned it into aching tendons, screaming quads, and busted knuckles. I left the tears and the memories as sweat on the gym floor.
Grief was precisely as bad as people imagined it to be before they experienced it. The inspirational quotes and songs liked to talk about grief getting better, and some days, it did feel less heavy, and that was when I desperately tried to hold onto it. Yet some days, most days, there was nothing that could be done to make me feel better. In those moments, it felt like there was no happily ever after in store for me. What was lost wasn’t coming back; that was the fact. It couldn’t be fixed so I had to carry it for the rest of my life. I couldn’t move on from it. No matter how much Gordon wanted me to. No matter how much the boys needed me to. This is who I was now. Grief was a part of me. It had been absorbed into my bones.
I cried in the shower, letting the tears wash away with the water. My arms protested with every move I made as Iwashed my hair and cleaned my body. I had put myself through the wringer tonight. My muscles were swollen, and the veins in my arms were prominent. I was emotionally wrung out, so all I focused on was that I had to eat and needed to sleep. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day. The thought landed flat, but I appreciated my brain's effort.
Robotically, through muscle memory, I dried off, pulled my hair into a low bun, oiled my beard, pulled on my sweats, and made my way to my van. Once I was settled in for the night, I opened three cans of tuna, mixed it with two packets of mayo in a plastic bowl, and ate it with six rice cakes. It was a pathetic attempt at a proper dinner, but it was a good post-workout meal due to the protein and carb content. I fell asleep, without brushing my teeth, alone in the parking lot of my gym. The stark difference between tonight and last night was painfully obvious.
I woke up around four a.m. with new music reverberating in my head. I was used to this, and the only way to shut it off was to write it down, turn it into a song, and then my mind would quiet, and I would be able to fall back to sleep. I strummed, then stopped to write. I hummed the tune, then changed it. I played the new notes on the guitar again, and then once I had a fully-formed song, I scratched most of the words out, re-formatted the lyrics, got angry, and threw the whole thing out. Then I started again, completely fresh. The sun was coming up, and the birds were chirping when I finally finished. I was satisfied with what I had created so far. I had written the music and a chorus. I set up my phone and quickly recorded myself playing it one time, and then, utterly exhausted, I laid the song on top of my guitar, and I fell into a deep, uninterrupted sleep.
One day, all you’ll have of me
Is my voice
A photo
A memory
And you’ll have to make a choice
(My love, My love)
One day, you’ll listen to my sound
And me-mo-ries will be found
But you need to promise me
That you’ll stop holding on
It has been way too long
And I don’t want to stay alive
In you through pain
I’d rather you have nothing left
Than the feeling of a knife in your chest
If the memory of me
Is not making you happy
Then let me drift
Give me a kiss
(Baby, Baby)
And let me drift
I woke up hours later, my stomach growling and my bladder protesting. Bleary-eyed, I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, sat up, and yawned and stretched. I had slept until the sun was fully in the sky. I really needed this—a day to just check out and fully feel the pain. I turned my phone to check what time it was and saw, with a flip-flop feeling in my stomach, that I had a text from the boys. It read, “Jace, this is so good. Come home. We’ll record it. We miss you. We love you. Come back to us. Where are you, Jace? We’re worried.”
Frantically, I scrolled up to see what they were talking about. Apparently, in my delusion of being half asleep and completely wrecked from my emotional breakdown last night, I had taken the recording of myself playing and singing the new song and sent it to my old group chat.
I rested my head in my hands, a massive headache threatening to overwhelm all of my senses. I had officially reached my breaking point. Maybe it was time to return. To shed this grief and go back to what I knew best. Creating music. Being around the people who cared about me and stop half existing.
I was no one here, and maybe that wasn’t a good thing anymore. I had loved it. I had craved the anonymity—needed it—but maybe that wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing anymore. It was just keeping me miserable. My whole goal in disappearing had been to heal and to become someone physically who would never let what happened ever happen again. To punish myself for letting it happen in the first place, but maybe I had paid my penance. Maybe I could be free. Maybe writing that song had finally started my healing.
Instead of ignoring their texts like I always did, I finally texted the group chat back. “I’ll be in touch soon. Give me a little longer.” I had made my decision. I had a little bit more time left of being Kian, the busker. A little more time left to receive coffee cups with notes on them. A little more time left till one last fight, and then I would go back to who I had been. Who I was destined to be.
Jace Kian West.