Page 17 of Take What You Want

Meaning he doesn’t have his bandmates to deflect the attention away from his…activities.

“Are you prepared to hold them up?” I scan over the pages. “They don’t want you photographed out at clubs with multiple women, being carried out by security, no public relationship declarations unless approved by management and the label?—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he says nonchalantly, waving me off.

I slap the papers on the table. “Nikolai, you have to take this seriously. I know that’s hard for you, but this is a legal document.”

“Don’t patronize me,” he shoots back, his eyes taking on an icy edge. “I’m well aware that I’m signing years of my life away with those.” He points to the contract. “But I’m also going to die if I can’t get back into the studio and make music again.”

“Alright,” I say, then clear my throat and reach for my wine. “There’s also a clause in here about no marriage. I’m assuming that is due to your quickie in Vegas a couple years ago?” I try to keep the bitterness out of my tone but fail.

Nikolai is never embarrassed. He’s never once in his life tried to take up less space or fade into the background. But right now? His shoulders roll inward and he looks like he wishes the booth would swallow him whole.

“I’m not proud of that one,” he admits, rubbing the back of his neck.

We’ve never talked about it. Was best to just leave that one in the past as we rebuilt our friendship. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t keep me up at night thinking about it.

“It was a mistake, Jane. A drunken night,” he says, eyeing me carefully. “It was a bad time in my life.”

I know it was. It happened only a few weeks before I almost lost him a second time.

The article covering it was the first thing I saw when I woke up one morning. The band was on a hiatus, but that didn’t slow Nikolai down. He was on a bender in Vegas one weekend with his fling of the month, and they got married at a drive-thru chapel.

Bystanders live streamed the whole thing.

It was announced the next day that the marriage was annulled and they broke up shortly after that. Nikolai refusesto talk about it in interviews and even the guys don’t tease him about it.

But it didn’t stop me from thinking about the fact that he saidI doto someone, and it wasn’t to me.

It’s never going to be me.

Did he also tell herI love you?

The three words that damned us all those years ago?

“LJ?”

Nikolai’s shoe brushes against my ankle softly beneath the table, stirring me out of my haze.

It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask him. To ask if he’s said those words to any of the women he’s been with over the years that he refused to say to me.

I don’t regret it. It’s a waste to have regrets and if I could go back to that night in his backyard when it seemed like our entire lives were ahead of us, I still would’ve done the same thing.

Because I loved Nikolai Brooks.

I think a part of me always will.

And even if he never loved me, I’m glad he knew.

But as I stare into the eyes of twenty-six-year-old Nikolai, I know it’s unfair to hold him to the actions of eighteen-year-old Nikolai. We’ve moved on. Life goes on.

He wanted to live the rock star lifestyle with no one tying him down and I wanted to go to college in Boston and then get my law degree. And that’s exactly what we’ve done.

We both got what we wanted.

Right?

I tip my wine glass back, gulping the last of it down, before I turn my attention back to the contract.

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