Worlds Apart

Chapter Twenty One

Another two hours later and I still hadn’t slept.

Really I’d known that this was going to come back and bite me in the ass. I’d had it coming for a while. I should have just gone to bed the night before, just followed Logan’s advice which had been – for once in his life – quite sound. There should have been no gallivanting across a city with Cameron, only sleeping.

However it was me, what else could I be? I was impulsive and short sighted and thoughtless.

And it all led to around fifty hours with no sleep.

To put it shortly, I was a fucking train wreck. But when was I not?

Back at the club the after party had been located; I’d done my best to search the streets for any sign of Cam. It was like I expected him to be waiting in some dark alley as if we’d planned it all along. However with the fact I had no idea where I was and between fans and the press, I’d been shit out of luck.

In defeat I’d headed back to the club, thinking that I could at least do some sort of saving face with Logan. I mean, he deserved more than that and I wasn’t picky about which brother I had at this point. However there was not even a hair of his to be found. I’d tried to question Clara but she was too far gone to speak besides proclaiming that she didn’t care where they were now that they’d done their gig.

With the after party raging behind me despite the absence of the guests of honour, I’d headed back out onto the street and straight into a cab. I barely even noticed the flashes of the cameras as I scooted into it smoothly.

As my cab driver cut through the elderly city, I went back to work on my phone. Whereas I’d been so successful at finding Logan hours before, this time I wasn’t quite as lucky. My countless phone calls to Cam were useless, half leaving me waiting on a dial tone and the rest heading straight to voicemail. It was enough to tell me I was being ignored. And half way through the cab ride, I admitted defeat, pressing the phone to my lips as I stared at the lights whirling past without ever seeing them.

It happened that my mind moved too quickly for my eyes to catch up on. And it was all devoted to those brothers.

Giving a wince, I rubbed my temples, wondering when they’d managed to hijack my mind like this. It surely hadn’t been a choice on my part.

I couldn’t seem to force them out of it.

When I got back to my hotel room that threw me back into the lap of luxury that wasn’t made to fit me, there was no sleeping on my part. My eyelids dropped but my mind refused to slow down. And it only led to me pacing around my bed. It was times like these when I wondered if they’d been right in high school saying that I probably had a tendency towards the manic.

With that in mind, I did the one thing that had always helped shut down my mind; drinking. It used to drown out all my suspicions about Josh. Because when I drank and he’d smile at me before kissing me there were no thoughts about whom else he looked at like that. And even after that when he’d reassured all my insecurities about knowing I wasn’t the kind of person people wasted much time on, I could smother them all with some well placed alcohol. It had always been rather beautiful, really.

Nothing much shut down my brain, so it was comforting to know there was always going to be a substance that could do it for me. Or at least slow it down.

Yet this time it failed me.

I blamed the liquor’s ineffectiveness on my abuse of it, because it was easiest explanation to accept. It was harder to think that while it failed either brother could create the reaction I so desperately needed just by looking at me. No, that definitely wasn’t something I needed to think about.