Chapter
42: Return To Me
When Chance left…
Darren frantically ran up the stairs of the condo to search for Chance. She wasn’t there, and neither were her bags or clothes. He kept searching until he couldn’t find her anywhere. He had made his way onto the beach when he realized she had left for good.
“Fuck!” Darren cried when he realized she was out of his life again. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have gone along with Dan and Shiri,’ he angrily though to himself.
“Darren!” Dan called from behind him. Reaching his best friend, he rested his hands on his knees and panted to get his breath back. “Did you find her?”
Darren glared at him and turned away towards the beach house. He didn’t want to talk to his former best friend after what he had done to him. As Darren walked farther away from the ocean, he could hear Dan running towards him.
“What do you want?” Darren yelled in his face as he walked up to him. “You’ve already screwed up my life enough, what more do you want to do to me? Kill me?”
“Darren, listen to me. Nobody was planning for this to happen. Nobody knew how Chance would react to the news. I’m just as saddened by it as you are,” Dan tried to explain.
“But you didn’t lose your fiancé over it, did you?” Darren kept yelling. “You didn’t really lose anyone. You still have your wife.”
“I did lose someone!” Dan shouted back. “I lost my best friend!”
“Then why did you tell your so called best friend that she was really adopted and that her sister was Shiri?” Darren retorted.
“I didn’t want to do this! It was Shiri’s idea! She wanted to find out if Chance was part of her family. Why are you yelling at me?” Dan asked.
“Because you’re the fucking idiot that went along with her, that’s why!”
“So did you!”
Darren’s eyes began to glow with fury. He lunged at Dan and began to fight with him on the sand. Shiri was only a few meters away and quickly came to stop the fight. By the time she got there, the two were already at each other’s throats and ready to choke each other to death. Darren threw a few punches Dan’s way and vice versa.
“Enough!” Shiri’s high-pitched shriek stopped them dead in their tracks. She pulled Daniel away and looked him over. His lip was fat and bleeding, and his face was a total mess. Darren was pretty much the same way, except instead of a bloody lip, his eye was swollen shut.
“You two act like five year olds!” It was her turn to yell. “I’m ashamed of both of you! There’s nothing more embarrassing than having two superstars trying to beat the shit out of each other. Let alone being married to one of them. What the hell is wrong with you? There are bigger things that we need to figure out. We don’t need any fighting at the present time. We need to find Chance.”
“Where are we gonna find her?” Darren asked as he felt his jaw.
“Let’s start with local hotels the work our way up. I’ll ask around to see if anyone has seen her. You two can then search the local coffee shops to see if she’s been to one of them. Our last resort is the airport, but I seriously doubt that she’s going anywhere. Come on, let’s go,” Shiri said as she marched down the beach in a determined manner.
Dan and Darren stayed put on the sand as they watched her leave. Shiri turned back to see that they weren’t following her and immediately ran back to where they were sitting.
“There’s no chance in hell I’m going anywhere with him,” Darren stubbornly answered her unspoken question as he pointed a finger at Dan.
“ARG! You two are even more childish than I expected!” Shiri almost screamed. “You’d better apologize, or Dan, we’re not having sex tonight.”
Dan’s mouth dropped with the last comment. He quickly turned to Darren and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry,” Darren grumbled as he stood up and slowly made his way back to the house.
They began their search of the hotels a few hours later. They hadn’t found a single person who had seen Chance all day. The next things on their list were the coffee shops in the area. Again, no sign of Chance anywhere. During their search, Shiri had made a number of phone calls to friends and family trying to figure out where Chance had gone. Nobody seemed to know. Darren was becoming more and more panicked at the hours passed without a single thread of information.
On the drive back home, he was completely distant from everyone around him. His thoughts drifted from the fight to Chance to the information he had just found out that day. He couldn’t put it all together and had trouble sorting all out in his mind. He felt as if he had been shot and was still bleeding from the open wound.
“Darren?” Shiri asked as she gently touched his shoulder. He jumped then looked at her as his heart began to beat normally again. “I’m sorry we didn’t find Chance. I’m sorry all this had to happen today. I’m sorry I had to tell her the news that she was my sister,” she started crying.
Darren wrapped his arms around her when he realized that she also felt bad about what had happened with Chance that day. Shiri was just as devastated about the outcome as Darren was. She cried on his shoulder while they drove back to the condo. Darren got out of the car and pulled out his keys.
“Thanks, guys,” he said as he walked up the lonely stairs and into the even lonelier condo. Darren plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV.
~~~~~~~~~~
A phone call woke Darren from his restless sleep that morning. He staggered to the cordless and answered it. “Hello?”
“Darren? What’s going on? You sound sick,” a soft female voice said.
“I’ve just had the worst night of my life, Leonie,” he replied, slumping into a chair at the kitchen table. She was, of course, his solo manager.
“What happened?” she calmly asked.
“Chance left me,” Darren mumbled.
“What was that? I didn’t hear you,” Leonie said.
“Chance is gone! She left!” he almost yelled.
“Whoa! Hon, calm down. She left?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because Dan and Shiri told her the truth about her past. They told her that she was adopted and that she was Shiri’s sister. Things got fucked up from then on, and she left because she couldn’t handle all of this. And you know what else happened behind my back? Dan got married to Shiri! Can things get anymore mess up than this?”
Leonie bit down on her lip, then said, “Yeah, Sony wants you to promote the album and the single.”
Darren slammed his head onto the wooden table and stayed that way until the throbbing stopped. “Shit,” he replied. “What am I supposed to do without Chance? This is her song, not mine. I can’t go and tour without her. She’s the lead. Am I just supposed to go and look for another girl to sing it now that my fiancé decided to drop off the face of the earth?”
“Daz, calm down. I’m on damage control right now. Give me a few days and I’ll have this all cleared up with the record company and the media. First things first, what do you want to say?” she asked.
“What do you think I should do?” Darren responded. He had no clue as to what he was going to do now with his musical career.
“Tell the truth,” Leonie honestly suggest.
Darren thought for a long time about it. He wanted to make sure this was the best choice. He ran through most of the questions reporters would probably ask him. He could almost picture the headlines in the National Enquirer and all those other tabloid papers. His career was going down the drain, and he knew it.
“Fine, but try to keep all the rumors down. Don’t make too many interviews, just do performances. I don’t feel like explaining my life to the public at the moment. And don’t tell anyone about Dan’s marriage. He doesn’t want to reveal that to the public just yet,” Darren finally informed her.
“Okay, anything you say. I have to go get this done now. I’ll talk to you later,” she replied. “Take care of yourself. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I won’t. Bye.”
“Bye.”
The moment Leonie hung up the phone, Darren made his way to the wine cabinet in the fridge. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he bitterly laughed at the comment. Rummaging through the many bottles, he finally found the stashed Vodka he had place in there months ago for an occasion such as this. Instead of taking a shot glass from the cabinet, he opened the bottle and drank straight from it. He sat down on the couch and turned on the TV again.
Flipping through the channels, Darren settled on MTV. At that moment,
the new 3 Doors Down song was playing. With it’s end came ‘N Sync’s “Gone” video.
Darren paused his drinking for a moment to listen to the lyrics. “I've been sittin’ here. Can't get you off mind. I try my best to be a
man and be strong. I drive myself insane wishing I could touch your face. But
the truth remains your gone.”
“My life in one pathetic love song,” he grumbled, talking another long
swig of Vodka. The phone rang again.
“Now what?” Darren answered angrily.
“Daz, have you been drinking?” Dan immediately asked.
“No,” Darren quickly replied. “Why makes you think that?”
“Because you’re very angry when you’re drunk. And don’t try to fool me.
I know you have some kind of hard liquor in you possession as we speak. It’s
a good thing I’m on my way up the stairs right now, or you’d drink yourself
to death if you had the opportunity,” Dan reasoned, then knocked on the door.
“Shit,” Darren answered as he went to get it.
“I was right. Give me that.” Dan took the bottle of Vodka out of Darren’s
grasp and recapped it. “No more. You’re coming with me. Shiri doesn’t want you
staying here alone, so she’d made an extra bed out of the couch for you to sleep
on.”
“But I have to get my stuff,” Darren protested as he walked into his
bedroom and retrieved a backpack full of necessities. He walked back into the
living room. “Leonie called. She’s doing damage control.”
“Good, at least someone is impartial about all this. Makes it easier
on both of us. Did you make sure to tell her not to tell anyone about Shiri
and me?”
“Yeah, I made sure to. Don’t worry. Nobody knows, and nobody will know.”
Dan and Darren walked out of the condo and made their way back to Dan’s
car. Soon they were on their way to Shiri’s.
~~~~~~~~~~
Six weeks had passed since Chance’s disappearance. Darren had quit his worrying now that the press had been informed. He had to keep pushing the ideas that came into his mind far away so he wouldn’t go crazy. Leonie did the best she could with scheduling the promotional tour. The drawbacks were that everyone wanted to do an interview with him. She tried to get him on as few shows as possible, but the record company gave the orders, and they wanted more interviews.
Darren was struggling with trying to cope in his hell, and doing all these interviews only opened the wound in his heart larger and larger until finally, he snapped. It all happened after The Late Show. Hundreds of reporters and news crews were waiting to talk to him after the show. When he walked out of the studio, they were all in his face. Trying to be as polite and quiet as possible, he made his way through the mob with bodyguards all around him.
Darren safely made his way to the bus, but as soon as he stepped into his bunk, he began to cry. Leonie was in her bunk reading a magazine when she heard his muffled sobs. She found him sitting there on the covers holding a knife to his wrist.
“Darren,” she softly said trying to be as calm and in control as possible. “Put the knife down.”
Darren shook his head as he shivered. “I can’t take it anymore. This is driving me crazy. I can’t take answering all these questions anymore. Can’t you see what it’s doing to me?” he finally answered in a shaky voice.
Leonie cautiously got closer to him and took the hand he was holding the knife with. “You don’t have to do anymore interviews. I’ll call the record company and tell them they’re slowly killing you. The promo tour is over. You can go home. I don’t want to see you end up dead any time soon,” she said. She wiggled the knife out of his grasp and walked away with it only to return a few minutes later. “Come with me.”
“Where are we going?” Darren asked. He sounded like a frightened child going to school for the first time. Leonie led him to the back of the bus where there was a single couch.
“You can sleep here tonight,” she told him. “You need some more space than that little bunk.” She grabbed a blanket from her bunk and wrapped him in it. “Sleep tight,” she said, kissing his forehead.
“Night,” Darren managed to mumble as she walked away. When she was gone, he sifted through his pocked to find the diamond engagement ring that Chance had thrown at him. It sparkled in the twilight as he slowly rotated it with his hand. “Please come back,” he whispered into the darkness.
The next day, Darren returned to LA where Shiri and Dan kept an eagle eye on him day and night. They had been informed about his recent suicide attempt and were only looking out for his well-being. He promised them he’d go to a shrink, and that’s just what he did. In the hour-long session at the office ever few days, he’d talk about his problems and about his fears. It was there that he finally realized he needed to give up his search for Chance. She wasn’t coming back, and he needed to move on.
After two weeks of therapy, Darren moved back into the condo. That same day, he decided to get rid of the last remnant he had of Chance’s love.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chance walked out of the airport that same day to spot Steve waiting for her at the gate. She jumped into his arms and gave him a hug.
“I missed you so much,” she said.
“I didn’t think I’d ever hear from you again,” he happily replied.
“Come on, I’m dying to see Darren. I realized that I couldn’t hate him forever. I just want to apologize for waiting so long to forgive him.” Chance took Steve’s hand and dragged him to the waiting limo.
~~~~~~~~~~
Darren scribbled down a note on the kitchen table and walked out of the condo with the ring in his pocket. He strolled down the beach until he found the perfect place to sit down and think. It was a natural rock formation about a mile down from the condo. He sat down on the jagged edges and stared into the deep blue ocean as the sun set behind him.
Darren took the ring out of his pocket and looked at it in the fading light. He wasn’t ready to give it up just yet. He kept staring at the beautiful diamond and thought about Chance.
“Where are you?” he asked aloud. “Do you still love me?”
His words echoed in his mind as he returned his gaze to the ocean.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chance opened the door to the condo and yelled, “Honey, I’m home!” But no answer came, just eerie silence.
“Is he here?” Steve asked.
“No, that’s odd,” Chance replied. She walked into the empty house and into the kitchen where she found the note.
‘I’m taking a walk on the beach. I’ll be back soon. Daz,’ it read.
“Come on, I think I know where he is,” Chance said as she ran out of the condo and towards the beach. She threw her shoes off in the sand and ran down the ocean’s edge hoping she’d find Darren. As her bare feet flew effortlessly across the sand, her eyes scanned the surroundings for any signs of human life. It was then that she spotted the rock formation and Darren sitting on it looking out at the ocean.
“Darren!” Chance cried out. He sharply turned towards her with an angry glare in his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” Darren angrily asked. “I thought you had left for good.”
“So did I,” Chance shyly replied as she made her way towards him. “I realized I made a mistake by leaving. I guess I figured that out a little too late in my trip. I can see you’re over me.”
Darren tossed the ring in his hand and said, “Maybe, maybe not.”
“It’s a simple, straight forward question. Are you or are you not over me?” she asked.
He thought about everything he had been through in the last two months of his life without her. If he said no, he’d by lying. If he said yes, he’d be setting himself up for more pain in the long run. But what if she was here to stay, for good? “I’m not over you,” he answered quietly, his eyes falling away from her and to the ocean.
“Then let me come back to you, Darren. I love you. There’s nothing on earth that can change that,” Chance said, her hand gently reaching over to his cheek and moving his face so that she could look into his moist eyes. “I never stopped loving you. I never stopped thinking about you during my trip. There were times that I wanted to call, or even write to tell you about so many things, but I kept myself closed off because I was afraid I’d end up doing something I’d regret later on. And I did. I regret not talking to you and telling you I missed you and that I wanted to be there with you, cheering you on, telling you I loved you.”
As the sun began to set above their heads, Darren moved closer to the clearly upset Chance and put his arm around her waist. “Don’t regret it. I’m glad you didn’t call or write, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to make such a moving speech,” he told her. Darren took her hand and placed the ring back on her finger. “Will you still marry me even though I plotted against you with Dan and Shiri?”
“Of course,” Chance whispered, placing a tender kiss on his waiting lips.