Miss Americana and The Hearbreak Princess

Chapter Forty Four - Wonderland

"I think for me... it never really seemed real. I'll be the first to admit that everything I thought I knew about love, or was told that love should be, was so horribly wrong, and I always thought she'd come back. We'd been there before a couple of times, and we always ended up choosing each other. I thought we both just needed some time to cool off, to realise that us together, in any capacity, was better than being apart. But months went by, and... I don't know. I don't know if I should've made the first move, or why I didn't. I'm not a proud person; I can admit when I'm wrong, but I think it's just that... I wasn't wrong. Maybe that kept me from reaching out."

"Do you think things would've turned out differently if you had?"

With a scoffing laugh, Becca's forehead creased with an incredulous look of amusement. Shaking her head, she gave Mei a thin smile, picking at the stitching on the arm of the chair.

"No. Absolutely not. And maybe that was also part of what stopped me from reaching out. Rejection is never a fun thing, and I'd already rejected her proposal and she'd rejected our relationship, and it was just... too much. We both needed that time, I think. No matter how much you love someone, when they hurt you, sometimes you just can't forgive them. Not immediately. Sometimes not ever."

"She's forgiven you now though," Mei stated, an insistent look on her face.

A small smile twitched one side of Becca's mouth as her teeth worried at her red lip, a doe-eyed look of sorrow in the depths of her eyes. There was a forlorn air about her as Becca gestured off-handedly.

"Sure."

Pausing for a moment, Mei pressed her lips into a flat line as she narrowed her eyes in a shrewd manner.

The silence hung heavily for a moment as they locked eyes, at a stalemate, before Mei drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair and shifted, breaking the spell. Arching an eyebrow, she gave Becca a droll smile.

"Care to elaborate?"

Exhaling softly, Becca raked her fingers through her hair in an anxious habit, momentarily forgetting the cameras and her publicist burning a hole into the side of her head. Hastily dropping her hand back down to her lap, Becca shrugged nonchalantly.

"She has, yes," she slowly agreed, "but back then I thought that I'd apologise to her and she'd apologise to me and we'd put it behind us and fix things for the better again. That's what we did. We fixed the problems and we made each other better. When we were apart... things had a bad habit of falling apart. It's like we were losing our support. It was like walking around without a heart."

A ghost of a smile graced Becca's face as her eyebrows rose and fell quickly. Chewing on the inside of her lip she paused for a moment, a hesitant look on her face, before she let out a faint sigh.

"I'm grateful though, that things happened the way they did. You see, there was no guarantee that it all would've turned out better if I'd accepted her proposal. In fact, I imagine it would've ended up even worse than it did. If I'd made a different choice, if I'd said yes, it never would've worked."

Her voice was soft and barely audible, pain threading through the words as Becca fiddled with her hands, a crease between her eyebrows. Old wounds ached in her heart, needling pricks of hurt that made her squirm in her seat, chafing at the discomfort her honesty brought her.

Becca wasn't much in the habit of sharing her personal life through means other than song, and it was brutally vulnerable and exposing. She suspected she'd need a stiff drink and a long bout of isolation from the rest of the world afterwards to recover.

"Whispers of our relationship had already garnered enough talk, and that talking had caused enough arguments within our teams. If I'd said yes to her, well... things would be a lot different right now, but I really don't think they would be better. I think... well, I know for me, my career would've been over. Effective immediately. One of the stipulations of my contract was that I put forward the image the label created for me - within reason of what they could control, which, admittedly, wasn't everything - and I'd already been warned, plainly, that I would be shelved. If Don Chen had a change of heart, thought he could still wring some money out of me, I'm sure he would've, but he strongly believed that my career would tank too. Now, in the current climate, I'm not so sure that's true, but he sure instilled that fear into me at a young enough age for me to not want to risk it."