MAD

~ Chapter 12 ~

 One week and a half after the movie night at the house and Zachary couldn't get the image of Maddeline dancing on the table off his head. After that night he had decided he needed to talk with Rebecca and tell her all the truth about Maddeline. The only problem being he was scared shitless of telling her, and so had been postponing it for a week.

"Come on Zach, you've been weird for days now. Are you going to finally talk to me or not?" Rebecca asked, growing frustrated with him.

"Yeah, I am. But please Rebecca, don't get mad at me." he pleaded, pulling her down to sit next to him on the bed.

"Why would I get mad at you?" she asked. "Did you cheat on me?" she continued before giving him a chance to talk.

""Baby, calm down. I didn't cheat, and I won't, ever. I just need to tell you something from my past." he said calmly, rubbing her back gently. "I think you have a right to know this, specially because of all that is going on right now."

"What are you saying Zachary? I'm really trying to think of something that could have you so stressed and I can't think of anything. Unless you're going to tell me you have a kid. Do you have a kid Zachary?" she rambles, raising an eyebrow at him.

"God no! Fucking hell Rebecca, you need to stop assuming and let me talk." he huffs.

"Sorry, sorry. Go on then." she took a deep breath, tightening the hold on his hand in a gesture of reassurance.

"What I'm about to tell you happened before we met, about two years ago, when we signed or first contract, but I need to go a little back for you to understand..."

"Oh, I remember hearing about you guys signing." Rebecca intervened.

"As you know, I've known the guys for a long time. I actually met Gabe and Mike when we were like eleven or twelve and we just kind of hit it off. When we were fourteen, Nate moved to town and we just befriended him, more like he just latched onto us and never let go." Zach chuckled. "You also know that Gabe is one year younger than the three of us, yeah?" he asked, to wich Rebecca promptly nodded.

Zachary took a deep breath then, preparing himself for the real thing he wanted to tell his girlfriend, knowing she wouldn't be exactly pleased.

"One day Gabe started talking about this girl in his class. Apparently she was one year younger than him and had skipped one year because she was really smart and he would talk about her nonstop. That was when I was sixteen, I believe. By the time we actually got to meet this girl I was seventeen, she was fifteen and I finally understood why he couldn't stop talking about her. She was this bright ray of sunshine that burst into our lives and made us see that maybe Freaks wasn't just something we did for fun or to piss our parent of." he laughed lightly, fondly even, running his free hand through his hair.

Rebecca couldn't help but notice how he had started to smile when talking about the girl, she noticed the way his eyes shone and his cheeks tinted pink.

"We also found out that she was kind of Nate's cousin, but that's another story. In that time she looked very different than she does now, you wouldn't recognize her if you saw it." he said, shacking his head.

"Wait, I know this girl?" she asked, genuinely intrigued who was this girl Zach talked about with so much emotion in his eyes.

"Yeah. it's Maddeline." she smiled, quickly covering it up with a fake cough.

"Oh" Rebecca looked down at their intertwined hands "Go on."

"By the time I turned eighteen she was sixteen and I was madly in love with her... After a few months of trying to keep my distance and my feelings at bay I decided to just dive in and think later, so I wrote her this sappy, very cliché-like song, and asked her to be my girlfriend. She said yes. From that moment onward we became inseparable. She kept on encouraging us to pursue our dreams and, thanks to her, when we were nineteen we got offered our first contract.

When I was twenty I could not be happier, my band has just signed a contract and we were recording our very first album, we were playing as opening acts to some amazing world wide famous artists, I was crazily in love with this amazing, beautiful girl. I felt like I was on top of the world. So I did the only plausible thing I could do, I asked her to marry me." he breathed out, not daring to face his girlfriend.

Rebecca was in shock. She could not believe she had just heard her boyfriend say he had proposed. To another girl.

"Did you just say you proposed to Maddeline?" she asked, voice trembling.

"Yes," he whispered. "but please, let me finish."

"Fine." Rebecca grumbled, but made no move to remove her hand form his.

"After I proposed thing with the band started to get busier and Maddeline was in college by then, so we saw less and less of each other and we started drifting apart, but still I loved her. It was only a few months before I turned twenty-one that things really went down hill." Zach was trembling by this point, his hands were sweaty, his skin pale, but he kept going, telling Rebecca what she deserved to know. "Shit, I'm sorry, I just, it's really hard for me to talk about this." he mumbled, pushing his hair away form his face.

"It's okay Zach, you know you can tell me anything. Relax." Rebecca soothed, moving closer to her boyfriend. "Go on, I'm listening." she encouraged.

"God, I was so stupid back then..." he mumbled. "One day, Maddeline came to me, she wanted to talk and she had this look of nervousness on her face, she even looked sick, she was sweating and crying so much I was expecting the worst. She told me she was pregnant. and she was nervous because she knew I want going to have a good reaction, and she was right. i started yelling at her, telling her that she was faking it, that she was sleeping with some other guy and wanted to tie me down with a baby that wasn't even mine. God Rebecca, I told her every bad thing that came to my mind in that moment and I saw as she completely broke in front of me while I kept pushing her. That was when I ended our relationship, I told her that I wants going to take advantage of me because all she wanted was my money and the face I was finally earning." Zach was trembling more and more as he spoke. "A few weeks later Nate walked up to me, I hadn't seen him since that day, and punched me, hard, he actually broke my nose, and told me i was the worst thing that ever walked on this planet in way more graphic words. Turns out Maddeline suffered a miscarriage and she'd locked herself in her room the moment she was released from the hospital, not talking to anyone nor telling them what I'd done until that day.

Nate was never the same with me after that, even if we're still friends and in the band, but i can't blame him, I mean, I broke her beyond repair, I was the reason the three of them lost one of their best friends and I am the reason they spent two years without seeing her. The only one who actually got to see her a couple of times was Nate and he wouldn't tell any of us where she went. I wanted to talk to her so bad, to apologize, to redeem myself, but I couldn't, and now that she's back I can't help but feel this sense of panic thats she's going to disappear again if I say anything. I can't look at her without thinking of what I destroyed, our relationship, the family we could've been if I hadn't been so damn arrogant... I want to redeem myself Becca, I want her to forgive me."

By the time he finished, Rebecca was sitting on his lap, trying to calm down his sobs and hiccups.

"Hey, it's okay, you're all going to be okay now. Next time you see her, go talk to her, tell her what you just told me and everyhting will be just fine." Rebecca kissed his head, in hopes it would help calm him down. "And if you need me, I'll be there, holding your hand through it all." she promised.

A few hours later they were in bed, Zach still curled into her chest as she kept on running her fingers through his hair. She couldn't sleep, as much as she wanted to, she couldn't stop thinking about what Zach had told her, what he had done, what he had gone through, but mostly, the look on his eyes when he spoke about Maddeline.

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Author's Note:

Don't forget to comment and vote if you liked it, it would mean the world!

Besitos,

Jessy.