“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.
To say that Jenna’s parents were not thrilled that their daughter was moving in with and then marrying a heroin addict with just over three month’s sobriety is the understatement of the century. And I think Ty announcing to them that Jenna’s going to let me officially adopt him only made matters worse.
Ty says there’s still more eggs to find, and I finally locate one in the shirt pocket of the guy manning the front desk. He winks at Ty as he hands it over. We’re up to eleven eggs now, and we have to play hot and cold to find the last one, as not even Ty’s grandparents appear to be sure where it’s hidden.
“You’re getting hotter—ahhh!” Ty shouts. “It’s gone!”
“Keep your voice down, buddy,” I say as he runs past me to one of the halls on the first floor. “Most people are still asleep.”
Ty is undeterred, as he stares down the hallway of rooms, and I’m starting to wonder if someone with a hot plate found an egg in one of the wall sconces and decided to fry himself an omelet.
“Where’d you put it?” I ask.
“It wasn’t me, it was the—”
“Where did the Easter Bunny put it?”
Jenna appears at the end of the hall, smiling at me like this whole thing is adorable, and I have to admit it is. Worth the lost hours of sleep, even, and given how hard we’re going to work ourselves over these next weeks, I don’t say that lightly.
Ty gives me a sideways look, like he wants to tell me, but knows this breaks with tradition. “I think the Easter Bunny may have snuck it onto one of those carts the cleaning people use.”
I laugh. “All right. Come on, kid.” Ty and I tear down the hall, circling the first floor and then taking the stairs up to the second where we find the cart outside an open hotel room door. I’m not sure who has checked out already that their room is prepared to be cleaned, but I’m willing to guess there aren’t too many carts circling the hotel at this hour. Sure enough, there in a bin with new lotion and sh
ampoo bottles and tiny wax-paper wrapped bars of soap, sits a bright blue egg.
“Ah ha!” I say, and slip it into the basket. “Twelve. Is that all of them?”
“Yes,” Ty says. “Now we need to eat them.”
I’m about to tell the kid that as much as I love him and appreciate his efforts, I’m not eating raw eggs. This must already be written on my face, because he adds, “Pops says there’s a skillet for making your own eggs at the breakfast bar.”
“Ahhh,” I say. “Great. Come on, kid. I’ll show you the trick my mom taught me for how to crack eggs.”
Ty grabs my hand, and we take the stairs back to Jenna and her parents to show them my Easter basket triumph, and then we all head off to breakfast. And even though they threatened not to come to our wedding if Jenna was so irresponsible as to marry me, I think I catch her dad giving me an approving glance. I sit between Jenna and Ty at breakfast, and if I wasn’t certain before, I sure am now.
I’m the luckiest bastard who ever lived.
Three
Jenna
By the second week of a tour, I’m usually well past the pre-show nerves and settling into a nice mixture of routine and excitement. This lasts until about week four or five, when all the long nights and early morning flights and still attempting to be a decent mom have finally caught up to me, and I start to fantasize about getting a solid eight hours of uninterrupted sleep with the kind of fervent longing most people reserve for incredible sex.
At least if I can’t have sleep, I’ve definitely been getting lots of that.
So by the first show of week three of the Jenna Rollins Mays Real Love Tour, I should be settled and still enjoying the natural buzz that comes with knowing there’s a stadium of people out there who have paid to hear me sing.
I’m not. Instead I’m awkwardly pacing the green room, toying with the ends of my hair. Wishing Felix were here with me right now instead of getting a last-minute wardrobe fix after Ty dropped an open-face PB&J on the jeans he was supposed to wear tonight. But it’s probably good he’s not here. He’s already had to deal with so much of my stress and worry, when he’s the one on his first tour, and trying to manage his sobriety, besides. I should be the one supporting him through this.
And I shouldn’t be worried anymore. Grant didn’t show up at the Michigan concert, which would have been the most likely place for him to harass me if he was going to take steps past sending those awful letters. The tour has been going better than either of us imagined. The response to the new music—to Felix and me in general—has been overwhelmingly positive. The tickets that had been canceled for future shows are being snatched up, and Phil said just today that seeing the merch sale numbers may have cured his ulcers. It’s not quite up to AJ levels of success, but it’s more than we’d hoped for.
I should be fine.
But there’s still this knot in my chest I can’t loosen, and it gets tighter every time Felix and I talk about his addiction.
It’s even worse when I think about Grant. There are a lot of guys in my past that didn’t treat me well, but he was one of the few I considered my boyfriend. The rest of them were using some girl they met at a party, but he’s the only one who took specific ownership of me.
“Hey,” I hear from behind me, and turn to see Alec leaning against the door frame, his hands in the pockets of his dark jeans. His dark hair hangs down past his jaw, which is, as usual, shaded with stubble.
Seeing Alec again doesn’t help things, and from the slouch in his normally-straight posture and the dark circles under his blue eyes, I gather the feeling is mutual.
“Hey,” I say back, in a cheery tone I know he’ll see right through. For someone who spent the last year lying to pretty much everyone, I’m not particularly great at it.
The sardonic lift of his lips tells me I’m right. “Thanks for the gift,” he says. “I think the hotel staff thought it was a message for them—they stopped folding my towels into animal shapes.”
Ha. Back when Felix and I were first dating, he hated the big marquee letters A and J that Alec and I had in our living room. After Alec tried to force me to keep the band together—going so far as to lie on-stage at the VMAs that he and I had gotten married—Felix joked that we should get Alec a marquee F and a U as a token of our appreciation.
Before the tour we did just that, hoping Alec would take the gesture as the joke we intended it to be. Alec has always had a pretty biting sense of humor, and appealing to that has always been one of the better ways to make peace with him, which—despite how upset we were with him right after the VMAs—is something both Felix and I want. We made sure to attach a thank-you note telling him we appreciate him being willing to make amends with us publicly—the reason he’s here performing with us on these next few concerts—and thanking him again for coming to our wedding.
Now that, I’d been nervous about. We only invited our families and the band, which meant that the event was a whole bunch of people gathered together who loved one of us and hated that we were getting married so quickly—or at all—plus Leo and Roxie and Gabby and Ty, the only people who actually approved. We’d talked about not inviting any of the others, but in the end, Felix had his sister Gabby make a gorgeously scripted sign that read Rollins/Mays Wedding. Don’t be an asshole. Alec obliged, even if he didn’t stay long.
“Too soon?” I ask him. I twist the cap off a bottle of AquaVita sitting on the table next to a fruit platter. I usually request healthy foods for before the shows, then splurge on the junk after.
“Yeah, probably,” Alec says, his voice less bitter than it might be, given the circumstances. “But it didn’t stop you, did it?”
It occurs to me then that this statement could be applied to any number of the things Felix and I have done since we met on Hollywood Boulevard. I don’t regret any of them, and I’m not going to take responsibility for what a dick Alec was about it.
But I do feel terrible that he lost the band, and I didn’t, especially when it was my choice to end things.
Alec strolls over to the fruit plate and pops a green grape in his mouth. He’s faking his casual demeanor as much as I am, and I hate that we both feel it’s necessary, but not enough to drop the act. “So I hear the tour is going well.”
I wince. It was supposed to be his tour. “It is. I was worried the fans wouldn’t be on board with the new sound, but . . .” I shrug, and mess around with the cap more.
“Thanks for asking me to come out,” Alec says, and he sounds like he means it. Felix and I invited him to play with us not only as an olive branch, but as an opportunity for him to salvage some part of his public image. If we don’t hate him, maybe our fans will relax their own loathing a bit.
At least, that’s the hope.
“I’m happy for you guys,” he says. “I mean, not that a part of me didn’t want to see you guys crash and burn, but . . .” He shrugs and trails off like I did. He picks through the strawberries, looking for the biggest one, like he always does. “And how’s married life?”
“Good.” I search for something more to say, something natural, but come up short. Even after Alec and I broke up—and he moved into my walk-in closet so we could still pretend to be living together—things were never this awkward between us. I want to bridge the gap, to put things back the way they used to be, when even though we weren’t in love anymore, we were still friends.
But I guess there are a lot of things that are never going back to the way they used to be, and no one knows that better than Alec. “Why?” I finally manage. “Did you get some other impression from Felix?”
Felix met up with Alec and Leo and Roxie earlier today to practice the song Alec will be performing with them. I’m sitting that one out, so I spent that time playing what felt like a hundred rounds of Uno with Ty instead. I’d like to think that choice was mainly motivated by my excellent mothering, but really I was just putti
ng off this awkwardness as long as possible.
Alec rolls his eyes. “God, no. That boy is definitely happy. Deliriously so.”
“Well, he’s not the only one.” My smile this time comes naturally.
Delirious sounds about right.
Alec’s eyes narrow, and opens his mouth, probably to make some snide comment, but Felix walks into the green room, already talking to me. “So the only clean pants Allison had for me are these skinny jeans that I’m pretty sure would fit Ty better than—oh, hey, Alec.”
Alec nods in greeting, and takes a bite out of his carefully selected strawberry.
Some of the pressure knotting in my chest lifts a little at seeing Felix.
“How bad do these look?” Felix asks, gesturing to his dark-wash jeans slashed with an occasional strategic rip. “Tell me the truth.”
I eye him up and down—something I always enjoy. “They’re snug. But that’s hardly a bad thing.” I grin at him. “The fans will certainly enjoy it.” Felix has amassed his share of swooning fangirls and boys from this tour, and I don’t blame them one bit. My husband is sexy as hell.
“I hope they enjoy hearing me sing falsetto, because that’s what might happen.” Felix walks over to me and slings an arm around my waist, drawing me into his side. My pulse thrums happily.
Alec smirks, but doesn’t say anything. Probably he thinks Felix is making some kind of power play, reminding Alec that I’m his, but the truth is, Felix has never really been jealous of Alec—not since Felix and I have been in a relationship in which we can actually touch each other, anyway.
Felix can tell this is tough for me, hanging out with Alec, and he’s comforting me in the best way possible. By just being with me.
God, I love this man.
“Can you play the cello in them?” I ask.
Now it’s Felix’s turn to smirk. “I can play the cello in anything.”
Alec makes a point of checking the time on his phone. “Well, I’d better give you two a few minutes alone, let Jenna calm her nerves before the show.” He grabs a bottle of water, and flips it once. “I remember really well what she likes to do for that.” He shoots us both a knowing look, and swaggers out of the green room.
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