Of course I want to marry her. For her, so she knows I’m in this. For Ty, so he can have the security of knowing I’m really sticking it out. And for me, to create something stable, a place where I’m safe, so I can keep working on recovery.
“I love you,” I say.
She smiles, and is about to respond when her phone beeps. She checks it. “It’s Phil.” She looks up at me with concern. “He wants to know what the plan is.”
“Shit. I have no idea.”
Jenna’s giggle sounds a little delirious, and I get how she feels.
“What do you want?” I ask.
She thinks about that. “I want to be with you.”
“You’ve got that locked in. What else?”
Jenna snuggles up next to me, and it’s a long moment before she answers. “I want to be honest. Real. Before I was telling a story, but I was guessing at it. Imagining what it might be like. And I believed, but it was still only a story.” She looks at me. “Now I have something real to fight for, and I want to sing about that.”
“Well, I’m in, and it sounded like Leo and Roxie are, too. Do you want to try to do the tour?”
Jenna looks panicked. “The tour next week? I don’t think I can—I mean, without Alec I don’t see how—”
“We could see if it could be pushed back a couple weeks. Maybe a month?” I shrug. “The venues might drop us, but they’re shitting bricks right now anyway—they’d probably rather have some show, even a delayed one, than none at all. We can have Phil pitch keeping us on, and we can do a different show. A real one.”
She blinks at me. “And you want to put this together in a month.”
I smile. “It’s crazy, right? But it’s an option.”
Jenna stares into space as if she’s overwhelmed at the very prospect. “Alec might beat us to it.” She glances at her phone again. “But Phil says the preliminary buzz on the internet is that a lot of fans are siding with me.”
“I bet they are, after what Alec pulled.” I squint up at the huge light-up marquee letters, A and J. “Do you know where to get those? Because I’d like to get some for Alec. Specifically an F and a U.”
“Ha,” Jenna says. “I thought you were going to want an F for Felix.”
“That’s definitely not what that F is for.”
Jenna laughs, and then grows serious again. “I have some songs I could polish up. Ones that are more gritty and honest, and didn’t fit with the AJ sound. But there’s not enough to fill a whole concert.”
“We could play some classical. We could do some covers. And we could tell the real story. Our story.”
Jenna’s face lights up. “That would be amazing. Do you think it’s possible?”
“Pitch it to Phil,” I say. “It doesn’t hurt to try.”
Jenna looks down at her phone, but she hesitates. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, let’s do it. Put together a tour-ready show in three weeks? All while spending plenty of family time with Ty and each other? Sounds totally doable.” Jenna laughs, but I mean it, and from the way she’s smiling, I know she believes me. “The Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour.”
We’re both laughing at the enormity of this ridiculousness, but it feels good. It feels right. Neither Jenna nor I are people who do things halfway.
We’re in this.
“Okay,” Jenna says. “I better not pitch this to Phil over text. I need to call him.”
“Go right ahead.” I glance toward the stairs. It’s late, and Ty is no doubt asleep. “Can I do one thing while you call?”
“What’s that?”
“Can I tell Ty?” I ask.
“You want to wake him up?”
“Is that awful?”
“No,” she says, smiling. “Go ahead.” She taps her phone to call.
I make my way up the stairs and into the doorway of Ty’s room. The kid is fast asleep in my old cello case, with his hands across his chest like a vampire, and a blanket wrapped around his legs. I kneel next to the cello case and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Ty?”
It takes him a moment to wake up enough to look up at me. He stretches out, pressing the top of his head to the case. “Felix?”
“Hey, kiddo. I’m back.”
Ty sits straight up, his eyes wide and his hair sticking in all directions. “Are you going to be my dad again?”
“Yeah. For real this time. Your mom and I are going to get married. Is that okay with you?”
He nods. “And then you’ll be my real dad?”
I don’t want to get into the details of the differences between stepdads and real dads, and I’m hoping eventually, once I’ve proven I can stay sober, Jenna might consider letting me adopt him.
“Yeah. If that’s okay with you.”
He looks skeptical. “I thought you said some broken things couldn’t be fixed.”
I smile. “It’s true. But it turns out your mom and I aren’t one of those things.”
Ty throws his arms around my neck and squeezes tight. Jenna appears in the doorway, phone still in her hand, and she looks at us and melts. I smile at her and she smiles at me, and I know.
I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Acknowledgments
There are so many people we’d like to thank for helping make this book a reality. First, our families, especially our incredibly supportive husbands Glen and Drew, and our amazing kids. Thanks also to our writing group, Accidental Erotica, for all the feedback, and particularly to Heather, our first genuine superfan.
Thanks to Michelle of Melissa Williams Design for the fabulous cover, and to our agent extraordinaire, Hannah Ekren, for her love and enthusiasm for these books. Thanks to Dantzel Cherry and Amy Carlin for being proofreading goddesses, and thanks to everyone who read and gave us notes throughout the many drafts of this project—your feedback was invaluable and greatly appreciated.
And a special thanks to you, our readers. We hope you love these characters as much as we do.
Janci Patterson got her start writing contemporary and science fiction young adult novels, and couldn’t be happier to now be writing adult romance. She has an MA in creative writing, and lives in Utah with her husband and two adorable kids. When she’s not writing she can be found surrounded by dolls, games, and her border collie. She has written collaborative novels with several partners, and is honored to be working on this series with Megan.
Megan Walker lives in Utah with her husband, two kids, and two dogs–all of whom are incredibly supportive of the time she spends writing about romance and crazy Hollywood hijinks. She loves making Barbie dioramas and reading trashy gossip magazines (and, okay, lots of other books and magazines, as well.) She’s so excited to be collaborating on this series with Janci. Megan has also written several published fantasy and science-fiction stories under the name Megan Grey.
Find Megan and Janci at www.extraseriesbooks.com
Other Books in the Extra Series
The Extra
The Girlfriend Stage
Everything We Are
The Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour
Starving with the Stars
My Faire Lady
You are the Story
Beauty and the Bassist
Su-Lin’s Super-Awesome Casual Dating Plan
Exes, Lies, and Videotape
Turn the page to read the beginning of The Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour, a Felix and Jenna Novella.
One
Jenna
I’m standing at the front of the stage at the Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, a venue I’ve played several times before with Alec, staring out at the empty seats that will soon be filled with fans. Felix joked earlier that he hoped it wasn’t an omen that the first stop of the Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour is a stadium named af
ter a cheap pizza place, and we both laughed, but now that I’m up here again, I’m starting to think maybe this wasn’t such a great idea.
Not just starting the tour so close to my (and Alec’s) hometown of Ann Arbor. But the tour itself. Thinking we could do this so soon on the heels of AJ’s demise. Thinking the fans will want to hear my more indie-inspired sound. Thinking they’ll care to hear our real story, when all I’ve fed them for over a year now is lies.
Thinking they won’t hate it, and us.
I breathe in slowly and out again, trying to calm myself. I wipe my sweaty palms on the hem of my black skirt. Usually for an AJ concert, I’d be dressed like some maxed-out, blingy pop-princess, with a bit of the punk edge I like in my normal look. But for this tour, Allison, our wardrobe maven, wanted to dress me more low-key. So tonight I’m wearing a simple form-fitting black dress that flares out a bit around my hips, and my only bling is a waterfall of thin silver necklaces draped over the low neckline. I’ve got some fun multi-color extensions in my black hair to complement my signature red streaks, and my stylist has hairsprayed me within an inch of my life, but other than that, it’s a pretty elegant look. Something that seems like it would fit more in a small jazz club than a massive stadium.
I like it. It feels more honest. More me.
Which is the point of all this, right?
Well, that and getting to do all this with Felix at my side. Together. I twist the silver wedding ring around on my finger, feeling the texture of the decorative engraving that matches Felix’s band. That, more than any amount of slow breathing or self-talk, helps to ease my nerves a bit.
Voices drift from the back of the stage, where Roxie is re-positioning her drums, crouched down in her short sparkly skirt and huge platform shoes. Her bubble-gum-pink hair is hanging down in a long braid on one side of her head and shaved on the other. Leo is hanging out next to her, as usual, his bass guitar slung across the back of his alligator-skin vest, his hair a mass of dark blond spikes.
My onstage look has changed somewhat, but these two still look the same—which feels honest, too. Roxie and Leo don’t exactly do “low-key.”
“They’re going to love you,” Roxie is saying as I get closer. “Don’t sweat it.”
Felix has joined them, having just emerged from wardrobe himself. He’s wearing dark-wash jeans and a pale blue t-shirt that matches his eyes. He spots me coming over to them and smiles, which never fails to get my heart beating faster.
I still can’t believe he’s mine.
Felix runs a hand through his artfully mussed blond hair, a gesture that would definitely make our stylist cringe. “They loved Alec.”
Leo slaps him on the back. “Dude. Trust me. No one is coming to this concert expecting to see Alec.” Then he walks to the other side of the stage to check his own mic.
“That’s true, you know,” I tell him. “Besides, who cares what they think? I love you.”
Felix smiles, but his eyes run over the seats of the indoor stadium, and he looks nervous.
Leo is right. The people showing up at this concert definitely know what they’re in for. We’ve been all over the entertainment news, and the venue contacted them all personally and gave them the opportunity to cancel their tickets. After the official public breakup of Alec and Jenna, we had to cancel the first leg of the tour, and our manager Phil spent hours on the phone talking the remaining venues into keeping us. The first one he’d been able to convince was this one, in Detroit—most likely because Alec and I were Michigan’s darlings, so there’s a loyal fan base.
Some of the ticket holders did cancel, but tonight’s show sold out again anyway. Though whether they’re more loyal to me or Alec is anyone’s guess.
“Hate-watching is a thing,” Felix says. “Maybe they’re all coming to throw stuff at us.”
“Oh, things will be thrown, all right,” Roxie says. “Flowers. Letters. Panties.” She taps one of the cymbals for emphasis.
Felix cringes, and I know it’s not because he’s worried about being buried in a mound of women’s underwear.
My gut twists. He’s worried about drugs.
I walk over and take his hand. It’s not a totally unfounded worry. I’ve seen all sorts of stuff thrown on stage—cigarettes and joints, of course, but also pills. Baggies and bottles. We released a video on the internet last week talking about our pasts. Just me and Felix, sitting on our couch, spilling the story of his drug addiction and my partying days, and, yes, my breakup with Alec more than a year before we told anyone about it. So far, that video has over a million views, and part two—the one where we tell the story of how we met—is airing tonight on the giant screens in the center of the arena right before it hits YouTube for the rest of the world.
But it means people know about his past. Tonight, some asshole might throw heroin.
I hate him having to worry about this, in addition to the tour in general, and the stress of dealing with his recovery, with finding meetings and refilling his meds and making Skype therapy appointments while on the road.
I squeeze his hand tightly, and he looks over at me and his expression of worry softens. He runs his thumb over my wedding band. We’ve been married a week—which still feels crazy and incredible—but keeping it secret until today, so this is the first time we’ve worn them outside the house.
I smile at him. “We were so happy that the show sold out. What the hell were we thinking?”
“I don’t know,” he says, squeezing my hand back. “Technically it’s not too late to sneak out the back.”
I groan. The idea is a little too tempting. “If leaving Alec didn’t end my career, that sure will.”
“It’s going to be fine,” he says, even though Leo and Roxie were just assuring him of that. Roxie is over by Leo now, back to adjusting his alligator vest—something she still feels the need to do all the time, despite the fact that they’ve been sleeping together since the VMAs.
Though, I think, as I lean into my husband—my husband—I don’t suppose I can blame them for unnecessary touching.
And though I desperately don’t want to give him more to worry about, I can’t help but bring it up anyway. “How’s security?”
He puts his arm around me. “Phil says the extra people we asked for are all in place. It’s going to be fine.”
I let out a breath, trying to tell myself he’s right, but all I can think of is those letters my ex-boyfriend Grant sent me. I hadn’t heard from him since the day I ended things with him, soon after my sister Rachel died. Years ago. Nothing during the time I was with Alec, nothing as AJ got big and we moved out to LA. I thought Grant was buried deep in my past along with all the many, many other mistakes of those days.
But days after the VMAs, the letters started arriving. I suppose the headlines about my breakup with Alec and our subsequent lies must have shaken something loose in his cruel, twisted mind, because the letters keep coming. Threatening that he wasn’t done with me, calling me the sick things I remember hearing from him when he’d get in that mood. He even signed his name to the letters, as if I wouldn’t already know it was him. Not that I’d never been called nasty things by other guys before, but Grant turned making me feel like shit into an art form.
And here we are, performing less than an hour from his house. If he shows up . . .
Felix must be reading my mind. “If he shows up tonight,” he says, his eyes fixed on mine, “you’re still safe. We have security keeping people from getting backstage and an escort back to the hotel. I’ll be with you the whole time.”
I wish Felix didn’t have to know all this. I didn’t want him to read the letters, didn’t want him to see the kind of stuff I put up with back then, but he said he wanted to understand what we were dealing with, so I let him. And right now, I’m glad he did. I can’t imagine dealing with the fear of Grant—stupid as it is—alone.
“I know
,” I say. “I’ll still feel better when this show is over.”
He kisses the top of my head, and I just want to burrow into him and never emerge. “Me too,” he says.
Allison appears from backstage. “Guys. You’re needed in makeup,” she says.
I look at Felix and he looks at me. In twenty minutes, the house doors will open and not long after, the opening act will start to play.
Whatever happens, it’ll all be over in a matter of hours.
Despite my growing desire to take Felix up on that running away idea, we’re whisked into makeup, and then to the green room where Roxie and Leo lie draped all over one another on the couch. It feels like we’re only there for seconds before Phil is poking his balding head in and throwing back a handful of antacids before telling us they’re ready for us up on stage.
I’m a bundle of nerves, hearing the sounds of the huge crowd out there, but Felix looks like he’s about to pass out.
“You’ve got this,” I say. I know he does. He’s Felix freaking Mays, and the crowd will love the hell out of him.
“So do you,” he returns, and from the look he gives me, I think maybe he’s thinking the same thing of me. And we hold onto each other’s hands as we stride up the stairs and onto the stage.
The lights are blinding, and my heart is racing, but the minute I step on that stage and hear the roar of the crowd, the anxiety becomes the rush of straight-up excitement that I know from so many concerts before.
But now it’s Felix standing in Alec’s place at the front of the stage, holding my hand, and it’s so, so much better. I can only clearly make out the fans in the first few rows, and about a third of them have donned the shirts we had made especially for the tour—The Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour, but with Rollins crossed out and replaced with Mays.
Everything We Are Page 30