Chapter 26 #3
My hands went straight to the cabinets, rummaging through them for something to dull the sharp edge cutting through my chest. Finally, I found a bottle of vodka.
I grabbed a cup from the counter, poured in some orange juice left sitting there, and then topped it off with a long, unmeasured splash of vodka. I could feel her watching me.
“A little early for that, don’t you think?” she finally said.
I paused, the glass halfway to my lips, and glanced at her.
“I would normally agree with you. But I wasn’t exactly ready to deal with your ex-husband, who’s clearly still in love with you.
” I knew I was being unreasonable, but I couldn’t help it.
Ten minutes ago, I’d felt like I could finally have everything I’d been dreaming about for years—her, the kids, us.
Then came the fame, the paparazzi, Vanessa, and Jules’ fucking ex-husband, and it all came crashing down like a wrecking ball.
She shook her head.
“He’s not in love with me. He cares about his family.” Her voice wavered.
Bullshit.
Jules was a terrible liar. She knew it. And now I knew exactly where George’s heart still lay.
I could handle losing the battle with myself, but for some reason, the thought of losing Jules to someone else stripped away whatever sliver of the decent guy act I had left—which wasn’t much to begin with.
I set the cup down harder than I needed to, the bang echoing in the room.
“You’re saying I don’t care?”
Her eyes met mine. They told me the whole damn story.
Knowing her too well was both a gift and a curse, because I could feel exactly how disappointed she was in me right now.
And just like me, the tension of this whole situation had stripped away her mask and shattered her filters.
Whatever was coming next was unleashed, raw, and probably hurtful.
“I’m saying we’re not your family,” she said, the words cutting even deeper than I was prepared for.
The room went still. I grabbed the cup and downed half of it in one go, the liquid burning its way down my throat. My chest tightened at the sting—not from the alcohol, but from her words.
“Low blow,” I muttered.
“Well,” she snapped, “you look more interested in marking your territory, like a fucking crazy dog, than in the fact that my children’s faces are all over the internet.”
I exhaled sharply. “I said I’m sorry. But what do you expect me to do?
I’m famous! People will follow me everywhere I go…
You should’ve known that.” And that was it, wasn’t it?
The life I chose. The life she had chosen, too, in the dreams we shared.
She’d tried to make it in Hollywood once, but now she wanted to act as if none of that mattered anymore like it wasn’t still part of her.
“You’re right,” she said, carrying an edge of defeat. “This is not gonna work.”
“Don’t you start,” I said firmly.
“Chris, we can’t make this work. Look at us!”
“Couples fight, Jules,” I shot back.
“You’re not listening to me,” her voice broke. “I can’t do the messy relationship anymore. The going days without talking, the wanting to punch each other’s exes… I can’t.”
“But we have to.”
“Why? Because of some dream? Because our minds created a story that would never be real?”
“No. Because we are supposed to be married, that’s how it was supposed to be. He wasn’t even going to meet you,” I said, letting the words tumble out before I could stop them.
Jules froze, her confusion written all over her face.
“What does that mean?”
“We were supposed to meet. Twelve years ago.”
“What?” she managed, barely above a whisper.
I took a deep breath, steadying myself as I revealed the truth.
There was no turning back now, and she needed to understand why seeing her with George cut so damn deep.
That son of a bitch got everything that should’ve been mine.
It was a disgusting, raw and ugly kind of jealousy, but too strong to fight.
“Your script that went into production all those years back… I was the actor attached to it. I was at that first meeting, and you…” I hesitated.
“You never showed.” The moment the words left my mouth, I knew I’d messed up.
This wasn’t how I wanted to tell her. I’d let my emotions take the wheel again, crashing into anything and anyone in front of me.
I’d never really learned how to control it, because most people would rather take the hit than confront a movie star.
But now it was barreling forward at full speed—fatal speed—straight into the person I’d loved the most in my life.
She stood there, her face a mixture of shock and disbelief. I saw her tears well up almost instantly, and it broke me. It wrecked me. It was like watching the crash in slow motion and everything I’d dreamed I could have, flying straight through the metaphorical broken windows.
Here I was, calling George a dick, when it was more than clear who the real problem was. Me. This was another piece of evidence—out of thousands—that the man I was, in real life, not in dreams, was far from someone who deserved a place in Jules’ and the kids’ lives.
“How long have you known this?” She was fighting to keep it together.
“A week.”
The silence that followed was crushing. It made it physically hard to breathe.
I knew what I needed to do, but all I wanted was the power to take her pain away with my bare hands.
I took a small step toward her, wanting to close the distance, to offer some kind of comfort, but she stepped back, her hands raised as if to physically keep me away. Who could even blame her?
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was going to…”
“When?” she cut me off. The tears that had escaped now flowed freely, and she didn’t bother trying to stop them. Fuck. “WHEN?” Her voice echoed through the room, louder than either of us expected.
“I was planning to this weekend,” I stammered.
“I was trying to make sense of it first. I don’t know.
” I hated the way the words sounded like I didn’t care when that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
I’d barely wrapped my own head around it, but somehow, I thought I could figure out the perfect way to tell her.
Congratu-fucking-lations, Chris Jones. You picked the worst way possible.
Her disbelief morphed into fury, sharp and unrelenting.
“Oh my God!” she snapped. “Why did I ever expect you to think of anyone other than yourself? Why do I keep falling into this fantasy that you actually care about me?” The way she said it wasn’t an attack on me—it was on herself.
She was kicking herself for letting her guard down. That hit me harder than anything else.
I swallowed the sting of her words, but my emotions’ race car was going way too damn fast to stop. She wanted to see the real Chris—how different he was from the dream version—and here he was. My voice came out darker, rougher than I intended.
“Of course, I care about you. You’re the one pushing me away.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “You drink like a sailor and sleep with half the women under thirty in this city. You’re rude to everyone, and I’m supposed to ignore that and welcome you into my children’s lives so I don’t hurt your megastar feelings?”
I flinched at the accusations, even if I deserved them. The drinking. The women. I’d spent so long convincing myself that none of it mattered, that it was part of the life I chose.
“You make it sound worse than it is.”
Was it true? Yeah. But it wasn’t the whole story.
There were a million reasons why I’d been the way I was.
The isolation, the frustration of wanting a connection I could never seem to find.
And for twelve years, the constant ache of not having her.
But things were different now. Since Jules came into my life, I hadn’t been that guy.
Or at least, I was trying not to be. I hoped she’d noticed.
Apparently, she hadn’t.
“The drinking or the whoring?” she shot back.
“That’s not fair,” I said, and my jaw tightened because her words had hit the mark.
She shook her head. “I’m a parent. I don’t get to think about you or even me first.”
I held it in, but the words pushed their way out like a dam breaking.
“You got everything. Don’t you see that?
” My voice cracked, and I hated how vulnerable I sounded.
She stared at me, tears streaming down her face, while I felt my own anger twist and churn inside me, reddening my face.
“You got the good part of the deal,” I continued.
“The long marriage, the freedom to just be. To have your partner, your friends. And you got the kids, for God’s sake! ”
I could hear my own voice shaking as the weight of it hit me again. The twelve years I spent with nothing but glimpses of her in dreams, while she got to build a life that was supposed to be ours.
“How is that fair?” My voice wavered as I said it.
“You got all of it, and now I get to see what I could have had, but I have to be… understanding.” Hell, I waited twelve goddamn years, watching the life I wanted playing out in my head every night.
How could she blame me for wanting it all and wanting it now?
Jules stood there, trembling.
“I get that’s hard for you. But do you really think I got it all?”
“Well, yes,” I shot back. “Because you did.”
Her body shook with the intensity of her words as she fired back, “And what is ‘all’ again, Chris? Living half awake and half asleep? Not feeling safe enough to be myself, to go after my dreams, to do the things that I love?” Her words cut through me.
I hadn’t considered that. Hell, I hadn’t wanted to.
The sound of slow, cautious footsteps pulled my attention, and I looked up to see Carol coming down the stairs. She looked concerned, and she moved quietly as if she didn’t want to be noticed, but also couldn’t ignore the shouting anymore.
My chest felt tight, my heart pounding so hard it threatened to break free. What was it about this woman? Everything I felt for her was so damn intense. From the moment I met her, it was like I’d been hit by a freight train.
This was it. The main act, the showdown. Starring Chris Jones: egotistic, selfish, rude, and completely fucking clueless.
“Oh, please,” I snapped. “Don’t play the victim here.
Nothing was stopping you from going after what you wanted.
You love being the martyr. But not getting everything you wanted?
That’s no one’s fault but your own!” The words burned as they came out, but I couldn’t stop them.
I was completely gone. “If you had stuck around and fought for your project… You would have been mine! They would have been mine!” The second the words left my mouth, I wanted to grab them out of the air and shove them back in.
The room went completely silent. The kind of silence that suffocates you.
So much for keeping my asshole tendencies in check; this was a new personal record.
I knew it wasn’t that simple. I knew what had happened to her, how that producer hurt her. And yet, I said the worst possible thing. Jules stared at me, her eyes changed so fast—anger giving way to heartbreak. Neither of us moved, surrounded by the echoes of the mess I made.
She was right. I didn’t belong in their lives. This pretentious fuck who says things to hurt and has the emotional self-control of a toddler? They didn’t deserve that. She didn’t deserve that.
And that’s when I knew—I loved her too much to keep hurting her.
“This is ridiculous,” I whispered, staring at the floor, because I had no strength to look in their eyes.
Dreams are dreams for a reason, right? Our time had come and gone. The people we were now just… didn’t fit.
In another life, the stakes weren’t this high when we met. But now they were astronomical. And I got where she was coming from. She wanted to protect her kids from me.
That was her job, to keep them safe. And I might not have turned out to be their actual father, but I loved those kids so much already, I knew I had to do the same. I had to protect her and them… from me.
Carol’s voice cut through the thick tension, sharp and commanding. “Chris.” My head shot up, meeting her gaze. Her face was serious, and there was no room for debate. “You need to go.”
I hesitated for a second, caught between anger and regret. She was right. Of course, she was right. I had completely fucked this up.
“I’m sorry,” I managed. “You’re right. I’ll just…
” I trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
There was nothing left to say. I turned, my body moving on autopilot.
Too ashamed to fight anymore. I walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway, but before I could reach the front door, something made me stop.
Sitting on the console table was a little robot built out of LEGO, but with a pink pom-pom glued to the top and glittery paint on its wheels. A piece of paper sat underneath it.
To: Chris From: Liam & Nova
As if I wasn’t already wrecked, this was the final blow.
The last nail in the coffin. But also the confirmation I needed to keep walking towards the door.
I was doing what was best for them, and I had to find a place in my heart to be okay with that.
Even if I didn’t get to be their parent, they had good ones.
And maybe, for once, I could be the bigger man and learn to be happy knowing they would be happy… without me.
I swallowed hard, my throat tight, and picked up the robot, tucking it—and the note—into my pocket. And then, without another word, I walked out the door.