“Why me?” Jane asked, as she sat up in the hotel bed, wrapping a sheet around herself. “Out of all the women in New York City you could get to go to bed with you?”

Adam had rolled onto his back and crossed his feet at the ankles, bracing his weight on his elbows as he looked up at her. “Do you remember my cousin Jeffrey’s wedding?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not. Do you remember?”

She shrugged impatiently. “That was 15 years ago.”

“Do you remember the conversation we had afterward?”

“Do you, Adam? Do you remember every conversation you had 15 years ago?”

“The important ones. Yeah.”

Jane let out a sigh. “What about it?”

“You pretty much asked me the same question. Do you remember what I said?”

“Something about magnets.”

He grinned at her and reached for her arm, pulling her back down in the bed with him. “See, little girl, you do remember.”

Jane was trying her best to keep glaring at him, but she couldn’t prevent the corners of her mouth from quirking up in a smile as she thought back to that day in the park.

“After that,” Adam prompted.

She shook her head slowly.

“Think,” he whispered.

“You said you felt like you were always putting on an act. You didn’t know how to be with a woman without feeling like that.”

“It’s crazy. I felt that way when I was an 18 year old little nobody. Can you imagine how it is for me now? I’m Adam Levine! When I’m with a woman, hell when I’m with anyone, it’s always the Adam Levine Show. It’s completely fucking exhausting. I can only do it for so long before I need a break. I spend the whole time I’m in a relationship with anyone just asking for space. The last one – I tried to push past it with her. She really was a great girl. I thought maybe if I just forced myself to keep going, I would eventually get past it. Two years, I stuck with it. Two years! Until finally I couldn’t keep it up anymore and she got fed up with all the excuses, and that was the end.”

He let out a harsh laugh. His words had brought back a memory of the early days in that relationship, when things were still supposedly fresh and exciting. It must have been early 2010. The guys had been working feverishly at the time on the latest album, Hands All Over, but the record label kept rejecting the new material. There weren’t any singles, they said. He’d felt frustrated, smothered, unable to focus on the music while constantly in his new girlfriend’s presence. He remembered locking himself in a hotel bathroom with a pad of paper one night and coming out the next morning with the lyrics to Misery.

I am in misery.

There ain't nobody who can comfort me.

Why won't you answer me?

The silence is slowly killing me.

He could laugh at himself now, looking back. There he was with a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model sleeping naked in the next room, and that was the song he had written. He had told himself he was done writing songs about Jane, but when his back was against the wall and he needed a single, that’s what came out. He knew right then and there that the new relationship wasn’t going to work. He should have broken it off, he thought guiltily, instead of wasting two perfectly good years of someone else’s life.

Jane was watching him now, a look of concern on her face.

“Anyway,” he shrugged, lightening his tone. “It’s nice to be with someone who knew me before I was famous. That’s all. It’s fun. Does there have to be any more to it than that?”

“OK.”

They watched each other tentatively, each thinking their own thoughts. He’d only told her half the truth just now. He knew very well there was a lot more at stake for him than just a bit of fun. A bit of fun wouldn’t have made his heart stop like it did when she’d started bickering with him a moment ago. He didn’t quite have the nerve to follow that thought through to whatever its logical conclusion might be. No, right now, he just needed to distract her from these questions she was asking so she didn’t leave.

He stroked her back as she shifted closer, resting her head on his shoulder. “So explain it to me, Janie. How is it possible you’re still single?”

“I almost got married once. We were engaged and everything.”

“What happened?”

“I broke it off.”

He nodded, keeping his face blank. He knew a thing or two about Jane breaking things off, but he also knew better than to jab her about that just now.

“Why?” he asked.

Jane thought back to the moment it all came apart. A spring day in 2007. A sudden New York City downpour, caught outside without an umbrella. She’d dashed under some scaffolding to save her expensive outfit from the rain as she came up out of the subway at Union Square, and suddenly there was Adam, looking straight at her through a store window, his eyes boring into hers – that smoldering look he used to bestow upon her when she had his full attention.

It wasn’t really him, of course. She was standing outside the Virgin Record Megastore. It was the window display for his second album, It Won’t Be Soon Before Long. They had blown up a publicity shot so large that his image was life-sized. It was a photo of the band members decked out in jackets and ties, with Adam front and center, staring straight ahead. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from his as she pressed her hand to the glass between them.

She had resolved, when she and Jeremy started getting serious, to quit her bad habit of following Adam’s career. She’d stopped cold turkey. No more reading the Maroon 5 fan sites, watching the videos of his TV appearances, waiting for the announcements of his latest tour dates. She’d even deleted Songs About Jane from her iPod. They were just songs, she told herself. Jeremy was real life, and she vowed to remain focused on him alone.

But that afternoon in Union Square, against all her resolutions, she walked into the record store and bought the new CD. She could have downloaded it, of course, but she wanted the liner notes. She wanted that photo. There was no way she could lie to herself that her motivations were innocent. She wanted to imagine Adam looking at her the way he used to do.

After listening to the album, things only got worse. There was one song, Goodnight Goodnight, and one line in particular that stopped her in her tracks.

I’m sorry, I did not mean to hurt my little girl. 

Little girl. It had been his pet name for her. He’d called her by it their first night together, and it had stuck. What did it mean, hearing it again in that song, so many years later? Probably that she should be insulted. She had been so interchangeable to him that he’d used the same name with all the other little girls that followed. Deep down, though, she couldn’t resist the urge to pretend that he was singing that song to her.

So much to love, so much to learn,

But I won’t be there to teach you.

I know I can’t be close,

But I try my best to reach you.

It was a fantasy, and yet she couldn’t help but indulge it. The first time she listened to the song and heard his voice uttering those words, it left her crying harder than she’d cried since the dark weeks just after she’d left him. She couldn’t stop listening to his voice. She couldn’t stop looking at his picture. She couldn’t stand the thought of Jeremy so much as touching her.

She’d managed to hide the confusion for a little while, waiting for the turmoil to pass, but eventually she knew it was over. She couldn’t marry Jeremy, as much as she wanted the life he had to offer her. Not when a cardboard image of another man in a store window made her feel more in one instant than Jeremy had ever made her feel in the entire course of their relationship.

After that, she’d given up on the idea of settling for a life with anyone who made her feel less. There were other men of course, semi-strangers who fulfilled her nighttime urges. But she was careful not to offer any of them more than she was prepared to give. She put her energy into her career, working 12-, 14-, sometimes 16-hour days. She made partner at age 32, one of the first in her law school class to rise so high so fast. Maybe this was how it was meant to be, she told herself, when she allowed herself to consider the subject of her future. She looked around at the other women who made it to the highest reaches of her profession, and so many of them were single and childless. Maybe that was her future as well, a road she had unwittingly started down her first month away at college – the inevitable destination of a one-way street, just off Avenue C, where fate had thrown her headlong into the path of an unyielding 18-wheeler named Adam Noah Levine.

“Jane?” He was looking at her questioningly, gently touching her shoulder. “Where did you just go?”

“Sorry, what were you saying?”

”Why did you break it off?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I guess I loved the idea of him more than I actually loved him. Something like that.”

“Ah,” Adam said with a knowing smile. “So, the sex was bad.”

She punched him in the arm, laughing in spite of herself. “The sex was fine.”

“Poor guy,” he shook his head sadly. “I’m a tough act to follow.”

“Who says the sex was any better with you?”

“Oh please.” He tackled her and started wrestling with her on the bed, grabbing her by the wrists and pinning them up above her head. “Admit it,” he said, eyes blazing, boring into her.

“Admit what?” she asked innocently, concealing from him the burst of heat coursing through her, struggling so hard not to shut her eyes when he looked straight through her to the core like that.

“I was better,” he commanded.

“You were better.”

“Ha!”

She squirmed to break free, but he held her firmly, locking her in place with his eyes.

“I was the best you ever had.”

Unable to bear his scrutiny any longer, she bucked with all her strength and rolled him over, pulling herself up on top.

“Don’t push your luck,” she said, pressing his shoulders down against the bed, reveling in his gasp as she ground her hips against him.

She couldn’t give him the satisfaction of the truth. The best she ever had? Yes, Adam. The first, the last, the best.

The only one she ever truly wanted.

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