High Strung (Power Station Book 1) (35 page)

“Ash, I know this is fucked up and I know I kept things from you, but you can’t doubt what we have.” I looked at her right in the eye. She had to believe me. I’ll be the first person to put my hand up and say I may have omitted some details and maybe I fucked up. Okay, so I
definitely
fucked up, but I’ve never lied to her. I would never hurt her.

“That day…in Lexi’s office.” She swallowed hard as the first tear dropped from the corner of her eye. She tried to wipe it away before I could see. “When I met you the first time. Why were you there?”

She looked like she was in so much pain. I couldn’t make it worse. Why couldn’t we let go of that shit and concentrate on what we had. On what we had built. Nothing else mattered.

“I was with Alex, he had to see Lexi.”

I remembered that day like it was burned into my brain. We had been rehearsing at James’s. Hannah had been looking after Grace, and Noah had helped keep her entertained while her daddy played rock star with her uncles. We had wrapped and Alex had said he was going to stop by and see Lexi. I thought it would have been the perfect opportunity to see Sydney, maybe ask her out. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. She would shoot me down like she always did and I’d move on. It was almost like a game. I never expected to find something else there that day.
Someone
else. Someone like Ash.

“Dan, from the little I know of Alex, I know he does not need a babysitter to see his wife. Why were
you
there that day?”

I couldn’t lie to her. I promised I wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure if this was some sick fucking test I had to pass or what, but whatever happened from here on out was going to be the fucking truth.

“I was there to see Sydney.”

It was as if the words had smacked her hard in the face. Her hand flew to her mouth as she let out a gasp.

“Why?” she barely choked out.

“I was going to ask her out.” The truth, no matter what happened she was going to get the truth.

“So I was the consolation prize?” The pain in her eyes tore through me. I’d swallow broken glass before I had to see it again.

“No. Ash. No. I swear to you.” Fuck the consequences. I needed to hold her. To put her in my arms and for her to feel it. To feel us. I moved to her, toe to toe. We needed to make sense of this and the only way I knew how was to touch her.

“I can’t.” She pushed me away, her hand hitting me square in the chest. “This is too much. I can’t.”

“Ash, don’t fucking leave. Do not walk away from this.” I grabbed her hand. Did she want me to beg? Whatever the fuck she needed, she just had to say the word.

She held my stare, her green eyes annihilating me as I watched her fight against the tears. “I need to be enough, and I can’t be that with you. The girls, the job, being your second choice? It’s too much. We never belonged together, Dan. We were a mistake that just went on too long. Neither of us was going to admit it, but you and me, it was destined to fail. We are just too different, and I can’t be anyone else anymore than you can. Goodbye, Dan.”

She didn’t yell and somehow that was so much worse. It fucking scared the hell out of me. I wanted her to scream, to slap me and tell me what an asshole I was, but she didn’t. Instead, she turned around and walked out. She didn’t even slam the door. Nothing. She was just gone. I kept staring at the door. Hoping it would open and it was all a big mistake. Like what just happened, didn’t actually happen. But it didn’t. Nothing changed and I was left standing there with the biggest pain in my chest I’d ever known. All that shit about feeling like your heart was tearing in two was a lie. That didn’t even come close to the pain I was feeling. It felt so much worse. Like having your heart ripped from your chest, tossed on the floor, and forced to watch it helplessly while you slowly die. That’s what it felt like. It felt like dying.

Megs kept asking me
how I felt and I didn’t know what to say. Hurt. Sad. Angry. Tired. Sad. Hurt. It was everything wrapped up in a huge indescribable fuck-you emotion. I felt betrayed. I felt stupid but most of all I felt an overwhelming sense of pain and loss that compared to nothing I’d ever experienced before. I’d experienced break-ups before. Nothing even came close to this. This was some kind of medieval type pain. Epic. Sustained.

It was like a hole had been torn through me, letting the cold seep in and I could never warm up. My body shivered. I felt empty. I felt lost. I felt so incredibly sad I couldn’t stand it.

“Ash. I’ve never seen you like this. Sweetie, I don’t know what to do to make this better.” It’s a sad sorry state of affairs when one of my best friends, who happened to be a psychologist, didn’t know what to say. That’s where I had ended up. Pushing the boundaries of even professional help. Go hard or go home, right?

“Nothing, there’s nothing.” I was curled up on my couch in my pjs. It was the weekend so therefore it was my go-to attire. I wasn’t leaving the apartment. Not unless I had to. Like if the place was on fire or something like that, and even then I’d probably seriously evaluate the size of the flames before actually leaving.

It had been exactly one week and one day since I’d walked out of Dan’s apartment. He had been calling me relentlessly. I didn’t answer. Letting every single one of those calls go to voice mail, and deleting them before I had a moment of weakness and listened. I couldn’t. I couldn’t go back. It had hurt too much.

I had made it through in a daze. Faking it through the days when I had to see people, going to work and pretending it hadn’t happened, but allowing myself the luxury to fall apart at night when I was alone. It had been three days before I’d finally confessed what had happened to Megs. I had a feeling she already knew, maybe through Troy, or maybe even Dan trying to gain an ally, but she didn’t say a word. She just held me and let me cry on her bedroom floor.

I wanted to pull myself together. To stop it. But it was something I just couldn’t manage. Part of me didn’t want to. Like finally letting go of the pain would be letting go of that last piece of Dan. How stupid was that? That even after all of this, I still loved him. I was insane.

“Ash, maybe you should talk to him. Even if it’s just for closure.” Megs sat beside me. She was grasping. Looking for anything to pull me out of it.

“No, I have all the closure I need.” I didn’t even look at her. My eyes fixed on the television screen in front of me. Not that it was actually playing anything. Staring at the black focal point just helped me not to cry.

“Ashlyn Marie Murphy, you are full of shit. You aren’t anywhere close to closure.” Megs pulled on my arm, forcing me to look at her. We both knew she was right. One of us was just not ready to deal with what she was suggesting.

“I’m not calling him, I don’t want to hear his voice. It will hurt too much.”

“Ash. I get that you are hurting right now, and I’m not going to pretend I know what you are going through, but anyone can see you are still in love with him. Maybe there is a way you can work through this.”

I loved Megs, and usually her optimism was welcomed, but today I wanted to ask her
what the hell was she thinking?
She had to be kidding, trying to get me out of my funk with shock treatment. Like delivered pulses into my brain by electrodes, this was her mental equivalent.

“Megs.” Where to even start? “He made a play for me while interested in another woman. Then he went to Lexi, a potential employer, and asked her to give me a job, obviously not having any faith in my own ability and making me look desperate. Then failing that, he went to a girl who he’d had a one-night stand with and got her to pull some strings. The same girl he had been trying to win over when he met me. See where I’m going with this? My pride is about all I have right now.” The words come out in a jumbled rush. I barely took a breath before continuing, “What’s worse is that I don’t even know if the job is still mine. Like if now the gig is up, will JenCorp pull the pin? After all, they don’t need to do me any more favors now I’m no longer screwing Dan. The whole week I’ve been waiting for someone to come into my office and hand me my walking papers. My world has dropped out from under me. None of it was real. It had just been an illusion.”

“Ash, take a breath. I don’t care how or who got you that interview at JenCorp, you earned that position. You are more than qualified, and you are doing an outstanding job. Even assuming they hired you as a favor, which they didn’t, but assuming they did, they wouldn’t keep you if you sucked. It’s a business, Ash; you look at their bottom line every day. Do you think they going to sink money into you as a charity case? Even you have to admit that regardless of how you got there, you have more than proven your worth.”

If I gave it some proper consideration, what Megs said was logical. JenCorp had thrived on ruthless business decisions. Simon Jennings wouldn’t think twice about firing me if I didn’t perform. That man was only interested in what I could do to expand his net worth, rather than who my boyfriend was. Not that it mattered now. I had no boyfriend.

“Even if I could find a way to work through it, he didn’t believe in my ability to get a job on my own. I’m not sure if I could somehow find peace about possibly running into one of his past and numerous conquests. Or even, believing that if we had met under different circumstances, he still would have wanted to be with me, it doesn’t change anything. All those problems did, was highlight one major flaw. We didn’t belong together. We were too different.”

“Ash, you were happy. I saw it. I know that those feelings you had for him were real. He was a manwhore and he had slept with a lot of women, but that was before he met you. He wasn’t with anyone while you were together, right?”

I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. “I don’t think… I hope he didn’t.” In my heart, I believed he had been faithful even if my head, the jury was still out. I hated that either way, I just wasn’t sure.

Megs rubbed my arm as she continued her dissection of our break-up. “The job thing, perhaps his methods weren’t great, but I think his heart was in the right place. We’ve already established you got the job legitimately; all he did was get your foot in the door.”

“I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I need to know that I’m good enough on my own.”

“Oh sweetie, you are. He was just trying to help. He wanted you to be happy because he loves you.”

“It doesn’t matter. Whether he loved me or not, nothing changes. I mean really, what the fuck was I thinking? A rock star, Megs. A fucking rock star. What kind of future was I going to have with him? Maybe we’d date for a few months, a year at most? Then, what? We move onto
friends
like he did with Sydney? Is there some special club of girlfriends past, where we all gather and commiserate? I can’t do that. It would hurt too much. He was larger than life, and I got caught up in the madness. When I met him, I knew that it wasn’t going to be forever. I just stupidly forgot, and then went and did something dumb like falling in love with him.”

It felt like the room had become suddenly larger, or I was smaller in it. The overwhelming hurt hung in the air above us. It had consumed me, and I knew there was no going back. I wasn’t that strong.

“Please think about this. Please, talk to him,” Megs begged, pulling me closer into a hug.

“You are supposed to be my friend. Please don’t try and make me feel worse than I already do.” I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let this go. My heart was broken into a million tiny pieces and I wasn’t even sure whom to blame.

“I’m not. I promise. Ash, I really believe he loves you. I know he is hurting just as much as you are. I’m trying to help.”

“Well if you want to help, stop trying to convince me that I’ve made a mistake. Help me get over him, and help me move on.” Help me to forget how much I love him. I couldn’t say that last part. Not out loud. Not ever again.

“Okay. If that’s what you want.” Megs sighed. Her expression was sad but resigned, like she was finally going to let it go.

I closed my eyes and let out a long, slow breath. I didn’t want to feel like this, I didn’t want to hurt. I’m not sure what part cut me the most, maybe it was because I had felt like a consolation prize. He had admitted he didn’t do long-term, and perhaps he wasn’t wired for that. Either way, even if I still loved him, and he me, I needed to look after my heart.

“It’s what I need.”