It’s a narrative we’ve been doing our best to clarify, through our videos and songs. There was never any fight over me, and the truth is, I have as much responsibility in the lies Alec and I told as he does—at least until that whole surprise engagement thing.
This, though, makes Alec look good. The crowd is going wild for it. Alec and Felix are both killing it, and though that kind of goes without saying when it comes to Felix, it reminds me what a truly talented guitarist Alec is. The AJ stuff didn’t really ever push his limits any more than it did mine on the piano.
The song ends with Felix the winner, and Alec gives a little salute of respect, and even works up the crowd to cheer extra hard for him, and then Felix does the same for him. I’ve been standing off to the side for this one, but I head over and give Alec a big hug, which he returns—it’s a clear “no hard feelings,” driving the point home with a sledgehammer, in case bringing him up on stage with us isn’t enough.
It feels like a stage hug.
The rest of the concert goes well. We’ve tweaked the set list as we go, having seen the way the crowd responds to different songs, to the classical interludes and the various covers, so the order now is better able to hit the right emotional notes at the right times. Felix performs his version of “Danny’s Song” for me—my favorite part of every concert, by a wide margin.
Then it’s time for our final song, which now is the one I wrote for Felix, the one out of all of them (except maybe the new “Danny’s Song”) that’s most about us. This one is his favorite, I know, and I love performing it. And even though I’m performing it with him, it always feels like I’m performing it for him. Like it’s this gift I can give to him, over and over.
I do our usual bidding farewell to the audience, thanking them for being so awesome, and telling them we’ll definitely hit a Red Sox game next time we’re in town, which gets a huge cheer.
“But we have one final song for you guys,” I say, smiling widely at the mass of faces and cell phone lights. “And I think by now you all know which one I’m talking about.”
They clearly do. “You Are the Story” is another one getting huge traction on the internet.
“When I think about the concept of real love, and about what it means to me, this song—”
My eyes land on a man in the audience, and the words catch in my throat. My whole body freezes, like I’ve had a pail of ice water poured over me.
Grant. He’s right there, in the audience, just a few rows from the front.
For the space of one hopeful heartbeat, I think maybe it’s not him. Just some guy that looks like him.
But no. It’s him all right. The square jaw, the piercing in his right eyebrow, the broad shoulders. He’s not incredibly tall—falling somewhere between Felix and Alec—but he’s well-muscled, and has always liked to show that off, which he’s doing now in a Jenna Mays Real Love Tour concert t-shirt a few sizes too small.
He gives me this big, mocking smile that sends a chill all the way down to my toes.
It takes a moment for me to become aware that I’m just standing there, frozen, in front of everyone, and my mouth works to try to make sounds, but nothing comes out, and all I can hear is my heart pounding in my ears.
Grant’s smile grows wider. I realize I’ve covered up my wedding ring instinctively with my other hand, like somehow by doing so he won’t know I’m married. And he won’t hurt me, and he won’t hurt Felix.
I look over to Felix, who is watching me with undisguised concern, and glancing from me out to the audience and back. He starts to set down his bow, to set down June.
I try to swallow, my throat so tight I can’t even do that.
“This song is . . .” I start again, my voice too sudden, too loud in the microphone, and I wince.
Felix sits back down, confused. Grant folds his arms across his chest, his pierced eyebrow raised. Taunting me. He always had this demeanor of control about him, and not just because he was thirty when we dated, and I was only nineteen. He controlled me then, and he’s doing it again now.
This is clearly the reaction he wanted.
“I’ll just play it,” I say hurriedly. I feel the need to be behind my piano, not so exposed like this. I don’t think Grant will hurt me, or any of us, not while we’re on stage. He had the whole concert to do so if he wanted to, and he’s not making any threatening moves.
I walk to the piano, my legs so rubbery I’m not sure how they’re working at all.
He wants to get a rise from me. He wants me to be afraid. He wants to control me, like he used to.
Like I let him.
I start playing, my fingers slick on the keys. I start singing, my voice hoarse and unsteady.
Worthless slut, his voice says in my mind. Useless cunt.
Words from his messages, yes, but I hear them the way he used to say them to me, his hands tight—painfully, terrifyingly tight—around my neck as he moved on top of me. Or pushing my face hard into a pillow as he went at me from behind.
I fight to breathe evenly now, fight to sing. I botch a chord progression, the discordant sound hitting my already taut nerves.
It’s not that bad, the stuff he did to me, I tell myself, as I told myself then. Some people do that kind of thing for sex, and they like it.
And now it’s like I can hear Felix, his voice sad. Maybe, but you didn’t.
Felix.
I try to channel everything I have into the song. I try to remember the first time I played it for him, back at our house, and the way he kissed me and kissed me afterward.
But my mind keeps swinging back to Grant.
Stupid bitch. Who would want you now?
Afterward, he’d always tell me he never meant it. It was just sex stuff, you know? And I pretended I did know, partly because at the time I was being the Jenna who was cool with anything. And partly because I was afraid of him, afraid he’d take it too far one time.
Afraid, too, that all the stuff he said about me was true. That it always had been.
I’m on total autopilot, and it’s not going well—the song is more complicated than most of the AJ stuff, and I haven’t played it nearly as much. The bridge is a disaster, and I’m playing too fast, and then a little too slow to compensate, and I know Felix is struggling to match me.
I’m trembling by the end, literally just shaking. Breathing hard, my heart pounding like I’m trapped in some race I can never stop running.
After I play the last chord, I look back out to the audience. I can’t see Grant anymore. He’s gone.
I’m afraid to even look at Felix, afraid of what he’ll think of me.
“Thank you, Boston,” I manage. And then I all but run off stage.
Four
Felix
Jenna runs off the stage looking like she’s seen a ghost. She played the whole last song that way, and I’m desperate to know what’s wrong. I follow her backstage and put my arms around her, and she shivers.
“Grant,” she says. “I saw him in the crowd.”
I tighten my grip on her. The idea that he’s here makes my hackles rise and ice pool in my veins, but I try to keep my voice even. “Show me where?”
We move behind the scaffolding to a dark corner, where she points through the curtain to a section of people near the front, none of whom look particularly threatening at the moment. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a very good idea of what Grant looks like, beyond Jenna’s years-old description and a single blurry profile pic we found online. The guy has a pretty much nonexistent internet presence, and Jenna didn’t keep any pictures of him, which I certainly can understand.
“He’s not there now,” she says. “I don’t know where he went.”
“I’ll tell security,” I say, but I don’t want to let go of her. I wrap my arms around her again and hold her against me.
She c
lings to me, still trembling. “He saw me see him. And he smiled.”
I at once want to murder this guy and never leave Jenna’s side. I should go tell security, but what are they going to do? He hasn’t done anything yet—nothing but smile, apparently. Time isn’t exactly of the essence when they wouldn’t be able to do much more than tail him. And the size of the crowd . . .
Alec comes over to us, and I realize the crowd is calling for an encore. We have one planned, but—
“You’re not going back out there,” I say.
She shakes her head. “No, I—I can’t. I—”
“It’s okay,” I say. I still don’t want to leave her, so I turn to Alec. “Grant is out there. In the crowd. Would you do the encore?”
Alec’s face hardens, and I wait for him to refuse. We ditched him, quite literally stealing his tour and his band and everything he worked so hard for. None of us would be here if it weren’t for him, and I’m in no position to ask him for favors. I don’t think he blames me specifically for the dissolution of AJ, but his sharpness with me at practice today leads me to believe he’s not thrilled about my part in it.
Or maybe that’s just Alec’s voice.
“That asshole is here?” he says.
He hasn’t heard anything about the threatening messages as far as I know, but clearly he knows at least the basics about Jenna’s past with Grant. Alec’s done some douchey things to us, but the malice in his voice makes me love him. “Yeah,” I say. “We’ll fill you in later.”
Alec turns and strides back on the stage, and a few seconds later the crowd quiets, and I hear him making some joke about how we’ve gotten distracted backstage, but he still knows how to give them a show.
The crowd cheers, and Alec must tell Roxie what to play, because she counts off.
Of course. One thing you can always count on Alec to do is take the stage. The challenge may be getting him to give it back.
I bring Jenna down the stairs toward the green room, signaling to Phil on the way. Phil’s got his usual Red Bull in one hand and his phone in the other, and his face is so red he looks like he’s about to burst a blood vessel, but he pales visibly when I mouth at him, “He’s out there.”
Phil knows exactly who I mean. He turns and hustles off. I hope he’s about to warn security for me, because when I’ve got Jenna on the couch in the green room, there’s no way I’m leaving her to go back up there.
“I choked.” She draws her knees up to her chest, her long dark hair falling over her face. “I completely botched that song.”
“It’s okay. Everyone screws up on stage sometimes. And you definitely had cause.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “But he saw. He saw how he affected me. And he liked it.”
Rage simmers in my chest. I want to find Grant and follow him home and make sure he never hurts her again.
But I can’t—literally, as I’ve never physically hurt anyone in my life and I already know Grant can’t say the same. Even if I could, Jenna needs me here. She doesn’t need me to fight her battles for her any more than I need her to fend off drug buddies and dealers.
What she needs is my support. She’s wilted against me, and I run my hand under her chin. “Hey,” I say. “It doesn’t matter what he saw. He can’t hurt you. Now we know he’s here, so you don’t go anywhere alone. We can switch hotels in case he’s found out where we’re staying.”
“Ty,” she says, her eyes widening. “What if he knows where Ty and my parents are?”
I pull out my phone. I’m relatively certain Jenna’s the one he wants, as nothing in the letters mentioned Ty. But it doesn’t hurt to take precautions. “I’ll text Phil. Get him to switch them to somewhere else.”
“I don’t want to scare Ty,” Jenna says.
I try to smile reassuringly. “Your parents can tell Ty that there’s, I don’t know, a snake loose in the hotel or something. Then he won’t worry.”
Jenna snorts. “He’ll want to track down the snake and keep it for a pet.”
I smile. She’s still got her sense of humor, which has to be a good sign. “Okay, then I’ll just text your parents and let them know to watch out.”
Jenna looks like she’s about to tell me not to worry them either, but decides against it.
Alec comes stomping down the stairs, anger rolling off him in waves. “What the hell is that asshole doing here?”
“Stalking Jenna,” I say. “Apparently. He’s sent a bunch of threatening messages, but when he didn’t show up in Detroit we thought we were in the clear.”
Alec calls Grant a string of nasty names, and Jenna nods her agreement. Her fists tighten. “He had no right to do that,” she says. “He had no right to show up and stand up front and throw me off balance and ruin my show.”
Legally he clearly has a right, which is part of the problem. “Maybe we should see about getting a restraining order,” I say.
“You probably should,” Alec says. “Could keep him out of future concerts, but you’d probably have to register the order in every state you visit.”
Jenna swears. “I would have had that song. I was in my element. Who the hell does he think he is, coming to my show and ruining my song.”
I take her hand and hold it tight. I’m glad she’s angry. She has every right to be. And it feels a hell of a lot better to be pissed off than afraid, which I think I’m leaning into as well.
God, if anything happened to her . . .
“I’d like to go out there and find him right now,” Alec says.
“You’d be mobbed,” I tell him. “You’d get like three feet and you’d be covered in fans.”
Alec considers this, and then shrugs, as if that wouldn’t be so bad. I shake my head. If the news is to be believed, he’s had his share of fans crawling all over him wanting to comfort him. And at least publicly, he hasn’t exactly been shunning them.
Not that I blame him for wanting to get out of here. If I were him, I don’t know that I’d be able to stand to be in the room with either of us.
Jenna’s phone buzzes, and she stands abruptly. “I’m going to get my food,” she says firmly, like by doing so, she’s fighting back against Grant and his sick mind-games.
I stand with her. And though I don’t want to take away her resolve, we don’t know for sure that mind-games are all he has planned. “You shouldn’t go alone.”
She looks up at the ceiling, and I can see her warring with herself. She loves talking to the delivery people and giving them a huge tip, and she wants to pick up her lobster pizza and Boston cream pie, the latter of which she’s been looking forward to since before we left on tour. She personally called up the highest-rated pie place and arranged for the special delivery.
She wants to go do this by herself, like she usually does, and not let Grant win.
But she also knows I’m right.
“At least take security with you,” I say. I grip her hand. “Please.”
She gives me a crisp nod and then heads up the stairs.
I put my head in my hands, and let out a slow, shaky breath.
“I really will kill him for you,” Alec says.
And while I’m reasonably certain he doesn’t mean it, I’m grateful for the offer all the same.
Five
Jenna
I wake up alone in an unfamiliar bed and there’s this long, panicked second where I don’t know where I am or how I got here.
In that moment—just a heartbeat, maybe two—I’m sixteen again, waking up in some random frat house. Not remembering a thing from the night before, other than drinks and a few pills and loud loud music, all the things that make the pain go away. My shirt’s half off, and my underwear is gone. My skirt is bunched up around my waist. There’s a bruise on my right inner thigh, and my head is pounding, but worse than the hangover is the sense that my body is all st
retched out and pulled apart, like I’m made of taffy.
Like it’s not even my body anymore.
Reality comes back to me in the next second—I’m in a hotel, a nice one, in Chicago. We had another concert last night, and curled up in this bed together after, and I fell asleep in Felix’s arms. He had a twelve-step meeting he was going to in the morning, which must be where he is now.
I know all this, but that initial uncertainty still sits heavy in my gut, and my skin is damp with sweat.
These memories have been happening more and more lately. Not always this exact one—sometimes I’m fourteen, or seventeen. Sometimes I remember the guy, or guys. Usually not.
The feelings are always the same.
I wish Felix was here. I want to tell him; I want him to put his arms around me and hear him say again that it doesn’t matter what I did back then. That it doesn’t matter that I kept going back to those parties, to those guys. It’s not like he doesn’t know about my partying past—god, I told him about the frat parties at that sushi restaurant on the third day I’d known him.
I’d shocked myself, talking about it so openly with him like that, when I barely ever told anyone. My parents knew, of course—they got dragged through my partying years right along with me, in a way. I’d been in the band with Alec for weeks before I’d opened up with him that much, and then mainly because I knew that with us both living in Ann Arbor, he’d hear the rumors eventually.
But from the beginning, Felix and I had this connection, and I’d never felt anything like it. I think, in some way, I told him those stories because if he was going to be scared off, I wanted it to happen then and not later. He wasn’t scared off, thankfully. But there’s this horrible little part of me that wonders if maybe that’s still coming.
Worthless slut, Grant’s voice whispers in my head.
My nails dig into my palms.
I reach over for my phone to see the time—it’s past noon. I slept in way later than I meant to, but it’s one of the rare days we don’t have a concert tonight, and honestly, we all need way more sleep than we’re getting.
The Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour Page 4