Her Song

29 - Black

**Van**

There was no denying it I was a coward. Pure and simple.

We were two weeks into our tour and things should have been fucking amazing. I was an idiot. They were fucking amazing. Our album was roaring up the charts, our shows were sold out and our fan base was becoming so rabidly fanatical we'd had to bring on personal security to join us on the road.

What was the rain on my parade? Kim. Or rather my inability to broach the subject of Sammy with Kim.

I was so terrified that I'd destroyed everything with my bad behaviour in New York that when I'd seized the moment offered by her numerous sidelong glances during our flight to LA to apologize I'd focused on my drunken loutishness. In my mind that had been the worst of my sins. I'd not only disrespected her personally, I'd fucked up professionally. I didn't want her to have to decide if she wanted to tell Lucy what I'd done or not. We were all so close, our lives constantly drifting over the border between professional and personal. Sometimes it was a hard border to navigate.

My groveling airborne apology had focused solely on what I had done. When she'd tried to take her own share of the blame and apologise for not telling me the full truth about her family – she could hardly pretend I didn't know when social media and online gossip was serving up the details with glee - I'd shut her down. I didn't want our secrets out there. I didn't want to tell her why I'd gone out and gotten so drunk I'd taken a swing at one of my friends. I preferred for her to think that my brother had pushed me and I'd cracked, which in a roundabout way was true.

I most definitely didn't want her to know that just for a moment I'd flashed back to the memory of Sammy slumming it with first me and then Rich. I couldn't bring myself to discuss that moment with her, to even give that swirling dark feeling that Kim was slumming it with me the oxygen of my attention. Because even though logically, deep down, I knew it wasn't true, in the moment it had felt true and it felt like there was nothing she could have said to me that would have washed that feeling away. It wasn't up to her to make me feel better. It was up to me.

My reluctance to let her have her say, to give her a chance to soothe my ruffled feelings, was strange because I knew that there were things I could tell her, explanations I could offer, of the truth behind what Rich had, for his own dark amusement, spilled about what had happened with Sammy. But letting her open up meant that I had to open up and a climate controlled metal tube hurtling through the air across the country with hundreds of people packed in like sardines was not the place to do it. I could have – should have – said something in LA where we were afforded the luxury of all the privacy that Troy and Hope's Bel Air estate could provide. But by that stage the fear had set in. In the same way I knew that there was nothing she could say to ease my insecurities over her family background, I worried that my explanation and the truth about Sammy wouldn't offer her enough to convince her that she was no Sammy substitute the way Rich had implied.

My hesitation had cost me the opportunity to have the conversation when we could be guaranteed privacy because if anywhere offered less privacy than an aircraft cabin it was a tour bus crammed with six people minimum most of the time. I'd let fear take over and for the moment my dread had won.

Like I said, I'm a coward. And even though things with Kim and me were still good, I was left waiting for the bomb to explode. Because let's face it, it usually does right?

The ridiculous thing was if she'd cared to look she could have pulled up any number of variations of the entire sorry story on line. There were plenty of photos of me and Sammy and even more of Sammy and Rich. Sammy hadn't been famous in her own right but she'd moved in enough of the right circles to get her face in the gossip pages. Rich had been catnip for the paparazzi from the day we'd released our first single. Rich and Sammy together? It was a sleazy tabloids dream. The only saving grace had been that when Rich had ditched her he'd moved on to a well-known model. Tabloid interest in her had pretty much died, only the occasional picture of a pregnant Sammy and me had ever surfaced.