noncommittally.
“Just eating breakfast?”
“Yup.” I hope that my short, curt answers were going to give him the hand that he wasn’t exactly welcome to join me for breakfast. Unfortunately, he didn’t get the hint.
“Hey Violet, while I’ve got you here alone, I wanted to ask you something.”
“Yeah?”
“What is it that you see in Christian?”
“What?”
“The guys not super nice, and sure he looks good, but that’s about as deep as it gets. He is the smartest guy on the block, and I know you guys have a history together but surely would’ve been able to find someone better than him.”
“That’s a ridiculous thing to say.”
“I love you Violet. I’m only telling you this in the hopes that you’ll be Christian and come be with me instead.”
“Let me put this clearly Jared. There isn’t a chance in hell that that would ever happen. I’m with Christian, I’m happy with Christian, I love Christian, and I’m not leaving him for you.”
“You’d be way better off without him.”
“That’s absolutely none of your business, never get out. I don’t want to ever be alone with you again.”
Jared got up slowly, and made his way towards the door.
“If you ever change your mind, you know where to find me” he finished before leaving. I didn’t even reply.
I sat at the table, staring at my newspaper and my empty tub of yogurt. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. The conversation with my mom had been less than a week earlier, and now I had this stress to add to my troubles. I leaned back in my chair, through my head back, and sighed. Once again, I had to decide if I was going to tell Christian about this.
This is completely different to the conversation with my mom. This was definitely true, Jared definitely want to me to leave Christian for him. But could I tell Christian? After all, chances were Christian would be incredibly angry at Jared’s conduct, and I couldn’t guarantee that the band was going to stay together. I mean, stealing your best friend’s girlfriend isn’t exactly the sort of thing you get over in just a couple of days. This could be bad. I didn’t want to keep this information from Christian, obviously, but I also didn’t want the band to split up. I didn’t want to be the cause of that.
Once again, confusion reigned in my brain. What should I do? Should I tell Christian, let him know that one of his best friends wanted me to leave him, and risk Christian’s career? Or should I keep this information to myself, and hope that Jared got the message?
I thought about it through the day before settling on the latter. Once again, I was keeping things from Christian, and I could feel the guilt inside of me growing even bigger, but I just knew I had to do it. There was no way that I wanted to be responsible for the band breaking up, and after all it was only fair to give Jared a chance. Maybe he would realize how foolish he’d been, and maybe that would be the last I’d hear of it. I had to give him that chance.
As our tour moved into Ireland for the last leg in the UK before moving to the continent, I found myself feeling consistently depressed and wracked with guilt. My mother kept trying to call me, every few days I would have a voicemail from her, all of them saying the same thing.
“Violet, sweetie, please give me a call. I didn’t mean what I said, and I just want to talk about it.”
I knew that was my mother’s way of saying that she did mean what she said, and she wanted to convince me to come home anyway. I ignored her calls, refusing to call her back. Every time that phone rang and I pressed the ignore button I felt the sadness creeping up inside me. Before our last conversation, speaking my mom had been one of the nice things that remind me of home. But I didn’t have that anymore.
On top of that, I found myself trying to avoid Jared as much as possible. It’s actually a lot harder to do when you’re practically living with somebody