Page 14 of False Promises

I nodded again, my throat too tight to speak a word.

“And Carter, one day you’ll find the one. I know you will. In the meantime, just hang on. We’ll be fine. You and I. We’ll get through this, I promise. Just give it some time.”

She rose to her feet and leaned in to drop a kiss on my cheek, her lips warm against my skin. I breathed her floral scent in, and it calmed the tidal waves inside me. It always did.

I breathed out. Was she right? Was there someone out there—other than her—made just for me?

I dropped my shoulders and gave the back of my neck a scratch.

If what Dahlia just said was true, I hoped I was lucky enough to find her one day. Because right now, life had never felt so lonely.

* * *

Sixteen missed calls. All from the same number. Dahlia Ellis. My childhood best friend and the one person I could never hate even after what went down between us.

All night, she’d been calling. Fucking nonstop.

In the last few months, she’d screwed up with my existence. She left the band. Our band. The one we created when we were seven-year-old kids with dreams of making it big one day.

How ironic. We succeeded. We reached the top. And it all came crashing down. Then she got married to my brother and had a child on the way. They were a family, and I was alone. Only a shadow of myself existed.

I gulped another mouthful of whiskey and discarded the bottle as the room spun around me. A weird laugh bubbled out from me. I’d become a pathetic man in a matter of months. Tears burned the back of my eyeballs, and my laughter died down. A mass grew in my chest, the heavy one that always crushed my organs. I leaned forward, trying to catch my breath. Every cell in me hurt with agony. Tremors started in my core, extending to my fingers. A black void opened at my feet, ready to suck me in. I fought with my breathing. Lumps down my throat made it harder than it should have. Another bout of heartbreaking sobs pierced the silence of the night and reverberated against the walls of my house. Yeah, I’d been having a lot of those breakdowns lately.

Nothing in my life made sense anymore. I had everything and lost it all just as fast. I had no idea who I was anymore. I had barely touched my dream when it vanished in thin air like it had been an illusion all along.

Anger simmered in the pit of my stomach. It replaced my sadness. It always did.

On shaky legs, I stumbled to the bathroom. Drinking my weight in liquor had become my full-time job. Who would have thought months ago, when I was a music superstar topping the charts, this was how my existence would turn out to be? No one. Not even I could have predicted that. What a joke. These days, I was reduced to a drunken mess. The worst part was that booze, lots of it, didn’t erase the clusterfuck my life had turned into.

It just numbed some of my thoughts.

Sometimes.

I slid the back of my hand over my mouth after I emptied the content of my stomach in the toilet and moved back to my feet to assess the state I was in.

In the mirror, I cringed at my reflection. The guy standing in front of me looked nothing like the Carter Hills I’d known my entire life.

Surrounded by dark circles, my steel irises stared back at me, looking bluish than they usually did. For a long second, I was transfixed by the sight. Chapped lips, scruffy stubble, disheveled dark locks, longer than usual, I looked like I’d escaped a crack house and hadn’t slept in a while.

I burst out into a fit of manic laughter, unable to silence it this time.

With both hands, I splashed cold water over my ghostly-white face that hadn’t seen the sunlight in too fucking long, trying to wake myself up. In vain.

Closing my eyes and clamping my fingers on the counter, I tried to stop the spinning in my head. Fucking waste of time.

With a hand, I lifted the collar of my T-shirt and took a whiff of my armpit. Geez, I smelled.

Lost in my thoughts, I looked into the distance. When was the last time I showered?

I snorted. No. Clue. I didn’t even know what day it was.

My brain swam in the bliss of alcohol, but the grumbling of my stomach hinted I should eat something more consistent than a liquid diet.

In the kitchen, I gathered a slice of bread and peanut butter, trying to make myself a sandwich, without dropping anything.

My phone rang again.

Dahlia.