Prologue

Rowan ( 5 months after the Prologue of Two Punks In Love)

Trace was married today in a pasture with one large oak tree.

It's kind of ironic that the first day of my brother's marriage is the last day of mine.

I didn't go to the North Georgia Mountains, where Trace bought a tree and the farm surrounding it, and staged a four month long intervention that happily ended in his marriage. Finally.

It wasn't right for me be there. My brother and I share a father, but we all know Trace's first family is his band family. He calls that family SCIC—Soundcrush Inner Circle. Besides the five Soundcrush members themselves, no one is more a part of that family than my nearly ex-husband, Riley Emsworth.

Once, I was a part of that family as well. Once, I often stood sidestage with Riley, Soundcrush's manager, and watched my brother kick ass and take names with his guitar. I can remember the last Soundcrush show I attended a year and half ago. I remember lounging in a green room, Riley's leg's tangled in mine on one of the couches as he worked on his laptop and I memorized scripts for my tv show, Girl Band.

Today, my brand new sister-in-law flipped the shit and sang to my brother the rock star at their wedding, and I wasn't there to see it.

It's okay, though. Riley and I can't be in the same place, and Riley deserved to be there. He deserved the day free of the reminder that I destroyed our marriage. He deserved to watch one of his oldest friends marry without the anger he always feels in my presence.

Everyone there deserved to be free of me, really. My husband, my parents, my siblings, and especially my brother Trace and his bride Katheryn. No one should have the shadow of betrayal and heartbreak cast over a family wedding. No one should should have to suffer a cheater standing just over their shoulder on their wedding day.

It's been thirteen months since I destroyed my marriage. I still can't exactly explain why I did it. I mean, I can recite the factors that were discussed in marriage counseling, after I confessed what I had done.

So many factors.

Riley and I had been married for more than three years and we'd spent more than half that time oceans apart. I was lonely. I was disconnected from my husband's life and he from mine. We lived in separate countries with separate circles of friends. Even long distance, Riley and I were arguing more and more.

I was suffering from a diet pill problem, a problem which Riley viewed with extreme disapproval and very little compassion. I tried to get off them but I was used to the bump they give, and I felt like shit without them. When we were together I felt as though Riley was comparing my pill problem with his first love's drug overdose.

Not to mention, Riley was in constant conflict with the producers of my tv show because he didn't think they had my best interest at heart, and I had to constantly run interference between his demands and theirs. He had become the thing my father had warned me about—a controlling, overbearing manager/husband I had to please and placate.

There were many factors that lead to our crisis.

I can recite the factors, but I can't still can't explain the cheating. None of the factors justified what I did anyway.

Especially since Riley had his beefs, too.

He told me so many times we were in trouble. He told me me before I signed my last contract renewal. He didn't foresee our long distance working for another three years. He begged me not cave to the producers insistence that I continue to  use diet pills to lose more weight for my character's drug spiral.

He saw it as his job as both my manager and husband to trouble shoot for me in areas where his expertise was greater. He told me we were too deep to separate his roll as manager from husband anymore, and he would not hold back his strong disapproval from the producers, no matter how I felt. He said he couldn't. He said he would not lose another love to a drug problem.

He thought that sounded like a promise.

I took it as a threat.

Good feelings got scarce from there on.

I'm not sure if it's better or worse that I had begun to think I had feelings for the man with whom I cheated.

Aidan Mosteller was my co-star. On the show, he plays Lars Jensen, a rock star that outweighs my character's star power. Stella is in over her head with Lars. I didn't realize until it was too late that I was in the same situation with Aidan.

He is handsome, charismatic and dangerously amoral, in the calmest, coolest ways possible. He says societal mores do not move him, but the light of the true individual draws him. He said I was such an individual--filled with light but blighted by the shroud of oppression. He meant that Riley was my oppressor.

I realized much too late the things he filled my head with were probably lifted straight out of interviews with Leed Lawson, whom he studied as one of his character inspirations. Likely his plagiarism was taken completely taken out of context, too. Leed was probably talking about the Dalai Lama or someone, but Aidan superimposed his words on my personal struggles.

Aidan plays a Unicorn on tv, but he's no Leed Lawson. He just wanted to get in my pants.

Our storyline this season was intense. That was part of the problem. Then came a huge fight with Riley over my contract with the show and next season's direction—apparently there's more horrible depths to my character that Riley fears will somehow cause life to imitate art.

He treated me like a child at the production planning meeting for next season. Instead of supporting me, he told the producers that he thought my dieting and diet pills were becoming an unhealthy addiction well beyond my character. He suggested to my producers that I didn't have a handle on it and that he might stage a del Marco intervention to get me to go to rehab.

I was so angry with him all season, but that was the final straw. After that, there was nothing but bitter words and long distance in every way. Then came the wrap party, and I was happy that he hadn't come to the end of season celebration.

It was...lit.

The cast and crew all got so drunk and then someone started passing around trays with lines of coke.

I'm no stranger to that scene, but I took it way too far.

Aidan and I were dancing and dancing and dancing.

And then we were kissing.

And then we were fucking.

We were fucking, and it was nothing.

That's when I realized I had no real feelings for him at all.

Not like the ocean of love I had once had for Riley, that had dried up somewhere along the way.

It was no comparison. I lay there in the bed, my face pressed into a mattress,  and I realized with horror, I didn't want this. This didn't feel like love. This just felt like anger at Riley.

Aidan was fucking me from behind, and in my head I was screaming all the angry things I wanted to say to my husband.

But I'm stubborn and reckless, so decided that if I had already messed up, I better make it worth it.

Of course the first time was awful. I was married. I felt guilty. How could I expect it to be good?

We would go again. And again. And again, goddammit.

I would find the zone. That perfect stream of ecstasy.

The love.

It had to be there, right?

Wrong.

There was nothing there. The more I fucked the guy the more sure I became.

I loved my husband, but I was also really really pissed off at him.

And I had just ruined my marriage.

Right there in the last screwing of Aidan, I thought about what Riley would feel when he found out, and I decided I wanted to die.

Death by cocaine should be easy, but I'm not as bad-ass as I pretend to be. I chickened out. When I thought I was having a heart attack and I was actually going to die, I called for an ambulance.

Riley is my husband, my manager, my emergency contact. The doctors called him immediately. He was an ocean away, but he was in New Zealand the very next day, full of fear and tears and choking off his anger at me. And I was half-dead, and half-crazy, and I confessed everything.

My marriage was over then, but I didn't see it. I thought maybe I could earn his forgiveness, but reconciliation was never Riley's goal. He just didn't want me to kill myself with pills and anorexic behavior like Priscilla did with her drug problem.  For six months Riley drug me through hell, but when it was over, he'd drug me out the other side, and I was still alive. I had traded pills and coke for booze and a little more food, but as Riley sometimes cynically reminded me as he nursed a gin and tonic: booze at least has calories.

Speaking of calories, I could use some.

It takes some time for me to summon the energy to rise from the couch were I'm watching the sunlight on the wall, reflected from the pool surface outside, but eventually I pull myself up and walk over to the bar. It's strange, living at home again in my parents house. It used to be my brother Street, my twin Bridge, and I sharing this wing of the house. Now Street lives in Italy, and Bridge has her own place.

"Happy Wedding Day, TrayKat," I say to myself as I splash cranberry juice into a tumbler full of vodka. I swivel and stare at the picture on the wall of my own wedding day. It was Christmas. We eloped to the Keys, and it's the only picture of our wedding day. My hair was still grey, not bleached blond like it is now. I was wearing Docs and a wine colored cowboy hat with a tight white suede dress fringed in a vaguely Native American way. Riley is the kind of man that carry off a colored suit. He wore cranberry, a skinny tie, and an expression I haven't seen on his face in a very long time.

Joy.

I raise the glass to him.

"Happy Last Day," I say softly, quickly following the words with the glass so that I don't cry.

A divorce doesn't become final like you see on tv. There's no...ceremony to it. You don't go to court and get declared divorced and walk out free. At least not here in California. Someone files, someone gets served, there's more paperwork back and forth, you go to court-some people more than once, but not us because the lawyers worked it out—you receive the judgment, then sometime later you get the finalized paperwork, with a future date stamped on it. That's your divorce date. That date will come, it will pass and after it does, you are no longer married. No final confrontation. You just...wait.

Six months. In case the spouses have a change of heart.

It's kind of ironic that my heart hasn't changed at all. I loved Riley the day I married him, the day he served me with divorce papers, on our day in court, and today—the last day of our marriage. It's just that thirteen months ago, for about seventy two hours, I didn't listen to my heart. I listened to the rage and resentment in my head.

I tried to do penance. I tried to earn his forgiveness. The more I groveled, the more he seemed to hate me, and the more angry he became. I swear to God, I don't know what more I could have done.

It doesn't seem right. That today we are still married and that at midnight we won't be, and there's no...closure. It doesn't seem right that I need so badly what he doesn't. I need...some kind of acknowledgment that though he can never forgive me, he did love me once and it did mean something. I know he knows the date and what it means. Riley is always in command of the details of his day. And yet he's letting it pass without even so much as a text.

He won't even give me the kindness of one last sad goodbye.

Tears roll down my cheeks as I pour another drink. This one's not for me. This one is for him.

"Here's to getting over you, you son of a bitch." I throw the full glass against our wedding picture and it falls from the wall.

An hour later, I'm on the couch again. The reflection from the pool has faded as dusk has risen.

My phone is vibrating over and over on the bar, but I have no will to retrieve it.

It's probably Bridge, checking on me. Or my mom. Or my dad. Or Street.

Who am I kidding? It's all four of them, tag-teaming.

Finally, guilt compels me to rise. My misery shouldn't ruin their enjoyment of Trace's wedding.

When I reach the bar, I can't quite believe my eyes.

Riley is calling.

I rub my lips. They are cracked and feel rough against my palm. For a long moment I can't bring myself to face this last good-bye, and I think I will just let it pass after all.

But then, my heart stutters.

And in the stutter there is a broken rush of love and it's echo...hope.

I snatch the phone.

"Riley?"

"No ma'am. This is Officer Frank Gonzalez, California Highway Patrol. Am I speaking with Rowan del Marco?"

"Why do you have Riley's phone?" I whimper. But I know. I know already why a police officer would have his phone.

"Is this Rowan del Marco?"

I close my eyes. Oh god. "Yes."

"Ma'am are you aware that you are listed at Riley Emsworth's ICE contact in his phone?"

"He's my husband."

For three more hours.

"I'm sorry to tell you this, ma'am, but he's been in a vehicular accident."

"That's not possible. You said California Highway Patrol. Riley is in Georgia."

"No ma'am. Your husband is en route to a Level One Trauma Center. "He tells me which hospital. "You should get there as quickly as possible."

"It's bad?" I whisper.

"It's...serious."