Runaway [cake au] ✔

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

I swallowed, hard. Was this really Calum asking me to run away with him? I had not seen this coming.

Or maybe I had.

In any case, a forgotten memory was now making a comeback... 10 years ago, Calum and I were sitting on the rooftop of an apartment building, talking about life and the future and our band.

"Wouldn't it be nice to just run away?" Calum asks idly, staring into the deep blue sky. Some pastel colours linger at the horizon from where the sun was earlier.

"Sure, but we'd be leaving behind an awful lot for everyone else to deal with," I reply, not really engaging or taking Calum seriously. "Don't you think?"

"Hmm," he murmurs. "Perhaps. But we'd be escaping a lot more."

At the time, I didn't know what Calum meant. To me he was just being an overdramatic teenager who'd had a few beers to drink – now looking back, maybe he'd been eluding to something completely different? Maybe he'd been hiding something from me, despite me being his best friend and boyfriend. Maybe, it was a cry for help for something a lot scarier than I had ever imagined.

"Luke? Did you hear me?"

"Is there a deeper reason as to why you ran away before?" I whispered, not daring to look him in the eye. "Or did you really just want to get away from the fame?"

He hesitated, either because he was preparing to tell me the truth or because he was thinking up a lie. Whichever of the two, he was being awfully shifty about it.

"It doesn't matter," he said dismissively. I sighed, rubbing my forehead with a palm.

"You can't ask me to run away with you if you won't even tell me what was wrong!" I replied in exasperation.

"Okay, okay. It's a long story-"

"I've got time."

"Fine. Just... okay. Do you remember Damien, the front man of our rival band 20SOA?" I nodded. Damien hadn't been a nice guy, that was all I could recall. "Well, I got in a bit of trouble with him back before we'd written She Looks So Perfect. Basically, we'd been writing together in secret (since management never let me write with him) and there was a song I thought would really suit our band. It was light, with a good guitar riff and decent rhythms section, but because I was there in secret, he couldn't credit me for the lyrics... And you know how shit his band was – they only covered super heavy metal songs and I knew that the song would be wasted on them."

"What did you do?" I asked, gulping as part of me really didn't want to know.

"I did something awful. I stole the song and told him it had been lost. Decided I would change a few of the lyrics then introduce it to you guys... except he found out. His career had been going downhill so apparently this song was exactly what he needed. I was adamant and said he could buy it off me if he really wanted it. Then he saw that we were about to make our massive debut into the music world with SLSP and used it as his opportunity to get revenge... He threatened me, saying that if I didn't leave the band he'd release to the newspapers what I'd done, and I couldn't possibly let you, Michael and Ashton deal with that... So I packed my bag and left, only I had no money."

"All that for a song? You could've come to us, Cal – talked it through, we could've mentioned it to Matt and management would've helped you!" I argued. He shook his head.

"I got into the mess, I had to get myself out."

"Okay, so you left – why ten years? And why did you come back for money? So you could keep on living in the shadows?"