by Selena Kitt
Part Two: The Headliner
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Happy Halloween!” John opened the door when I knocked, and I laughed when I saw his costume.
“Crocodile Dundee?” I guessed.
“That’s right, mate!” He gave me a thumbs-up, doing his best Australian accent as I came into the apartment, shutting the door behind me. “Dale’s in his room. Are you sure you two don’t want to go out to a party or something?”
“We’ll be fine here giving out candy,” I assured him, heading back to Dale’s room, following the sound of the guitar.
I opened the door without knocking, finding Dale sitting on the bed, shirtless and barefoot, playing his acoustic. He looked up when he saw me, smiling, but didn’t stop playing as I closed the door, leaning against it, just watching him. He still took my breath away, two months into our relationship and every time I saw him, it was like flashbulbs and noisemakers went off in my head, alerting me the world’s best party was about to begin.
The song was familiar, and he played beautifully, hair falling across his face as he looked down, moving his fingers over the strings, playing the chords. Thank goodness there was a door to lean against, because for me, seeing him shirtless and barefoot with a guitar in his lap was like dangling raw meat in a tiger’s cage. I wanted to jump him right there. The last note of the song hung in the air as he peeked up at me, still smiling his dimple-making smile, his gaze starting at my face and sweeping downward—just jeans and a t-shirt, nothing fancy, but he looked at me like I’d walked in wearing an evening gown.
He always looked at me like that.
“Your father is dressed up as a Crocodile Dundee,” I remarked, moving forward toward him—toward the bed.
“I know.” He rolled his eyes, setting his guitar aside, leaning it against the nightstand, and holding his arms out to me. “Thank God he didn’t decide to go shirtless.”
“Or as Boy George.” I went to him, toeing off my sneakers as he tumbled me backwards onto the bed. Dale had a double bed. It was like swimming in the ocean after playing in the kiddie pool compared to mine.
“God forbid.” He captured my mouth before I could say another word, tasting like Tootsie rolls and Gatorade, a combination I had noted sitting on his night table. His lips, as always, were soft, inviting me to open to him. John didn’t care what we did in Dale’s room. Dale was an adult—that’s what John said—and what went on in Dale’s room was Dale’s business. It was so foreign to me to come across a parent who didn’t try to control every aspect of their child’s life—even if the child wasn’t technically a child at all anymore.
Not that we did anything in Dale’s room we didn’t do outside of Dale’s room. So far, in spite of my myriad of attempts at seducing this gorgeous man in my arms, we had done nothing but kiss. Just kiss. When my hands went to stray, he caught them and trapped me, kissing me into submission until I was so dizzy I forgot where they were headed in the first place. When his hands moved to those places I longed and ached for him to touch, just my response seemed to remind him he wanted to wait.
Except I didn’t know what we were waiting for.
“You’re going to be a rock star.” I whispered against his mouth, stroking the slight stubble on his cheek. He had discovered how ticklish I was when he rubbed his five o’clock shadow on my neck or belly, and I think he’d stopped shaving so often just for that reason.
“I don’t care.” Dale licked the corner of my mouth, first one side, then the other. “As long as I’m your rock star.”
“Ha.” I rolled him onto his back, grabbing his hands in mine, pinning them over his head, straddling him at the waist. Looking down, everything I could see of him was naked. It made my thighs quiver as they squeezed him, focusing on the deliciously dark line of hair disappearing under his studded belt. “You won’t even remember me when you’re a big star.”
“Don’t say that.” His face had gone serious. I knew when he really meant it. His usually light-colored blue-as-a-summer-sky eyes darkened when he was angry, or serious—or lusting after me. “Besides, I won’t need to remember you.”
“Oh?”
“Damn right. Because you’ll be mine.”
“Too late.” I leaned in, my hair falling around us, a golden curtain, and touched my lips softly to his. “Already am.”
“Are you ready to pass out Tootsie Rolls to trick-or-treaters?”
I sighed. “Well, if we can’t have sex, I guess that’s the next best thing.”
“If that’s the next best thing, we need to work on your social life.”
“I brought my chemistry homework. How’s that for fun?”
“Good. Can you do mine?” He grinned. “I’ve got to practice. It’s only a couple months until the semifinals.”
“I know.” I hopped off him, picking up his guitar. Of course they had made it to the semi-finals. Dale had been nervous, but I knew all along. No one could beat them.
“Are you nervous?” I sat on the bed with the guitar in my lap. I had no idea how to play. The only instrument I’d ever come close to playing was a recorder in kindergarten, and my music teacher ended up asking me to just pretend. That’s how bad I was. But I liked to play around with it.
“Should I be?”
Dale sat up too, sliding his long, slender legs around me from behind, his bare chest against my back. Just the feel of him, his muscular frame, his arms wrapping around me from behind, was enough to make me want him. Not that wanting him was anything new. I wanted him all the time, whether I was with him or I wasn’t. But thankfully, we were together a lot. As much as we could be, given that my stepfather didn’t approve of me having a “boyfriend” and we had to sneak around and lie in order to see each other.
I simply told my parents I’d started working at the theater again taking tickets as an excuse to be gone most nights of the week. The stepbeast didn’t approve of me having a job either—because it meant I had my own money—but that was more acceptable than a boyfriend.
“Like this.” Dale’s hands cupped mine, moving my fingers on the strings, pressing them down with my left hand, and strumming with my right. The guitar suddenly made a beautiful sound, nothing like I had ever heard when it was in my possession.
I glanced over my shoulder at him, incredulous.
“See?” Dale manipulated my fingers some more, strumming, the two of us suddenly one, making sweet music together. “You can do it.”
“Not without you.” God, that was the truth. “I’m certainly not going to be winning any contests. But you are.”
“Maybe.” He was playing now. I let go of the guitar and he continued to play with the guitar in my lap. He couldn’t even see but his hands just knew where to go, how to stroke and slide his fingers over the strings to make the instrument sing just the way he wanted it to.
His voice in my ear, singing an old Bob Dylan tune, something with a little country twang, surprised me. His voice was rough, a little like Dylan, but sweeter. Rough and sweet. That was Dale. For some reason, it made me think of Tyler Vincent, which was unusual, because even knowing the concert was coming up in another month, I hadn’t thought about Tyler Vincent much at all in the past few months. He was still papered all over my walls, I still listened to his music when I drew or painted, but it was Dale who filled my thoughts.
What was Tyler Vincent doing right now? I imagined October in Maine. Halloween was probably snowy. Was he taking his youngest son, Ian, out to trick-or-treat? I imagined Tyler Vincent as a particularly good father. A little like Dale’s father, John. I could tell how much John loved his son, in spite of his misgivings about Dale’s ambition to be a rock star. What parent wouldn’t want to give their child an education, a fallback position? Only one in a million people were good-looking enough, smart enough, lucky enough, and talented enough to ever make it in the music business.
I just happened to know Dale was one of those. One in a million.
“That’s beautiful.” I leaned back against
him, feeling the music thrumming through my belly as he played the guitar sitting in my lap, his voice filling my ear. He was playing and singing just for me, a one-man concert. I was the luckiest girl who had ever lived, and I knew it. I would have known it even if I hadn’t seen hordes of fans rushing the stage, trying to touch Dale, to be a part of him, to feel his energy, just for one brief moment.
When the song ended, Dale kissed my cheek and put the guitar down again, leaning it against the night stand before wrapping his arms around my waist and pulling me back onto the bed. I rolled with him, letting him curl himself around me from behind so we were spooning together in the middle of his bed, not kissing, not doing anything but laying there, breathing together as if we were one entity.
“Did you know Tyler Vincent didn’t even start playing guitar until he was in college?” I asked softly. It slipped. I had been thinking of him and it just... slipped. I tried not to mention him when I was with Dale. He usually got a hard look on his face, like stone, but he wouldn’t say anything about it. He would just look at me—and make me feel guilty I’d mentioned him at all.
“Oh yeah?” Dale murmured in response. “I think I read that somewhere.”
Dale had been playing guitar since he was three years old. John had told me that. He could also play piano, bass, and drums. He really was a one-man band, or he could be. He also wrote his own songs, music and lyrics.
“You’re better than he is.” I snuggled up closer, sighing as I felt his pelvis pressed against my behind. God, he always made me think about wanting him, no matter what we were doing or what we were talking about.
“I didn’t know it was a competition.” He kissed my hair at the top of my head, taking a long, slow deep breath, his hand sliding under my t-shirt to rest against the soft skin of my belly. “So how many fan letters have you written to Tyler Vincent?”
“I don’t know.” I felt defensive, a little suspicious. Cautious. Dale sounded too amiable, even interested. That was unusual. “A few.”
Of course, that was a lie. When I was fourteen, I mailed him a letter every single week. No joke. That was until my mother cut me off from stamps. When I had to buy my own, the letters dwindled down to once a month. Eventually, I stopped sending them. But I never stopped writing them. I had notebooks full of letters to Tyler Vincent. Really, they were more like diary or journal entries. I probably never would have ever shared them with Tyler Vincent, unless he and I became friends... or something more.
Being in Dale’s arms and thinking about Tyler Vincent and my fantasies about living in Maine and becoming... more... It was just too strange. But I couldn’t share my journals with Dale either. There was far too much truth in them, things I knew he couldn’t accept, things I couldn’t tell anyone. Even Aimee. I started every entry with Dear Tyler, but it might as well have been Dear Diary or Dear Rockstar for that matter. It was just me getting my thoughts on paper, getting them out.
“Did he ever write back?”
“No. I got an autographed picture once. I don’t know if it’s even really signed by him. But that was it.” I really didn’t like talking about this with Dale. I liked keeping Tyler Vincent and Dale Diamond as far away from each other as I possibly could, both in my mind and in the real world. But Dale seemed determined to talk about it tonight for some reason. “Can we change the subject?”
“Don’t mind me. It’s just the irony. I fall for a girl whose heart already belongs to some guy who’s twice her age who she’s never even met. You have to admit, it’s probably the most bizarre threesome in history.”
“You would have been better off with Aimee.” The thought caused a sharp stab of pain in my middle, and if Dale had known, he would have been pleased.
“No,” he said. “That’s not true. She’s not you. I don’t want anybody else.”
“Why do you want to talk about this?”
“I guess I want to know,” he said softly. “Tell me why he’s so important to you. Make me understand it.”
Dale was quiet, waiting for me, and I groped for words, the right words, which would put my feelings for Tyler Vincent outside myself. There weren’t any, I found. They hadn’t been invented yet. I tried anyway.
“Tyler Vincent puts himself into the stuff he does,” I said, closing my eyes, trying to put it into words. “And I can feel him. Sure, I like his music, and that’s how it started. He carried me away, and I enjoy that... but it’s more. It’s his voice I hear in his lyrics, his music, even in his movies... and it appeals to a deep part of me... the creative, feeling part of me.”
I chewed thoughtfully on my lip.
“I can understand that,” Dale murmured, encouraging me to go on.
It was the next part that was going to be hard to swallow. Even as I thought about it, I was discovering things about my feelings I’d hidden from myself.
“He’s somehow become... everything to me. I’m sure some shrink would say it ties into my dad. I hate my stepfather, and there’s Tyler Vincent, someone I admire and respect, everything my stepfather isn’t and never will be. He’s such a great person, with a great mind, and a wife and three kids he loves more than life itself...”
“How can you know that?” Dale interrupted.
“I know,” I assured him. “I just know. And the worse my life got, the worse my stepfather got, the more I needed...”
I shrugged, my words trailing off. There wasn’t any more I could say.
“You know... what if he’s not as great as you’ve made him out to be in your head?” Dale asked. “I mean, it’s like you’ve created him in your mind. You took a puzzle and you filled in the missing pieces with your imagination, and maybe... maybe they’re the wrong pieces. You see what I mean?”
“Maybe.”
The door opened, and John poked his head in. “I’m off to the staff party. You two ready for trick-or-treaters?”
“Sure.” I stood up, holding my hand out for Dale, and he took it, climbing off the bed and following me into the living room. John had set up a bowl of Tootsie Rolls for the trick-or-treaters.
“If you run out of candy, I left two rolls of pennies on the kitchen table.” John shrugged on a jacket, tipping his Crocodile Dundee hat in my direction. “G’Day, lil Sheila.”
I laughed. “Call us if you have too much to drink. We’ll come get you.”
“Not me.” John shook his head, opening the door, frightening two trick-or-treaters who were just about to knock.
I put two Tootsie Rolls into a Smurf’s pillow case, and two more into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s bag, closing the door as John made his way down the stairs.
“Smurfs?” Dale shook his head. “Whatever happened to Bugs Bunny? Daffy Duck?”
“Normal cartoons!” I agreed. “I turned on the TV a couple Saturdays ago, and I swear, I didn’t recognize one cartoon. I felt so old.”
“I know what you mean.” He sat on the sofa with the Tupperware bowl full of candy. “Saturdays were the best. When I was little my mom would...”
He stopped, stirring around the bowl and picking out a Tootsie Roll. I waited for him to continue but he didn’t. He never talked about his family, especially his mom. I knew his parents were divorced, but now I wondered if maybe she’s dead?
I sat down on the couch beside him, reaching in and plucking out a Tootsie Roll, trying to make the question sound casual. “Dale... where’s your mom?”
I felt him stiffen beside me. He shoved the candy into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully, a good excuse for his hesitation.
“In Maine,” he said finally. “They split up. End of story.”
“It must’ve been hard,” I said. I’d never had to go through that. My real father died in a car accident before I ever knew him, and my mother had married the stepbeast by the time I entered second grade.
He set the candy bowl between us, his laugh hard, bitter. “Not really. I hate my mother.”
“Why?” I watched him folding his Tootsie Roll wrapper into some shape on hi
s thigh.
“Because... because she cheated on my father. Because she did it for years and never told him. Because—” He stopped and looked at me. “Because the jerk she was cheating with is still with his wife and kids and they have no idea it ever happened.”
“God,” I whispered. “How did you find out?”
“You really want to know?”
I nodded. He’d finished folding his wrapper into a miniature paper airplane and now he threw it vigorously. It sailed over the coffee table. “I walked in on them. This guy—he was my dad’s best friend—he invited us to go swimming in his pool. My dad had work to do—term papers to grade, I think—so just Mom and I went.” He unwrapped another Tootsie Roll and he spoke his next words around it.
“So we were playing around, and I got stung by a bee. Hurt like hell but I pulled the stinger out and went to get my mom.” He began to fold another wrapper.
“Then what?” I prodded.
Dale tossed his second little airplane. It nose-dived into the carpet.
“Well, I couldn’t find her for a while. I stumbled around—the house was huge—and happened to open a door I thought was a bathroom. Turned out it was a bedroom.”
I gasped. “You found them... actually... you know...?”
“Uh, yeah. There was no doubt about what they were doing.”
“Oh my God.” I threw my own little wrapper airplane. It hit the edge of the coffee table. “What did you do?”
“They were too busy to even notice I was there. I had to yell ‘Mom!’ three times and even then, she just told me to get the hell out. So I waited for her outside the door.”
“And?”
“They finished what they were doing.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Are you... sure?”
He glanced sideways at me and I shrank back.
“Very sure.” His eyes were dark with anger. “So then, my mother came out in her dress and high heels and walked past me like I wasn’t even there.”
