Sound Bites: A Rock & Roll Love Story (22 page)

“David,” I interrupted, looking him straight in the eye. “I appreciate you coming here to have some sort of… closure, if you will. But trust me, it’s over.”

He winced, obviously not expecting that to be my response. “Really? You have no feelings for me whatsoever?”

“You slept with my best friend!” I yelled. “Even if I had all the feelings in the world for you, it wouldn’t matter. Would you really want to be
that
guy? The
guy that
everyone
knows slept with my best friend?”

He knelt down on the floor in front of me and grabbed my hand. I quickly jerked it away. “I’ll do
whatever
it takes. I could even move to Boston if you wanted. We could start over.”

I knew that David didn’t really love me. He was in love with the idea of me. He only wanted me because he couldn’t
have me. I was the one girl who
wasn’t going to allow him to charm his way back into
her
life and he knew it. I told him this, but he refused to believe me. He insisted that he could make me trust him again.

I shook my head. “David, it’s over. I’m with someone now that I love very much.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, the
band guy
? Yeah, you’re sister told me all about him. Come on, Renee, you’re really going to have a future with that guy? Is he going to be able to support you with the money he makes playing gigs? Are you going to marry someone who works until two in the morning and has girls hanging all over him every night? You can’t have a future with someone like that.”

I couldn’t believe there was ever a time in my life when I’d been so blinded by David’s adorable dimples and angelic face that I hadn’t picked up on how differently we both viewed the world.

Just as I opened my mouth to
protest
, the room started to spin. A lot. My eyes felt like bricks. The kamikaze shots slowly started burning their way up the back of my throat. I lay down on my couch and rested my head on the pillow, leaving one foot on the floor, a trick that someone once told me stopped the spins. It didn’t work. I could feel the outside world begin to fade as I drifted into unconsciousness.

“David,” I mumbled to him. “I really need to go to sleep. You need to leave.”

“Renee, please…”

“You’re five minutes is up. Please go.”

That’s the last thing I remember before passing out.

***

When I awoke, my head felt like someone had stepped on it. My temples were throbbing, and it sounded like there were tiny animals running back and forth between my ears. I rolled over and buried my head in the pillow.

“Dylan,” I mumbled, slowly coming out of my semiconscious state. “I need aspirin.”

“Dylan? Is that the angry guy who lives upstairs?”

My eyes swung open in a flash of horror as the events of last night flooded my memory. I sprung up and found David sprawled out on my armchair, sipping on a Starbucks Frappuccino like he owned the place.

“
What are you doing here
?” I shrieked.

David shrugged. “We didn’t get a chance to finish talking last night since you passed out. I got you a blanket and waited for you to wake up, but I ended up falling asleep on your chair. I figured we could finish talking when you woke up.”

I glared at him, furious. “Are you
insane?
”

“Renee, please…”

“There is nothing to talk about,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s over. We’re over. We’ve been over for a long time. You need to leave.
Now.
”

He stood up and walked into my kitchen, reappearing with a ginger ale. “Here,” he said, placing it on the table. “I figured you’d need this.” My demands had completely eluded him. I wondered if he was really this dense when we dated.

Then his words came back to me in a flash:
Dylan?
Is that
the angry guy who lives upstairs?

“David,” I asked, trying to refrain from panicking. “What did you mean when you mentioned the angry guy upstairs?”

“Oh, when I came back from Starbucks this morning, some guy was coming down the stairs. When he saw me walking into your place, he demanded to know who I was, li
ke he was your
boyfriend or something.”

“He
is
my boyfriend!” I screamed, throwing my hands over my eyes. “Dylan lives upstairs! Oh my God. Oh my God.” My heart was racing in my chest. “What did you say to him?”

“Nothing, really. I just introduced myself and said I was a friend of yours. Dylan, yeah, that was his name. He didn’t say he was your boyfriend, though. He just looked really pissed and took off.”

“Jesus Christ.” I flung myself off my couch, threw on a pair of shoes and bolted out the door. I had to find Dylan. I could only imagine what was going through his head.

“Renee, where are you going?” I could hear David’s footsteps trailing behind me.

“To my
boyfriend’s
apartment!” I screamed, barreling up the stairs. I reached Dylan apartment and pounded on the door. The knob was locked. I pressed my ear to the door and listened but all I heard was silence.

“He left this morning!” David yelled from the bottom of the stairs.

I ran back down the stairs, past David and out to the parking lot. Dylan’s van was nowhere to be found. I turned around and saw David hovering in the doorway, staring at the ground uncomfortably.

“David,” I said to him. “I’m sorry that you came all the way here. The truth is: I love Dylan. More than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life. Maybe the same way you think that you love me, I don’t know. But I do know that right now, he’s probably under the assumption that you and I slept together, so I need to find him.”

David’s face fell, but he forced a pitiful smile and nodded like he understood. As angry as I was, for some ludicrous reason I still felt bad for him.

I put my hands on his shoulders and pulled him closer to me. “Look at me,” I said, lowering my gaze to meet his, which was still focused on the ground. “You’re going to meet someone someday,
someone who
you care about as much as me, probably even more than me. And when you do, don’t cheat on them and don’t do anything to screw it up. Okay?”

He nodded but remained silent.

“I have to go.” I turned around and walked back towards my apartment. As much as I pitied him, David had made his own bed and he could drown in it for all I cared. I had my own problems to deal with.

I ran into the kitchen and grabbed my cell phone out of my purse. There were two missed calls and two messages from Dylan. I immediately dialed his number without even listening to the messages.

His voicemail picked right up. He’d shut his phone off.

“Damn it!” I yelled.

I left him a frantic message, trying to piece together the combustion of words that were falling out of my mouth into some sort of logical explanation that nothing had happened between David and me. With my heart pounding rapidly in my chest, I dialed my voicemail and listened to his messages.

The first message was from the night before. Dylan apologized for the whole episode with Christina, told me he loved me and asked me to call him first thing in the morning. I smiled for a split second before moving on to the second message.

The second message, as predicted, was left after his encounter with David. In it, he took back his apology from the night before and called me a lying, cheating whore. I deleted it without listening to the rest.

I racked my brain trying to figure out where he would have gone. I called Justin to see if he’d heard from him but he said he hadn’t. I explained the whole situation and begged him to relay that information to Dylan if he ended up speaking to him. He promised he would.

I spent the majority of the day perched at my window like a psycho stalker. Every time I heard a car pull into the parking lot, I’d bolt to the window to see if it was him. And every time I looked, it wasn’t. 

By the time night fell, I’d given up. I must’ve called his cell phone about a hundred times but all I got was the same voicemail greeting on the first ring. I did everything I could
to try to get my mind off him –
read
a book, surfed the internet, watched a movie. None of them helped.

I managed to catch a little bit of sleep that night, but every hour, I’d wake up and look out the window for his car. And every hour, his car was nowhere to be found.

He never came home that night.

Chapter
21

I hated the train. Even though I rode it to and from work every day, I could never get used to it. At least when I dro
ve my car, I had distractions –
speed
limits, stop signs
, traffic lights, pedestrians –
there
was always something that kept my mind active. The train left me alone with nothing but my thoughts. There was no radio to fidget with, no air conditioner vent to toy with, nothing. So, needless to say, the mornings were the worst part of my day.

When I was at work, I had all sorts of distractions. Answering phones, sending out emails, editing resumes, participating in vacant half-conscious conversations with my coworkers. It was great. It limited my thoughts of Dylan to occur every other second as opposed to every second. 

Four days had officially passed with no word from him. His cell was still shut off, my messages continued to escalate to higher levels of desperation, and my nerves made it barely possible to even function.

Every day that went by without him was like a blur. It was as if reality had finally set in. I was lost. I had become completely accustomed to spending every waking, non-working hour with someone, and then one day, he was gone. Work helped distract me temporarily, even though it was hard to concentrate on resume writing when all I could think about
was Dylan
. But I knew that if I stayed home, I’d be permanently glued to my window, dying a slow torturous death. I tried my hardest not to stress and told myself that
he
just needed some time to cool off and when he was ready to talk, he’d come home.

The truth was, every day spent without Dylan felt like a part of me died. 

***

In addition to the mental exhaustion building inside my brain, my bladder had decided to join the party as well. For the past week, my body had been completely out of whack, and I’d convinced myself it was strictly stress related. But about three days in, it started to feel like a sumo wrestler was stepping on my abdomen.

I relayed this information to the nurse who was seated across from me at the doctor’s office, at which point she documented my symptoms and handed me a cup to pee in.