by Maxene Novak
I made a point of being there on the steps waiting with a comforting shoulder to cry on.
Then all too soon, it was my turn to face the music. I thought about copying Jessie’s strategy and avoiding eye contact with her. God knew looking at her even from a distance felt like someone was ripping out my guts.
But then I realized this was probably my last chance to see and be with her like this. So instead I looked her right in the eye the entire time we were on stage together, putting everything I felt into the music.
As I stared into those shimmering pools of melted chocolate brown, I wondered if she knew what she’d become to me, how she’d changed me, the way she’d made me feel. I’d never told her, not in actual words. But I’d tried to let her know how I felt every time we touched, kissed, made love.
Now all I had was this damn song we’d performed together for what felt like years but was only a few short months.
How did someone have the power to change another human being in so short a time?
But unlike Jessie, I loved her enough to let her go, to try like hell to respect her decision even as that decision was ripping me apart.
The song began to wrap up, and we were standing there toe to toe, and I knew this was it. This was our final few seconds. There was nothing I could say or do to change it. I had to just let it happen.
As the song trailed off, just before she was supposed to turn and walk off stage, I grabbed her wrist, silently begging her for this one last thing. She uncertainly let me pull her into a hug. I kissed her temple, my throat choking closed, then ducked my head and whispered into her ear, “I love you, Sabrina.”
Then I let her go, turning and joining my band mates, letting the woman I loved walk off the stage and out of my life for good.
CHAPTER 13
Sabrina
I did what I had to for all of our careers. Or at least that was what I believed as I ran away overseas on the world tour portion of my next three-month-long itinerary.
And I thought I could be strong and handle it. After all, it was only a three-month-long relationship. With two guys instead of one, but still.
But all that meant now was that I’d managed to break my heart twice as badly.
Still, I’d hoped I had saved us from the majority of the bad press, figuring the paps would focus on my illness instead of any threesome rumors that might kill Jessie’s and Shane’s careers right as they were just taking off. And at first, it seemed to work. The paps did go crazy, as I’d predicted, hounding me relentlessly from country to country for details about what I was sick with, how long I’d been sick, whether I was trying for a cure.
I purposely gave them nothing, knowing this would only drive them even crazier and focus all their efforts on worming out the truth about my illness instead of going after Shane or Jessie for details about our relationship.
What I totally hadn’t counted on was Jessie and Shane outing themselves as a couple.
I read about it in a text Dani sent me, which included a link to a TMZ article that even included a not so sneakily taken photo of the two men I loved cuddled up together at some night club in L.A.
I stared and stared at that photo on my phone, my heart racing, wondering what in the world they had been thinking. Because I knew them too well. They’d known the photo would be snapped and posted online the minute they’d decided to get cozy together in public. So why had they done it? They didn’t need to out themselves as a cover for our threesome. My illness had distracted the press enough on its own.
The question of why they’d outed themselves hounded me night and day worse than even the most ambitious paparazzi. I even caught myself thinking about it while brushing my teeth and getting ready for a show, missing Jessie showing up to hang out with me during hair and makeup, missing what I now thought of as our bus because I was stuck overseas and having to deal with local everything…hotels, transportation, planes, crazy time zone shifts, weird food and way too many people all speaking languages I didn’t understand.
Now I was the outsider, still welcomed but definitely different, everywhere I went. And while I still had the same stage crew and backup dancers and managers handling everything, I quickly grew homesick. Not for my old hotel suite back in L.A. at the Beverly Wilshire, but for that bus and my guys.
My guys…who had faced whatever the public chose to throw at them so they could openly be together, regardless of what it might do to their careers.
They were either crazy, or brave, or both.
And obviously very much in love, judging by the number of places I kept seeing online photos taken of them at together…bars, clubs, strip joints, shopping, eating at cafes, buying coffees together at friggin Starbucks even.
And every new photo I couldn’t stop myself from looking up about them seemed to scream out what was missing from the pictures…
Me.
I should be there with them, my arms around their waists or looped through their arms, my feet tangled with theirs beneath the tables at the club lounges, our bodies all wrapped up together on the dance floors at the clubs I didn’t even usually want to go to. But now I did, desperately…with them.
I tried to remind myself that even if we were still together, I wouldn’t be with them at the clubs or strip joints or bars. Those definitely were not my scenes, even before I got too sick to be able to handle it all.
But if I were with them, we would have found different places to go to. Definitely Starbucks and the cafes, maybe even the shopping too. I would have taken them to my favorite places around L.A., and other places too, like San Francisco, and the coast, and the wine valley. We could have carved out a few days to go north to Portland or Seattle, or who knew where else. Maybe we’d just pick a spot on the map and drive there on a spur of the moment decision.
Or they could be here with me on this tour that was quickly feeling like it was starting to kill me as many of the places we stayed at had little or no air conditioning despite the crazy heat and humidity.
And they would have been here to hold me when my driver got lost and accidentally showed me the poorer side of the city in India where so many children were digging through piles of trash just thrown everywhere that I couldn’t stop myself from bursting into tears.
What was I doing here?
I should be home.
And then I realized exactly where my heart now believed “home” was.
It wasn’t some hotel suite or bus.
It was wherever my guys were.
With every passing day in a strange country surrounded by strangers and employees, I started to lose sight of what I was doing, why I was doing it, who I was becoming. And then there was the ever-present pain and fatigue, but now it steadily grew worse, dragging me down, constantly tearing at my will to keep going or even to get up each day. Even getting dressed became a monumental effort.
I thought if it were just a bad breakup I could have handled it better. I would have talked to Dani more, found a way to bitch and moan to vent, gotten angry and proved I was okay by living life harder than before. I would have been happy to throw myself into an overseas tour. I would have reveled in the thousand and one new things to see and smell and taste and do. I would have been ecstatic to go shopping at the local bazaars, dress in the local garb, talk to the locals and try crazy foods I never would have tried back home.
But the double breakup combined with the torturous pain and fatigue was just too much. It was a triple header of misery, and nothing about the foreign world around me interested me in the slightest this time around. All I wanted was to fly back to L.A. and hole up in my hotel suite with a huge bucket of mint chocolate ice cream with a can of whipped cream topping to spray directly into my mouth. I wanted to watch sappy romantic tragedies, preferably ones where the girl was sick and died at the end and left the guy heartbroken and sobbing for the rest of his life.
I wanted to wallow in my spoiled American misery in air conditioning with super fattening comfort food, not be dragg
ed through streets full of strangers like a dressed-up pony on parade and handed sticks of cooked but still weirdly hairy tarantulas to snack on.
And then came the day when I literally could not find the energy to get out of bed. Not even when hair and makeup arrived. Not even when the tour manager marched in and said I was going to be late. Not even when Roz called and all but begged me to save both our butts and get myself on stage already.
I didn’t give a shit about being a professional anymore.
I was done. With all of it. And especially with gorgeous guys and friggin lupus.
“When’s the last time she ate anything?” someone asked my bodyguard, who I realized I didn’t even know the name of. They kept changing out from country to country. Sometimes I had a whole small group of guards instead of just one. It was impossible to keep up with all of them when half the time I only saw them in the background for a day or less.
But the question was a good one. When was the last time I’d eaten?
Then I realized I didn’t really care about the answer, and I drifted off back to sleep.
I awoke sometime later to a doctor poking and prodding and feeling up my lymph nodes under my jaw. Freaked out at being touched by some stranger, I swatted his hands away even as the tour manager was trying to explain who he was.
“I don’t need a doctor!” I told them furiously. “I just need to go home.”
I was so tired. Couldn’t they just leave me alone and let me sleep? If I could just get some sleep, maybe I would feel good enough to get up and do whatever show they wanted out of me this time.
There was a lot of jabbering, and I started to nod off again.
When I woke up the next time, it was as I was being carried by a tall, seriously built white guy. Which was strange because we were in a city full of Indians, so we probably stuck out like sore thumbs.
I rested my cheek on his chest, not caring where he was taking me at this point, pretending he was Jessie or Shane carrying me to bed instead. I fell back asleep with the first smile in weeks.
***
Two months later…
“Ready to blow this joint?” Dani said, grinning as she shifted her little sports coup into drive.
I double checked that my seatbelt was buckled, took one last look at the lushly landscaped grounds around us, and nodded.
Funny how two months could change your whole perspective enough to make even me a little sad about leaving rehab.
When I’d first woken up in the little bungalow on these grounds a day after returning to the States, I hadn’t even realized it was a rehab center. I’d thought it was just some swanky resort with individual cottages for the guests to stay in instead of a central hotel facility. It wasn’t until Roz and Dani showed up with the psychiatrist that I learned where they’d really checked me into.
To say I was pissed was an understatement. They’d stuck me in the one place I’d always vowed I would never end up in. Rehab was for drug addicts like my mother. I had my shit together. I didn’t even touch prescribed drugs if they could become addictive.
But then Dani dragged me into the bathroom to the mirror, and I was shocked at my reflection. My eyes were sunk in, my skin was pale and sickly looking, and my hair was the saddest I’d ever seen it, including that time I had the flu for a whole week.
The lupus hadn’t done this to me. I had, by giving up and not asking for help when it all became too much.
Still, it took a whole month of private counseling sessions before I would leave my cottage and join the other “guests” for the group sessions, which I was sure I didn’t belong at. After all, I wasn’t addicted to anything. Even the psychiatrist had reluctantly conceded that I probably hadn’t been using sex with Shane and Jessie solely as a coping mechanism to deal with being sick.
Eating healthy and getting lots of rest, sunshine, and having nowhere to be from minute to minute also helped a ton.
But in the end, what really helped me deal with what the psychiatrist diagnosed as anxiety and depression, and my rheumatologist diagnosed as both lupus and a lovely side dose of also incurable fibromyalgia—which was basically just a broken volume dial on my pain receptors—was finally going to group sessions. Where I learned that rehab was in fact not just for drug addicts and alcoholics after all.
And with all my confusion, frustration, anger, resentment, and desperation to keep it all a secret, I fit right in with the other guests.
And just like even the self-professed addicts in my group, I learned that the things I thought were “broken” inside me could only be fixed by me. And it had nothing to do with an incurable illness, and everything to do with the choices I made each day.
I learned some hard truths…that every time I denied myself what I needed and loved, I was being every bit as awful as a parent who abused a child. I slowly began to see that, regardless of how any marketing team packaged me, I was still a human with needs and desires of my own that deserved to be acknowledged and allowed as long as they were good for me.
I came to see that, far from being a dirty, socially unacceptable secret—as I’d believed the psychiatrist would want me to believe—what I’d shared with Shane and Jessie was actually love. A love that had accepted each other for who and what we really were, that had set fairly healthy boundaries and showed respect for each other’s needs. We hadn’t just been using each others’ bodies as a way to escape. We’d been honest and loving together.
It was hiding everything and then rejecting that love, along with hiding and rejecting my illnesses, that had ripped me apart and driven me into the darkness. What I’d found with Jessie and Shane had been light and love. And I’d denied myself that out of some desire to keep earning the false love and impossible-to-keep approval of my fans.
By the end of the two months of rehab, I felt like a different person. Not the girl who’d been floundering all year with a hard to diagnose disease I was trying to hide. Not the parade pony being dragged from show to show to prance around and pose with the fans. But someone else.
I was still shaky inside, still uncertain about the future of my career and my health and how to perfectly manage it all. But at least I was a little clearer about who I wasn’t, what I didn’t want from my future anymore. And what I did want and hope for.
“You look so much better,” Dani announced bluntly as she hugged me hard upon arriving to pick me up from the center on my last day.
I’d touched my now shoulder-length bob nervously. “Really? The hair’s not too…mommish?”
She’d snorted, and I’d known instantly that everything was going to be okay. Including my much shorter, but so much easier to wash and style hair that no longer hurt my scalp or gave me headaches from having to carry around so much weight on my head all the time.
And then Dani had grabbed one of my bags, looped her arm through mine, and led me out to her car at the secluded circle drive’s curb.
Now she turned to me, the car purring beneath and around us like a happy tiger eager to go for a run. “So? Where to first?”
I hesitated, wondering what she’d think of my request. But then I remembered all that the psychiatrist and my fellow rehabbers had said about how important it was to set healthy boundaries for myself and finding the daily courage to go for what I really wanted regardless of what others thought.
I took a deep breath and said, “Know any good tattoo parlors around here?”
Her eyes lit up. “Oh, my God, finally! And yes. Yes, I do.”
***
So I did the talk show thing. And it was kind of like my own coming out event. I didn’t show my new tattoo to the audience and cameras, but I did admit to getting it and briefly described it when pressed by the hostess.
I also was determinedly frank about the lupus and fibromyalgia. But I didn’t talk about Jessie or Shane, because it was nobody’s business.
Even just talking about the lupus, it was awkward and nerve wracking to feel so exposed, worse than performing on stage or any other
interview I’d ever done. But once it was done, Roz promised I’d never have to agree to another grueling interview like it if I didn’t want to. Which was good, because my new vow was to try very hard to limit the crap that others forced on me whenever and wherever possible. I was still determined to be a professional and do good work. But I would be doing so on my own terms from now on.
And I was through being the perfect, sweet Princess of Pop. All I wanted was to be myself for a change. And I’d gone through enough hell this year to realize that if I couldn’t have the rest of my career on my own honest terms, then I didn’t want it at all. Stress was a huge factor in both my lupus and my fibromyalgia. If I didn’t learn how to be honest and live my life on my terms, I could end up in a hospital or even dead. People still died from lupus-caused complications, even in the modern first world of medicine and decent health care.
It was either shed the bullshit or get really sick. And I was choosing to live.
It was a daily process, and it required daily reminders to myself that it was okay for me to be human and imperfect. And I thought I was doing an okay job of it…until Roz called with the request for me to perform my song “Killing With Kindness” at the American Music Awards.
But they wanted me to perform it with Jessie and Shane as an homage to the current ongoing struggle that everyone in the LGBTQ+ community still faced for equal rights.
The cause I could fully support. But singing with them…
I had to take a day to think about it, to analyze whether this was right for me to do. It wouldn’t mean just getting up on stage with them for a few minutes at the awards show. It would also mean at least a few rehearsals with them ahead of time.
Was I really ready to face the two men I was still madly, pathetically in love with just a couple of months after leaving rehab and dealing with all the public outing bullshit about my illness and time spent in that rehab?
Would they pity me and think they were the sole reason I’d had to go to rehab for depression and anxiety?