Chapter Thirty
Allie
In my dorm, I feel like I’m going to pass out. The only time I’ve felt like this was when the leak happened – when Iris called me, told me to do a sweep of social media. I feel like I’ve just stepped off a rollercoaster that has spent the last ten minutes throwing me upside down.
My hands are trembling.
I glance around at my room, my head rushing with blood. The walls seem to pulse. I can’t seem to get a breath.
Why was my phone there, with him?
He was so drunk. Why didn’t he tell me?
And why did he lie?
He didn’t talk about a party, like the one in the video.
He said he went back to someone’s cabin after dinner.
Made it sound like chats and soft drinks and a – guitar, was it?
He told me he didn’t tell anyone about us too.
‘Keep the circle small,’ we always said.
Did drink fool him into telling them? Did drink tell him taking my phone out with him was a good idea?
He always seemed sober when we talked. He always seemed OK . . .
I bend, place my palms against the wall, let out a groan. Those weird, animalistic things you do when you are nothing but adrenaline and panic.
So, it was him? He was the one behind the leak?
On that screen, I didn’t recognise him. And that image of him throwing my phone around to anyone who’d look, eyes slits, limbs heavy and flopping, sidles into my mind and I feel it – a rush of anger and sadness red-hot under my skin.
Sadness for us both and what I saw on the screen.
Anger that even after all I just saw, he so easily blamed me for everything . . .
This is why this can’t work.
It can never be as simple as that photo of us on that hill in Cote Rock.
This could never work. Too much has happened.
Milo bursts into my dorm room.
‘Please just leave,’ I say.
‘No. Allie . . .’
‘I need to think, Milo.’
‘Please talk to me.’
He gazes at me – his caramel brown eyes are liquid pain, pain I feel sear across my own heart.
My hands were on his chest, moments ago, my mouth on his mouth.
I was ready. I was ready to let it go, whatever the risk.
I was ready to drop the armour. And now we’re .
. . here. How can there be trust now? How, when Milo has definitely been keeping things from me?
‘Allie,’ his voice cracks and he steps towards me. I don’t move. ‘I’m so ashamed of what I just watched . . .’
And I don’t even react. I just stand, my heart, still, like metal in my chest, although Milo uttering the word ‘ashamed’, still, despite my own heartache, makes me sad. ‘This – none of it makes sense . . .’
‘I was an addict, Allie. I was in trouble—’
‘I – I don’t know where to even begin, Milo—’
‘—And I was recovering. In Romania, I was clean,’ Milo’s deep voice cracks again.
‘But then like, I – started drinking. It was just one. I had like, one after about a week of shooting, and it helped. To get into the scene, to wind down my mind. But that night . . . clearly, you can see what happened that night. A relapse, a – that wasn’t me. ’
‘Do you remember?’ I ask him.
‘Remember that night? No. No, I promise. They feel like blurs. Blackouts. Bad dreams you remember a feeling of, but not a scene, or something—’
‘I meant everything else,’ I say. My voice sounds devoid of life. Of warmth. ‘Not that night. Everything else.’
Milo steps towards me. ‘God, Allie,’ he utters. ‘I remember everything. I was sober. I was awake with you.’
‘Why did you show everyone my phone? Why had you told people—’
‘I – I was . . . We both just saw how I was in that video—’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s clear even before that night, you’d ignored what I asked you. My terms. To keep it private because that made me feel comfortable. When you were sober. When you were . . . awake.’
His eyes drop sadly to the floor. ‘I . . . I guess I wanted to tell the world about you,’ he says.
‘But I didn’t want you to. I asked you not to.’
And there’s something heartbreaking about this.
The contrast of it. The way it feels almost right.
But it’s actually made up of so much wrong.
And I hate that it chimes in, a disloyal voice that reminds me tauntingly, of Sara, Milo’s ex, and what she said about him.
Smoke and mirrors, she said. Self-conscious. Cares only about himself.
‘I know. I’m sorry. My stupid ego, I guess? I just – I had so much pain. All this shit to prove to the world. I was selfish.’
Milo steps forward, brings his hand to my face. ‘I don’t remember what happened that night, Allie.’
‘I know,’ I sniff. ‘But even before that, you were telling people . . .’
‘I know.’
‘And I asked you in the cabin. I looked right at you and I asked you. I asked you “is that the truth?” You could’ve said no.
You could’ve said . . . something. Anything.
Starting with, OK, Allie, I may have told some co-workers about us and about your phone.
Or there were things you may not remember.
I wasn’t expecting everything. You know I understand how hard that might be. ’
‘But I thought – I thought that you would, I don’t know. Break it off? I didn’t want people to think – for you to think badly of me, for you to decide that actually, no, screw this guy.’
My eyes close.
Because that’s it, isn’t it? He is more concerned with how he is perceived than who he really is. And who he really is is who I was ready to love.
‘If we are going to really do this, Milo,’ I whisper. ‘You can’t pick and choose the parts of yourself that you let me see.’
He swallows, hard and thick, his eyes lifting to the ceiling. ‘But I told you about rehab,’ he utters. ‘On a video call one night. Do you remember?’
I say nothing.
‘I told you about Day Falls. About breaking up with Sara. And you looked . . . haunted, Allie. And I got it. You know? Your dad. Everything rehab represented. But I remembered how you looked at me. Replayed it—’
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘But that’s up to me, Milo. You don’t get to control how I feel.’
Everything rushes back to me now, like a movie on fast-forward and rewind all at once.
Every phone call. The cabin and my ankle bath.
The first kiss, his lips against my knee.
The awards in three weeks. All the hope of what we could be .
. . and now this. This stark truth. I was right, trying to stay safe, and stay an ‘I’.
I was right to be scared of being a ‘we’.
Because they always lie. They always leave. It is never, ever simple.
‘Allie, I’m so sorry,’ Milo says. His eyes shine with water. His voice like shattering glass. ‘Things are different now. I’m better. Healthier than I’ve ever been in my life. That was then.’
‘It’s not the addiction, Milo,’ I tell him.
My words shake. ‘God, I understand that. I would never wish it on anyone. I know, believe me, I do, what it does to someone. But I asked you. I asked you in the cabin, in a moment that felt like the between of us before and us after. And you didn’t even try.
I wasn’t asking you to tell me every single shred of your life, but you could’ve started with the fact my phone wasn’t always where you said it was.
That you messed up, boasted to people you shouldn’t have .
. . That there are parts of that time, the days before our leak, that are unclear in your memory. That you were struggling.’
‘I didn’t want to lose you.’
‘You don’t trust me with who you are.’ The words burst from me. ‘That’s what this is. You’re . . . you’re still trying to show the world only what you want them to see.’
He swallows. And I want, so much, to reach out and hold him. Because despite everything, what I felt for him was real, which makes the lie so much more damaging.
‘You’re right,’ he says, breathlessly. ‘You’re right.
But God, Allie, I did show you who I was.
And all right, maybe not every morsel, but .
. . you saw me, back then. And knowing me, you still jumped straight to blaming me.
One phone call from a publicist, one single call, and that was me – toast.’
‘Oh, so it’s my fault, is it?’
‘No.’ He pauses then. Too long. ‘No. No, it’s not. I’m sorry, I just . . . This is a total mess.’
I step back. It’s too much. My head hurts with it, like someone’s plugged in fifty radios and turned them all up to full volume.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say to him. My voice sounds so tiny, so pathetic, it hardly sounds like me at all. ‘Was it . . . was it actually real?’
Milo looks up at me. ‘Of course it was real,’ he croaks. ‘Everything I felt with you, for you, was real. It’s me. I’m standing here. Right in front of you.’
He steps forwards and takes my hands. I can’t look at him.
I’m afraid that if I do that’ll be it. There’ll be no turning back.
I need to keep my head. I need to remember myself, protect myself.
Because nobody else will. Milo’s just proven that.
Even when someone looks you in the eye and says they will, they don’t.
‘It was real for me,’ I say. ‘There is nothing that you don’t know. I’m concealing nothing from you.’
‘It was real. It is real.’ Milo moves towards me again, folds his hand around mine, presses it to his chest. ‘Do you think we’d be standing here if it wasn’t? And Jameson wouldn’t want to do this, both Jameson and Iris wouldn’t have wanted to pick this story back up if—’
‘But my life is not a story, Milo. This is my heart.’ I’m surprised when those last few words burst out of me angrily.
Milo sinks down onto the bed, head in his hands. ‘Fuck,’ he mutters.
‘Do you know how long I’ve spent preparing myself to trust even just a little bit? I was even beating myself up for not trusting you more tonight. Actions,’ I say. ‘I told you that’s what was important to me.’
‘I know. I know, and maybe that’s what I was trying to do, Allie,’ Milo says almost desperately. A clamour. ‘Back then, I wanted to tell the world. Shout it from the literal mountains. And I know I did it in a total asshole way, my stupid-ass ego in the driving seat, but at least I wasn’t ashamed.’
‘I have never been ashamed.’
‘But even when I got here – I followed you everywhere, even though I was scared too, Allie. I told you I missed you. I told you I wanted to try this with you. That was all me. You talk about trust, about concealing nothing, but you go through life not wholly believing a word people say.’
‘It’s been proven that I’m right to. Over and over.’
Milo looks up at me, his eyes watery, his face pained.
‘And you say you aren’t ashamed,’ he croaks.
‘But if we’re talking about actions. I saw your face when we were in that picture together today.
You couldn’t wait to get out of that room.
And I know you said in my dorm that you didn’t care but – your face in that moment.
It told me everything I needed to know. I don’t think I’ll ever be who you wish I was.
The things that frighten you are a part of me.
And maybe that’s why I was afraid to tell you the things I believe are the unlovable parts of me. ’
I shake my head. ‘That isn’t true.’
‘I think that it is.’
Laughter sounds behind the door and I feel stupid.
I feel like the world is laughing at me, like they did before.
Like Milo did on The Really Late Show. That audience.
The comments all over social media after.
The emails to the Count Your Chicks address.
And everything now feels devastating. That this was my place.
That my heart was guarded. And now it’s like everything I left behind and ran from has infiltrated this safe space: Milo Ford has tarred and muddied it.
We have. I will never be able to return here without thinking about him – about how this is where we broke apart. Again.
I am inches from falling in love with him. That’s the truth. And yet I suddenly know this will be the last time I stand here like this, with Milo Ford.
‘The whole thing’s done,’ I say, pushing the heels of my hands into my eyes. ‘Always has been. We never made it because we were never meant to. The end.’
Milo then laughs – a harsh, sad sound that hurts me. ‘Then looks like we’re right back to where we started.’ He stands and walks across the room. The soles of his trainers scraping the floor heavily. ‘Goodnight, Allie,’ he says.
Behind me, he closes the door.