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.
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.
In all the years that I had known and lived with Shawn, I had seen his mother a total of three times. I seriously doubted that Shawn had seen her many more times than that.
She was a selfish, horrible woman and I couldn’t understand why, even now, he would trust her enough to try to live with her. But I supposed it was really his prerogative. There wasn’t much that I was going to do about him going, especially since lately, for whatever reason he wasn’t even speaking to me.
This bothered me and I had confided in Zachary about his, but he just told me that he was jealous.
Though I felt that there was something more than that, I couldn’t disagree with him. I knew that he felt my father treated me better than he treated Shawn, but that certainly wasn’t my fault.
Zachary shook his head as he watched the discussion play out between my mother and my stepbrother. They were always very close, which was why it seemed so natural when his father and my mother decided to get married; she was already a solid mother figure in Shawn’s life and had been for years.
“I don’t get it,” Zachary answered finally, “At least his father wants him.”
Zachary, like me, was raised by a single mother. Both of our fathers had passed away, which was part of what drew me to him in the first place.
We both had similar experiences and feelings, which made him easy to talk to. Zachary understood not only the feelings I had concerning my father, but also the friendship that Shawn and I had once shared.
Zachary was not the jealous type, which was good. When we first started dating, Shawn and I were still trying to maintain our friendship and so, I spent a lot of time with him.
As time went on though, he witnessed the decline in our friendship and was there for me, when I didn’t feel like I could talk to anyone else. It wasn’t like I could talk to my mother about it, because she seemed to be on Shawn’s side a lot of the time. And it just didn’t seem right talking to my stepfather about his son, whether he agreed or not; especially because I was afraid of what I might admit once I started to talk.
“At least he has the option to live with both of his parents,” I said carefully, shrugging my shoulders in a way that came across far more envious than I had meant it.
Zachary smiled, though, in an understanding way and closed his hand around my own. He didn’t say anything, but he really didn’t have to. I knew that he understood and I was once again overwhelmed with a sense of thankfulness.
I looked back at Zachary, leaned up and kissed him, simply needing to feel that extra sense of comfort wash over me. Feeling this comfort and understanding touch made all of the difference in the world to me.
At least I have Zachary, I thought to myself, relishing in the closeness that the two of us acquired easily.
With him, I found that special connection that unfortunately, I had once felt very strongly between Shawn and I. Even though I yearned to have that feeling once again with Shawn, I was happy that for now, what I had with Zachary was enough.