by Martha James
God, he thought. Had he really just been flirting with her?
Where did the lines get drawn between small talk, and banter, and flirting, anyway? Of which was he guilty, and did it really matter?
She was way out of his league, he knew. So beautiful, so talented, and so- let's face it- wealthy.
But still, refused to wholly believe that that twinkle in her eyes whenever she looked at him had been nothing but his imagination. There had been something there between the two of them, something almost palpable. And it left him feeling like- hell, what did it leave him feeling like?
Really, it was a feeling he couldn't remember having experienced since his teenage years, harboring crushes on girls that were built up to the status of goddesses in his mind, and thus would always be vastly beyond the level of what one might think of as “attainable.”
He sighed, and shook his head.
Why did he torture himself like this?
What did he think, that the multimillionaire pop star who could have any man in the world she wanted- men with far greater prospects than he would ever have- would settle for a scruffy, washed-up nobody who stood outside her dressing room before her performances?
No, he didn't really think that... But he nevertheless allowed himself to believe it.
Her eyes, after all, had been so beautiful as they peered into him, gazing with an intensity that practically made his throat hurt to consider in retrospect. Her lips had been painted a gentle pink, beautiful and glossy, and throughout their entire conversation the urge to lean in and kiss them had become more and more difficult for him to suppress.
He would never do such a thing, of course, not without consent. It had simply been a desire, and he knew from that point onward that it would be one that lingered and haunted him, day and night, with no likely possibility of real world fulfillment.
He sighed, and shook his head.
Well, he shrugged. If nothing else, he had to admit that watching after an international pop star on her world tour and casually flirting with her outside her dressing room was a hell of a lot more interesting than standing guard outside the footlocker, sniffing out misbehaving adolescents and various potential shoplifters.
He'd always wanted to break into the music industry, and at least this way he got to stand on the periphery of it- even if, as with Desiree, there was no realistic path for him to make his way from the doorstep and in through the front door.
Just then, he heard the largest swell of applause yet, this one lasting for minutes on end, seeming as though it might reasonably never end.
Desiree, he knew, would have just taken her first few steps onto the stage, and presented herself to the crowd.
At that moment, it all felt more ridiculous than ever- there was no way that a girl like her could be possessed by a single individual, to the extent he believed necessary for a relationship between two people to truly stand a chance of working.
Desiree Starr belonged to the world...
“How's everyone doing tonight?” Desiree spoke into the microphone, and there was another spike of applause and otherwise rabid fanfare, before the first loud burst had even come close to dying down.
As surreal as it had all been up until this point, the scene now hit her like a bag of bricks. She couldn't even see with total clarity into the audience beyond the stage, blinded as she was by the lights overhead flooding down upon her. But she could vaguely make out the size of the crowd- the masses of people towering overhead, row upon row stacked so high up that that she felt like an ant in their presence, small and insignificant, despite being the one they'd all expressly come out tonight to see.
Wasn't it strange how the mind worked?
She could feel her heartbeat racing, growing steadily faster and faster, to the point that she was practically in a state of full on panic.
I can't do this... I can't do this... her mind was telling her, despite the fact that she'd put on such performances so many times before, and that this should reasonably have proven to her that she could.
What had changed?
The size of the crowds?
The pressure not to fail, which she suddenly felt certain she might do?
Maybe it was just the time away from touring, the months she'd spent recording and recovering her strength, setting her too greatly at ease, and making it hard for her to jump back into the swing of things so abruptly.
I can't do this... I can't do this, her mind kept repeating, and for a brief, horrible moment, she truly believed this to be the case.
I can't play tonight... I'm just standing here like an idiot, paralyzed by fear, and I can't get out of it. All these loyal fans paid so much to see me, and I'm letting them down. This is it... This humiliation is the end of my career... A quick, embarrassing ending to my quick, embarrassing career.
Her hands were getting tighter and tighter around the neck of her guitar, her fingers trembling, her throat becoming painfully dry. She could tell that Jason and Shade were staring up at her, wondering what the hold-up was, waiting for her to get started.
But she couldn't get started...
She simply couldn't- she was stuck. Incapable of doing anything except standing there like an imbecile, her spinning mind trapped in the confines of her stiff, trembling body.
But then a thought appeared inside that same anxious mind.
An image...
Two blue eyes.
Gazing at her as they had, minutes ago, as she made her way out of her dressing room.
Julian's eyes...
They eased something inside her. Mitigated the tension.
She suddenly felt completely safe, completely secure and looked after.
Her nerves settled. The tension in her muscles eased away, and she felt her shoulders lowering, as though she'd just been unfrozen from a block of ice. Accordingly, she shivered very slightly, and the next thing she knew she was capable once more of concentrating on the performance at hand.
She blinked, and was aware of the audience still cheering for her. She was aware that she still had an endearing smile across her face, and that, apparently, no one had taken any note of her extended freak out. Well, probably the backstage crew had suspected it, but not the audience. They, rather, had risen to a fever pitch, confusing her fleeting breakdown for a theatrical pause, providing her with just the relief she needed as she recovered her sanity.
Slowly, thankfully, she lowered her head to the guitar in her arms, and placed her fingers softly on the strings. She stood in this pose for a moment, drawing out the tension, trying to blend the action in with that first long pause, and make it seem as though the full period of her stalling had been planned all along.
Then, at last, she allowed gravity to pull her arm downward, and let the strum of a single note pass from her guitar.
“Yooooou're...” she began, holding out the word for a long moment, and the audience went deathly silent for a moment, hanging on the edge of their seats. She smiled at this as the word faded out, and after a breath, finally belted out the song's first line.
“...not the boy I thought you were,
The only thing that's sure
And I'm not the girl you think I am
so perfect and so pure...”
The crowd lost their minds.
Desiree coasted on, the smile on her face now sincere, and her heart now racing with excitement, rather than the crippling anxiety that had occupied it up until the present point.
She made her way adeptly through the song, sliding back into her old routine like someone riding a bike for the first time in years- it all came back to her with astonishing clarity once she made her way past that initial speed bump of recollection.
From “Not the Girl You Think I Am,” she went directly into “Hearts Beating as One,” and spent the next two hours playing through some of her most popular tunes. From “Lion Inside” to “My Own Way,” from “Wild Side” to “Heartbeatz,” and all the best stuff from her first two albums, as well as s
ome of her favorite cover songs, some of which had been instrumental in getting her to where she was today.
The crowd was electrified, screeching with enthusiasm as she hopscotched from tune to tune, scarcely taking breaks between the songs as their energy flowed into her. The louder they cheered for her, the more encouraged she was to keep on going, to double down on her own performance, to give each and every person in that audience the show of their lives, and make sure every last cent they'd paid for their tickets here tonight was made totally and completely worth it.
At last, once the whole of the setlist had been burned through without her even truly realizing it, she found herself on the final song of the evening. Shade and Jason made their way discreetly offstage, the spotlights on them dimming and instead fixating solely on Desiree herself. It was a bit abrupt, having to transition from the high voltage energy of the night up until now, to the slow, gentle, cool down that was the final song.
She swapped out her electric guitar for the wooden acoustic one with which she'd been practicing backstage, and slowly began to strum out the first few chords of the very song she'd been practicing- a stripped down, acoustic version of “Now That You're Gone,” which she'd meticulously worked out to sound just right in its current iteration, considerably distinct as it was from the album version of the song- which sounded good, but was far more produced than this. Not overproduced, exactly, but recorded and assembled in a way that was slightly less intimate than the rawness of Desiree and her guitar, performing in isolation, the woman and her instrument almost like a singular unit.
“Ever since you left me
And left me on my own,” she began.
There was a burst of applause from the audience, then everyone died down, listening to the quiet finale, letting the pure feeling of her voice and guitar pierce them like a knife.
She rode the hills and valleys of her song, caught up in the emotional flow of it, nearly bringing herself to tears as she tapped into the pain and hope that had brought on its original composition.
And all the while, as she sang, and as it had been throughout the entire performance that evening, through every song, it was a singular vision which glowed inside her mind. The same set of glowing blue eyes staring back at her from the depths of her mind, making her short of breath, while also simultaneously giving her life.
The eyes of the man she'd only just met, and about whom she knew next to nothing, aside from her primitive, instinctual feelings for him.
And all the while, this same man stood backstage, his eyes closed, his ears piqued as he listened to the beauty of her voice, the movement of her fingers over the guitar strings, totally unaware that every note, every syllable performed that evening had been performed with him in mind...
2
And so, she was off.
The Starrstruck world tour rolled out with steady momentum after that first touch and go performance, with sold out show after sold out show, and Desiree's confidence and ability only continuing to grow along the way.
They hopped from city to city, from Las Vegas to Houston, New Orleans to Miami and Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Louisville, spanning the entire country in a mere matter of days. The next couple of shows would take place in New York, after which they would fly back to the west coast and hit a couple of stops there, before taking things outside the country to some shows in Asia- she was strangely huge in Japan, much to her surprise and, she had to admit, her gratification.
Every second of the experience was invigorating for her, and she felt as though she kept learning more and more about herself and her skills with every stop they made.
Things with Julian the security guard, meanwhile, progressed slowly but surely.
Although, progressed wasn't exactly the right term for it...
Nothing actually changed between the two of them, for these first several weeks on end, at any rate. They were still flirtatious, and became unmistakably flustered around one another. It should have been obvious, or at least it was to any outside observer, that the two of them felt something toward one another. They would always stand around before her shows got started, talking and laughing outside Desiree's dressing room, making clear but unspoken advances, and leaving one another just enough room for doubt that things didn't really have the chance to progress.
Julian, for his part, felt as though it wouldn't be appropriate for him to make a move. As much as he liked Desiree, and as much as she liked him in return (or at least, as much as she seemed to let on to liking him,) he felt like asking her out would be like stepping dangerously outside of his own station. Besides, where the hell was his broke ass going to take a multimillionaire pop star on a date and have the least hope at all of impressing her? And then there was the matter of security- obviously he worked in the field, but he was pretty sure that being out on a date with the girl he was charged with protecting qualified him as being “off the clock.”
And so, any kind of date the two of them went on would have to be supervised by Desiree's own private secret service, largely stripping the evening of any potential it may have otherwise had for anything resembling romance.
For Desiree's part, it wasn't so much a matter of social complexity as it was one of complete shyness. Oddly enough, her runaway success hadn't brought with it the inflated sense of ego one might normally have expected with such a development. She was still the modest, unassuming girl she'd always been, never too sure of herself even when the world seemed to validate her to the fullest extent.
Hey, she thought, that could be an idea for a song- the divide she felt between outward success and inward confidence. She had to imagine that was something a lot of girls, and women went through.
She would have to explore that possibility, and see what became of it.
Right now, though, she tried to tell herself that there was still time. The two of them were traveling around the world together, after all, and the opportunities to express their true feelings for one another would surely be abundant.
Until then they just had to bide their time, not lose hope, and hope that the right moment would present itself.
When it did finally present itself, however, that opportunity took a form that neither of them might have expected- and one that would change both of their lives forever...
_____
Up to that point, everything in the evening had been going, for the most part, as normal.
They were in New York, getting ready for what they all thought would be an incredible show. Desiree was back stage, participating in a VIP meet and greet with a few lucky fans- lucky, in this case, meant rich, and rich, to her, meant insufferable. But, she grinned and bore it all the same, doing her best to smile graciously at them, signing whatever they happened to foist at her, answering their questions about fame and the limelight.
Her keyboardist, Jason, was with her as well- he wasn't in quite as high demand as she, but there was more than a significant portion of her fan base who shared a collective crush on him. She supposed, in his way, he was decent looking, but she'd never really felt any sort of attraction to him in that regard. He was tall, slender, dark haired, had a bit of a reserved nature- though you might not suspect as much whenever he was jamming out on his synthesizer onstage. She could certainly see the appeal he might have had to the right kind of girl, she supposed. But she'd known him for so long by this point- they'd known each other since high school, before her rapid rise to fame- that he was almost more like a brother to her than anyone she should feel that way about.
It was the same with Shade, who happened to be the only member of the trio not present for the event tonight.
It wasn't as though he couldn't have been... And looking back on the night Desiree wished to God she would have forced him to participate, made him come along and suffer through it like the rest of them.
He was only a few hundred feet away, shut in his dressing room down the hallway. She had tried to persuade him to come along, as had Jason- in
his case, it was more out of annoyance than anything. “If I have to deal with this BS then you should too...” (They both loved Desiree and her music, but could generally due without her rabid, teenybopper fan base, much less being forced to interact with them for any extended period.)
“No thanks,” Shade had said flippantly. “You two go ahead and enjoy the Mickey Mouse Fan Club. I'm going to stay behind for a while and get... Mentally prepared...”
He'd twirled a drumstick in his hand at this, and Desiree could clearly recognize the presence of innuendo in his voice.
It wasn't an innuendo that she liked, either...
Shade had been doing a lot more “mental preparation” ever since Desiree had made it to the big time, and she'd always done her best to turn a blind eye to it. She knew that Jason likely had a much clearer idea of what Shade's “mental preparation” entailed (i.e., which substances were entailed,), and she probably could have found out from him had she genuinely wanted to. But, from her perspective, it was probably better to keep a barrier of plausible deniability about the situation. As long as it didn't interfere with his duties in the band, it really wasn't any of her business what he did, she thought.