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Marcus had always been the steady Sullivan, the one who knehat do in any situation However, from the first moment with Nicola, he’d been completely out of his depth More so now than ever before But even though he’d known all along that their relationship was going to end in the very near future, he hated the thought of it ending this way

"You’ve never been a pop star to me, Nicola You’ve always just been you A woman I wanted and liked fro more than a sex kitten, I’ seconds Finally, she said, "It’s nice of you to say that"

He waited for ht he was uy in a suit who kne to make her scream with pleasure when she ca and looked at the tiet to the Warfield?"

Suddenly, he felt like he was bending over backward to try to get her to listen to his apologies, but she wasn’t willing to bend at all

Hadn’t he spent two straight years bending over for Jill, doing whatever he could to make her happy? Look how that had turned out If he’d been too boring, too emotionless for Jill, then surely one day soon, even if he and Nicola found a way to patch things up today, she would surely end up bored with him, tooand eventually he’d have the extreuy with piercings and a goatee, knowing he’d been a fool one more time

"About an hour"

"I hope there’s no traffic If you know any short cuts, I’d appreciate you taking the love in the ocean to sitting in his car while Nicola spoke to hi her again for forgiveness He’d tried She’d pushed him away

They were done

"Don’t worry," he told her in a voice that was just as distant as hers had been, "I’ll hteen

Thank God she’d done a thousand shows like this one, Nicola thought as she went through thearound with her band She , but she felt hollow Es Marcus had said to her kept repeating over and over in her head, so loudly that she actually forgot the lyrics to one of her songs and had to stop in the ize to her band with a joke, pretend she didn’t see the way they looked at her, at each other, with questions in their eyes

One slip She was only ever one slip away fros and wild parties

Of course, she wasn’t exactly helping herself by playing into the wild ie, the fact that she let herself be photographed with people whose wild iined

It was as much as Marcus had said to her out on the beach, when they were angrily throords at each other

She knew that was a large part of why she’d been so angry Maybe if she could have taken one breath, and then another, she could have let herself adirl iwith it And that she wanted to let her songs stand for themselves

Just the power of her music, sink or sithout the silent promise of sex to sell them to the world