“Tristan!” Elly called out to me again. The house was big and she was probably making the rounds through it, looking for us. When she finally found us she said, “You were ignoring me, weren’t you?”
I smiled and said, “Absolutely. Can the boys go with us this morning?”
“I’m not sure they’d be too cooperative in that little green room over at ABC.” She came over and scooped Patrick up off the floor. He squealed as she started kissing him all over his face. They were teething again and he slobbered like a faucet. Elly didn’t care, she kissed him anyways. When she finished with him she handed him to me and picked up Eli, doing the same to him. “Brandi’s here,” she said then. “You’re going to be late.”
With a sigh, I picked up both the boys and kissed their little, fat faces. I carried them to the dining room where Brandi was putting their breakfast on the table and I sat them in their high chairs. I kissed them on top of the head one more time. I really didn’t want to leave them.
“We won’t be long, Brandi,” Elly told her as we were leaving.
“Take your time,” she said, “Good luck, Tristan.”
“Thanks,” I told her.
Brandy quipped, “It’s live television, so watch the potty mouth.”
“No one has any fu—”
“Tristan!” Since the boys were old enough to make sounds, Elly had made me promise not to say fuck in front of them, ever. It had taken some doing since that eliminated half of my functioning vocabulary, but that would have been my first slip in a long time.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just going to say none of you have any faith in my good sense. But since you knew how I was going to phrase it…I guess I can see why.” Brandi and Elly both laughed and the boys, thinking we were laughing about them since they were usually the center of all the action, giggled too. It was so cute I had to go kiss them again.
“Let’s go, potty mouth,” Elly told me.
Elly drove us to Burbank in her SUV. The traffic was pretty light since it was so early. On the way home, we wouldn’t be so lucky. I wanted to take the bike but she didn’t want me looking wind-blown on TV, she said. We’d be sitting bumper to bumper on the I-5 somewhere before the day is over and then she’d wish she had listened to me. The one thing I hated about L.A. is the traffic. When I was on the bike, I could make my own lanes most of the time.
We made it to the studio and into the green room where we were supposed to wait just in the nick of time, apparently. Everyone looked really nervous like they were afraid I wasn’t going to show, even my own band.
“Hey, guys!” I said when we sat down.
“Hey,” the three guys said back.
Carl, the drummer said, “That hot girl from that new comedy show is on right now.” He pointed up at the television and we all looked up.
I didn’t think she was all that hot. She had big tits and a nice ass, but her nose was funny and her hair looked fake. Elly was hotter, but if I said that right then it would have embarrass her, so I didn’t. Instead I said, “Why don’t you go for it, Carl?”
“Nah, she’s way out of my league,” he said.
“That’s what I thought about Elly,” I told him. “Just look at us now.”
Carl looked over at Elly and smiled. Then he said, “He’s right, you know. A girl like you is not supposed to be hanging around bad boys like us.”
Elly was nodding as she said, “I know but I’ve always had a thing for the bad boys.”
We chatted with the band for a while and when Hot Girl came back in the room, they called me out to make-up. Elly kissed me and wished me luck. I was praying that Jerry gave them the list of things not to talk about…one of which was my parents.
I got all made up and prissy like a girl and then they called me out. The studio audience was a lot smaller than a concert one but it was still cool that they all got to their feet for me when I came out. I waved and blew kisses and played to the crowd like Elly told me too. It was an older crowd, but they still seemed to like me. I had to hug or kiss all five of the women hostesses of the show before we all took a seat at the big dining room table on the center of the set.
“So, Tristan, we hear you’re making a new CD,” the lady who was a retired news anchor said. “What can you tell us about it? When’s it coming out?”
“It should be out on the Tuesday before Halloween,” I told her. “I think it’s my best one yet. My band is just amazing and, best of all, my wife agreed to do a duet with me on this one.”
“Aw, that’s sweet,” one of the other ladies said. “Is it a song you wrote?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of a song about us. I think it’s going to be the best one on the CD.”
“Tristan, we heard you had twin boys! What’s that like?” asked another woman.
I couldn’t see myself on the monitor, but I’m sure my chest was puffed out and I was beaming as I said, “It’s indescribable. They’re so amazing, I can’t stop looking at them some days.”
The ladies smiled and then one of them said, “Do you have any pictures of them?”
Elly and I had tried to keep their little faces out of the media, but the paparazzi had caught us out shopping or eating more than once and snapped pictures and printed them without our permission. We talked about it before I came on the show and decided that since those pictures were out there, it would be safe to show them off now. I took one of them out of my wallet that had been taken on their first birthday. One of the ladies handed it to the camera man and within seconds my handsome boys were on the big screen.
“Oh, Tristan! They’re beautiful!” The ladies told me. I knew that already, but politely thanked them anyways.
“Tristan, I’m going to ask you something, and it’s okay if you don’t care to talk about it…” I was thinking, fuck! She’s going to ask about my parents or the boy band. Instead she said, “I hear you’re about five years clean and sober now. For some of our young viewers who might be struggling with addiction, maybe you could share your secret.”
“Honestly, I don’t have a secret. I owe my sobriety to my wife Elly. She’s the one who made me realize that my life was worth more than that. Once I realized it was worth more, I wanted more. I’m a better man, a better human being than I ever was and I owe it all to her.”
“Well, they say behind every great man is an even greater woman.”
“That’s my Elly,” I told her, honestly, “Only she’s not behind me, ever. She’s always beside me. She’s my biggest inspiration, my biggest fan, and the love of my life all rolled into one.”
The ladies at the table were all saying, “Awwwww….” and so was the audience.
“I have a question,” the lady who used to be a stand-up comedian said. “I heard that you flew out to New York a few months ago to visit a sick little girl in the hospital.”
“Yeah, her name was Becca and she was twelve.” It made my chest hurt to talk about her. I’d only met the little girl once at the urging of my agent. He was only interested in the publicity it would generate. I saw how brave she was and how beautiful she was and it really affected me. She died about a month later. It still hurt me to be reminded of that. “She loved math and animals and soccer. She was an example of the kind of person I wanted to be. She had acute lymphoma and she told me she knew she was going to die. She passed away about a month after I saw her.
“That’s so sad,” the news anchor said.
“Yeah, it was really sad for us as humans because it’s one less good person in the world. In twelve short years I think she had learned more about human nature and compassion that most of us learn in our lifetime, or she was just born with it. Either way, the world was lucky to have her, if only for a little while.”
“That was a good thing you did,” one of the other ladies said, “You must be one of those good human beings yourself.”
“I hope so, but the truth is I owe my life to the love of a twelve year old girl.”
They looked shocked by that and one of t
hem said, “What do you mean?”
“Elly always tells me she was twelve when she fell in love with me. I’m glad she didn’t know me then because I wouldn’t have been deserving. But she held onto that for a lot of years and that’s why I’m alive today, I guarantee you. So, like I said, I owe my life to the love of a twelve year old.”
I was glad after they took their break then they said it was time to perform. I joined my band up on the little stage in the corner of the set and I was back in my element. We did one of the songs from the new CD and the audience loved it. After we performed, the ladies had a few more questions for me, nothing major, and that was it. I walked off that stage realizing that this talk show thing wasn’t as bad as I’d been afraid it would be. I knew one of these days someone was going to ask me about my parents….or worse yet, interview them. For the moment, I was just thankful they didn’t.
Chapter Fifteen
Elly
I sat in the green room and watched Tristan’s interview on the TV mounted up in the corner. When they asked about his sobriety, I was nervous for him. I know that he doesn’t like talking about it because he is afraid that it will inevitably lead to questions about his parents. Or, worse yet in Tristan’s eyes, someone will think of him as weak. To him, there would be no worse punishment. I could see on his face through the TV screen that he didn’t really want to answer it. I held my breath, waiting for him to speak. When he did, the tears came gushing out of my eyes so fast that I didn’t realize I was crying until they were rolling down my cheeks. He was saying things about me that he had said to me before….but not so eloquently. I wondered if he’d rehearsed it, if he’d planned on saying all of that. But, I decided that I didn’t care. What he said about a twelve year old saving him with her love, that was about me, I knew that for sure. I cried again when I heard him say that and I’m sure it won’t be the last time. Every time I thought about how proud he seemed to be of me up there when he talked about me and our little family and how he remembered that I was only twelve years old when I fell in love with him, I teared up all over again. All that time I was talking about how infatuated I was with him as a kid when we first got together, I would have sworn he was tuning me out.
I got up and left the green room. I didn’t like being in there alone and I suddenly wanted to be closer to Tristan. I asked the security officer where I could stand backstage and he showed me. I looked out at the small stage he was on and, just like what he’d said about the babies, I couldn’t stop looking at him. I couldn’t imagine my life without him and I loved him more every day. Even on a tiny little stage in front of a small audience of people, he was killing it. My beautiful husband was going to be immortal. No one would ever be able to forget he existed because his music was going to live on forever.
I listened to the words of the song he was singing. It was one I hadn’t heard before and it was about a “bad boy” who fell in love with a “good girl.” The chorus of the song talked about her being out of his league, the way Tristan had said it earlier about me. It’s a sweet song, but absolutely untrue where Tristan is concerned. I had problems and faults just like he did, or anyone else for that matter. The difference was that I’d had a great support system and Tristan had pretty much crap. I was glad we found each other so that I could be there for him, but I wasn’t taking credit for all the hard work he’d put in and all the growing up he’d done himself. He’d turned into a fine man, and since he’d had so many odds stacked against him, I thought he deserved extra credit.
He finished his song and then went back to talk to the ladies. They asked him some more questions about his record label and he talked some more about the babies, then they said good-bye and let him go. I was waiting for him so that as soon as he walked off the stage, I could tell him how much I appreciate him saying such nice things about me. He didn’t give me a chance. Instead of walking up to me, he walked into me. He walked up; put his hands on my hips and his face down close to mine. After shooting me another grin he put his lips against mine. He kissed me softly with his lips first all over my mouth before I felt the sliver of his tongue slip through. My own tongue didn’t even wait for directions; she hurriedly tangled herself up with his.
As we kissed, deeply and passionately, I lost all conscious thought of where I was or who I was with, except Tristan. He wasn’t the only one in the room…he was the only one in every room. When he broke the kiss he looked down into my eyes and I said, “Thank you for all of that out there. You know though that no matter who it had been that encouraged you to go to rehab, you did all of that work and you’ve stayed sober yourself.”
“I know. I’ll give myself credit for that, but I meant it…I think I would have died if you let me continue down the path I was on. If I hadn’t died, I’d at least be living on the streets, maybe banging on my guitar to get people to throw money in my case. I was an alcoholic, a drug addict and an all-around lousy, miserable person. By all rights, you should have run as far away from me as you could get…but you didn’t. You stuck it out and you saved my life.”
“I saved it for me,” I told him with a grin. Brandi was right not to argue with him, he never let anyone else win.
“I will never be able to tell you how glad I am that you did. I love you, Elly.”
I kissed him again and said, “I love you, too.”
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STEPBROTHER BESTIE
By Alycia Taylor
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2016. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Valerie
Wow…He really went through with it…I thought as I eyed my stepbrother. He was already home and packing his car, just as he had told us he would when he had stormed away from the dinner table the night before.
I shook my head and rolled my eyes.
“What is it?” my boyfriend, Zachary asked me before his eyes crossed between my gaze and down the street to where Shawn was loading his car.
Looking back at him, I shook my head again. “Oh, just Shawn…He’s in a rebellious stage.”
I supposed that was the best way to describe it to him, without going through every grievance my stepbrother had.
Since turning eighteen, life for me had gone from good to great. My mother and stepfather had given me the freedom that I needed to flourish and I was taking advantage of it…responsibly, of course. After all, I still had the rest of the year’s worth of good grades to earn before going off to college.
I had big ambitions, and everything seemed to be falling into place.
“What is he doing?” Zachary asked as we both stopped to observe my stepbrother trying to shove the remainder of the boxes into his car while my mother helped him.
I stared at the two of them for a while before I answered.
Life for Shawn wasn’t as great as my own was turning out to be. So for the past few years, he was bitter.
It was a shame that bitterness had caused us to grow apart pretty drastically. Before my parents, well, his father and my mother, got married, we were friends. I had known Shawn since Kindergarten and we were best friends until about ninth grade.
When our parents first started officially dating about a year before, after years of flirting with one another, we had thought that everything was going to fall right into place. Shawn would finally have an official mother figure and I would have an official father.
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Yet, our grand ideas quickly dissipated after the wedding. As it turns out, living together under the same roof as brother and sister didn’t go so well for us. Our friendship quickly turned to rivalry and that dissolved the relationship we once had to almost nothing.
We still cared for one another, but not in the way that we thought we always would. I knew there was still a friendship there somewhere, but it was buried under the regret and poison that had worked against it for the past three years.
Of course, that was far too strange a story to explain to Zachary, since I didn’t quite understand it all myself.
Therefore, I just answered, finally, “He’s moving out…Going to live with his mom.”
Zachary stared at me with a hinged jaw and a confused expression. “Doesn’t his mother ignore his very existence?”
I nodded. “Yeah, pretty much. I doubt she could be very happy with actually having to take care of anyone but herself, but she agreed to have him stay there.” I shrugged, not too sure about my stepbrother’s mother.
I didn’t particularly like her, because I saw what she had done to Shawn. Growing up, all he wanted was a relationship. She would tell him that she wanted to see him and basically lie to him about how much she missed him. But when he asked her when he was going to see her, she would dodge the question, with an excuse at the ready, almost every time.
Then, when she actually would be cornered into making plans with her son, especially when he was little, it was all Shawn would talk about. And on the day that she was supposed to come, he would wait for her for hours. I knew this all too well, because I was usually the one waiting with him; she would never show.
Dirty Stepbrother - A Firefighter Romance (The Maxwell Family) Page 68