“How’d it go with your dad?” I asked later that day when we finally left the party.
Campbell grimaced. “Not great.”
“I don’t think he likes me.”
“What? Why would you say that?”
“Intuition.”
He shook his head as he drove us back to his place. “No, not at all. That all has to do with me. Not you.” He grasped my hand in his. “There is absolutely nothing that anyone could dislike about you.”
“Well, he saw me coming out of a bathroom with his son. I bet he could guess what we were doing.”
“He did. But he’s more worried for you than anything.”
My eyes widened. “What? Why?”
“He thinks I’m love bombing you.”
I nodded slowly. “Actually, that makes perfect sense.”
Campbell blinked at me. “What?”
I dealt with a lot of girls with Blaire Blush who got love bombed by their boyfriends or latest Tinder find. Love bombing was a complex, manipulative tactic that was usually a form of psychological abuse. It was when a person showed excessive amounts of attention and affection in a way to make the receipt more dependent on them.
His father may not know that he’d helped me gain millions of new followers and was stealing all my time, but he was meeting me after assuming we’d only been together for a matter of weeks. It was perfectly reasonable to have that fear. Especially since Campbell was a celebrity and I was just a small-town girl. But that didn’t account for our past and the fact that we had a much deeper connection than what might appear on the surface.
“He doesn’t know the truth about us. So, he came to his own conclusions. Maybe you just need to have a real conversation with him about us. That way, we can all be on the same page.”
A smile tugged at his lips. “There’s therapist Blaire to the rescue.”
I laughed. “I promise that I am so much worse at diagnosing my own problems than everyone else’s.”
“Fine. I will talk to him,” he said with a sigh. “Again. It’s going to suck. He thinks the worst of me.”
“He loves you,” I assured him.
“Yeah, yeah.”
It wasn’t until we got back to his place and he was drawing me inside that I realized he had been waiting to say anything more.
“He actually was worried about what will happen after I leave again.”
I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “I also was wondering that.”
“Come with me,” he said, taking my hand.
My eyes widened. “What?”
“Not forever. But for a week…or two even. Last time I left for LA without you, it was traumatic, to say the least. I don’t want to leave you behind. So, come be with me there while I iron out what we’re doing for the album. We can decide the rest as we go.”
I opened my mouth to tell him all the reasons that I couldn’t leave Lubbock, but was that true? I could leave Lubbock. For a week or two. I didn’t have a traditional job. There was no college holding me back, as there had been last time. And hadn’t I been the one begging him to let me go to LA with him when he left in high school? Why had I been brave enough then and not now?
“Okay,” I finally said.
“Really?”
I nodded. “I need to run things by Honey for production and move some meetings around. But yes. Yes, I’ll go to LA with you.”
Campbell pulled me tight against him and kissed me as if he’d never imagined I’d say yes to this.
“Will we be…a couple in LA?”
“If you want. I think we should get English in the same room with my music publicist, Barbara, and see what they think about it all.”
I nodded. That sounded like a lot.
“But we don’t have to decide anything before we get there. There’s already been a few press pieces about you recording the band. So, it won’t be strange for you to travel with us.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay. Good. I’m excited.”
“Me too.”
But if I was going to LA with the potential that my relationship might be public with Campbell, then I needed to tell one more person before that. The last person I wanted to talk to.
My mom.
Pamela had been working at the same doctor’s office for almost her entire career. I’d called ahead to speak with her secretary, Lacey, about fitting me in. There was no other way to see her during business hours, and I wasn’t willing to go home to have this conversation. I knew too well what it would be like there.
“Blaire,” Lacey said with a smile when I walked in. “It’s good to see you, sweetie. It’s been a while.”
It had been at least a year since I’d been at the office. It would have been longer if I could have helped it.
“Good to see you, Lacey.”
“She’s ready. If you want to head inside.”
I nodded and pushed into my mother’s office. It looked like a generic therapist’s office with seats and a lounge for people to talk to her, and she had a desk, plus actual filing for her records. The business had gone digital, but she still swore by paper and handed it all off to Lacey to type up later.
“Hi,” I said as I walked inside.
My mom looked up in surprise. “Marie, I didn’t know you were going to be here. I have a client.”
“I’m the client,” I told her.
Pamela blinked at that. “Oh? You’ve come for a session.”
“No,” I said quickly. “Just to talk.”
“Ah, couldn’t we have done that out of business hours?”
We could have, but I refused to go home. Plus, there, I’d have had to deal with Hal, too.
“I thought this would be better.”
“All right,” she said, folding up the records she had been working on and lacing her fingers together in front of her. “What can I help you with?”
I swallowed and took a seat. “I don’t have a problem. I just wanted to tell you something.”
“Oh?”
“I didn’t want you to hear about it from someone else. I thought it would be best from me.”
“Sit up straight, Marie. Tell me what this is about.”
I straightened automatically. It felt like a grape was lodged in my throat. I needed to choke it down, so I could breathe these words to my mother. On a good day, I didn’t like talking to my mom, and this was hardly going to be good in her book.
“I started dating Campbell again.” I cleared my throat. “Campbell Abbey.”
Whatever she’d thought I was going to tell her, that was not it. Her eyes widened marginally. Then, she clenched her hands tighter together and set her jaw.
“I see,” she said slowly. “Since when?”
“Since the Fourth of July. Sort of,” I tacked on at the end. It was when it’d all started at least.
“Well, on a scale from one to ten, how confident are you in this decision?” She kept steady eye contact for a moment before turning the page on her notebook, as if she was going to take notes.
I ground my teeth together. Of course, she was going to treat this like a patient problem and not reality. I was her daughter, but my problems…my entire life was just a colossal test run for her career. She was so in her own head that she’d never seen what this did to me.
“Mom!” I snapped. “Don’t treat me like one of your patients. I’m your kid.”
“I know, Marie.” She slapped her hand down on her notepad. “The easiest way to assess situations is to use my methods. I don’t want to elicit an emotional response about this. I want to be practical.”
“Screw practical. Can you even be emotional?”
Pamela stared back at me, stunned. “Of course I am emotional. Why would you ask me something like that?”
“Because you don’t have emotions.”
“Just because I am not ruled by them does not mean that I do not have them. You should know that very well, Marie. You play by the same rules.”
I glared back at her. I hated that she was right. I hid so much of what I was feeling from others. My friends still didn’t know everything that had happened with Campbell, and I’d only told them the bare minimum when I finally confessed to it. Hell, Campbell only knew the half of it. It was a defense mechanism, and I’d learned it from my mom.
“Fine,” I said, getting to my feet. “On a scale from one to ten, I feel a ten about my relationship with Campbell. Thanks for asking, Pam.”
“Marie, I—”
“Blaire! It’s Blaire. Why can’t you call me by the name I prefer?”
She met me stare for stare and steepled her fingers in front of her. “All right, Blaire. The definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting different results.”
I balked at my mother. That was not what I’d expected from her. “It’s not the same as it was in high school. He asked me to come to LA with him this time. For a week or two when he has to go back.”
“I see. And you believe that changes what happened last time?”
“No. It’s just different.”
“Need I remind you, the last time he left you alone and refused to handle his responsibilities, I was the one who was there for you when you were eighteen and pregnant.”
I winced and closed my eyes around that word.
Pregnant.
I didn’t even think that word in my mind anymore if I could help it. The memory hurt far too much.
It shouldn’t have been possible for me to get pregnant anyway. Mom had put me on birth control after finding us that one weekend. We always used condoms. But then, one time, we were out. Neither of us knew how it’d happened. We were in the middle of nowhere. I’d been taking my pills. And we’d decided, Fuck it. We’ll be fine. He’d pull out.
My mind reeled back to that day when I’d held the tiny test in my hand and seen the two pink lines. I’d never cried so hard in my life. And I’d thought that Campbell telling me he was leaving was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Now, here I was, with this.
I called him until he answered. It took a dozen calls before he finally picked up and said, “Blaire, we can’t talk.”
“Campbell, I need to see you.”
He sighed. “It won’t make it any easier.”
We had four days until graduation. I had been shamelessly calling and texting him since he’d ended it. I didn’t know what else to do. He had been my life, and now, I was just supposed to go on without him? Without even talking to him every minute of every day like I had for months? It was impossible.
But today was not about that.
“I don’t care,” I said, my voice wobbly. “I need to see you now. I’m sneaking out. Meet me at the park.”
“Blaire,” he said on a long-suffering sigh. “I can’t. This is going to be harder.”
“Campbell Abbey, you meet me at the fucking park in a half hour.”
Then, I hung up on him. I figured that would get the message across that it was important. And as I pulled up to the park, I saw that I had been right. His truck was already parked there. I got out of my beat-up Civic and walked to where he was seated on the swings.
“Hey.”
He tipped his head at me. He looked at me as if I were a goddess that he had forgotten existed, and now, he was bathing in my light. “Blaire.”
I held my hand up. “I know you don’t want to make this harder. And I tried, all right? I tried so hard to stay away, but I’m not good at living without you.”
He hung his head. The swing creaked as he moved. “I know. Me either.”
“But I had to see you tonight.”
Then, I pulled the test out of my pocket, and I held it out to him. He looked at it as if it were a hand grenade.
“What is that?”
“You know what it is, Campbell.”
He jumped off the swing and took the test in his hand. He looked down at the two pink lines. Then, he shook his head. “No.”
“I know.”
He glared down at it and shoved it back into my hand. “No, Blaire. No.”
“Look, I didn’t think this would happen. It had to have been that time we didn’t use a condom.”
“No, no, no,” he repeated like a mantra. “What do you want me to say? I’m leaving for LA in four days!”
I shrank back from his anger. I hadn’t known what to expect. I hadn’t exactly been happy to see the news. That I was going to be a teen mom. A fucking statistic in my mother’s book. I’d cried. I’d sobbed. But this was visceral.
“I know, Campbell. Jesus Christ.”
“I’m not staying,” he shouted.
I reeled back. “You’re…you’re going to go anyway?”
A part of me had thought of this new world, where Campbell stayed and we had a small family. Where everything was different and hard but also wonderful because we had each other. It was the only way I’d been able to get past the news. To think that he would make it all better by being an incredible father.
“Did you do this so that I’d stay?” he asked, gesturing to the pregnancy test.
Tears came to my eyes. “Do what?” I glanced down at the test. “You think it isn’t real?”
“I don’t know, Blaire. Fuck. You said you’d do anything to make me stay.”
“I said I’d leave for you,” I yelled back. “Why would I fucking fake this? What could I possibly gain? You’d hate me forever, and I’d deserve it. Instead, you’re being a total asshole.”
He shook his head and paced away from me. The news was sinking into him now. It was real to him, as it had been real to me since I had taken this test this morning. But he was still shaking his head. I knew then that the carefully optimistic fantasy I’d had in my head was never going to be a reality.
Campbell wasn’t going to stay for me. He wasn’t going to stay for the baby inside of me. He wasn’t going to stay for anything.
And he hadn’t.
He’d gone.
I’d stayed.
“It’s not the same,” I finally got out to my mother. “It won’t be the same as last time.”
She gave me a perfectly blank therapist look and held up her pen. “Tell me more about that.”
Which I knew, as well as she did, meant, You’re lying to yourself.