Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Eddie
While Cleo dresses and Barret disappears into his room, I go to the kitchen and put the kettle on, like that’s a thing that can hold a day together. Gas flame, blue ring, metal warming—something I can measure when nothing else adds up.
I should dial my therapist. Maybe even page the pilot, and say, “Fuel the plane. I need an emergency session in Seattle. Now.” I should do a lot more than stand here with my hands on a counter, trying not to crawl out of my skin.
Not running after her took everything I had.
Barret caught me in the hall and kissed me like a dare—hard, brief, his mouth crushing against mine with a surge that sent fire rushing through my veins, left every nerve sparking as if he’d branded me with his conviction.
When he pulled back, his breath still tangled with mine, he said, “I swear you can do it. Do it for all of us. You can’t keep trying to save people who don’t want to save themselves. ”
He meant, Let her run. He also meant, You can start helping when she comes, but not before. Let her see how far she’ll go before she returns.
Barret didn’t want to let her go, either. I know it cost him not to run. But he gets this in ways that I don’t.
He’s been in the ledger—opposite the side where obsession masquerades as care.
Me? I’ve lived there. I nearly lost them both: the man who turned a hand on my skin into prayer, a liturgy spoken without words, and the woman who stepped onto the cliff as if summoned by the wind, only to choose—for today—to rewrite her fate beneath the sky’s unblinking gaze.
I don’t know precisely when the “loving these two beautiful, infuriating people,” part began. It happened somewhere between managing a band and trying to drag a kid out of Connor Dempsey’s claws.
The kettle in the back of my head ticks as I slide into the wrong year, into an after-party that still smells like trouble. It’s the late ’80s. Connor rented a penthouse and filled it with a taste that made my teeth ache: cigarettes, spilled liquor, and cologne that you could almost chew.
Roderick worked the room with a grin like he’d stolen it. Photographers had been paid to be “coincidentally” present. The label wanted a story: two golden boys of grunge, decadent, desired, untouchable. It sells records.
It also eats people, but Connor Dempsey didn’t give a shit about anything but his pocket.
“Image is everything,” Connor murmured, all sugar and barbed wire. “Wilder’s got it. Barret needs practice. He’s still too earnest.”
Earnest, as if that were a flaw you fix with a flame.
The girls Connor hired were bored and dangerous in a pretty way.
They knew where the cameras aimed and where they didn’t.
They laughed on cue, pressed close in corners, whispered names that would read sweet in the next morning’s gossip.
Barret did what he was told: drink this, lean there, let her sit on your knee and pretend your life is a photograph.
This had been the script for years. That’s how Roderick lost Kit Dempsey—how anyone with a vulnerable heart became a subplot. He was high, too far gone to notice what was happening. It didn’t matter to Connor.
He didn’t care his daughter had a broken heart—or that Roderick did too. That thing actually could make better music, he told me once, and he celebrated the breaks.
Midnight stripped the room down. Cameras left and the light went mean. The hookers Connor hired went to the room. I watched Barret disappear down the hallway with two of them—platinum hair and cherry lipstick, bracelets that chimed like alarms.
Roderick glanced at me over a mountain of coats and gave the shrug that said, This is how it goes. I hated him for that. I hated myself more for knowing he wasn’t entirely wrong. My friend had been hollowed out and didn’t care whom he dragged down with him.
An hour later, Barret stumbled back into the living room, shirt misbuttoned, and a smile pulled tight in the wrong places. He moved like his bones didn’t fit. The crowd cheered him like a mascot that had learned a new trick.
Connor clapped him on the back. “See? He’s a total playboy,” he said, satisfied. “Takes to it fine.”
I’d had enough. I stepped between them.
“He’s done,” I said, flat. There was no begging in my voice. I have a way of not asking.
Connor laughed, a sound that wanted to make me small. “He’s barely started,” he said.
“Then he’ll finish in my room,” I replied. I didn’t ask. I have a way of taking things that need saving.
“Eddie—” Barret’s name broke out like he’d been brave for too long and run dry.
I took his wrist. Not tight. Not possessive. Just there. “You’re leaving,” I told him, and nodded toward the elevator. He followed me, like a man learning a new verb.
Back in my suite, I locked the door and bolted it for good measure. He stood in the middle of the carpet like a lost tourist. The party’s smell clung to him—perfume layered over smoke, alcohol sweating from his skin, fear hiding behind a grin.
“I’m fine,” he lied.
Barret was anything but fine.
I started the shower—warm, not hot. I brought a glass of water and a wet washcloth and set them on the counter like offerings. “Do you want help?” I asked.
His hands trembled. “Yeah,” he said. The boy who’d been paraded like a prize vanished, and the one who stayed put looked like he might break.
I undid his buttons like I was untying a knot.
I scraped glitter from his neck with my thumb.
I placed him under the spray and undressed.
Once I joined him, I washed his hair the way you handle something you can’t afford to ruin.
I rinsed the smell from him, rinsed the fear, and his shoulders stopped trying to hold up the world for the first time in hours.
He leaned into the water, and when I rinsed the last of the soap from his hair, he met my eyes, raw, ridiculous, and real. I wanted to say everything that would make it right, but I knew there were no words big enough.
So, I did the thing that mattered: I stayed.
I scrubbed until the night felt less like an animal clinging to his skin, then wrapped him in a towel and tried to be part of the dark that wouldn’t break under him.
I sat him on the closed toilet lid and worked my fingers through the damp curls at the nape of his neck, slow and careful, until his chest stopped pounding like a warning and found a softer rhythm.
His breath loosened. The tension in his shoulders eased as if he’d been holding the room up and finally set it down.
“Better?” I asked.
He blinked, eyes half-closed. “I don’t know if I can keep this up,” he said at last, voice small. “I don’t want to be someone I don’t even want to meet. I just want to play my music.”
“I know,” I said.
“Rod thinks it’s part of the job.”
“Rod says a lot at midnight he wouldn’t at noon,” I answered, not bothering to point out that Roderick started unraveling the night he lost Kit. It wouldn’t help. Barret cracked one eye.
“You gonna tuck me in and tell me a story?” he asked with a crooked grin.
“If you’re lucky,” I said.
His smile softened, small and surprised, like a door that hadn’t meant to open.
I led him to the bed, peeled back the covers, and climbed in after him.
We lay on our sides, facing each other, knees brushing under the sheet like two teenagers who’d stolen a secret.
I didn’t reach for more. He did—his hand sliding to my jaw, his thumb resting at the corner of my mouth as if he were learning my face by Braille.
“Do you think I’m good?” he asked. “Like . . . good at being a person?”
“You’re the best person I know,” I said, and the truth landed with a bit of weight that surprised me. “And you’re learning how to become someone. It’s about experiences and making the right choices.”
He kissed me with the gentleness of someone asking permission and getting it. When the kiss grew hungry, I drew back and pressed my forehead to his, counting—one, two, three—up to a hundred in my head until the urge settled. He breathed with me, matching the slow count.
“You don’t want me?” he whispered.
“I do,” I said, my fingers tracing his jaw like a small benediction, “but right now you’re still drunk, maybe high. I’m not rejecting you. I’m protecting the parts of you I want to love.”
“If I’m clean?” he asked, as if it were a dare and a promise.
“What if we talk about it tomorrow morning?” I offered. “When you’re awake and you know what you’re choosing.”
“I can do that,” he said.
He fell asleep with his fingers curled in my shirt, like I was a rope he was clinging to, and for a breath I let myself believe that being here—doing this—might be enough.
The kettle screams. I shut it off, and my hands don’t shake, which feels like cheating.
I pour water over the tea leaves and breathe in the steam like medicine. I grab a second mug for Barret. I line up honey, lemon, the jar of sugar he pretends not to use.
My mind tries to sprint—call the therapist, call the pilot, pack a bag, retreat to a city where sessions have couches and schedules, and I can pay to be told what to do.
But leaving would be running, and I don’t want to turn this house into another place I ran from the minute it asked me to sit with something hard.
Barret’s kiss burns on my mouth. Do it for all of us. He trusts me to hold a line I keep wanting to jump over.