Staring at him, I grip the glass of water a little too tightly and hear it crack. “If you’re only in it for the money, then why did you even agree to come back? If you were that unhappy, why bother saying yes for a second time instead of staying on the east coast? You invested enough money to live off of for a long time. You have plenty of—”
“Because this is what you wanted. Me and the guys didn’t care either way when you decided to get back together. Jax, Cal, and Manning all love living here. They don’t think about New York or Mass or what they left behind because they don’t have that much to focus on back home. You know damn well that I do. But they all do whatever the hell they want without giving a shit what people have to say about it. The reason they bent so easily when you reached out was because you’ve always been the glue to this group, always pushing us to be and do better. You’ve always wanted more and were happier when you had shit to work toward. And when you went to rehab, it was obvious that we’d breakup if you didn’t recover. We needed you to survive. But when all was said and done, it was easy to see we would’ve been fine if we all chose to let it go for good.”
Rylee clears her throat. “Maybe we should—”
“No.” Zayne cuts her a look. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, but I need you both to hear this. For too long, me and the guys have done whatever you wanted because we knew how much this meant to you. The money is nice, hearing people love our music is rewarding, but that’s it. Nothing else about this lifestyle is something we wanted. Me especially. We were relieved when it was called. We did our own things and lived in a way we couldn’t before.”
How the hell am I just hearing about this now? It’s been years of hard work building us back up to where we were. “What happened to us, mate?”
The table is quiet. Too quiet.
Eventually, Zayne’s shoulders lift. “I don’t know. We grew up, I guess.”
Staring down at the cracked glass, I push it away and try figuring out how we got here. “I suppose the recordings in the press were right, then?” I ask him, brows arched in wait for his response.
He evades my eyes. “What people were saying wasn’t wrong.”
I swear under my breath and feel Rylee’s hand rest on my thigh, right above my knee. I drop mine on top of hers and keep it there, needing the contact. “Were you ever going to tell me, or were you going to let the tabloids do that for you?”
Rylee’s fingers tighten on my leg.
My best mate says, “You’re not being fair, and you know it.”
Maybe I’m not, but I simply say, “Neither are you.”
We’re at a stalemate that I’m not sure how to get out of. I look to Rylee. “We should go. I promised Chase I’d help him finish packing the rest of this things.”
“So that’s it?” Zayne asks as I slide out of the booth. “You’re just going to walk away even though we’ve accomplished nothing here?”
Eye twitching, I give him a terse nod. “I had to watch you walk away the first time, maybe it’s my turn.” Turning on my heels, I reach out for Rylee’s hand and reply, “I don’t know where this is going to take us. That’s up to you, I guess. Until then, I’d like to leave with my wife.”
It’s a low blow, one that he takes exactly as its meant. I’ll feel bad about it later, but all that erases itself from my mind when Rylee slips her fingers around my hand and stands beside me.
Zayne calls out, “Right before we called it, we’d silently agreed not to talk about the reason. Maybe that doomed us from the start. You struggling with your addiction and me battling mine was tension that should have never stayed bottled up. We broke up because we weren’t fucking into it anymore. The music. The people. The attention. The control everybody had on us. Let’s face it, Garrick. We all knew then that this would happen eventually, I just made the decision sooner before it completely destroyed us. Everybody has their limit. What’s yours?”
I don’t grace him with an answer. The fallout was a heated argument that led to us not speaking for way too long, and I thought getting back together was an olive branch that he’d accepted because he knew he was wrong. Clearly, that wasn’t his thought process at all.
Rylee and I take the back way out to avoid the people I’d undoubtedly fight with if they approached us because my patience is thin.
“I’m sorry,” Rylee tells me quietly.
“Don’t be.” I raise our hands to my mouth and press a kiss against the back of hers. “Are you ready to go home?”
My chest lightens when she says, “Yes.”
28
