Chapter 23
The stadium hallway stretched out either side of me, cold and empty. My footsteps echoed off the concrete walls as I paced with my phone clutched in my hand.
The digital clock ticked over to 11:05 PM. Five minutes since the final encore. He should be here by now. Unless he was tied up with the band, or the fans, or…
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the doubt swirling in my brain. He’d come. He had to come. We couldn’t keep avoiding this, avoiding each other.
My phone buzzed in my hand and I nearly jumped out of my skin. But it wasn’t Lewis’s name lighting up my screen. It was Ashley’s.
I frowned, doing a quick mental calculation. It had to be well past 2 AM back in Jasmine Bay. What was she doing up so late?
I swiped to answer, pressing the phone to my ear. “Ash? Everything okay?”
“There you are!” Her voice was too loud, straining to be heard over the muted thump of bass and chatter in the background. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours, sugar!”
I winced, pulling the phone away slightly. “Are you at a club? It’s the middle of the night back home.”
“Just blowing off some steam.” She laughed, the sound more carefree than I had any hope of achieving right now. “I wanted to check in on you before I head home. Have you talked to him yet about…?” She trailed off, like she couldn’t quite say the word. Like saying it out loud would make it too real.
Marriage.
The happy buzz that had come with that word a few hours ago had long shrivelled up and faded. I hadn’t taken the ring off. I couldn’t bear to. Too scared that that would mean we really were done.
“He’s avoiding me.” I slumped against the concrete wall, hating how small my voice sounded, how defeated. “He didn’t come to the side stage during my set tonight, like he usually does. Didn’t text me good luck before the show. It’s like he can’t stand to be around me, Ash.”
She made a sympathetic noise, the club sounds fading with the slam of a car door. “Oh honey. I’m so sorry. He’s being a real ass, isn’t he?”
I laughed, but it came out more like a sob. “I just don’t get it. Last night, it was like… like magic. It felt so right, you know? Like it was meant to be. And now…”
Now I was standing in a cold, empty hallway, waiting for a man who might never come. Waiting for answers I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.
“Have you considered that maybe…” Ashley hesitated, like she didn’t want to say it. “Maybe it was too much for him? Too soon?”
Too soon. The words hit like a punch to the chest, stealing my breath. Because isn’t that exactly what Lewis had said that morning, his eyes wide and panicked, his voice shaking with regret?
But I had been so ready, so sure. Sure of him, of us, of this wild, wonderful thing brewing between us.
Had I been wrong? Had I let the fantasy of it all, blind me to reality? To the fact that a few weeks of whirlwind romance didn’t erase whatever baggage had driven him to keep us secret in the first place?
Hell, even that should have clued me in. You didn’t fall in love with someone and then keep it to yourself. I’d barely managed to hold in my excitement these last few weeks and even trying, I’d failed to mask the deliriously happy look people in love got. The girls all knew. They’d just chosen to overlook it for now.
I bit my lip, fighting back the tears I refused to let fall. Not here, not now. Not when I had to walk out of this stadium and stay on The Brightside’s tour bus for the ten hour drive to Eugene.
It took a strong person to say no to Lily Tyler and when she’d caught me after my sound check this afternoon, it had taken everything I had not to break down crying in front of the entire crew. I didn’t have it in me to beg off hanging out with the band like I normally would.
She thought she was being helpful. Instinct told me tonight would be the most painful night of my life.
“Maybe you’re right,” I whispered finally, the words like ashes on my tongue. “Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe I… maybe I’m not enough for him.”
“Olivia Monroe, you stop that right now.” Ashley’s voice cut through the spiral of my thoughts, hard and fierce. “You are more than enough. You are everything. And if Lewis Davies is too much of a fool to see that, then that’s his loss.”
I smiled despite myself, a rush of gratitude and love for my best friend warming the cold, numb places in my chest. “Thanks Ash.”
She blew out a breath. “You want me to come out there? Give him a piece of my mind?”
The thought of Ashley storming into the bus, all five feet four inches of Southern fire and fury, made me laugh for real this time.
“That’s sweet, but no. I need to handle this myself.” I glanced at my phone again. 11:35. Half an hour since the show ended. Half an hour of standing here like a fool, waiting for a man who clearly wasn’t coming. “I have to go. The bus will be leaving soon.”
She sighed but didn’t argue. “Alright. But promise me you’ll call if you need anything, okay? Anything at all. I don’t care what time it is.”
“I promise. Love you, Ash.”
I hung up, the ghost of a smile still playing about my lips. But as I slipped my phone back into my pocket, the smile faded, replaced by a cold, sinking certainty.
He wasn’t coming. He’d left me standing here, waiting, hoping, like a fool. Like the naive small-town girl I was starting to feel like again.