Disharmony

Whatever It Takes

Xavier Spiers was a dead man.

He had been anticipating his downfall for about a week, but it wasn’t the actual event itself that was causing him tension; it was the fact that he had yet to tell Kari. Despite his confession that he was falling in love with her – which he knew had completely freaked her out – things between the two of them had never been better, probably because his confession had changed absolutely nothing. She had been grateful that he hadn’t pressured her into responding and the fact that he’d said those words was soon forgotten and things between them had gone back to normal.

It wasn’t as though he expected her to say them back anytime soon anyway. He was well aware that her last relationship had left her plenty jaded, so he was fine with just expressing his own emotions and waiting for her to be ready to do the same.

But he was afraid that her feelings for him would change once she found out what he did.

In retrospect, it had been a pretty stupid idea. Sure, he could say he had done it because he loved her and he knew it could make her happy in the long term, but the fact that he understood her so well meant that he also knew she wouldn’t see it that way. Kari had never been about the long term: her emotions were entirely invested in the here and now, which meant her reaction to his actions would be entirely filled with anger.

It had taken him all of five minutes after making the call to realize how idiotic that decision had been and seeing as he had only left a voicemail; he had hoped that there would simply be no response. But a week before, he’d gotten confirmation that his message had been received and now he was sitting on an amp on the side of the stage as he watched Kari soundcheck, wondering how he had managed to ruin the best thing that had ever happened to him in such a short amount of time.

He knew he had to tell her: keeping it a secret until it actually happened served no purpose to anyone. Besides, if she knew beforehand, she’d have more time to mentally prepare and then maybe she wouldn’t be pissed at him for as long. So it was now or never, he decided as she replaced the microphone in its stand and thanked the backup singers for their hard work.

Forcing the corners of his lips upwards into a smile, he pushed himself off the amp as she approached, shoving his fingers into the pockets of his jeans and sinking back onto the heels of his black Converse. “Hey, you sounded great.”

“Thanks,” she grinned, coming to a stop in front of him and flattening on hand against his chest, lifting herself to the balls of her feet and pressing a deep kiss to his lips, leaving him flustered and surprised when she pulled away.

They rarely, if ever, kissed in public. Kari had meant what she said about how being linked to her would just make Xavier’s life chaotic, so they generally kept their affection behind closed doors, but understood that they were exclusive to each other when out in the real world. Still, Kari had seemed to be on top of the world for the past couple weeks and she trusted her crew not to take pictures or leak things to the press, so she didn’t mind kissing the man who loved her on the side of the stage.

“Well, that was nice,” he murmured, wrapping his fingers around the hand that was pressed to his chest and tugging her further off the stage. “Come here.”

Her eyes lit with delight as she eagerly followed him out the stage exit door and down the hall to her dressing room, pressing her lips to his almost as soon as he shut the door. The pressure pushed him back against the closed door and he squeezed his fingers into her hips to hold himself steady, returning a few of her kisses before remembering the reason he had wanted them to have some privacy.

“Kar, Kar, wait,” he managed to breathe out between kisses, pulling his head back to catch his breath and gain some sense of coherence. “That’s not why I brought you back here.”

Lifting her eyebrows doubtfully, she twisted her lips into a knowing smirk, curling her fingers around the buttons on his flannel shirt. “Oh come on, Spiers, you don’t have to play innocent with me.”

He was well aware of that fact; that they didn’t need to play games with each other and that was one of the things he loved most about their relationship – the complete and total honesty regarding their feelings. Which why he owed it to her to tell her the truth before things progressed any further.

“I’m not,” he inhaled deeply. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

His words shifted the mood of the interaction almost immediately and she unfurled her fingers, stepping back to create some distance between them, her eyebrows drawn downwards in confusion. “What’s going on?”

Pressing his lips together, he gulped to alleviate the dryness in his throat, also hoping the action would calm the twisting knots in his stomach. Exhaling deeply through his nose, he gestured towards the worn leather couch pushed against the side wall of her dressing room. “Maybe you should take a seat.”

He knew the way he was handling the situation was probably scaring the s**t out of her, but he didn’t know how else to begin. He’d spent the past week running through every possible scenario in his head and trying to figure out the best way to say what he needed to say without her getting incredibly upset, but no matter how he played it out, there was no scenario in which this ended with them staying together and going back to how things used to be.

He was hopeful, that maybe she would understand his reasoning, but not optimistic, because at the end of the day, he knew what he had done had been incredibly stupid.

“Xavier…,” she said slowly, stepping backwards until the backs of her knees hit the edge of the couch and plopping down on the leather cushions. “You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”

Despite her words, he didn’t think she looked particularly scared. In fact, she looked more like she was bracing herself for the worst, because that was exactly what she expected. This is what happened every time – she would open herself to someone only to have them let her down and disappoint her and although Xavier had vowed he would never fall into that category, it seemed he was breaking promises all over the place.

“I, uhh,” he started, reaching up to pull his snapback off his head with one hand and tugging his fingers through his hair with the other. “I did something stupid and I don’t know why I did it, but at the time, I thought it was a good idea. But I realize now that it wasn’t and I wanted to apologize in advance.”

“What did you do?” she whispered, her face expressionless and he couldn’t help but think that he had never seen her look more like a child.

“I tracked down your dad.”

She blinked rapidly a couple times and he could tell she was doing her best to process his words before she responded, most likely recalling the night a few weeks ago when she had been lying with her head on his chest on the floor of her hotel room and told him how her father walked out on her when she was ten years old and how the last time she saw him had been at her first headline show when she was seventeen, an event at which he’d gotten so drunk, he’d vomited all over her thirty minutes before she was set to take the stage.

“Why? Why would you do that?” she said soft enough that he still couldn’t make out the emotion in her tone.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, settling his hat on top of his hair once more. “I guess I saw how you were when Dylan was here and how you were with my grandparents and I felt like you were longing for a family so I thought I’d reconnect you with yours.”

As soon as the words left his mouth he realized how utterly idiotic that sounded.

“So you felt sorry for me,” she deadpanned, crossing her arms over her chest and raising her eyebrows. “f**k you, Xavier.”

He supposed he deserved that, so he kept quiet as she continued.

“I don’t need your sympathy, okay? I am doing just fine on my own. I built my entire career from nothing without any help whatsoever from either of my parents. I made myself into who I am today entirely on my own, so don’t stand there and tell me that you thought I needed my family. I don’t need anybody, especially not my father.”

Pressing his lips together, he nodded, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans and wincing apologetically, because he still hadn’t told her everything for which he was apologizing. “He’s coming tonight.”

“What?” her eyebrows lifted upwards, her anger momentarily replaced by shock. “My dad? He’s coming here?”

“Yeah,” Xavier let out a shaky sigh. “I didn’t get a response when I originally reached out to him so I didn’t think anything was going to happen anyway, but he called me a week ago and told me he was coming to tonight’s show.”

All of the color drained from her face and her eyes widened as she stared at him in disbelief, her words coming out barely above a whisper. “I haven’t seen my father in five years.”

“I know,” he replied softly. “And I’m sorry and I wish I could go back and stop myself from calling him in the first place and I wish I had worked up the courage to tell you sooner, but I can’t and I didn’t, but I figured you should know.”

It took her a few minutes to respond and they inched by, making it seem like he’d been standing there for hours, willing her to speak, to say that she would forgive him for complicating her life in such a way. But that wasn’t what happened when she opened her mouth to speak, and although her words were exactly what he expected, they still made him feel as though his heart had been run over by a semi-truck.

“I think you should go.”

She was no longer making eye contact with him, her gaze averted to the coffee table to her front, as though she was reading the headlines of the magazines announcing the gender of the baby of Hollywood’s ‘it’ couple, but he knew that she just couldn’t stand to look at him. And the worst part was that he deserved it; he had been the cause of this situation. If he had just minded his own business and let Kari live her life as she wanted, she wouldn’t be sitting frozen in her dressing room, wondering what the hell she was going to say to a man she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager.

Nodding, he turned towards the door, parting his lips to apologize once more, but knowing it wouldn’t help in the slightest, so he pressed his lips together and slipped into the hallway, shutting the door behind him. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his back against the cement wall outside her dressing room and exhaling deeply through his nose, wondering if things between them would ever be the same, wondering if he had just shattered any chance he had of Kari reciprocating his feelings. Because he knew that she had meant what she said, that she didn’t need anyone, which meant that he was well aware that she didn’t need him either.