Adam paced in front of the window of his hotel suite, checking his watch again. 8:45 PM. Maybe she worked late. Maybe she wasn’t going to show.

He couldn’t remember the last time he was this nervous over anything. The first time he’d played on live TV? Certainly not for a woman. When was the last time he’d felt much of anything for a woman?

After Jane broke up with him, he’d been in so much pain, he’d used sex to try to deaden it. It would make him numb for a little while. Some people used alcohol, some used drugs, he used sex. The problem was, sex wasn’t meant to be used as an analgesic. It was supposed to make your heart race. It was supposed to burn a hole in the pit of your stomach. That’s how it used to feel.

He figured he had broken it – whatever that thing was inside of him, his capacity for desire. He had abused it, and now it was broken beyond repair, like a cigarette lighter that had been flicked one too many times. Maybe it would never come back.

Not that he was a bad lover. He could get the girls off – no problem there. He just didn’t feel anything. Maybe he was just too jaded after banging so many of them. Or too ashamed of himself.

How would Jane even react, he remembered thinking to himself during those early months after she left him, when she found out the way he’d been behaving? He’d lain awake after some one night stand, imagining the look of disappointment on her face, and wrote the words to Tangled:

You’re just an innocent,

A helpless victim of a spider's web,

And I'm an insect,

Going after anything that I can get.

So you better turn your head and run,

And don't look back

'Cause I fear

There is nothing left to say to you

That you wanna hear,

That you wanna know.

I think I should go.

The things I've done are way too shameful.

Of course, he’d still assumed at that point that he would eventually see her again. It didn’t matter that she was stonewalling him, ignoring his calls and emails. She would respond eventually. And then when she cut off her phone number, changed her email address, he still hadn’t given up. No, he’d just recorded the album, knowing she must be out there somewhere listening. If he could just get her to listen, he’d been confident, he could convince her to come back. He’d always been able to talk her into just about anything. But Songs About Jane had only been met with more silence. That’s what had really twisted the knife. He’d fucking named a record after her, and she couldn’t so much as pick up the phone. He’d gone through the whole gamut of emotions after that. Anger, bitterness, depression, and no matter what, a never-ending longing to see her.

Eventually, he’d come to believe that it was all in his head, this obsession he had with her. He’d idealized their relationship, building up a memory of something that had never really existed. That’s why he had so much trouble connecting with anyone else, he told himself. They were all competing against a fantasy. Jane was just a girl like any other girl.

That’s why he wanted to see Jane so badly now, he decided. He wanted to feel that awkwardness that comes from talking to someone you used to know but who is now nothing more than a stranger. He wanted to be alone in a room with her and feel nothing. If he could only see her again, he was sure, this hold she had over him would be broken. Maybe then he’d be free at last to feel something with someone else.

That’s why he was so nervous now, right? He didn’t allow himself to dwell on the niggling doubt in the back of his mind. What had that feeling been this morning, when he stood up on that stage and watched Jane touch her hand to her heart from fifty feet away? What was this tightness now in his chest that made him feel like he was a teenager again?

His thoughts were interrupted by the hotel phone beeping. “Mr. Levine, I have a Jane Smith here to see you. She has the password.”

Jane. Alone in a room with Jane. His lungs weren’t working quite properly all of a sudden.

“Send her up.”

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