The Invisible Thread

by Lisa Suzanne

  I don’t know what the right answer is here. If I say it’s what I want, we can keep living our lives like we have for the past fifteen years. It hasn’t been so bad, really. Part of me has missed him, but part of me just got used to it after so long.

  But I can’t help considering the tiny peanut growing inside me.

  This baby deserves to be surrounded by as much family and love as possible. Every baby deserves that. I can’t help but think of my father holding a tiny baby girl with a pink onesie and a pink pacifier in her pink mouth. I don’t know if it’s a girl...there’s still a long time before I’ll know for sure, but if I cut final ties with my father forever, she’ll miss out on knowing her grandfather. She’ll already miss knowing her grandmother and her paternal grandparents. I don’t have any siblings to share with her. The life of a musician’s child is difficult, especially with two parents from two bands who have completely different priorities and schedules. Would having my father as part of her life provide some level of stability I won’t be able to give her?

  Or would she be better off not knowing him?

  I don’t know the answer to that, but before I can stop myself, the words come tumbling off my tongue. “I’m pregnant.”

  My dad’s eyes soften as he looks at me. “You are?” his voice is gentle and soft, and where before it held a hint of defeat, now it’s full of hope.

  “Yeah. I’m a little over seven weeks along.”

  “Is your boyfriend the father?”

  I don’t know if I’d call him my boyfriend, but... “Yeah, it’s Ethan’s.” What are we, exactly? So many questions hang in the air. We’re more than friends, more than fuck buddies. It’s one of those conversations we haven’t had, yet I’m pretty sure we don’t need to have it. I’m not seeing anyone else, and he’s made it clear he doesn’t want anybody else.

  “Congratulations,” he says. He looks up at the ceiling of my bus in wonder. “God, I’m going to be a grandpa.”

  I think of all the meaning that word holds. Someone gets to be a grandfather when his child has a child. It’s a title, a label. But a grandpa seems to hold something more—a close relationship, an unending bond. I’m not in that place with my dad anymore, but I’m also not entirely opposed to try getting back there someday despite everything that has been said today.

  I don’t answer because I’m not ready to. Instead, I remember that Griff just took my wrapped gift over to Ethan’s bus, and I want to be there when he opens it. I may already be too late.

  I stand and walk past my dad toward the front of the bus. I’m sure this looks rude given my announcement a few seconds ago, but I have the overwhelming need to be with Ethan and I’m not sure how to deal with the whole grandpa thing right now. “I need to go,” I say.

  My dad looks confused for a minute. “Should I wait here?” he asks just as I hit the first step.

  I turn to look back at him. “Yeah.” I nod. “I think that would be okay.”

  When I get over to Ethan’s bus, he’s sitting at his table talking to Griffin over the huge wrapped present in front of him.

  “I’ll leave you two to it,” Griff says, and then he walks off the bus.

  “Were you going to tell me you talked to my dad?” I ask.

  Ethan has the grace to look a little embarrassed. “How’d you find out?”

  “He’s sitting on my bus right now. Griff’s in for a shock when he steps back on.”

  He chuckles and nods down at the present. “Black and white polka dots?”

  I shrug. “You never told me what they mean, just that they meant something to you.”

  He smiles. “Do you remember twenty years ago when I kissed you in a deserted high school hallway?”

  I nod. I think about that kiss all the time—my first real kiss and the first time I kissed a boy I had a huge crush on.

  “You were wearing a black shirt with white polka dots.” His eyes take on a faraway look. “You were adorable and innocent and everything I wanted but nothing I could have.”

  “You were wearing a black t-shirt with a little rip right next to the shoulder,” I say. I feel oddly like the words I’m speaking are a vow that will bind us together in an unbreakable union. “You were corrupt and experienced and everything I wanted but nothing I could have.”

  His gaze lands on me, heat and passion practically burning me from where I stand. “You’re still adorable and innocent.”

  I huff out a chuckle at that. “Hardly. You’re still corrupt and experienced.”

  He nods. “Even more now than back then.” He stands, abandoning the present on the table, and stalks across the tiny room toward me. He pulls me into his arms, and I feel warm and comfortable and right. “You’re still everything I want.”

  “But now you have me. All of me. Maci Dane, Dani Mayne, and every single piece in between.”

  A sly smile tips up the corners of his mouth. He moves his face closer to mine, his voice a breathy murmur. “I like the sound of that,” he says, and then his mouth covers mine.

  The familiar rush of tingles glides through my body as his mouth opens to mine. I want him, need him, crave him...but doctor’s orders said I can’t, not right now.

  He pulls away brusquely. “Sorry,” he mutters. He steps away from me and strides back for the table, not so subtly readjusting himself as he walks. He sits and looks up at me.

  “What was that?” I demand.

  “I got carried away.”

  “Get carried away some more then.” I give him a glare, and he laughs.

  “Nope. My job is to keep you and that kid in there safe. Now get off your feet so you can get off pelvic rest and I can give you the good fuck you deserve.”

  I raise my brows, but I don’t even think about laughing at his words—because while they sort of sound funny, they’re not. They’re intended as a promise...one I can’t wait to cash in on. “Open your gift.”

  He finally takes those heated eyes off me, and I sit across the table from him. He tears off the paper like a kid on Christmas morning, bits and pieces torn off and thrown here or there without a care. It so perfectly embodies who he is that I can’t help my smile as I watch.

  He opens the box once the paper is off and pulls out the first item.

  “The puzzle,” he says.

  I smile. “I had it framed so we can hang it up together somewhere important to us. But there’s more in the box.”

  He lifts out another matching frame and takes a minute to read through the words I wrote and framed for him.

  The Revenge Plan

  I had this big plan to get back at you

  To make you want me, need me, fall for me

  But my plan was foiled because of you

  I fell in love right out of the blue

  Revenge is sweet and I had a real plan

  But you grew up from a boy to a man

  I had this big plan to hurt you so bad

  To damage you, injure you, pummel you

  Instead I fell for you all over again

  So much harder than way back then

  I’m glad this plan of mine fell apart

  Because I’m tattooed right over your heart

  I had this big plan to exact my revenge

  But plans sometimes fail and flounder and fold

  You and revenge were supposed to intersect

  But love came along and killed that effect

  Revenge is sweet and I had a real plan

  But I grew up from a girl to a woman

  I had this big plan but it all went to hell

  The moment I saw you, needed you, fell for you

  Now we have something to link us together

  The past doesn’t matter, I’ll love you forever

  I’m glad this plan of mine fell apart

  Because you’re tattooed right over my heart

  When he’s done reading, he looks up at me. I pull my shirt aside and show him the first tattoo I ever got. It’s a small black heart just above my left breast, rig
ht over my heart. “I got this when I was nineteen. I chose a black heart because they represent coldness and a lack of emotions. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to forget your words, I didn’t want to feel the pain of losing my mother and seeing my father kissing someone else.”

  A hint of shame crosses those blue eyes, but that’s not my intent.

  “It always represented you in some way to me, but now it’s different. And once the baby is born, I’m going to have it retouched and add an E to it.”

  “An E?”

  “For Ethan, or maybe for whatever we decide to name the baby.”

  “You’re thinking an E name?”

  “My mom was Eleanor, but she went by Ellie.”

  “Ellie if it’s a girl?” He looks up at me in wonder, like he still can’t believe he’s going to be a father. He’s scared, but so am I. This is just one of those things we’ll navigate together.

  I lift a shoulder.

  “I love that,” he says softly. “And what about Eli if it’s a boy?”

  My heart soars as I think about doing this with him. We’ve been so back and forth, crossing the roughest waters we’ve ever faced, yet we somehow ended up on the other side of it and now we’re talking about what names our future baby could have.

  I smile. “I love it.”

  “This tattoo here,” he says, pulling his shirt down to show me the word love tattooed right across the middle of his collarbone. “I got it because I never believed in love. In my own twisted way, I figured if I tattooed it on my body, it would mean I had it. The possibility of it vanished when you did, but you brought it with you when you came back to me.”

  I press my lips together to try to keep from crying.

  He glances down and sees there’s something else in the box. “What’s this?” he asks. He pulls out an envelope.

  “Open it.”

  He does, and then he pulls out the papers inside. He reads through them and looks up at me, surprise in his eyes. “A contract?”

  I nod, smiling. “I want to record a whole album with you, and I want these two songs on there.”

  “Plus ‘The Invisible Thread’?” he asks.

  “Sounds like our first three songs. And our album title.”

  “That reminds me,” he says. He stands and heads toward his bedroom then returns with a sheet of paper. “I added a final verse to our song.” He sets the paper in front of me, and I read his words.

  (Ethan) You’re unbreakable with the power to break

  (Maci) I’m sorry I left, it was my mistake

  (Ethan) I love you more every single day

  (Maci) And I love you, please say you’ll stay

  When I’m done reading, I look up at him. He’s blurry through my tears. “I love it,” I say.

  He kneels down in between my legs. “I love you more every single day,” he says. He sings the words to me to the tune of our song, but I know he’s speaking the words from his heart. His voice is pure magic to my ears—the voice hidden away behind the drums so Mark can take the Vail lead. With me, though, and with our album, he’ll be front and center.

  “And I love you, please say you’ll stay,” I sing, and he rests his cheek against my stomach.

  I’m so dazed with emotion that all I can do is stroke his hair as he laces his arms around my waist.

  We hold each other like that for a few beats, and then I hear his voice, a quiet plea. “Marry me.”

  I freeze. Those weren’t the words I expected him to say, but after an emotional few months...weeks...days...hours...minutes, I get it. We’re both overwhelmed in each other, and now that we’ve made it through the hardest part, we have an unbreakable bond that’ll only be strengthened by the life we created together.

  “Okay,” I whisper.

  He leans back on his heels, his expression a mixed bag of anxiety and surprise and love. “Okay?”

  I nod as tears stream down my cheeks. “Okay.”

  He breaks out into a grin so wide that his eyes crinkle, and I can’t wait to kiss that gorgeous face and hold his strong hands and look into those icy blue eyes for the rest of my life.

  EPILOGUE

  Maci, Almost Three Years Later

  I stare into my fireplace as the lights on my tree twinkle. I see the lights out the corner of my eye, but I’m not really paying attention to them.

  Eventually my eyes drift over to the tree. Colored lights glimmer and flicker, and rows and rows of red garland cover the green.

  I think back to just three short years ago as I sat by myself on my couch and stared into the flames, watched the crackling and popping of the fire until I saw tiny spots in front of my eyes from the brightness.

  I remember I had specifically chosen colored twinkling lights for my tree instead of still white bulbs because the white was too reminiscent of my childhood. I remember the ache of loneliness, too. Even though I was on top of the world back then in terms of my career, it was probably the loneliest I’d ever been in my life.

  Now I can’t get two damn minutes to myself, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  “Mama?” Eli calls from the kitchen. He’s talking so much these days at two years and two months, and though most of it is gibberish to anyone else, it’s the language I know best.

  “Yeah, baby?” I call back to him.

  “More milk.” His baby voice is so sweet I’m tempted to get up from my spot on the couch. But that would be against the rules.

  “Did you ask Daddy?” I call to him.

  “Dada!” Eli yells, then a second later, a little louder, a little more forceful, “Dada!”

  “Yeah, bud?” I hear Ethan’s quiet, musical voice from the nursery, just a decibel above a whisper-yell across the house.

  “More milk!”

  I giggle from my spot on the couch. I could easily get up and get it for him, but one of Ethan’s Christmas gifts to me—and clearly the one he was proudest about—was to give me a few nights “off,” starting with tonight.

  I glance up at the photo on the mantel. It stands out amidst the garland with twinkling colored lights and poinsettias and smaller lit trees. It’s the same frame I gave Ethan as my first real gift to him, and it was wrapped in black paper with white polka dots, but the image inside isn’t of song lyrics this time. This time, it’s a family portrait of a mother, a father, their sweet little two-year-old, and their newborn baby girl, only a couple days old when we had the photo taken a month ago.

  I remember thinking I could never picture Ethan Fuller, the bad boy drummer rock star, holding a baby. I barely even notice the black ink peeking out the arms of his shirt and snaking down to his forearms because my focus is on the sweet boy he clutches. It’s on a father’s smiling eyes where I used to see a hint of rebellion and the start of a glare. It’s on the look of utter joy on Ethan’s face—on all our faces, really.

  I love our portrait because it’s traditional. It’s everything I remember from my childhood and everything I ever dreamed of for my future, even though it’s definitely with someone I never saw in any of those visions.

  These are the gifts we give one another now—things that have the kids, Eli and Ellie, in them. For as much as neither of us seemed to want kids when we first met, neither of us can imagine life any other way. It may not have been what I expected or even what I wanted at the time, but fate somehow has this way of knowing what’s good for us even when we don’t.

  I sit and stare at the fire, at the tree, at the photograph of us for what must be at least an hour. I can’t help when my eyes keep drifting over to the red garland on the tree. Rows and rows loop round and round the greenery.

  It’s gorgeous, and it’s symbolic of our red thread.

  My arms were full of scratch marks from the evergreen needles after I hung it, symbolic of our incredibly bumpy road to get here, but once it was up, the scratches eventually disappeared and the tree was complete and beautiful...just like our lives are now.

  No music, no television, no toddler toys scr
eam in the background. Just time for quiet reflection after a loud, busy day while my husband puts the kids to bed.

  We started the morning with Santa presents. Dad and Kathy came first thing in the morning and spent the whole day with us, and we headed over to the Ashton’s for a huge Christmas dinner complete with our entire extended family—Mark and Reese with their two kids, Steve and Angelique with their little girl, and James with his very pregnant wife were there along with Mark’s family and Steve’s parents. Even Griffin and the woman he started dating on our tour, Vail’s own publicist Penny, showed up to celebrate with us for a bit. We Facetimed with Zoey, who has become a close friend of mine, and with Ethan’s half-sisters. We opened presents and ate a ton of food. We played Cornhole and Yardzee out on the beach and then ate some more.

  I love our extended family. They make up the brothers and sisters I never had, and they provide such a solid foundation of family for Ethan, who grew up never knowing what it was like to have stability in his home. It’s because of them that we have such a stable foundation for our own children. And it’s because of them that I stopped touring solo after the Vail boys invited me to be a permanent part of the Vail family. Now when we tour, I open with a few of my own songs, and then Ethan joins me for some of ours from our album that released over a year ago and has hit platinum status multiple times. I join Vail for a few of their songs, including the ones we’ve recorded together. Mark tells me all the time I’m the member of the band they never knew they were missing.

  The fifteen-year-old Dani Mayne never could’ve imagined this for her future. Maybe that’s why I had to go through everything I did—maybe my quest for revenge wasn’t really so much a quest for revenge as it was a way to get back into Ethan Fuller’s life after so much time had passed. Maybe his one comment stuck with me so much because I loved him even then, and the ones we love have the power to hurt us the most.

  “They’re both down,” Ethan says. I lift my legs so he can collapse on the couch beside me, and he starts massaging my feet once I set them back down in his lap. I can’t help but watch his hands as he works. I always saw them as strong drummer hands, but the platinum band on the third finger of his left hand makes them husband’s hands—for over two years now—and the two babies down the hall make them daddy’s hands.