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“You really don’t remember sending me any of these?”
I sighed and shook my head. Had I really been that drunk that I didn’t remember sending her letters? Was this going to be a disaster of my own making in the end?
“Can I see any of them? They might refresh my memory.”
“This one was one of the first that wasn’t a birthday or a Christmas card,” she explained fondly, untying the ribbon and pulling it from the bundle. “Let me read it to you,” she suggested, looking at the ropes around me.
Silently I nodded, and she began reading what ‘I’ had written.
“Dear Natasha,
Tonight was the first gig in London, and it was an insane one. I don’t think any of us had been prepared for just how much noise was going to be coming back at us from an arena with over twenty thousand fans packed in and ready to see us. It was an amazing experience! I really hope you were there, and you got to see for yourself just how unreal it was. I’m buzzing, I have been for hours, and I can’t wait to do it all over again already!
Write soon,
Love, Lennox xo.”
I blinked, taking in the words as she read them. They sounded familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on where I knew them from. Had I really been so drunk that I didn’t know what I was doing? No, I pushed that thought from my mind. This was on the first day of the first tour that we ever did. It was another six months or so before I really started to even feel like shit about what the record label were pushing, and at least another year before I started to drink. So why couldn’t I remember sending her this letter?
“Does it sound familiar?”
“A little,” I admitted.
“You know these cards and notes got me through some pretty tough shit in my life,” Natasha disclosed in return. “I’ve re-read them a lot. They’re why I love you, and why I know you feel the same about me.”
I tried not to react to her words. I didn’t want to hurt her and have her overreact to what I said or did. I wanted to get out of here alive.
I thought about Tom again and just how much I wanted to get back to him. How much I wanted to be able to just straight up tell him that I was into him and I wanted to have a relationship with him.
“Let me read you another one,” Natasha suggested hopefully. When I nodded in agreement, she started to read another letter.
I listened, and again the words sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place where I knew them from. I was starting to doubt my memory. Maybe I had sent them to her. Maybe in my drunken desperation for company I had picked up on something that she needed via one of her letters in reply. She said she wrote back.
Natasha read me card after card, note after note. More and more of the words sounded familiar to me. I felt guilt, I felt forlorn, I felt numb. And in that almost checked-out haze of half-listening to her reading note number whatever-it-was, something in the words caught my attention.
“Wait, what was that last part?”
She stopped and looked at me with a furrowed brow.
“Read that last paragraph again for me? Please?” I begged her with my eyes to repeat the words. I thought I had it now. She looked at me suspiciously and read what was in front of her for the second time.
A lightbulb went off somewhere in my mind. I knew where the words came from now and why they were familiar. I just wasn’t sure how much Natasha was going to like what I was going to say.
“I recognise some of the words in those letters.”
A smile grew on her face and my guilt and trepidation rose again. “I knew you would remember! I knew that it wouldn’t take long for you to realise just what we used to have.”
I wanted to tell her where I knew the letters from. But something in me reminded me of how dangerous a situation I was in. This woman was holding me at gun-point, tied to a chair in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. I had no idea how to get out of this. My panicked mind had only one answer for me. Pray, and play along. Pray that wherever I was, Tom was going to be able to figure it out and come to my rescue and play along just long enough to give him the time he needed to find me.
“You’re right, I remember. I wrote those during our very first tour.” I smiled weakly at her as her face lit up with joy at my recognition.
“Yes!” She beamed.
“I wrote those notes for a backstage glimpse of life on the road. I’m glad that you still have them. I’d forgotten what it was like on that first tour until you read them to me.”
She moved herself closer to me. “Do you remember what I told you all those years ago?”
“Drinking so much really messed with my memory. Remind me what you said?” I smiled fakely at her. At least that wasn’t a complete lie. When I was drinking the most, I lost days to the booze. It was one of the biggest factors in me getting into rehab and getting myself sorted.
