The blood was draining from his face as he shook his head and slumped back on the couch. “Sofia, I don’t...”
And, oh God, maybe he didn’t know. Too high. Too drunk. Too preoccupied. Or maybe just too much of not giving a fuck about one burdensome girl.
Astonishment blazed through her as she, too, shook her head. “You remember getting caught making out with that girl, right? Breaking up with me after you’d asked me to move in with you?” Because she remembered it in cinematic brilliance: walking in on a cloud, crashing into the darkest pit when she saw his arms around a girl, his tongue deep in her mouth. He seemed drunk, yes, but not sloppy. He’d said he was sorry, but as he looked away from her shocked tears, suggested that maybe it was for the best. Mumbled halfheartedly about John, about what he owed him, about the manager’s insistence that girlfriends made for bad rock business, that he needed to give his all to the music before he settled down.
She’d no more expected him to give up his music and its demands than she was going to give up her University of Bordeaux education. They’d figure it out. And she’d never thought him being with her was settling.
“That was the biggest mistake of my life,” he said, fervently. “I never should have—”
She steamrolled over him because she was so tired of his excuses. “Vale, stick with me, guapo. Do you remember the call, oh say, three weeks later? When I told you I’d miscarried?”
He looked at her like she’d stabbed him. “You were pregnant?”
With three words, he flattened her. She had no more righteous fury or cold reasoning, she had nothing left. He scooped her out and left her empty. Exhausted. Without even a glimmer of hope. This was the one who’d ruined her for love? What a sad, pathetic creature she was.
She’d become exactly what she despised.
She closed her eyes and lowered her head, slumped back on the glass.
“Yes, I was pregnant, and I’d planned to get an abortion,” she murmured. “I told you that on the phone. But I started miscarrying before I could, and then I went into septic shock.”
She’d been bleeding and shaking and quivering with fever when the ambulance technicians had pulled her gurney through the fancy chrome and glass lobby of the hotel while businessmen gawked, and the noise and pain and fear had blurred for hours until the nurse in the ICU asked if there was anyone Sofia could call. It had been a blinding moment of clarity. There was no other person she needed, no other person she wanted by her side.
She’d had no doubt he would come.
“You told me it was my problem. You told me to handle it. You told me you had a tour schedule to keep.” He was making a sound, some kind of sounds on the couch. She didn’t care. “The contractions and the back pain and the fever, it all hurt so much. They said I was there for ten days; I don’t remember much until the last two. That’s when they told me that the infection had damaged my uterus to the point that I can’t have children.” He made another sound. “You told me to handle it and I did, that whole experience, all by myself. I still am handling it; you’re the only person I’ve told this much to and I imagine you’ll forget about it when you go back to your rock star life.”
He was muffled now. She looked up and saw that he’d buried his face in his hands. His muscles were shaking. She didn’t care.
“You know what, you can stay until the internship is over. I don’t care if you leave. I don’t care if you stay.”
Staring at him, half naked and ink covered and crying on her office couch was like looking at a bug on a vineyard leaf.
“You’re my first love, too, Aish,” she said, pushing herself off the glass and walking to her office door. “You’re also my last love.” She opened the glass and tossed her last statement over her shoulder. He probably wasn’t paying attention anyway.
“Because you’re the reason I’m never going to love again.”
September 28
Devonte had told Aish that he was going to have to lie to his face. But Aish hadn’t had to utter a word when his manager pounded his heavy fist against his suite door later that night. Instead, when Aish staggered to his door and threw it open, eager for whatever firing squad was behind it, Devonte took one look at him, cursed, and then strode into the room and threw his overnight bag into a corner.
“Talk to me,” he’d commanded. “Tomorrow, we’ll fix it.”
Early the next morning, Devonte was still passed out on the couch that looked comically tiny beneath him as Aish stood at his balcony doors, showered and drinking coffee he hoped the staff hadn’t poisoned, watching the sun peek over the top of Sofia’s mountain for what might be the last time.
Even if he could fix this for Sofia—no, he was going to fix this—even when he fixed this for Sofia, he knew she would never want to see him again. He would never be invited back to this kingdom that he’d begun to think of as a second home. He would never be embraced again by this community of people who showed him the value of honoring something bigger than personal ambition. He would never explore her mountains, hand in hand with her, finally getting to discuss the future and not the decade that had passed.
“Why won’t you let me apologize? Why won’t you let me try to make
