All Yours Somehow

Three months had past since I’d been on tour with John and we’d had our big fight about the pregnancy scare. We were back on track now but it had taken a while and now he was back on tour and I was back at college so we were back to barely seeing each other again.

It was now October and I was in the library between classes making use of the free internet when something caught my eye that sparked up all of my old fears. I was just scanning a few websites when I got a Facebook message from a name I didn’t recognise.

Maddie Stewart
Hey you probably don’t know me and don’t want to believe me but I think you might want to have a look at this.

This was all the message said, with a website link underneath. I hesitantly stared at the message for a few minutes and checked the girls own profile trying to work out who she was and what was going on. Eventually I clicked on the link and immediately regretted it. There were pictures and a bit of writing underneath them. As I read through and looked at the pictures, I began to think the worst.

I replied to the girls message and hoped she’d begin to clear things up for me.

Hannah Frazier
Do I actually know you? Do you know who that is in those photos?

Maddie Stewart
I met you at one of The Maine’s shows this summer. We talked for a bit at the show in Pittsburgh. That girls name is Becky. There’s more post, I just thought you should see this, I’m not trying to cause any trouble for you.

I still didn’t remember this girl and still didn’t believe any of it yet, but I needed more information. All I could see was pictures of John with drinks in his hands, his arms around and all over some brunette girl in a club. I knew just from looking t him how drunk he was. I looked at some of this girls other posts and she was telling people that she hooked up with John on their first UK tour, which was about a month ago now. John and the guys had come home since then and were back touring the US. I found as much as I could from Maddie but as she didn’t know this girl personally either, she apologised for not being as much help as she’d like to have been. I kept going round about how to handle the situation. Should I go to the girl and message her? Or go straight to John and immediately sound like I’m accusing him of cheating? Or should I just talk to one of the other guys first and see if they can help me?

A week later, the guys came home from tour and I still hadn’t said anything to John about what I knew. I couldn’t do it over a video chat or the phone. I was on my way to his house now and I couldn’t even imagine how this was going to go.

“Hey, I missed you,” he said, as he opened the door once I got there. He pulled me in for a hug and wrapped his arms around me.

“I missed you too,” I mumbled.

“What’s up?” he asked, pulling away from the hug.

“I need to talk to you about something,” I told him. He let me inside and we walked through to his room. I was careful to avoid his parents or brothers on my way, right now they were the last people I wanted to see. Walking in his room, I sat down awkwardly on his bed as he stood there and looked at me. “Is there anything you need to tell me?”

“What?” he asked, his expression completely changing from concerned to confused.

“I said, is there anything you need to tell me? In particular, maybe something that happened in England?”

“Hannah, what are you talking about?”

“John, there is a girl posting all over some website that you and her hooked up whilst you were touring the UK,” I sighed. “There are pictures of you and a girl, and I don’t want to believe it, but you do look pretty much all over her.”

“I’ll swear to you right now, nothing happened,” he told me, his tone completely flat.

“John, I believe when you say nothing happened, I honestly do,” I told him. “But if I find out anything did, it’s over. You know I’ve been there before.”

“Exactly, which is why I would never do anything to make you think otherwise.”

“But I am thinking otherwise.”

“Han, will you stop being so fucking paranoid? How can I ever think that you’ll trust me fully if you’re going to keep assuming every little thing is the worst?” he asked, raising his voice.

“I don’t assume,” I said, matching his raised voice. “I wouldn’t have believed it at all, but there are photos, John, what am I supposed to think?”

“And what exactly to these photos show?” he asked, pacing his room. “Do any of them actually show me kissing her? Or are we actually having sex in these photos?”

“No, you’re not.”

“So what do they actually prove? Because all I can see is you once again trying your very hardest to push me away.”

“Push you away? Is that really how this seems?” I asked.

“Yes it does, and I’m fucking fed up of it,” he sighed, running his hands through his hair. “I’ve just got home from tour and here we are once again arguing, this is not how I want to spend my time at home.”

I sat there and stared at the wall as tears began to fill my eyes. We both knew what was coming, it had been brewing for a while now. I couldn’t even meet his green eyes as we sat in silence. It had never been difficult with John like this. Even when we were just friends, everything had been easy, conversation had always flowed, there had never been any awkward silences.

“This isn’t working any more, is it?” he suddenly said, bringing his voice back to normal, causing me to finally look at him. When I did, I noticed the only emotion he was conveying was sadness, which I was probably reflecting back at him.

I couldn’t even speak, so just shook my head. It was then that the first tear fell down my cheek. I rubbed it away softly, hoping that he wouldn’t have seen.

“I love you Han, but this is just too hard now,” he continued. “I think even you can see that.”

This time I nodded my head.

“I know,” I said, as my voice began to break. “I just can’t cope with you being on the road anymore, I want you here. Not because I don’t trust you, but I just want to be able to see you whenever I want, not when it fits in with your touring schedule.”

“I know, and I wish I could be here all the time, but it’s just not possible at the moment.”

“You know, I lie awake at night sometimes just thinking that maybe I’m holding you back,” I told him. “I lie there thinking that if you didn’t have me back at home to check in with that maybe you could be having so much fun. And that’s when I begin to get jealous, when I think that if you didn’t have me, you could be off with a different girl every night and then I think about it too much and start to believe it’s actually happening.”

“But it’s not, I promise you, baby, it’s not.”

“Maybe it’s not, but I don’t want to be the one stopping you any more,” I said.

“What about me then? Don’t you think I get jealous sometimes when I’m on the road?” he told me. “You get to stay here, surrounded by your friends and family all year long, you’ve got the comfort of sleeping in your own bed every night. And you’re an extremely good looking girl, Han, anyone can see that, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t have a line of guys just waiting for me to fuck up and jump straight in there.”

“There are no other guys, John, never has been,” I told him. “It’s always you.”

“It’s always you for me too,” he said with a half smiled, the first one I’d seen since I’d got here. We sat in silence again for a while as we processed what the other had said.

“I feel like I don’t know you when you’re on the road,” I said to break the silence this time. “It’s like you get on that bus and immediately become a different John to the one I know.”

“That’s not fair,” he protested.

“It’s just what I think, alright?” I told him. “It might not be true, but whatever. We just can’t keep going on like this, it’s not right.”

“Are we throwing away something good here?” he said. I shrugged my shoulders.

“It hasn’t been good for weeks now,” I told him. “It’s just too hard.”

“But relationships are meant to be hard.”

“Not like this they’re not. I can’t even talk to you whenever I want because you might be in a different time zone or you’re asleep in the middle of the day after drinking all night.”

“But it’s what I love, are you asking me to give it up? Because I can’t do that,” he said, more forcefully than he had so far.

“No, I would never ask that of you,” I told him. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “I don’t know what to say to you anymore.”

We sat there again with neither of us saying anything. Suddenly, I couldn’t hold it back anymore and the tears started spilling from my eyes thick and fast. John moved closer to me and put an arm around my shoulders and his other hand rested on my thigh. The arm around my shoulder dropped as he rub up and down my back, trying to sooth my tears, which were refusing to stop.

After a while, I managed to recompose myself and John pulled his arms away from me but continued to stay close.

“I need to go,” I said, getting up and wiping the few remaining damp patches on my face.

“Please don’t,” John protested.

“I HAVE to,” I told him, walking to the door and out of his house. I got all the way to my car before I heard him call my name behind me. As I stopped and turned around, he stared at me briefly before opening his mouth.

“I love you.”

“I love you too, John, but it’s too late. And maybe that’s just not enough anymore,” I told him before I unlocked my car and opened the door. As I took one more look at him stood on the sidewalk, I immediately regretted it. “I’m sorry,” I told him, then got in my car and drove away.