He let out a sharp breath and gripped the arm rest at his side. The muscles in his arm pulsed. “I’m sorry I lost your phone number. I’m sorry I was messed up and only thinking of myself. I’m sorry you had to raise Alexia by yourself. I’m sorry. How many times do you want me to say it? A hundred? A thousand? Just let me know and I’ll say all of them, but you owe me an apology too.”
Sabrina felt tears pushing at the back of her eyes. Now that the veneer of pleasant banter was gone, it seemed all she had was emotion. Resentment mostly. He had no right to make her feel guilty. It was easy now to swoop in and say you would have been a parent. She had been the one struggling to do it. “Fine,” she said. “I want a sorry for every time Lexi asked about you, and I couldn’t tell her anything because I thought you wanted nothing to do with us. I want a sorry for every Father’s Day gift she made in school that I had to throw away. I want a sorry for every time I saw a man holding his daughter’s hand, and ached because Lexi couldn’t do that. And I apologize for not hunting you down and making sure you knew the truth, but don’t tell me you would have made sure I had everything I needed. You have no idea what I needed.”
She hadn’t meant to say the last part. This was about Lexi, not her. The words came out anyway though. Sabrina hoped Alex would ignore them, pass over them and push the conversation in another direction.
Instead he picked up those words like a shopper examining goods. “What did you need, Sabrina?” He said her name easily and, despite herself, it gave her the same jolt it had when she was younger. Her name on his lips. The syllables of her identity spoken in his smooth, rich voice.
She was obviously incurably foolish. Why not crack open her soul a little further and show him every wound that lay there? The tears were already pooling in her eyes and spilling onto her cheeks. It wasn’t like she could pretend indifference. “I needed you,” she said. “You weren’t about to give me that.”
Sabrina looked away as soon as the words came from her mouth. She didn’t want to see his expression. It would show pity or some sort of manifestation that he considered her too far beneath him, or worse yet, that she was delusional. All of which was probably true. Their relationship had only lasted one night for him.
Outside, the rows of empty cars looked like soldiers in a line, their headlights surveying one another placidly. Sabrina brushed the tears off her cheeks. “I shouldn’t have said that.” She shook her head wearily. “I’m a grown woman with a fulfilling life, but I get into the car with you and I suddenly feel like a needy eighteen-year-old.” She placed her hands in her lap. Her nails were short and unpolished. The hands of someone who was constantly working. “I used to believe we belonged together. Let’s just say it was a hard reality to wake up from.”
The hum of the engine was steady, not revving wildly like her heart. This was because the car knew when to keep its mouth shut. Something she wished she had done.
Alex stared at her silently then said the obvious. “It wasn’t real love. You didn’t even know who I was. Not really.”
It would have been easy to agree with him, to pretend she’d only been foolish back then. But doing so would have betrayed her eighteen-year-old self, and that girl, hurting and alone, needed fierce loyalty. Even if it was only in memory. “I knew everything about you,” she said.
“You knew my image,” he said. “You knew who I was when I was smiling for a crowd and what the tabloids said about me.”
She let out a little laugh that wasn’t a laugh at all. It was surprise that he didn’t realize his personality had always been clearly on display. It had shined out in the cadence of his calm voice, the directness of his gaze, his self-assured walk. “I knew you through your lyrics. When I listened to your albums, I could tell which songs you’d written before I checked the credits. The rest of your band wrote songs about drinking, chasing women, and breaking up. Your songs were about life.” Deep songs, meaningful words that repeated in your mind long after the music faded.
Sabrina shifted in her seat to better look at Alex’s face. “I bet I could tell you which songs of Kari’s you’ve written.” Without waiting for a reply she said, “Two Hearts Apart; A Long Way to Go; and Dreaming of a Better Place.”
Sabrina had bought Kari’s albums when they came out, hiding them away so neither her mother or Lexi would catch her with them. The albums listed Kari as the composer. Sabrina had listened anyway, checking. She wanted to see if Alex was there too, if he’d left a part of himself there to mingle with the notes and chords. She had recognized him in a few of the songs. It had been like getting an unexpected letter from a long-lost friend.
Alex let out an amazed whistle and stared at her.
“I’m right?” she asked, even though his expression already confirmed it.
“I helped on those songs,” he said. “The only one you missed is “Love, Your Style.” I guess I should be flattered you missed that one, though. I was in a black mood when I wrote it. I’d just been through a bad breakup.”
Sabrina silently reviewed the song, seeing it in a new light. It was filled with pain and cynicism.
She had just exposed her own feelings and was still shaky from the experience. Alex, on the other hand, set his heartbreak to music for the whole world to hear. It was either brave or fanatically entrepreneurial to make money off your own pain that way.
She wondered if he would write a song about her now . . . and what it would say.
Alex leaned back against his seat. She looked at his arms and wondered what he’d done to get so tan. The beach? Golf? It had to be some outdoor activity. He wasn’t the type to use a tanning bed or a spray on.
He regarded her cautiously. “What else do you know about me?”
“That you’re not really that hungry. We don’t seem to be moving very far.”
He looked at the steering wheel as though just noticing it and sat forward in his seat. “Sorry. I was supposed to take you to a restaurant, wasn’t I?”
He took hold of the gear shift, and she chided herself for being flippant, for being too afraid to answer his question honestly—that she still knew everything about him. It had been her secret vice to keep up on him. And why shouldn’t she? She had needed to know those sorts of details for the day when she finally told Lexi about him. It was only for Lexi. Sabrina had fallen out of love with him and moved on long ago. Hadn’t she had her share of boyfriends? It didn’t mean anything that she’d never actually wanted to settle down with any of them. Raising Lexi and finishing her degree had just always taken precedence.
Alex shifted the car into reverse. Sabrina put her hand on his arm before he could pull out of the parking space. She didn’t want to go sit in a restaurant and put the veneer of polite conversation back on again. “You don’t have to take me anywhere. I don’t really want to go out in public. I’m a mess.”
His gaze ran over her. He didn’t shift back to park. “No, you’re not. You look great.”
She tilted her head at him in disbelief. “I’ve just been crying, and I’m wearing my housekeeping uniform.”
“You still look great. I know women who spend all day in the salon trying to look as beautiful as you do—” He broke off suddenly, as though he’d said something wrong, and put the car back into park. “Look, I’m not trying to hit on you or anything.”
“What?” Her mind was still lingering on his comment, and she hadn’t processed the implications of the rest of his sentence.