Forty
“Liam, Aurora’s gone. We need to find her.” Drake comes into my room.
I’ve been sitting here since I got back from dropping her at the airport.
I didn’t want to let her go, but if we had kept holding so tight, she would have resented us. We can’t keep making decisions for her.
We had to let her do this.
“She’s in New York. I drove her to the airport this morning,” I mumble.
“You did what? Why the fuck would you do that?” Drake turns, yelling out the door. “Liam took her to the airport this morning.”
The other two guys are in my doorway within seconds.
“What?” Ezra is deathly calm.
“Why? Did she want to leave us?” Santi looks so fucking sad.
Me too, buddy.
“She loves us. She wanted me to make sure to tell you that. She needed some time alone. She wanted to go home to Holland.”
Ezra grunts, “Fuck this. I’m going after her.”
I stand, rushing him. His eyes widen as he hits the wall. “You won’t bother her. She asked for some fucking space, and we are going to give it. That woman has been through hell. We said we would always take care of her and do what was best for her. This is what she’s asking for. It’s not too much. If we love her, we can sure as fuck wait for her to figure her mind out.”
Ezra stares at me. Drake pulls me off him.
“All right, man. We will give her some time, but I’m not waiting years. She has at most a month before we hunt her ass down.” Drake holds me.
“She’s coming back. She promised she would come back. I think everything has become difficult for her, but she loves us. She won’t abandon us,” I tell him.
I don’t know who I’m trying to convince. Him or myself.
I hate how close this feels to what my parents did to me when I was a kid. Everything bad always happens in the middle of the night. I’ve always said that.
This is why I don’t sleep.
Had I been asleep last night, she would have left. Would she have even found a way to let us know that she was leaving and why? Or would she have broken us?
“What can we do?” Santi whispers.
“We keep on top of the comments on her PicApp. We defend her.” Ezra turns toward Drake and me. “And you two until our dying breath. We show her that we don’t give a fuck what the rest of the world thinks. All we care about is her. We show them that despite what they throw at us, we’re a united front.” Ezra sounds so confident.
How can he be so put together right now? I feel like my heart is bleeding out into my chest. I can barely breathe through the pain of knowing she’s gone. That slight insecurity that she may never come back is suffocating me. It’s begging me to do something about it. Something destructive.
I can’t though. I need to hold it together.
“Let’s post a response to everything,” Drake adds.
“Let’s do it now,” I agree.
We all head to the studio we have set up. Each of us sets up our phone. Then we all go live.
“Hey all. This is a last-minute live to discuss the events surrounding the leaked sex tape,” Ezra starts. “Someone released that video without our consent. It was a private moment between us that was never meant to be seen.”
We look rough as fuck. Still, Santi picks up Ezra’s thought.
