Not a single one of the bastards tried to help. Instead, the flashes intensified and now they were crowding over the top of me and I had nowhere to go.

With a detached sense of reality, I saw Alex knock two photographers out of the way, charging into the fray to get back to me. He looked angry and massive as he tore through the mob, reaching me in seconds that felt like they would never end.

He extended a hand down and locked his with mine, pulling me to my feet. That hand I’d been so dismissive of only moments earlier now felt like a lifeline, a tether to his steady strength. We started to walk with Alex’s arm thrown protectively around me, but I remembered too late that my heel was broken and started to fall again.

He caught me, and this time lifted me into his arms, holding me tightly against his body as he strode through the press of people. I turned my head to his chest, shielding my eyes from the continued assault of flashing cameras. In that moment, I didn’t think about whether I looked weak or ridiculous. I was just so happy to feel safe again, inhaling the reassuring scent of him in tight breaths as I tried not to humiliate myself by crying.

We reconnected with security when we reached the car, where Alex set me down carefully and I scrambled into the back seat with as much dignity as I could muster. He followed me in, slamming the door closed behind him.

The car seemed overwhelmingly quiet now that the roar of the shouting was dulled, but the flashes continued.

For a few tense moments, I thought the driver wasn’t going to be able to make it through the crowd without running anyone over, but security cleared a path, and suddenly we were driving on the open road, the silence between us deafening as we both simply sat and breathed heavily.

“Was that planned?” I snapped, assuming that’s what the message he got at the restaurant had been. Why let me walk into that unprepared? Did they plan it that way to get an authentic reaction from me? I’d gone from scared to angry, embracing the rage as something to burn away the shame of how pathetic I’d been.

“No! I knew there was a crowd of paparazzi outside waiting for us, but that’s it!”

I studied him, trying to decide whether to believe him. He started to speak again, but his phone went off and he answered it immediately.

He sat tensely, listening for several seconds. “What?! No, she’s not drunk. What the hell, Asha? That’s not what happened at all. We got separated and she fell, probably because one of them tripped her. We weren’t going to make it out of there, so I picked her up and got us to the car.”

I pointed to my broken shoe when I took it off, and he nodded, listening to whatever Asha was saying.