Page 68 of Heartbreaker

“Wrong how?”

More questions that normally would be met with my fury.

But, just like I can’t pretend to be okay, I also can’t pretend to be pissed at her.

“You know about the accident?—”

She nods. “They say that it wasn’t your fault.”

“I was speeding,” I say, “so that’s not completely right.”

“Doesn’t everyone speed in California?”

I wasn’t expecting a joke and a laugh is torn out of me. “Yeah.” I sigh. “I wasn’t flying, but I was going ten over on a busy boulevard—not something I would have normally even thought twice about. But I was late to meet the guys at the studio and I was pushing it.”

“And that’s when it happened?”

I nod. “I was thinking about the song we were recording and how the chorus wasn’t quite right and…I didn’t expect the person to blow the red light.”

She gasps.

“One second, I was closing in on the studio, and the next, I was…weightless as my car flew through the air.” I sit up, draw her into my lap, the flash of memories too intense to just lie there.

As though she senses the adrenaline suddenly coursing through me, she doesn’t fight me on the change in position.

“Then everything went black for who knows how long.” I exhale. “I woke up with a concussion, a broken leg, and a mangled hand.”

She tsks quietly and stares down at my hand, her fingers lightly tracing over the crisscross pattern of scars. They’re mostly faded now, pale white and dull rather than red, lifted, and shiny. “That’s how you got these?”

I resist the urge to pull my hand free. “Yeah. They thought I might lose it at first—or so my ex told me. I wasn’t functioning on all cylinders then, too hopped up on drugs and in and out of surgery, so I don’t remember those conversations. I just remember waking up a few days later in the hospital, after that fear had passed. Of course”—I chuckle darkly—“if I’d known I’d end up with this bullshit, I might have rather have it gone.”

“Is it bad—?” She breaks off, starts again. “No,” she says. “I know it’s bad, bad enough that you can’t play like you used to, but…what’s the part that’s actually stopping you from being able to?”

More shit I normally hate to talk about.

And yet, I just lay it all out there for her.

“Numbness, weakness, pain. Though the last one isn’t so bad anymore. But I can’t feel the strings well enough to play correctly, can’t get my hand to do what it needs to. Fuck, just teaching Frankie ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ is a challenge, let alone a Midnight Sun song or ‘Forever in Rewind.’” I pull back now, flexing my fingers. “I can hear it—the melody, the chord progressions—but I can’tdoit.”

She’s quiet for a moment. “That must be incredibly frustrating.”

“Yeah,” I mutter. “I tried to get it back for a while, all the physical therapy, all the treatments, but after a year, the doctors told me it’s probably as good as it’s going to get.”

“So, you took a break from music?”

I nod. “I can’t play with the guys on tour and I didn’t want to be the disabled millionaire guitar player with a sob story in the eyes of the world. It’s bad enough the accident and then my divorce was everywhere.”

“I’m really sorry,” she whispers. “About your hand and the accident and the divorce. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been.”

“I was a real asshole for a while afterward.”

“I mean,” she says. “Isn’t that, like, a typical reaction for someone with trauma?”

“Not according to Amber.”

“Your ex?”

“She made it clear to me that she’d signed up to be married to a functioning rock star, not an asshole cripple with a hermit complex.” I shrug.

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