Afraid of the Dark

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The ride back to the hotel was long and uncomfortable.

Pete tried to make conversation, but his attempts were rather one-sided: Stump just stared out the window and at his hands sometimes, only replying when acutely neccessary, and I pretended to be absorbed in my notes so I wouldn't have to talk to Pete. Or look at Pete. Or think about Pete.

Of course, that was impossible. In fact, as the city moved past the isolated world of me and Pete and Stump in the back of that limo, the shapes of the outside world glimpsed through the tinted windows blurred and insignificant, I could think of nothing but Pete.

The way the light emanating from that tiny flame played off his face, still and weary and beautiful. The pressure of his arms around my waist, his shoulder against my cheek, his chin on the top of my head. The nearness of him in that huge, dark room. The smile in his voice that shouldn't have been there, that warmed me from the inside out nonetheless as he promised that nothing would ever hurt me...

Short, bursts of memory and feeling and imagery--I hated them all with a sort of frantic desparation because I couldn't seem to shake them. They had taken root in the worst way possible, so here I was, avoiding Pete Wentz's gaze while I fantasized about the glitter of his dark eyes in the glow of a cheap gas station lighter's flame, knowing all too well how stupid and ridiculous and pathetic I was being.

He had only been only comforting me because I had been hysterical, not because he actually cared. Was my life really so sad that I had to imagine that a professional acquaintance of mine actually felt something for me on a personal level? That I had to misinterpret politeness, or even sheer neccessity, as compassion or empathy? Was I really so starved for affection?

Maybe.

I shook off the thought as I fidgeted with the notepad in my hand, reassuring myself that I knew damn well that Pete didn't give a shit about me. And I didn't care, either, because I didn't need him. My minor breakdown after the lights went out was, admittedly, extremely embarrassing, but that was all it was. I was never in any danger. I would have been fine without his help. And he probably didn't really help much anyway; after all, I was the one who eventually whipped out the lighter.

Pete sighed, and I looked up on reflex--then forced my gaze back down to my lap when he looked right back. Lame fantasizing aside, I was still so humiliated by the day's earlier events that I couldn't quite bring myself to look in him in the eye. No one had seen me break down like that since I was just a kid, and the thought of Pete (who was famous for playing mind games with basically everyone he knew) seeing that just a day after meeting me made me naseous with anxiety. I felt incredibly vulnerable and exposed. The only reason I wasn't freaking out more over the whole ordeal was because I simply wasn't allowing myself to think about it...and because Pete himself wasn't making a big deal out of it, either.

Almost two hours had passed since the incident, and so far he had treated me the same as he always had, mostly; I caught him stealing concerned glances at me a lot, but that was probably just because of my own behavior. It seemed like he wasn't worried about me because I had a severe aversion to the dark, but because I suddenly wasn't speaking to him.

The annoyingly logical part of me assured me that I wouldn't talk to or look at Pete because we had a purely professional relationship and I didn't want him to get the wrong impression, especially since we had crossed a few lines already in the twenty-four hours or so since we had met. I wasn't acknowledging him because I didn't want him to treat me like a friend when I was really just a...colleague, for lack of a better term.

The part of me that ached for the darkness of his eyes was saying something else--that maybe he was right. Maybe I liked him too much and I was afraid to let this go any farther. Because the lines were there and I could see them, but somehow his smile got them all jumbled up and I ended up crossing them before I even knew better.

The logical part of me told me that was bullshit, reminding me that Pete Wentz commonly made headlines for his various acts of idiocy. Pete Wentz was never right, never honest. His entire existence was one big farce. He was just another fame-seeking douchebag, digging for more fourteen-year-old fangirls with his every insincere reflection on Life. I mean, come on. Like Pete Wentz knew anything about Life.

All he knew was how to sell out.

I clung to that thought, repeating it to myself again and again like some kind of heinous prayer, because it was easier to label him a sell-out and turn my back on him and walk away forever. Everyone who ever knew him--and even those who didn't really know him, just saw his face on magazine covers and read his words on his blogs and listened to his music day in and day out--had been doing that to him all his life, and before I met him, I never understood why.

Now I understood. It was so hard to know Pete, to give him all the chances he deserved. He just got so close. He got way too close to everyone, sometimes without even realizing it, I think, and once he did it was so hard to push him away.

It scared me to death. So I did what everyone else did: I called him a douchebag and a sell-out and a liar and that was it. I tried my best to push him away.

But, even as I flipped through my notepad for the hundredth time, dutifully ignoring him, he wouldn't be deterred. "What's that?" he asked, and I made the mistake of looking up.

He smiled at me, and his whole damn face lit up.

I swallowed hard, choking back the smile that blossomed automatically at the sight of his smile, and forced my gaze back to the pad of paper on my lap. "It's just--just--my notes."

"Notes?"

"Yeah," I said, and more sarcasm than I had intended seeped into my tone. "You say shit, I take notes--it's kind of my job."

"Oh. Well..." He paused, biting his lip and tilting his head at me in a way that reminded me of a little kid bribing his mother. "Could I read them?"

"No!" I snapped. Reflex reaction.

He frowned, pouting just a little. "Why not? If I said it in the first place, why can't I read it?"

"Because..." I trailed off, looking for a reason he would be satisfied with and not finding one. The truth was, these particular notes were based on previous research--basic background information about all the band members, collected before I ever met them. It was just part of my job and normally it didn't bother me, but, sitting there in the back of that limo with him, I felt a little creepy for knowing so many personal things he never told me.

Out of nowhere, Pete lunged forward across the narrow gap between our rows of seats to snatch the notepad out of my hand. "Just let me--"

"No!" I insisted, jerking the pad away from him.

"Just--just let me see it!"

I tried to hold it out of his reach, but we were stuck in that small space together, and I couldn't keep it away from him. He had the notepad in his hands as he sank back into his seat with the gleam of triumph in his smile.

"Bastard," I grunted under my breath.

He looked up long enough to smirk at me and then turned back to squinting at my notes. His smile faded gradually as his eyes darted back and forth across the page, working their way through the lines of messy ink. "I never said this shit," said Pete slowly. "This is about--about when I was a kid."

I bit my lip and braced myself for his reaction--but that was it. He kept reading in silence, and by the time he finished the page, he was smiling a little.

"This is crazy," he said, grinning at me like I'd made some kind of incredible scientific discovery. "I can't believe you know all that stuff. It's so weird. I'm like a fucking research project to you."

He was laughing, but I was serious as I reached across the space between us and took back my notes.

"Yeah," I said coldly, "that's exactly what you are."

I had meant to be harsh, to make him understand that what happened between us back in that windowless room was just an accident and that the next six days were going to be strictly business. The way he held me back there, the way his face looked in the unsteady light, the way I felt suddenly at ease when he told me everything was going to be okay--I wanted to make sure he knew that none of that had any bearing on our relationship from here on out. Just because Pete had been there for me the way no one else ever had didn't mean that we were friends. That we were anything. We were both just here to do our jobs, and that was all. The radio station incident was just an unfortunate coincidence: the lights just happened to go out, and he just happened to be the only one around to look after me.

That was all it was--coincidence. He didn't mean anything to me, and I meant nothing to him.

In fact, I was sure that as soon as we got back to the hotel room and Pete had some time to himself, the first thing he would do was go blab to someone about the crazy girl who had a meltdown and cried all over his brand new hoodie just because the lights went out. What a pathetic bitch, right? he would say, snickering a little as he flopped down on his hotel room bed, on the phone with Ashlee or maybe his new best friend of the week. And I have to fucking talk to this chick. Every fucking day.

I was so sure of it. I could see the whole thing playing out in my mind like a scene from some fuzzy, low-budget film. And yet, there he was, sitting right in front of me in that limo, his jaw dropped open a little with the saddest look in his eyes I'd seen yet.

Because I told him he was just a research project.

I guess it was sort of mean--well, no, it was really mean, but I hadn't expected it to get to him like that. I didn't think Pete would care what he was to me. I figured he said much worse things about me, at least in his head.

But, judging by the look on his face, he definitely cared.

Pete let me take the notepad from him. He settled back into his seat, clasping his hands together and dropping them into his lap. He turned his head to stare out the window at the traffic moving past us at typical New-York-City-bottleneck speed, but I could still see the hurt in his face, even from that angle.

Stump could, too. He studied Pete carefully for a long moment, reading his expression, and then turned his gaze on me. I half-expected him to stare at me with an indignant sort of disapproval, like he did back at the radio station. Instead, the look on his face was just oddly appraising, as if to say, Wow, you really are a bitch.

I sighed and glanced over at Pete. In the few seconds since I had last looked at him, he had put his hood up, and now he stared down at his lap with purpose, biting his lip and looking troubled as he slid his wedding ring back and forth on his finger. I watched him for a long time, waiting for the chance to say something, but he just wouldn't look up.

I felt the strangest need to apologize, and I couldn't figure out why. After all, I had only told Pete the truth. Why apologize for the truth?

When the chauffered car finally came to a stop outside our hotel, Pete grabbed the door handle and finally looked up at me, and his eyes were so tired and sad that I just wanted to reach out to him somehow. He held my gaze for a moment and then he turned away, pushing a dark strand of hair out of his eyes and stepping out into the bright afternoon sunshine. I started to call after him, but he slammed the car door shut behind him before I could even get the words out.

My reflection swam above the image of Pete's retreating figure as I watched him through the dark tint of the limo window, and as the question returned to me--Why apologize for the truth?--I was pretty sure I knew the answer.

Stump sighed, startling me (because, to be completely honest, I had sort of forgotten about him altogether for a minute there), and I looked up at him in surprise. He stared back at me as he heaved another sigh, his thin lips pursed and twitching into a bittersweet half-smile. He probably would have looked amused at me if he hadn't looked so damn sad, too.

"Don't look so upset. He's not mad," he said.

"He's not?" I repeated stupidly.

"No," said Stump. "He just gets into these moods...you know. Give him an hour or two and he'll be fine."

I looked away, my gaze travelling back to the spot on the sidewalk where Pete had been just moments ago, and I sighed, too. "I didn't mean it..."

"Sure you did." I turned back to Stump, gaping and taken aback, but he just shrugged at me. "The truth hurts."

And just like that, I had a choice to make. I could agree with him, say, Yes, the truth does hurt, but that's just the way it goes sometimes. I mean nothing to him and he means nothing to me, and that's that. And maybe that would be the end of it, and we could go on with the rest of the week in the same boring pattern of questions and answers that I had followed so many times before.

Or I could suck it up, hold my vulnerability out for the world to see, and just tell the damn truth already.

Last night in his hotel room, Pete had showed me the darkest corners of his mind--parts of him I had never wanted to see, really. This morning, by accident, I showed him parts of myself that I had never wanted anyone to see. The technicalities were irrelevant. The fact of the matter was that he knew me and I knew him on a deeper level, and now I had to decide whether to push away or grasp at that connection.

And in the whole time I knew Pete, I never quite managed to push him away.

"But it's...it's not true," I mumbled, staring down into my own lap, at my white, trembling hands, in mortification--but no matter how much it killed me to face this one truth, as I said the words aloud, I knew they were right. "That's the thing--he's not just a research project."

In the seconds following those words, Stump was silent for so long that I finally glanced up at him nervously, searching his face for some kind of reaction. Despite all appearances, that was probably the biggest confession I'd ever made to anyone, ever (besides telling Pete that I was afraid of the dark, of course). I was sort of expecting something big to happen--the ground to shake beneath us, or lightning to strike out of the clear blue sky, or a whole bunch of random people dressed up in clown suits to jump up out of nowhere and spray me with silly string and confetti.

But nothing happened.

Stump just raised his eyebrows at me and repeated grimly, "Give him an hour."

Then he got out of the car and left me alone, and the echo of the car door slamming was so loud in that silent, empty space, that I figured it almost measured up to an earthquake or a bolt of lightning. And, hell, I was nervous enough already--the last thing I needed was a blast of confetti and silly string to put my poor, battered heart through even more strain.

-----

I gave him an hour. I went back to my hotel room and ordered overpriced room service for lunch, wallowing in the sweet comfort of carbohydrates as I sifted through all the notes and tape recordings I had made so far. I managed to keep all the guilt and fear and anxiety and impatience at bay as I focused on organizing some kind of basic outline for the article. I hated outlines, and I knew I would never use this one, but it served as a good distraction while I waited for Pete to get out of his "mood."

Once an hour had passed and I could no longer focus on the mundane job of slicing up quotes and describing bland locations, I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, said a little prayer, and went looking for Pete. And I finally found him in the very last place I would have ever looked: the gym.

I stumbled across him almost entirely by accident, in fact. I walked down to Pete's room and knocked on the door, but he never answered. Frustrated, I decided to pace the halls of the hotel until I could talk to him again and get all those heavy words off my chest.

Eventually, I found myself on the ground floor of the hotel. I passed the pool and then the adjoining gym, both of which were enclosed in solid glass walls. I glanced over through the glass and did a double take when I saw him there.

He was running on a treadmill in the corner of the room, his eyes fixed on some point in space ahead of him, the long white cords of an iPod's earbuds snaking around his neck and down his chest before disappearing into his pocket. He didn't appear to have noticed me.

Without even thinking, I opened the door to the gym and stepped inside. He must have seen the movement out of the corner of his eye, because he glanced over in my direction as I shut the door behind me. He stumbled and his eyes bugged out a little when he recognized me, but he didn't stop running. He just reached down to pause his iPod, slid the earbuds out of his ears, and waved me over to him with one hand.

The look on his face was grim as he beckoned me forward, but at least he was acknowledging me. That was a start. I had been afraid he wouldn't want to speak to me at all after what I said to him back in the limo.

There was a long mirror on the wall behind the treadmill he was using, and I watched my own reflection shuffle across the room to him. We were alone; the rest of the gym and the pool was deserted.

He had changed into a pair of dirty shorts that exposed legs too pale to match the rest of his body and a plain white wifebeater that showed off the sleeve tattoos winding their way down both of his arms. The duffle bag lying on the ground by the treadmill was unzipped, leaving the towels, water bottles, deoderant and change of clothes--the usual work-out supplies--inside visible. His dark skin gleamed with sweat as he ran, his hair messy and unkept and sticking to the sweat on his forehead, his face flushed and thoroughly make-up-free.

It was kind of weird, seeing him like that. He just looked so...normal.

I was still struggling to wrap my head around the idea of Pete Wentz, the emo king of today's wannabe-"hardcore" youth, working out just like any other middle-America office drone when he turned away from me to stare down that invisble point again. His jaw was tense as he muttered out of the side of his mouth, "Take a fucking picture, why don't you?"

I was so startled that, for a moment, I could only gape at him even further. Once I recovered enough to realize I had been staring, I looked away, my face heating up in embarrassment. I hated that feeling.

"Sorry--" I mumbled, but he didn't let me finish.

"No, I'm used to it," he said in a clipped voice. "That's usually all anyone ever wants from me--a picture." He just kept on staring straight ahead, refusing to look at me as his feet pounded away on the treadmill. From my side view of his face, I saw his eyebrows draw together in a frown as he added, "Or a goddamn quote."

I sighed, smoothing out my hair just to keep my mind off my own mortification long enough to put together a coherant apology. "Look..." I said, packing my tone with as much sincerity as I could manage, "I'm really sorry about--what I said--earlier..."

I paused, watching him carefully for a reaction. But he had none--or at least none that he let show.

Instead of feeling relieved at his lack of a response, I tensed up, paranoid that he hated me even more than he was willing to let on. "So...I'm sorry, and I hope you can...forgive me? But I understand if you're mad--"

"I'm not mad," he said curtly, his words coming out between little gasps of air as he kept on running.

I was staring at him again--this time in wonder. "You're--you're not?"

"No." He shrugged. "What's to be mad about?"

"Well," I insisted, feeling guilty because I had, in fact, hurt him in a way I hadn't meant to, "I really didn't mean that the way it came out. It's just that... It's just that I..." I sighed and pulled at my hair in frustration at my failure to put the words together right without showing too much of my insides. "I mean, after what happened today--"

The words died in my throat as Pete hit a button on the treadmill and it slowed to a stop. He finally stopped running, sliding gracefully off the end of the short track. He said nothing, but watched me intently as he dabbed his face with a towel, and then threw it back into his gym bag. I figured he was waiting for me to go on, but I wasn't going to until he made me.

He never did. He crouched down to zip up the gym bag and then got to his feet, swinging the bag over one shoulder. "So," said Pete, staring at me outright in a way that made me want to look away almost as much as I wanted to just stare back neverendingly, "you want to go get lunch?"

I ended up doing the whole stare-back-neverendingly thing. In fact, I was so stunned by his suggestion that I couldn't even blink, though my eyes felt like they might shrivel up and fall right out of my sockets at any moment now.

Was he asking me out? Even though he was married? Was that even possible? Or was I just being ridiculous?

My brain recognized the question for the Big Deal it was and shoved it into some dark corner I couldn't quite reach, realizing that I might have another meltdown if I contemplated it too much. Clearly, that was a loaded question that I wasn't ready to deal with yet. So the logical part of my brain took over, distracting me with minor details, such as:

"It's three o'clock."

Good job, brain, I congratulated myself. "It's three o'clock," may not be such a conversational gem, but it's better than, "Hey, are you asking me out behind your wife's, your bandmates', and basically the whole world's back? 'Cause, you know, that might not be such a good idea..."

Yeah, definitely better.

Pete's blinding smile broke through his previously blank expression, and I didn't realize how much I had missed it until my insides warmed and melted at the sight of it. "So?" he said, shrugging.

"So," I said, "I've already had lunch."

He didn't skip a beat. "Okay, then--how about ice cream?"

"Oh--uh..." He smiled at me hopefully, and there was never any real choice for me after that. "Sure."

"Awesome." He beamed at me again, and I think I might have swayed on the spot a bit. "There's this little place down the street I know, it's great--just let me go change into something a little less sweaty and then I'll take you..."

And with that, he bounded away, throwing little smiles and last-minute instructions over his shoulder at me as he went. And I watched him go, happy and carefree like a child despite the darkness of his eyes, and I knew I had never really had a choice to begin with. Just like Pete and his hopeful smile, the option to turn my back on that warm feeling had always been there--technically, if not actually. But the technicalities didn't matter, because I had never had the strength to deny him or the way he made me feel.

And no matter how hard I tried to push him away, he just refused to go.