Cheers erupt, and my chest flutters happily. I cock my hip, playing it all up. “A surprise? You know what happened last time someone surprised me on stage, right?”
Felix grins. “Yeah. I pushed him right off onto Kanye West.”
The crowd erupts in more screams, and I lean into him, feeling a little like Ty on Christmas morning, bouncing with excitement.
“But it’s okay,” Felix continues as the screams die down. “You’re going to like this one.”
“Mmmm,” I say, pretending to consider. “What do you think, guys? Should I give him a chance?”
More screams and cheers. He kisses me again and then goes back to his chair, where Roxie has brought over one of the mics and adjusted it to face height.
I stare at him. Is he going to sing?
He plays the first notes of “Danny’s Song” by Kenny Loggins, and I’m already melting. It’s not the first time he’d surprised me by doing so. At our wedding, he played and sang this one—my favorite song ever, because it was what I sang to Ty that night when I first decided I wanted to step up and actually be his mom. I’d been floored by Felix performing it for me, and not just on the cello. Felix had made it pretty clear he doesn’t sing.
But he can—really well, actually.
I melt further as he starts to sing the words—not the original words he sang at the wedding, but ones he’s clearly written just for us. About how much I mean to him, about how the three of us are a family, and, yes, everything’s gonna be all right.
I didn’t think I could love that song, or him, any more than I already do, but somehow Felix has managed it. Tears are spilling over my cheeks as the song ends, and I’m so happy I can barely contain myself. Felix lays June down and I climb onto his lap and just kiss the hell out of him while the crowd goes wild.
I’m with Felix, and we’re married and in love and just starting our lives together. And right now, right here, I’m happier than I ever thought I could possibly be.
Two
Felix
After the show, Jenna and I collapse in our hotel room. She sets down a box of what remains of the Coney Dogs she ordered in after the show—a tradition of hers, apparently, of trying whatever famous or well-reviewed local food she can get delivered in the middle of the night.
Being Jenna Rollins means she can pretty much get whatever she wants.
We should be crashing—we have a flight tomorrow and a long string of these concerts to do. Not to mention Ty, who’s come along on tour with his grandparents as chaperones. He didn’t stay up for the concert, so he’ll no doubt be up at his usual early-morning hour, eager for our attention.
But we’re still high on the post-concert buzz, talking and laughing the whole limo ride back to the hotel about how incredible it all was, both of us giddy and loud. I can’t stop smiling about the audience reaction, to the video, to the song I sang for Jenna, to the cell phone lights during the sonata—in all my years of playing classical, I never saw that image coming. The Ravel was ambitious and demanding, especially on short notice, kind of like our lives lately. I’d thought Jenna was going to tell me I was crazy when I picked it, and she probably should have. But instead she threw herself into it, playing beautifully, if not perfectly—the way she does with everything in our lives, and I respect her for it.
But most of all, what makes me smile is us. Being with her, being married to her. Not to mention getting to perform together like this—our music, which I love. It’s raw and powerful and lays bare a lot of stuff Jenna’s never talked about in her songs before. And while everything we’re putting on display is carefully curated, and there’s a lot we’re not ready to share, the bits we’re giving are being generously accepted, and that makes it worth all the planning and stress.
We’re winning them over. That stadium full of people were on board, not just with Jenna, but with me. Word will spread, and hopefully tickets to the remaining venues will sell out fast.
I watch Jenna as she pulls pins and extensions carefully out of her hair and drops them onto the dresser next to the big flat-screen TV. I’m pretty sure sleep is still a few hours off, which is going to come back to bite us tomorrow, but right now, I just want to bask in what we’ve accomplished.
And, well, her.
Jenna rakes her hands through her hair, which crinkles with hairspray, and stares at her reflection in the blank TV screen. Then she looks back at me, the giddy smile from before replaced by an expression more cautious, serious. Anxious, even, though she’s clearly trying not to be.
And I can tell even before she speaks that her thoughts have taken a darker turn.
“He didn’t show up,” she says.
Grant, obviously. “Or if he did, he was just one guy in the crowd.”
Jenna nods, though she doesn’t look consoled. Her mascara is now smudged along the side of her eye. “Did you hear anything from security?”
I shake my head. “Phil said no one reported seeing him. They had to deal with some pushy fans, but no one with his description.”
Jenna lets out a slow breath, and I move up behind her and put my arms around her. “I wish he didn’t get to you,” I say. “He can’t hurt you anymore.”
Jenna wilts in my arms. “I’m the idiot who let him do it before.”
My arms tighten around her. I hate it when she talks like that—like some dick coercing her into letting him choke her is somehow her fault. This wasn’t made better by the contents of the messages he sent her.
The things he called her made me want to strangle him with a cello string, except the bastard would probably get off on that.
“Well no one is going to let him now,” I say. “You know that, right?”
“Right,” Jenna says. She slips out of my arms, gently, like she doesn’t want me to think she’s brushing me off. But she is. I can tell by the way she doesn’t look at me when she crosses the room to wash her face.
I sink onto the bed, some of the concert high wearing off, crumbling with thoughts of asshole exes. And other things.
Things I don’t particularly want to bring up, but since we’re already talking about stuff we both wish we didn’t have to deal with . . .
“I didn’t take anything off the stage,” I say. “Heroin or otherwise.”
Jenna splashes her face with water. She still doesn’t look at me. “Did you see anything?”
During the show, I made it my business not to look. I saw few more obvious things—a girl’s shirt, most notably, and a couple of roses. It wasn’t hard to guess who each of those were aimed at.
Afterward was another story.
“Not heroin,” I say, kicking off my shoes and then my jeans, leaving them and my shirt in a pile beside the bed rather than folding them neatly, as I’m sure Allison, our type-A costumer, would prefer. “Needles, though. You were right about those. And a couple of joints.”
Jenna plants her hands on the edge of the sink. In the mirror, I can see water dripping off her chin. “Did you want to take them?”
“No,” I say, lying back with my head on a pillow. “The joints are no temptation.” I’ve never smoked pot. Jenna knows this. Ironically, I’ve almost never had anything besides heroin. After doing that once, it never felt like I needed anything new. “The needles might as well have been rattlesnakes, for all I wanted to touch them. I saw one next to my cello case and it scared me to death.”
Jenna dries her face. She’s still not looking at me, and there’s a dull, empty ache in my chest.
I’m beyond lucky Jenna gave me another chance—god, more than that, she married me—even though I’m still barely ninety days sober. I know all the recovery stuff is new to her, and I know it shouldn’t bother me how much it still hurts her to hear about it.
But it does.
Jenna busies herself with changing her clothes, stripping down to her underwear and pulling
on a Ben Folds concert t-shirt she likes to sleep in. Maybe she’s just tired, or winding down from the adrenaline surge of the concert, but the silence feels heavy.
“But that’s good news, right?” I say. “I didn’t want to touch them.”
Jenna nods. “Do you think it’ll always be that way?”
“No,” I say. We both know this is the answer. She’s lived with me long enough to see some bad days, when getting out of bed is the last thing in the world I want to do—or the last thing besides go out and buy some gear and shoot up until I forget my own name. “But I’m not going to use.”
Jenna climbs in bed beside me, the remaining hot dogs forgotten on the table. She lies facing me, but doesn’t touch me. “I believe you,” she says.
I hate how unsure she sounds.
She shouldn’t have to talk about this, not right after our first show. I decide to change the subject. “So you liked the song?” I ask.
She smiles, and it’s genuine, and for a second I think I see tears in her eyes again. “You have no idea what that meant to me,” she says. “That you would sing that for me, in front of all those people. I know you don’t like to sing.”
I smile. “I never said I didn’t like it.”
“Do you?”
“I plead the fifth.” I fold my lips between my teeth.
“You do!” she rolls over and pokes me in the stomach, and I curl around her like she’s mortally wounded me. “I’m going to convince you to sing with me yet.”
“You are,” I say. “That was part of the surprise, you know. That I’m willing to sing, when you write a song for us to do together.” I poke her back. “One you didn’t used to sing with Alec.”
She laughs, and the tension from before is gone. Her bare legs wrap around mine, her skin soft and warm. “And you’re going to sing that song again, right? At every concert. And record it for me.”
I laugh. “Phil’s still working on the recording rights. I barely got the performance rights for the show.”
Her gray eyes sparkle. “But you’re working on it.”
“Yes,” I say. “And I’ll sing to you. At every show. But only because it makes you so happy.”
“You make me happy,” she says, leaning in to press her lips to mine, softly, and the rush is back, the familiar floating feeling that I’m actually lucky enough to be here with her—not to mention all the other familiar feelings my body is having, with her so close and so barely-dressed. She pulls back with a grin and shakes her head. “I can’t believe you kept that a secret.”
“It wasn’t that difficult,” I say, grazing my fingers along her arm. “The idea of showing my lyrics to you was terrifying.”
“You have a talent for it. Next thing you know, you’ll be the one writing our music.”
“Our music,” I say. “I may never get tired of hearing you call it that.” I reach for her hand, lacing my fingers with hers. “Actually, I was thinking I might try it. Writing a song, I mean.”
Jenna’s eyes crinkle. “I’m pretty sure you already did.”
“A new one,” I say. “For Katy.”
Jenna is quiet, and for a terrified minute, I’m afraid she thinks this is a horrible idea. I’m talking about writing a song for another girl, even if I barely knew her and just happened to be present for her death. Katy’s overdose was the reason I went back to rehab the last time; the thing that finally scared me enough to make me really want to get help. I still have more guilt about that than I should, both for being partially responsible for her death—however accidentally—and for being the one who got clean, instead of the one who never woke up.
“I could help you with it, if you wanted,” Jenna says. “And if you wanted to go public with the story, or even if you didn’t—we could donate the proceeds of the song to organizations fighting addiction.”
I smile, relieved. I’d been thinking along those lines. I’m working on step seven, where I’m supposed to be asking God to remove my weaknesses. I’m not at all sure I’m doing it right, but I also think maybe I’m overcomplicating it to avoid beginning steps eight and nine—where I need to plan and make apologies and restitution.
“I’ve been thinking more and more I’m going to contact her family,” I say. Just thinking about it ties my guts in knots. “When I’m doing step nine. I hurt them, and I don’t want to make it worse, but I at least want to write them a letter.”
Jenna shimmies closer, and I put my arm around her and feel some of my tension uncoil. “I think that’ll be a good thing,” she says. “However they take it.”
I nod. “Yeah, that’s part of what I’m supposed to be doing. Letting go of how other people react and just saying the things I need to say and letting other people make their own choices.” I clear my throat. “And respecting their wishes if they don’t want to hear from me again.”
Jenna burrows into my chest, and I hold her close, feeling her heartbeat against me. A silence falls between us, but it’s a comfortable silence. And then, into my shoulder, she says, “I’m sorry about Grant.”
I pull back to look her in the eye, but she won’t look at me again. “What’s there to be sorry about? You didn’t make him write those messages.”
Jenna shrugs. “Yeah, but you thought my past was in the past, and now it’s coming back to bother us, and I’m freaking out about it, and it’s not fair to you.”
I’m reasonably certain there’s some thread that ties all those thoughts together in her head, but I’m not entirely sure what it is. “It is in the past,” I say. “I still have cravings. I still have to go to meetings and therapy and take Suboxone and avoid bars and all kinds of things that affect our lives. If we’re tallying up whose past is in the past, yours is doing a lot better than mine.”
She holds her breath for a moment and my stomach drops. I’m sure she’s going to tell me how much it bothers her that these things are all still part of my life, and if that’s how she feels, I want her to tell me. It just drives me crazy that I can’t do a damn thing to fix it.
“I just don’t see how it could not affect how you think about me,” she says. “Especially after reading the letters. Knowing I put up with that. That I felt I deserved the way he treated me. That I stayed.”
I slide my arms under her, gathering her to me, lying on top of her with my fingers weaving through her hair. “I love you,” I say. “I don’t blame you for what he did to you, then or now.”
Jenna smiles sadly, and pulls me down close. “I don’t deserve you,” she says with a little sigh. But as I hold her, this incredible woman who is somehow even more incredibly my wife, I can’t help but feel like if anyone’s undeserving here, it’s definitely me.
I wake up, as I often do these days, to an eight-year-old bouncing up and down on his knees next to my ribs.
“Wake up,” Ty is shouting. “It’s Easter!”
I groan. “I’m fairly certain it’s not,” I say. “Unless I slept through a full six months.”
Ty bounces up and down on top of me again and I roll, spilling him off. He perches on the edge of the bed, wearing his Harry Potter pajamas and with his blond hair mussed in a raging case of bedhead that probably resembles my own. He grins at me. “Nana and Pops said we were going to go shopping for a Halloween costume, and that’s when I had my idea.”
“To decide it’s April?”
“To celebrate Easter,” Ty says. “Because you’re my dad, but you’ve missed all the Easters.”
I’m awake now, and I sit up and face him, sheets settling across my lap. I can tell Jenna’s awake, too, but she’s lying very still, like she doesn’t want Ty to notice.
I’ve missed all the Easters. He isn’t saying it like he’s upset, just like it’s a fact of our lives, which it is. But I can’t help but feel sad about it. Ty’s felt like my kid since before I was sure he would be, and while a lot of things over the last
month have been hard—the mad rush to get material ready for the show being a large part of it—being his dad has been easy, like I’m shrugging on clothes that were made to fit.
Like somehow I was always his father, even before I met the kid.
“I’ll be there next Easter,” I tell him. “I’ll be there every year from now on, okay?”
Ty gives me a look. “You’re not listening. Today is Easter. We have eggs to find and everything. Come on.”
Now Jenna stirs. “We have a plane to catch at ten AM. I don’t know that we have time for—”
Jenna’s dad’s voice floats in from the hall. “That’s why we let him wake you at five. We’d better get down to the breakfast area or the staff are going to show up to set out pancakes and wonder why the Easter Bunny showed up in October.”
I can’t help but smile, even though this means Jenna and I have had about three hours of sleep. “You dyed eggs and hid them inside the hotel.”
Ty’s face grows serious. “It was the Easter Bunny. Come on.” He drags me by my arm out of bed, and I stumble over to my suitcase in my boxers and find some regular jeans—not the designer ones I wear on stage—and a shirt.
Jenna rolls over and looks like she’s about to go back to bed, but instead she slips on her glasses and follows us out of the room wearing yoga pants and a t-shirt. There may be pictures of this on the internet tomorrow—Jenna Rollins without makeup or contacts, hunting for Easter eggs with me and my brand-new son—but I’m glad to see that she doesn’t care. Or if she does, she thinks being with us is worth it.
Ty insists I hold a wicker basket that I’m pretty sure is meant to hold some kind of wine and cheese assortment as we collect the actual dyed eggs he—or the Easter Bunny, as he continues to insist—has hidden all over the lobby and breakfast areas of the hotel in improbable places: in potted plants, in the bottom of the brochure stand, sunk at the bottom of an actual koi pond. Jenna’s parents follow us around, warning me not to break the eggs because while they managed to dye them in their hotel room, they didn’t have the resources to hard-boil them. Jenna’s dad gives me a long-suffering look, which is better than a lot of the looks he’s given me over the last several weeks.
The Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour Page 2
