“For me, it’s taken therapy, routine, some medication, and the love of a really understanding man to get me to where I can sit up here and openly discuss this. I just didn’t want to lie to you guys, and I know I might get some backlash, or people who don’t understand, but I’d rather you guys see me for who I really am than be popular for the person my label wants me to be. I think there’s a lot of power in knowing who you are and being proud not just of your accomplishments, but the struggles we face to get there.”
There were at least a dozen cheers from the audience, shouts of support and encouragement.
She took a deep breath, and I echoed it, wishing I could lend her my strength at the same time realizing that she didn’t need it. I didn’t need to be her hero—she’d become that all by herself.
“So for the next song, I’d like to do something a little different. This song isn’t mine, but it’s come to mean so much to me, and I hope Phil Collins will approve of the cover.”
The crowd cheered, and didn’t die down until the first chords were played.
“This one is for Hawthorne, wherever he might be.”
Right here. I’m right here, baby.
She started to sing ‘Against All Odds,’ and I stopped breathing. With each line, my mind replayed our memories, from high school when I’d adored her, to graduation when I’d worshipped her, to seeing her again in L.A. and loving her just as much as when we were kids, to riding in my car, listening to this very song and wishing she’d understand what she meant to me…to New York when I walked away.
But out of all that, all I could hear was that she missed me. She wanted me. She still loved me despite what I’d just put her through.
As the song ended, the crowd stood, roaring in their applause.
I moved, ready to rush the stage, but Chad caught my arm. “No. Not here.”
“What?” I snapped. “I love her. She loves me. If she’s going to be open about her condition then there’s nothing for the label to hold over her.”
“Not here, because even though that song was about you, this moment is about her, and if you do this, if you run to her and profess your love in front of this crowd, you’re making it about you. So be the bigger man and let her shine.”
My gaze darted from his determined eyes to the way she smiled on stage, taking a bow. Damn it. He was right.
But that didn’t soothe the raw need I felt pulsing in every cell of my body, screaming out to hold her, to close this rift between us.
I needed a way to show her that I was all in. Screw the tabloids, the label, our own fears. We were the real deal, the love that people sang about, prayed for, cried about in the middle of the night.
And I knew exactly how to show her.
I ripped my eyes away from her and looked at my best friend. “I’m going to need a favor.”
“So you’ll enter from stage left at the cue,” the guy with the headset told me for the tenth time.
“And take up my mark at the half way point on stage,” I finished. “Sit through commercial break, lights will come up after we’re announced. I’ve got it, I promise.”
“Yes, Miss Caroline,” he said. “Two minutes,” he said.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, concentrating inward on my heartbeat, my sense of calm, and went through the plan in my head one more time. At the cue, I would walk out to center stage and take one of the two chairs that backed up to the other.
We’d be announced and Chad and I would sing back-to-back, as if we were lovers separated, with the rest of the Birds of Prey up on the pedestals in the background.
Hawke would be able to see me, but I wouldn’t see him.
Kind of like this whole week of rehearsals that he’d decided not to show up for. Not that I could blame him for not wanting to be seen with me. Things hadn’t exactly been quiet around me since I’d gone public about the phobia.
But hey, the label hadn’t dropped me, and the fan support was off the charts. If there had been any tabloid backlash, I’d avoided seeing it. Or Mom had simply done a great job of hiding it. She’d told the reporters to fuck off so frequently that I was pretty sure it had become her go-to response to just about everything.
Bette Midler and Dan Akroyd passed me on their way to the podium to announce and I sucked in another breath. It was almost go time.
“Now,” the headset guy said, and I walked out onto the stage, careful not to step on my dress in the relative dark. The minute the lights hit it I knew I’d light up like a golden disco ball, the floor-length empire gown covered completely in metallic gold.
I sat in the chair and rearranged my dress so it flowed around my legs. My clammy hands gripped the microphone, and I tried my breathing exercises again.
I leaned back just a little in my chair to make sure Chad was behind me. “You ready for this?” I whispered.
“More than you’ll ever know,” came his gruff reply.
But that wasn’t his voice. No, that was the voice I heard in my dreams, my memories, my fantasies.
My stomach dropped to the floor. “Hawke?”
He turned so we were nearly cheek-to-cheek. “I couldn’t do it,” he whispered like that was any explanation.
“Couldn’t do what?” I asked in a hurry, knowing commercial break had to just about be over.
“Couldn’t sit there and watch him sing to you, listen to him make our song his own, like he had any right to my soul, my love for you. It wasn’t going to happen.”
“You’re singing with me?” My chest tightened, a lump growing in my throat. He never sang in public unless it was back up.
“Unless you don’t want me to.” There was a question in his voice, a doubt that stripped my defenses like nothing else could.
My breath stuttered and I blinked back the tears that prickled in my eyes. Heather would kick my ass if I ruined her makeup job right before the cameras came on.
“What do you want?” I asked shakily.
“You,” he said, whispering as Bette and Dan started the intro. “I have always wanted you. I will always want you. And if being with you means I leave the Birds of Prey, I’ll do it. The music is hollow without you.”
Oh, God, I was going to melt into a puddle in front of a nationwide audience.
“But New York…”
“I just wanted to protect you. Once I saw you at the Troubadour and I knew you were ready to go public, there was no reason for us to put ourselves through this. I love you. You won’t have to worry about your rep if I’m not in the band. You won’t have to worry about anything at all if you’ll just let me love you. I’m willing to fight for our dream. Are you?”
“…with their number one song, ‘Requiem.’” Bette finished the intro and the lights came up to the resounding cheer of Radio City Music Hall.
“Oh yeah,” Hawke added as he adjusted the stand mic that had never been there during rehearsals. Wait…that was his guitar… “We’re doing this acoustic.”
Joy so sweet that I could taste it on my tongue filled me, replacing the fear of the stage, of losing him, of losing myself, and left me with a sense of peace that was only rivaled by the moments after I’d made love with Hawke.
He started, his fingers masterfully playing the instrument, reminding me of his hands on my body, and as effortlessly as our chemistry ignited while we were in bed, our voices had the same electric effect as we sang.
We stood in unison as the chorus, still back to back, and told the world our story, from two young kids with too much love, to two adults who didn’t know how to live without the other. In those moments, the pain of our past was wiped away, pulled away like the lone thread of an unraveling sweater, leaving only the soul-consuming love that I had for this man.
There would never be another love like this for me, because there would never be another Hawthorne. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought. We knew the truth—we were twin flames, halves of the same soul that was only whole when our jagged edges were pieced together.
As we came to the bridge, we turned, finally facing each other. The love shining from his eyes nearly made me forget the lyrics, but his voice brought me back and we sailed through the rest of the song sharing my microphone, so close that to my eyes, we were alone in a theater full of people.
As the final chord rang out, we lingered, locked into each other’s eyes and uncaring that the applause had started. The energy between us was palpable, connecting us in a way I knew could never be severed if I just accepted it—accepted him.
“Ball’s in your court, Brie,” he whispered.
I flung my arms around his neck and pressed my mouth to his in a kiss so powerful that every molecule of my body sighed in relief then woke up to hum, craving Hawthorne.
He swung his guitar to his back and gathered me in his arms, kissing me back with promise, and passion, and sheer perfection.
I was vaguely aware of the crowd’s deafening roar as the lights went down on our section of the stage and the announcers appeared at their podium.
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to need a cigarette after that performance,” Bette Midler said with a light pant. “Phew!” The crowd laughed, and we were forgotten as they moved on to the next category.
Hawke kissed me, harder, deeper, carrying me off stage without so much as breaking our embrace.
“No quitting the band,” I whispered against his lips once we were out of the camera’s view. “We’ll make it work. Like you said, it can’t be any harder to be together than it was to stay apart. No matter what, we’ll combine tour schedules, we’ll take winters off, whatever. But this dream includes both of us.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, finally letting my toes touch the ground.
I nodded. “Our problem is looking at the examples we have around us without taking the biggest factor into consideration.”
“What’s that?” he asked, stroking my cheeks with his thumbs.
“I don’t think anyone in the history of the world has loved each other like we do. Stereotypes and other people’s experiences can’t hold a candle to that.”
“So you want the dream?” he asked with a grin so sexy that I could barely wait to get him back to the hotel.
“No, I want the reality. You and me beating the odds and choosing whatever future we want.”
“I want you, the rest of this is just icing.”
A slow smile crept across my face, and I leaned up on tiptoes to kiss him, softly sucking on his lower lip.
“You’ve got me, the sweet, the sour, and every flavor in between.”
He lifted me so our mouths were level.
“Then it’s a good thing I’ve always loved the way you taste.”
“I love days off,” I said, rolling over in bed to drape my arm across Brie. The sun was just now coming up, the colors streaking the sky.
“You’ve loved this whole month off,” she joked, turning her head so I could kiss her.
“You know what I’m going to love more?” I asked, sliding over my wife’s incredible body.
She raised a delicate eyebrow. “I can probably guess…”
I kissed down her neck, then skipped her breasts to press my lips to the swell of her belly. “Having the whole year off for this little girl.”
“Boy,” she argued. “There’s no way a girl would disagree with everything I eat. All girls love chocolate.”
“Girl. She’s just practicing her angry teenage years where she hates everything we give her and only wants to play punk metal. Don’t worry, baby girl,” I whispered against Brie’s soft skin. “Daddy’s already got you covered. There’s a classical acoustic and an electric already waiting in your nursery.”
Brie laughed, the sound waking our sleeping soon-to-be-here daughter, and she kicked me. Hard. Right in the mouth.
“I take it back. He’s a boy who doesn’t want to share his mama.”
“Or a girl who doesn’t like her space crowded,” she retorted.
A girl who looked like Brie, or a boy with my hands and her eyes…it was all good. Everything was good.
The alarm went off, and I rolled quickly, slapping the thing off.
“Why would you have an alarm set?” she asked, snuggling deeper into the covers.
I grabbed the remote from my nightstand and turned the TV on, flipping until I hit the right channel. “Good, we didn’t miss it.”
“Ugh,” she said, rolling over, and pulling her pillow over her ears.
“Can’t block me out,” I sang.
“Watch me,” was her muffled reply.
One by one, names were announced, and my stomach tightened. Her last album had been amazing. The kind of legendary shit that won things like—
“The nominees for album of the year…”
Grammys.
My fingers bit into the remote as two, then three names were announced then—
“Sabrina Caroline, for Captivation.”
“What?” she screamed out, throwing the pillow at the window. “Did they just?”
“Yes!” I jumped up onto my feet, jumping on the bed as I shouted, “You’re nominated!” I hit my knees when I remembered that I didn’t want to scramble my poor daughter.
I kissed Brie’s shocked mouth. “I’m nominated,” she repeated, a slow smile spreading across her face.
“How do you feel?” I asked, pride overwhelming every other emotion I could have had.
She cupped my cheeks and kissed me, as our phone started to ring.
“Like we have some pretty sweet icing.”
The End
First and foremost, thank you to my Heavenly Father, who blesses me far more than I deserve.
Thank you to my husband, Jason, for putting up with rock star hours and generally being the most kickass husband on the planet. To my kiddos, you are what keeps me going, writing, and thriving. Thank you for putting up with pizza, late dinners, and a mom who has a hard time telling the difference between fiction and reality.
Thank you to Janet Wallace and Regina Wamba for the opportunity to participate in such a great anthology! Janet, you’re always a source of inspiration and Regina, you are a cover-design goddess. Thank you to Crystal, who found the nuances and curves of this little novella and brought them out to shine.
Thank you to my never-ending support group. Molly, for always being the first beta, Linda and Allison—for dropping everything to help me proof. You ladies keep the squirrels at bay. Melissa…what I can I say. You keep me sane and focused. Thank you for not just being my publicist, but an amazing friend. Gina, my Gina. Thank you for late-night sprints and daytime vents. Flygirls!!!! You guys are such a joy to be around. I freaking love each and every one of you.
Lastly, thank you to my sister. Kate, for the love of the 80’s and big hair, and the countless times you blared your music. For being the yin to my yang, my balance and stability while we moved around the world, and pretty much the best sister ever. I’m so glad we get to raise our kids together.
Rebecca Yarros is a hopeless romantic and a lover of all things coffee, chocolate, and Paleo. She is the author of the Flight & Glory series, including Full Measures, the award-winning Eyes Turned Skyward, Beyond What is Given, and Hallowed Ground. She loves military heroes, and has been blissfully married to hers for fourteen years.
When she's not writing, she's tying hockey skates for her four sons, sneaking in some guitar time, or watching brat-pack movies with her two daughters. She lives in Colorado with the hottest Apache pilot ever, their rambunctious gaggle of kids, an English bulldog who is more stubborn than sweet, and a bunny named General Fluffy Pants who torments the aforementioned bulldog. They recently adopted their youngest daughter from the foster system, and Rebecca is passionate about helping others do the same.
Want to know about Rebecca’s next release?
Join her mailing list!
Or check her out online at www.rebeccayarros.com
Before the internet…before sext messages, selfies, like buttons, an
d d**k picks…epic loves and broken hearts played out offline, on mixtapes that became the self-made soundtracks of a generation.
Love in the 80s: A New Adult Mix is a collection of ten contemporary romance, new adult, stand-alone novellas set in the 1980s.
Written by award-winning and bestselling authors, one digital novella will be released on the last Friday of each month January - October in 2016.
The title of each love story will be a hit song from the year that the novella represents. The totally awesome authors include: Casey L. Bond, Lindy Zart, Cambria Hebert, Amber Lynn Natusch, Misty Provencher, Rebecca Yarros, Rachel Higginson, RK Ryals, Cameo Renae and Chelsea Fine.
Love in the 80s: A New Adult Mix was created by UTOPiAcon founder, Janet Wallace, and is co-produced with award-winning book cover designer, Regina Wamba (together they are WaWa Productions).
Read on to check out, Love in the 80s: A New Adult Mix collection.
My name is Tina. I’m a freshman at USC, a good student and friend…
And I’m a victim.
Hot guys make my brain turn to mush. So, the fact that I was arrested then survived a massive earthquake only to be shackled to the fox next to me can all be overlooked, right?
Okay, so I was arrested before I met Luke. A tremor that caused a blackout at the LAPD precinct where we were being held. Although technically, I wasn’t shackled to him, I was handcuffed, but still. Any and all lapses in my usual—totally sane, I might add—judgments, are his fault. Totally.
I wouldn’t typically do the things I did. I’m no outlaw. I’m a college student.
Click here to read now.
The road trip from Minnesota to Pennsylvania and back is meant to be the final adventure before four friends go their separate ways in the fall.
Except nothing goes as intended, beginning with the unexpected addition of Catherine Tate, Jessie Keller’s new girlfriend. Sam Kent denies his attraction to her while simultaneously deflecting unusual interest from his pal Hannah Lopez. Dickie Dean is the socially inept book lover who surprises them all.
1984: Against All Odds (Love in the 80s #5) Page 11