Chapter 22
Istood on the stage, my bass slung around my shoulders, but I might as well have been a thousand miles away. It should have been another normal day. The stage was the same, the same people surrounded me. Only the venue and city had changed.
Come off it.
I was fucking married.
To Olivia.
Beautiful, brilliant, larger-than-life Liv, who I’d known for a handful of weeks and yet somehow felt like the missing piece I’d been searching for my entire life.
My fingers fumbled over the strings of my bass, the notes coming out all wrong, discordant and jarring. I winced, trying to focus, to lose myself in the music like I always did. But every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was her face. The hurt, the confusion, the barely-masked devastation when I’d panicked, when I’d called our marriage a mistake.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, my fingers slipping again. The sour note echoed through the stadium, earning me a raised eyebrow from Tom at the drums.
“Alright there, Enrique?” he called out, his voice tinged with equal parts amusement and concern. “You’re playing like you’ve never held a bass before, mate.”
I forced a smile, shaking my head. “Sorry, sorry. Just… got a lot on my mind.”
Understatement of the fucking century.
“Well, get it off your mind and into the music, yeah?” Alex said from the other side of the stage. “We’ve got a show to put on tonight, in case you forgot.”
I took a deep breath, trying to centre myself.
I launched into the opening riff of our fifth song, the notes flowing from my fingers on pure muscle memory. For a moment, it worked. For a moment, I was lost in the music, in the familiar rush of adrenaline that came with playing, with losing myself in the beat.
But then I caught a flash of chestnut hair out of the corner of my eye, and my heart stopped.
It wasn’t Liv.
My fingers faltered, the notes dying on the strings. Tom threw his drumsticks down.
“Dude, what the actual fuck?” he groaned.
“Sorry, I…”
“Hey!” Ben, the sound engineer, called out from the sound booth, his voice tight with frustration. “You guys planning on finishing sometime today? We’ve got a lot of work to do!”
I flinched, guilt churning in my gut. I was fucking this up for everyone, not just myself. Not just Olivia. The whole band, the whole crew, everyone was counting on me to get my shit together.
“Lew?” Andy’s voice cut through the haze, softer now, laced with concern. “Everything alright?”
“I… yeah. Yeah, I’m good.” I shook my head, like I could physically dislodge the confusion and fear swirling in my brain. “From the top, yeah?”
We launched into the song again, and this time, I held it together. Barely. The notes were right, the rhythm steady, but the soul was gone. I was just going through the motions, a robot in a leather jacket, while my heart beat a brutal tattoo against my ribs.
* * *
“Alright, that’s it!” Ben threw his hands up in exasperation five minutes later. “Let’s take five, yeah? Lewis, mate, go take a walk or something. Clear your head. We’ll pick this up in a bit.”
I nodded, just as frustrated at myself as everyone else. I needed air. I needed space. I needed…
“Lewis.” Andy’s voice stopped me in my tracks, his hand landing on my shoulder. “Talk to me, man. What’s going on with you?”
I shrugged him off, not meeting his eyes. “Nothing. I’m fine. Just… didn’t sleep well, that’s all.”
It wasn’t a lie. I hadn’t slept well. I’d been too busy getting hitched to the woman of my dreams in an alcohol-fuelled haze, then waking up to the cold, harsh reality of what that meant.
Andy snorted, clearly not buying it. “Bullshit. This is more than a rough night. You’ve been off since we started.” His eyes narrowed, a knowing glint sparking in their blue depths. “This is about Olivia, isn’t it?”
My heart lurched at the sound of her name, a physical ache forming in my chest. “No. Why would you think that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Andy drawled, crossing his arms over his chest. “Maybe because you have developed a habit of always having eyes on her? Or because she couldn’t get off the stage fast enough after her sound check, and refused to so much as look in your direction?”
I winced. “We’re just… it’s complicated.” I sighed, dragging a hand through my hair.
“You forget I know you, man.” Andy’s voice softened, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder again. Gentler this time, a grounding touch. “I’ve never seen you like this over a woman before.”
I let out a humourless laugh, the sound scraping my throat raw. “She’s not just any girl, Andy. She’s… fuck. She’s everything.”
The words slipped out before I could stop them, the truth of them rattling me to my core. Because she was. In the space of a few short weeks, Liv had become everything to me. My muse, my motivation, my North Star in the unstable, ever changing, high emotion whirlwind of this life.
And I was terrified of losing her before I even really had her.
“Okay.” Andy nodded slowly, understanding dawning on his face. “Okay, so she’s special. That’s a good thing, right? I mean, how long have we been talking about you needing to find someone who gets it, who gets you? And now you have.”
I shook my head, frustrated not at Andy but at the situation, at my own tangled mass of fears and doubts.
“It’s not that simple. You know what this life is like, the scrutiny, the fucking circus. And I’m already in too deep to hide the way I feel about her.”
The confession tasted bitter on my tongue, the ugly truth of it staring me in the face. I was so far gone for this woman, I couldn’t see straight. Couldn’t think past the desperate need to protect her, to shield her from the shit storm that came with loving someone like me.
“I’ve seen what that does to people, Andy. What it did to… to Tegan.” The name caught in my throat, the old wound throbbing beneath my ribs. My little sister, the bright-eyed girl I’d tried so hard to protect from the dark side of fame.
I’d failed her. Failed to save her from the vicious cycle of tabloid fodder and public meltdowns. I couldn’t do that again. I couldn’t watch another person I loved get chewed up and spat out by the machine.
Especially not Liv.
Beautiful, vibrant, fiercely talented Olivia, with her sunshine smile and her heart on her sleeve. She deserved better than that. Better than me, and the baggage that came with my name, my face.
“I get it, okay?” Andy’s grip tightened on my shoulder, forcing me to meet his gaze. “I do. What happened with Tegan… it was a fucking nightmare. For all of us, but especially for you. You’ve been through hell, mate.”
I swallowed hard, blinking back the sudden sting of tears. “But Olivia isn’t Tegan,” he said softly, his gaze searching mine. “No, listen. I’m not saying it’ll be easy. God knows this life is fucking hard on relationships. But Lew…” He paused, his expression softening into something achingly sincere. “If you’ve found something real with her, something that makes you feel like this? That’s worth fighting for, man. That’s worth a little risk.”
Risk. The word lodged in my throat, sharp and bitter.
Hadn’t I risked enough already? Risked my heart, my sanity, my fucking soul on this rollercoaster of a career?
Maybe he was right and she wasn’t Tegan, but that didn’t mean this would be any different. I had to protect her at all costs. Even if that meant annulling our marriage.
Carly, our publicist, would know how to keep a lid on it and then maybe we could go back to normal.