Founded on Goodbye by Kat Singleton
Having to be near her is fucking torture. Night after night, we have to pretend that there isn’t an ocean of lies and deceit between us. I thought I knew heartbreak when I saw Taylor in bed with my best friend—someone I considered my brother. But that feeling pales in comparison to the hole I feel in my heart now. It doesn’t help that we still have to be in each other’s worlds.
After giving Monica the verbal lashing of her life, incredibly hurt by her part in the whole ordeal, she made a point that there would be too much bad press if Nora wasn’t suddenly on tour with us, especially after I made a drunken fool of myself when I learned of the betrayal.
Not wanting to be around Nora any longer than I had to, I made a deal with Monica. Nora could stay and finish up the North American leg of the tour, but I wanted her replaced for the second half of it when we were overseas. I didn’t care who they got, but I didn’t want her traveling with us. I didn’t want to look at her night after night and face the fact that, despite her betrayal, I still love her.
A makeup artist is stuffing tissues in the collar of my shirt, fussing with brushing something over my forehead as I dread the interview that’s about to take place. I’m biting back a complaint, trying hard to not to be a dick. I got a lot of backlash from the way I acted at my hometown show. I was piss drunk, ranting and raving about things they still don’t understand. All the people calling me out would’ve probably acted the same way I did if they found out the first person they let in for years had bad intentions from the first time they met.
One of the worst parts of the whole ordeal is that Nora was the one thing in my life that felt like something I had control over. The rest of my life is heavily planned out and under a microscope. Nora felt like the first thing I chose for myself, and the universe laughed in my face, because she ended up being just another piece of my life that’s been planned out—for the sake of sales.
“Close your eyes for me,” the makeup artist instructs, still lightly running a makeup brush over my face.
Nora sits next to me, her own makeup artist working on her face. We’re sitting on a small loveseat in the middle of a set. Every time she pulls down her dress to cover more of her thighs, her elbow brushes mine, making me want to scream. The press still thinks we’re more than friends, even though I’ve been spotted out with other women since Nora ripped my heart out. Each time, Monica tears me a new asshole over the image I’m allegedly creating when the press thinks I’m dating Nora and cheating on her. It feeds into the image they already have of me.
I wish I could tell every last bit of them that Nora is the one who pushed me away. Her actions made her have no say in who I spend my time with. Even after all she did to me, the press is unaware, even though drunk me made it pretty clear at the hometown show. They’re still unbelievably fascinated with her. I could probably tell them what she did, and I don’t think they’d believe me. It’s the bed I’ve made for myself over the years, and I’m going to fucking lie in it. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it.
I’m only doing this interview because I didn’t have it in me to argue further. Plus, I’m a masochist. I wanted to pretend, if only for the cameras for a small period of time, that Nora and I were still that couple that the world fell in love with. It’s almost too easy to pretend that she hasn’t caused so much hurt in me.
“Cameras rolling in one minute,” someone shouts from my left.
The host of the nightly news, Piper Matthews, takes a seat across from us. She smiles, although the smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. I’ve done interviews with her before. She’s savage, completely ruthless in some of her questioning. She’ll ask questions as if she’s owed an explanation of your whole damn life. She’s tried to corner me many times into answering questions about my personal life, rehab, my parents—if it’s been a part of my life, she’s wanted to know about it.
“Y’all ready?” she asks. Her fake, sweet southern accent sets off my bullshit alarms.
Nora straightens in her seat, giving Piper a timid smile, a quiet “yes” coming right after.
I’ve got to give it to my Rose, she can act. I suppose I already knew that by the way our whole relationship was centered around her acting skills. Her body leans slightly toward me as if we don’t have any problems.
I still sit awake at night, trying to figure out if I think she was telling the truth when she said she loved me too. With the tears running down her face, her eyes pleading with mine to understand, it seemed like she wasn’t lying. But how could I trust that, when everything we were had been founded on her leaving me?
“Nash?” Piper asks, as the cameraman starts a twenty-second countdown.
“As I’ll ever be,” I mutter under my breath.
“Ten…nine…” the camera man counts down, switching to his fingers once he reaches three.
Suddenly, all cameras are pointed at us, the lights bright against our faces.
Piper looks at the camera, giving it a toothy smile. “Tonight, I get to sit down with Nash Pierce and the girl who’s not only stolen the hearts of people around the world, but Nash’s as well. Welcome to the show, Nora.” Piper fixes her eyes on Nora, waiting for her answer.
“Happy to be here.” Nora smiles, seeming completely at ease with all the rolling cameras.
“Nash,” Piper begins.
I smile, already fully aware of what she’s about to ask me. I’ve been trained by the best publicists; I can almost always guess what I’m about to be asked in interviews. They’re all cliché and want to know the same damn things.
“Can you tell us how you found Nora? It seems like a fairytale love story. Her joining your tour, the two of you becoming close…”
Her words die off, a tactic they use so I fill in the blanks.
“Well, I didn’t find Nora, my team did.” Oh, if only you knew the truth behind these words, Piper, I think, not lying at all. My team did find her—it just wasn’t through auditions, it was through socials—to find me someone acceptable to hand my heart over to. “But the first time we met was at auditions.”
“Did she catch your eye from the beginning?” Piper crosses her ankles.
I smile, throwing my arm over the back of the couch, which is also over Nora’s back. Piper eats it up, giving us a huge smile. “Yeah, you can say that.” Looking at Nora, I wink, giving the cameras exactly what they want.
She smiles hesitantly, probably waiting for me to lose my shit and tell the world about what she’s done.
My eyes find Monica’s over Piper’s shoulder. She gives me a nod, the look of approval for Monica-speak.
“What was it like, Nora? Catching the attention of someone like Nash?”
Nora swallows slowly, looking at me for a moment before fixing her attention on Piper. “He wasn’t what I was expecting,” she starts.
“Tell us more.” Piper is eating this shit up, feasting on every word Nora and I feed her.
Oh, the pretty lies, I think, remembering the words I told Nora.
Nora shifts her weight from one hip to the other. The movement causes my fingers to brush over her shoulder. I have to touch her every night on tour, but even the smallest hint of her skin against mine reminds me of all the times I got to touch every delicate inch of her, the way it felt to have her come undone under my touch.
“The Nash the world sees is not the same Nash that those closest to him see.” Those beautiful eyes of hers focus on me and I’m sucked in. “Getting to know him has been…epic. He’s captivating.”
I swallow, trying not to fall into her deception once again.
“Sounds like you think really highly of him. Could we assume that the two of you are in love?”
Breaking the trance between me and Nora, I face Piper. “I think that’s something we’d like to keep private.”
“Nora, you seem to have just popped up on our radar. You went from posting videos on your social media to dating America’s most eligible bachelor. Can you tell us a little about yourself?”
“Oh, I’m not that interesting, Piper. I grew up in your typical small town, but I had dreams that didn’t fit in that small town. After I graduated, I moved to LA to follow those dreams. The rest is history.”
“Well, it seems like your town really lost a special talent. While doing some research on you, we found this beautiful piece of art you performed while still in high school. Could we roll a clip of that please?”
The screen behind us lights up with a video of Nora on stage. She has on a white outfit, her body gliding effortlessly. I’m drawn to the video on stage when Piper speaks again. “This is my favorite part.”
It jumps to Nora being pulled at by multiple people, them ripping off layers of her clothing. She’s left in nothing but a small leotard. Out of nowhere she somehow gets ahold of what looks like paint, and her hands drift all over her body, leaving streaky handprints in her wake.
The music she’s dancing to is sad and dark. My eyes find her, wondering why I’ve never seen this video of her. My stomach falls to my feet when I look at her. All the blood has drained from her face, and she stares at the video with an agonizing look on her face.
Even after the screen goes black, she stares into the distance, her mind clearly not with us.
“When I first saw that video, it took my breath away. You were deliberate with every movement of your body. It was so beautiful, so haunting. Tell me, did the dance have anything to do with the expulsion of your high school’s basketball star? It says that you attacked him for what he did. Your ex-boyfriend?”
“What the fuck?” I say, my hand falling to Nora’s thigh. She jumps, looking at me with fear in her eyes.
“I can’t, I can’t, Nash,” she mumbles, tears welling in her eyes.
“You okay, honey?” Piper asks, leaning forward.
“Don’t fucking talk to her,” I snap, completely unaware of why Nora is so shook-up right now, but my mind goes to the worst. I have no idea what has her reacting this way, all I know is she isn’t okay right now, and I need to get her out of here.
“You guys agreed to sixty minutes,” Piper reminds us, standing up when I do.
Stepping in front of Nora, I look down my nose at the vulture of a talk show host. “We agreed to the questions outlined ahead of time. This,” I say, pointing toward the blank screen that started this, “wasn’t agreed upon. My team will be taking all the footage.”
“You can’t do that,” she interjects, visibly upset.
“Oh, I fucking can. You guys are god damn vultures. We’re leaving.”
I pull a shaking Nora off the couch and guide us away from the stage. We don’t stop until we’re out in the parking lot.
Stopping on the asphalt, I turn to face her. “Nora?” I ask cautiously.
She looks up at me, mascara running down her cheeks. “I left all that behind. It wasn’t supposed to come out. No one was supposed to know…”
Grabbing her by the shoulders, I try my best to soothe her. “Know what, Rose?”
Her painted bottom lip trembles as she looks me dead in the eye. “I tried to cover it up for her. It was supposed to be me…”
“What do you mean it was supposed to be you?”
She looks at me, tears falling freely from her eyes. Her voice shakes as she answers me. “He assaulted her. My sister. He almost raped my sister thinking she was me.”
For someone who makes a living off stringing words together to create something beautiful, I’m at a complete loss for any. Her reaction to the trauma is visceral. It’s clear that the situation Piper brought up was traumatic for Nora.
I don’t push her for more answers, not wanting to make her relive any of it if she doesn’t want to. The two of us stand in the middle of the backlot of the studio. I want to hug her, to show her that she doesn’t have to go through this alone, but I also don’t want to cross any boundaries.
“Can I hug you?” I ask, hesitant to touch her if she isn’t in the right mind space for it.
Rubbing her tear-stained lips together, she nods, closing the distance between us on her own.
“My ex and I had just broken up. He’d cheated on me again and I was done dealing with it. It was a few weeks after our breakup that my parents went out of town, so I decided to have a party. My sister’s two years younger than me, a sophomore at the time, and I’d convinced her not to go to her friend’s and party with me. It was always my sister that was the better dancer. She was so passionate about ballet that she almost never had fun. She was incredibly disciplined. I told her to let loose this once, telling her our dance teachers would never find out.”
Her shoulders shake in my arms as she takes a deep breath in, trying to steady her words. “My ex showed up, and I was pissed; we got in a fight a few hours into the party. I thought he left, but then as the night was winding down, one of my friends said he’d gone upstairs…”
There’s a distant sound of a car honking as she collects her thoughts. “My sister had gone to bed in my room that night. It was deeper into the house and not as loud. She spent maybe an hour with us before she decided she had to go to bed. I told her she could go to my room. I thought it would make her feel better. But he went in there, and he was drunk, not that it gives him any excuse. He thought it was me in that bed and without asking, he began to assault her. If I hadn’t found him, I think he would’ve gone all the way.”
Swallowing, I try and speak through the anger. All I see is red, thinking about this fucker. “You found him?”
She nods against my chest. “I found him with his pants down, Lennon bawling and pleading with him to stop. I lost it. I grabbed the first thing I could find, a floor length mirror by my door, and hit him with it. I couldn’t stop, I kept trying to swing it until broken glass was everywhere. If he wasn’t so drunk, he would’ve been able to overpower me, but I stunned him. The only reason I stopped was because I was pulled off him by one of his teammates. As I was pulled off him, he looked at me and told me he thought it was me saying no. My world collapsed when I realized it was supposed to be me dealing with that trauma, not her.”
“Fuck, Rose,” I begin, words failing me. I can’t even begin to fathom what her sister and her went through. There’s got to be some emotional trauma on her part, being told that this guy thought it was her and not her sister. I’m an older sibling as well and understand the responsibility you feel to take care of your younger sibling. The guilt she feels for what happened to her sister is palpable between us.
“Luckily, one of my dad’s best friends was a cop. They took it seriously when we told them the story. My scumbag ex obviously got in trouble with both the law and the school, causing his family to move away. Even with him gone, charges were pressed against him. There were still people at our high school that thought it was Lennon’s fault this all happened. It changed my sister. She’d always been quiet, preferring to speak through dance than with words. After that, she didn’t want to dance at all. She lost all interest. So, I decided to dance for her. That’s what my showcase was, to one of your songs, telling the story for her. Every shitty human in our small town needed to understand the trauma an assault victim has to work through. They needed to know what it can do to someone and that she was a victim. It wasn’t her fault. It was his.”
“For a long time, I thought it was my fault, but even my sister didn’t blame me. Still, our relationship changed. She changed. And I let her process it however she needed to. Which ended up in her bouncing from place to place, trying to find where she fits into the world. She got her GED and we speak occasionally. She was always my best friend, but now we’re acquaintances. I keep dancing in hopes that one day she’ll find her love for dance again, and it can be the thing to help mend our broken relationship. Before that night, dancing was just a hobby for me. Now it’s something more. I started posting videos of me dancing online in hopes it could encourage her to do something she loved again.”
Tears soak my shirt as she sobs against my chest. Her hands fist at the fabric between us. I let her cry, not being able to come up with words to justify what just happened to her—and her family. The dance Piper just cornered her into watching was her way of seeking justice for what happened to her sister. It was her way of coping with the damage that’s been inflicted on them.
I want to go back into that studio and rip every single person involved a new one, but it feels more important to support her in this moment. I’m trusting my team to do whatever it takes to make sure the interview that just happened never sees the light of day.
Letting Nora work through her emotions as needed, I simply hold onto her. It doesn’t take long before she’s taking a few deep breaths, her hands slowly unfisting the fabric of my shirt.
Taking a few small steps back, she looks at me. “I was going to tell you one day; I just didn’t know how to bring it up. It is something I’ve just wanted to…forget.” Her last words are said quietly.
“Hey, you don’t owe anyone that story.”
“I know I don’t, but it still doesn’t change that I did want to tell you. I just didn’t know how. And then…”
Her words drift off, the both of us knowing what the “and then” was.
Because no matter how bad I want to be there for her right now, there’s still so much brokenness between us. Just because she hurt me doesn’t mean I can’t be there for her when she needs it. I decide not to discuss her past anymore, letting her talk about it more only if she wants to.
“Want to get out of here?” I ask, pulling out my phone to see where Sebastian is.
Using the sleeves of her dress to wipe her eyes, she shrugs. “Don’t you hate me?”
Biting my lip, I let out a defeated sigh. “This would be a lot easier if I hated you, Rose.”
Matt and Sebastian pull up next to us, both of them giving Nora sympathetic looks as she climbs in. Even though my team will make sure an audience never sees the footage from today, it doesn’t erase the fact that half the people she works with daily all saw what happened in there.
After this, she may not be too upset about leaving the tour. She’ll probably be thankful one day that we didn’t get any deeper into a relationship, that way she’ll soon be forgotten by the media. As someone in the public eye, the press will dig up every one of our dirty little secrets, making them seem way worse than they really are when they expose it to the world.
There’s no excuse for the hurt Nora has caused me, but I can’t help but feel a little guilty that her past got brought up today because of her affiliation with me.
I hold her the entirety of the car ride, knowing that the second we arrive back to the venue, we’ll go our separate ways and I’ll go back to wallowing in the pain she’s caused me. I’ll go on pretending that the heart she broke doesn’t still beat for her and only her.