Hard As Rock (16 page)

Oddly enough,
that
hurt the most.

I felt like it was
our
car. I’d been there when he bought it. I’d driven all across the Western United States with him in that car. I’d made love to him in the front seat on the salt flats in Utah, with the sun setting behind us like fire.

And now he was using it to take home an endless procession of sluts.

Sorry; sorry. They weren’t sluts, they were just women.
He
was the fucking slut. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

You know in movies or books, where the wife loses it because her husband slept with somebody else in their bed? It felt like that. That car was special. It was
ours.
And he was tainting all my memories of it.

A phrase from church came to my mind:
the sanctity of the marriage bed.

We didn’t have a marriage bed, and I don’t think my college dorm room mattress counted, much less two dozen hotel suites… so that car was the closest thing I had to the concept.

And he had ruined it for me.

The one thing I noticed, though, was that Derek didn’t particularly seem to be enjoying himself. When he wasn’t bleary-eyed from booze, he had this thousand-yard stare going. It was often like the women weren’t even there – they were just a prop, a pretty bauble trailing in his wake as he stumbled through the dark.

That’s what I wanted to believe, anyway.

If Derek had wanted to sabotage any chance of a romance with Ryan, he’d done a masterful job at it.

I became obsessed with reading about him. Like a seven-year-old probing a sore tooth about to fall out, or a scabbed-over mosquito bite you just
have
to keep itching, I couldn’t stop myself. Every morning I got up and checked the website for whatever sleazy exploits he’d done the night before.

I hated him for what he was doing. More than that, I hated myself for giving in and reading about it. I saw how pathetic and weak I was being, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop reading about it, couldn’t stop the anger, couldn’t stop the jealousy, couldn’t stop the anxiety and depression and self-loathing.

Why couldn’t I get over him?

It was like being addicted to some horrific drug, but one that doesn’t bring any pleasure, only pain. I guess I needed a hit to keep me connected to whatever emotions and experiences I’d had weeks ago when times were good. Except now it was just torture.

Worst of all, I could see it was hurting my relationship with Ryan. I became withdrawn and depressed. I tried to hide it, but he was no fool. He knew it was Derek. He tried to draw me out of my torpor with horseback rides into the hills, with small talk, with music, but I just became more and more listless. The calm and easy joy I’d experienced on those two weeks before Derek showed up? All those feelings slowly eroded. The music didn’t console me, Ryan’s presence didn’t help… only the wine did any good as it numbed the pain.

I couldn’t talk to Ryan about what I was feeling, because I knew it would hurt him. So I didn’t really talk to him at all – which ended up hurting him even more.

When I say I didn’t talk to him, I didn’t mean I went silent. There was the polite chit-chat of meals, of our evenings spent in the same room but miles apart emotionally. All I could think about was Derek, about how he was doing this to get revenge on me, about how he was destroying himself, about what he was doing at that very moment.

And if Derek was all I could think about, then I couldn’t really talk about anything else of substance with Ryan. So I didn’t.

Because of that, we slowly descended into silence.

My depression grew.

And all the darkness that had seemed to recede since I got here began to creep back into my life once again.

It got so bad that I decided to give him back my ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ card.

It was about ten days after Derek’s drunken appearance during the rainstorm. I was sick with depression, obsession, and self-loathing. I knew I was hurting Ryan by being around him and still having all these feelings for Derek. So I figured the best thing to do would be to end it.

It may sound like it was a snap decision, but it actually took me several days to work up the courage to say, ‘Yeah, I really need to go and let him live his life and be happy.’ When all my deliberations finally came to a head, I was about to throw up I was so nervous. It took me 30 minutes of pacing before I could work up the courage to go talk to him.

He wasn’t in the house, so I walked outside to find him. He was in the barn, bailing hay for the horses. The barn had become his refuge over the last ten days, just like alcohol had become mine.

He stopped when I walked in. He was wearing a wifebeater and jeans, and I noted – in a kind of abstract, purely platonic way – how hot he was. Strong arms with biceps clearly defined… sweat-streaked hair tousled just so. He wasn’t Derek with his bulging muscles and broad back… but he was taller, and steadier, and just as attractive in his own way.

“You alright?” he asked when I walked in.

I could read the concern in his face – something I wouldn’t have gotten from Derek.

I swallowed. I felt nauseated and horrible, but I figured I had to do this.

Make a clean break.

Get it over with.

Allow him to get back to his life, and me to get back to mine… whatever was still left of it.

I held out the “Get Out Of Jail Free” card with a trembling hand.

He just looked at it. No surprise on his face, only a dark kind of resignation.

“We both know it’s not working out,” I said, my mouth dry.

He looked up from the card to my face.

His eyes… his eyes were so beautiful. Soft and brown and kind.

But I ignored that and plowed ahead. “I’m just… I can’t get over him… and I know that’s hurting you… and I think it would be best if I just left.”

“No,” he said.

At first I didn’t think I had heard him right.

“…what?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean ‘no.’ I refuse to take it.”

My confusion quickly turned to anger. “What about the whole ‘Are you sure?’ thing, and the ‘I won’t ask you any other questions, I’ll just put you on the next flight out’ thing? What about that?”

He looked at me for a long time before answering. “Do you remember on the ride home, when I said Derek would lie, cheat, and steal to get you back?”

You mean, the moment of sexual tension between us?

“…yes.”

“And you asked me, ‘And why didn’t you?’ Do you remember that?”

Suddenly I was very aware of the summer heat in the barn, and of the heat in my own body.

“…yeah?”

“I thought about that for a long time. I wondered, ‘Why
didn’t
you lie, cheat, and steal to get her? You wanted her. You
still
want her. Why don’t you take her?’”

When he said
take her,
something deep inside me did a loop-de-loop. I caught my breath.

“I was always trying to be
good.
A good friend… a good guy… a good person. But I never got what I wanted. Which was you.”

Jesus.

My mouth was dry again, but for a completely different reason.

“So this is me lying, and cheating, and stealing. Or my version, anyway. I’m not taking the card back; I’m not letting you go. I want you to stay here with me.”

I just stood there, not saying anything, staring at him goggle-eyed and open-mouthed.

I guess he took that for a sign, because he dropped the pitchfork into the hay and walked over to me, decisive and strong. He put his arms around me, grabbing me at the waist, and pulled me in to his body.

My head was spinning; my vision blurred around the edges so that all I could see clearly were his eyes. My heart was hammering in my chest, my knees were weak. I smelled the clean scent of his sweat, felt the strength of his arms around me and his body against mine as he leaned his head down to kiss me –

And I turned my head away.

Not out of anger, or not wanting it.

More out of shame. Guilt.

As insane as it was – as much as that asshole had put me through, and even though we were about as broken up as you can get – I felt like I would be cheating on Derek. I just couldn’t go through with it.

Ryan paused for a long moment… and then I felt his arms release me. He walked past me towards the door to the barn.

“Ryan,” I choked out, regret in my voice.

He stopped at the doorway and half-turned towards me – not facing me, instead staring at the ground.

“It’s okay, Kaitlyn. I get it.”

“No, you don’t – ”

“Yeah I do. You still love him.”

He turned all the way around and stared into my eyes. I shrank away slightly, under the full strength of being
seen
by him. Of those kind brown eyes seeing me and not judging me.

Not hating me.

“I get it. He’s incredibly good-looking. He’s the lead singer. He’s charismatic. He’s funny and clever and confident. He’s what every woman wants.”

With every word he said, my heart felt like it was being stabbed.

Because I knew he wasn’t just describing Derek. He was describing all the things he thought
he
wasn’t, because he’d spent the last five years comparing himself to the Golden Boy.

“Ryan…”

“And he’s a good guy,” Ryan continued. “He is. Maybe not always, maybe not now, maybe not the way he’s acting towards you – but he was once. And that’s the guy you fell in love with four years ago. I get it. I do.”

I walked over to him like I was led by a magnetic force. I wanted to touch him, to comfort him, to not be the one breaking his heart.

He watched me approach, watched me put my hands on his chest as I peered up into his eyes.

“Ryan…” I whispered.

But as I moved one hand up to touch his face, he grabbed my wrist. He didn’t hurt me… but he let me know there was no going further.

“Don’t. Okay? Just… don’t,” he whispered back, his voice full of pain. “Don’t pretend you feel something when it’s not there. Okay? Just… I can’t. I can’t deal with
that.
I can deal with you loving him, I just… I can’t deal with
that.
”

Four years earlier, there was a moment when I knew I had fallen in love with Derek for the first time. It was a conversation about crying during a movie. Derek had broken my heart with how sweet and open and vulnerable he was. He had cracked open all my walls, and love flooded in.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the same thing happened as the best man I had ever met walked away from me, leaving me in the barn alone, my heart breaking open all over again.

So, add to my depression and jealousy and obsession the realization of how fucked up I was. That I could love an emotionally abusive jerk like Derek, but I couldn’t let go of him and love someone else. Not completely.

The next week was a bad one. Ryan and I drifted apart even more. If the only conversations to be had were excruciating ones or vapid ones, then I guess we chose not to have any at all.

Derek’s life degenerated, as well. As chronicled by TMZ, he looked worse and worse, like he wasn’t sleeping or eating. Just boozing and fucking, apparently.

A club he was at got busted in a drug raid.  Five kilos of coke in the owner’s safe. Derek was reported as being there when it happened – in fact, there was a picture of him clowning around with the owner, a former NBA star who had retired and become a full-time partier – but there was no mention of Derek going to jail, no celebrity mug shot. Believe you me, TMZ would have
looooved
to put
that
on the site.

And then came the car wreck.

My morning ritual was to get my cup of coffee and sit down to torture myself by opening up my iPhone browser, bookmarked to TMZ.com.

When I saw the powder-blue Mercedes smashed into a telephone pole, I cried out and dropped the phone.

No lie, my heart actually stopped in my chest.

But the headline was as good as defibrillator pads:

ROCK STAR KANE AVOIDS THE REAPER

Derek Kane, heartthrob singer of the multiplatinum band Bigger, miraculously walked away unscathed when he totaled his car on Sunset Boulevard Saturday morning around 3AM… luckily he was alone and not with one of his trademark beauties he’s been spotted with over the last two weeks, or he might be on the block for manslaughter. Cops showed up and arrested Kane for DUI. Sources say he blew a 0.17 on the breathalyzer and that there was evidence of drugs in his car…

Sure enough, there they were: the mug shots. Derek looked like death warmed over – but
sexy
death warmed over. Like those old photos of ‘heroin chic’ ads in the 90’s. He managed to give the camera a ‘come here and fuck me’ look that probably had all his female fans swooning despite the gauntness in his cheeks and the circles under his eyes.
   

Kane was released Saturday afternoon on $5,000 bail – peanuts for the millionaire rock star – paid by the band’s manager, Miles Sumner. Sumner’s only statement to the press was, “F*ck off and leave him be,” before he piled Kane into a car and took off.

Funnily enough, it was good to see Miles again. He was dapper and furious as always, sticking his hand in the photographers’ lenses as he pushed Derek into the back of a black SUV.

I returned to the top photo of the blue Mercedes. It was an apt metaphor for our relationship now:

Wrecked.

Totaled.

I went to look for Ryan, and found him outside with the horses.

I had a bad moment recalling our last conversation in the barn… but then I steeled myself and walked up to him. “You need to look at this,” I said as I handed him the phone.

He took a long look at the article and muttered “Jesus.” Then he said, “I need to call Miles, and I left mine in the house. Can I?”

“Um… sure…”

He tapped out a number from memory, then held the phone to his ear.