He needed to play out his little melodrama; the least Sofia could do was limit his audience.
“If everyone could give us five minutes,” she said evenly.
Four people turned in shock and started arguing with her as Aish dropped his face into his hands and started muttering, “Fuck, thank God, yeah, just five minutes, thank you, just give me...”
Sofia put up a hand. “Now,” she commanded, and the room went quiet.
Standing behind the couch, Roman put a hand on Aish’s shoulder and said, “You keep your ass on this couch. If I see you going for her, I will kill you.”
Namrita shivered. Not one person in the room thought he was talking in hyperbole. But Aish stayed focused on Sofia. “I won’t, man, I promise,” he said fervently. “I don’t want anything from her she doesn’t want to give.”
Sofia felt the frown on her face, the line he used to try to soothe, before she cleared it away and raised her chin. The people who loved and protected her, the people she’d let down, left her office. They closed the door behind them but hovered, talking quietly in a clutch, just outside the glass.
The reality that everything turned out just as bad as she knew it would by letting him back in her life felt like a calming straitjacket as she looked at him. What had she ever been afraid of, in looking directly at him? His ardent stare and jumping jaw and white-knuckle grip on his forearm were the histrionics of a rock star used to making enough drama to satisfy millions of screaming fans.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Sofia said, standing away from the glass wall and sliding her hands into the pockets of her oversized pants. “You came here to manage the rumors and save your career. And...that’s right...‘soak in that Spanish air.’ Bravo. You got everything out of this month you wanted.”
“Sofia!” he spat, like the shock of it could drown out her words. “That’s not true. I don’t know where that motherfucking flash drive came from!”
She smiled, exhausted, and ran one hand through her hair. It probably looked as crazy as his. “You don’t know that it came from my room, where you had plenty of time to look for it. You don’t know that it came out of a box that you clumsily left out of its hiding place. You had no idea what was hidden on it although you left me quickly enough so you could review it and then send it on.”
“Left you?” he squawked. Sofia pinched her leg inside her pants pocket; why had she said it like that? “Sofia, I didn’t want to leave you. You asked me to leave! I wanted to stay wrapped in you all night. If it was up to me, we’d still be tearing up that stupid princess bedroom.”
She ignored the crackling in his eyes, the ugly anguish on his face, the way he gripped the edges of the couch so he could keep his promise to her brother. “Where’d the fuck you get that drive? Why did you keep it?”
Sofia noiselessly breathed through the hot jolt of emotion that question caused.
When she’d discovered the secret inside her, she’d listened to Aish’s performances over and over again in her San Francisco hotel. The addict going back for her fix.
She’d kept it in her treasure box like the addict who believed she’d recovered, who believed she was strong enough to keep something on hand. Just in case she needed a hit.
How Aish must have laughed when he’d sifted through the other items in that box—the torn condom wrapper, a corner of a pizza box, the pick he’d been using the night he declared he loved her. Or, more likely, he hadn’t recognized those items at all.
She needed to wrap the cold around herself tighter to stop the slide back to that stupid, stupid girl who assumed he had any emotion for her.
She gave him a bland smile. “Since you’re not going to fess up and I’m not going to answer your questions, I don’t see any reason for us to...”
“Sofia, ’cause, fuck, look, if the reason you took that drive was because you wanted songs, I have a million songs for you.” His fervent eyes, his big body, was straining toward her as he kept himself on the couch. “‘In You’ wasn’t my big secret; all the songs were. Every song I’ve ever written is about you. Or, at least, I thought they were. I’ve been figuring out since I’ve been here that I was writing them for me and what I wanted you to be. I came here wanting you to be that girl from ten years ago. But you’re too brave and smart and strong for the mold I was trying to fit you into. Sofia, I was wrong.”
Aish gripped his knees like he wanted to get down on them and beg. “I was wrong for believing I had to trade you in to have a music career. I was wrong for never contacting you to tell you that. I was wrong for thinking a bunch of songs could do the hard work I needed to do. I was wrong, Sofia,” he said, banging his chest. “Nobody else. Just me.”
There was a crumbling wall in the village plaza, the last remaining limestone rocks of a medieval barrier that once protected the young hamlet of the Monte del Vino Real. Sofia called upon those ancient rocks now to leave her impenetrable against the arrows Aish was shooting.
What he saw on her face made Aish grip both big hands in his black hair.
“Why would I write all those songs if I was just planning to fuck you over?” He huffed a breath like he was running. “There are a lot of ways to screw you that don’t include being haunted by you every
