“You have another daughter?”
He shakes his head. “I mean Mac and her mom.” He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Aubrey,” he says softly. “We were crazy in love. She stood by me through everything . . . and we had some hard fucking times, you know? Bank repo’d my truck. Nearly lost our house. And then . . .”
I hold my breath in anticipation of having my heart further broken on his behalf. I don’t know when I became so vulnerable to everyone else’s pain but I’m an oversensitive mess lately.
“My career took off. It got bigger than me. Bigger than us. The things I had to do to really make it here—the demands and the schedule and building a brand and a fan base—it didn’t leave any room in my life for them. And I just let it happen. I told myself there would be time to fix it later. That once I was on top of my game and killing it on the charts, we’d figure it out.”
I’m quiet because I don’t know what to say and because I get it now. What he’s trying to tell me. I’m sacrificing everything for a “one day” that might never come.
“I’ll stop boring you with my bullshit. It’s a great party, Robyn. I don’t say it enough, but I appreciate all of your hard work.”
He gazes at the crowd through the glass doors with a look of detached amusement on his face.
“You’re not boring me,” I assure him. “I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“About whether or not it’s worth it,” I answer quietly.
When he doesn’t speak, I glance over to see him looking at his phone again.
“It isn’t,” he says evenly.
A waiter steps over and offers us our choice of champagne in flutes or highball glasses of bourbon and another is close behind with chocolate-covered cherries on the music note sticks I ordered.
I skip the booze and take a few of the cherries. Jase lifts the squat glass full of amber liquid to his lips while I place the dessert in my mouth. Something about the combination of bittersweet dark chocolate and the sickly sour cherry hits me wrong and I spit it out over the balcony.
“Oh my God,” I say once I realize what I’ve done. “I cannot believe I just did that.”
And I sincerely hope my half-chewed cherry didn’t land in anyone’s hair.
Jase laughs at me. “And here I thought you were some classy broad. You could enter a chewing tobacco spitting contest and give some boys I know a serious run for their money.”
“I’ll add that to my resume.” I wrap the remaining cherries in my cocktail napkin. “I usually love those. But lately chocolate has been making my stomach turn. And I need to go see someone about those cherries. I think they might be rotten.”
Jase gives me some intense side-eye. “I had some earlier. Tasted fine to me.”
“Well, that batch had to be bad. They even smelled weird.”
“You think so?” He’s still scrutinizing me as if I am an alien life-form to be studied beneath a microscope. “You know, when Aubrey was pregnant with Mac, she couldn’t stand the smell of oranges. It was the damnedest thing. She used to love them. Then she got pregnant and said they smelled like kitchen cleaner and I had to keep her out of the produce section for fear she’d get a whiff and puke all over aisle five. We couldn’t even keep OJ in the house anymore.”
My mouth gapes open. What the hell does my spitting out a rancid rotten cherry have to do with his wife’s pregnancy and aversion to—
I feel as if my head is detaching from my body and floating up into the sky like a wayward balloon.
I don’t want it to be true but it’s entirely possible. I know it is. I knew the day I stood in my bathroom realizing I had two more birth control pills than I should have had after getting home from weeks of traveling for work. After having unprotected sex with Dallas. More than once.
I doubled up my next two doses but then I googled that and saw that it wasn’t necessarily effective or even a good idea.
Likely noting my distress, Jase takes my arm much more gently than he did when he almost knocked me over. “I think you’ve had enough fun for one evening, darlin’. I’m going to call us both a cab so we can get—”
“No. I’m fine. It’s just this stomach bug. I need to get back inside. Excuse me.”
Without another word, I stride quickly away from him and toward the throng of people flowing in and out of the ballroom.
Halfway across the room, I run smack into a couch where Dallas is sitting surrounded by executives and half-dressed women snapping pictures with him. A bottle blonde in a sparkly blue dress is in his lap. She looks comfortable. Like she’s been there awhile.
The small amount of lunch I’ve managed to keep down rises in my throat and I have to get to the ladies’ room or risk covering the entire couch and its occupants in puke.
On second thought . . . no. I’m better than that. I clench my jaw and try to swallow the excess saliva filling my mouth.
“Robyn, hey. There you are. You did an amazing job with the—”
I hold a hand up and shake my head. I can’t talk to whoever is trying to get my attention. Dallas looks up when they call my name but I avert my gaze.
I can’t do this right now.
All I can hear is Jase Wade in my head telling me about his pregnant wife as I run through the crowd, elbowing people out of my way in hopes that I make it to the bathroom in time.
I didn’t even eat that much today. Apparently my stomach decided to hang on to a week’s worth of meals to toss into the toilet.
Leaning against the side wall of the bathroom stall, I place a trembling hand to my forehead.
My head pounds and my throat is raw, but that’s not what’s concerning me the most. Jase’s words play over and over.
Then Dallas’s question at my apartment.
“Are you late?”
I kept telling myself it’s the stress. The traveling.
It isn’t the first time I’d skipped a period or two. But I’ve never felt like this before. Weak. Drained. Constantly nauseated and repulsed by smells that I barely even noticed before.
For a fleeting second, I wonder if maybe it’s something else. Cancer runs in my family on my mom’s side. Jesus Christ. If my brain is trying to reconcile this by reassuring me that it could be a fatal disease instead, I am even more screwed up than I thought.
Stepping out of the stall, I see one of the girls from Dallas’s estrogen-filled entourage heading into the stall beside me. I ignore her and turn on the sink in front of me. Rinsing my mouth and checking my hair for puke, I catch a glimpse of my ashen skin in the mirror.
My face looks gaunt, the skin beneath my eyes sallow and puffy.
If I get fired for blowing off my responsibilities at this party I have a promising career as a corpse on any crime show that will have me.
My purse is checked in the coatroom so I can’t really do anything about my horrifying appearance except splash some cold water on my face and dab at my smudged eye makeup with a paper towel.
“It reeks in here. Don’t you work here? Can’t you do something about that?”
Dallas’s groupie has joined me at the sink. Oh goody.
“Yeah I’ll get right on that.”
“Oh, and there are no more of the little blue shots. They’re so good. You might want to get on the waiters to send more of those around.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
She begins adding more black eyeliner to already overly lined eyes. I silently hope her hand slips and she stabs herself right in the retina.
I frown at my own reflection. First I cry all over Wade’s tragic turmoil, then I fantasize about gouging some random chick in the eye. I am so not this person.
Am I?
I have to get out of here.
After drying my hands briefly, I shove the door open.
“Hey.” Dallas stands there as if he’s waiting for someone.
“Hi.” I narrow my eyes because I don’t know if it’s me he’s out here for or the girl coming out behind me.
When she winks at him on her way by and he doesn’t so much as glance in her direction, I have my answer. But I can’t do this with him. Not here.