“And the Grammy for Best Album of the Year goes to…” Bella Jordin is stalling, clutching the envelope, a smug smile on her face. I’d like to believe I’m above punching a woman, but the ball of tension blocking my throat begs to differ. Does she think it’s cute? Does Bella Jordin think any of the fuckers who sit at the Oscars and Grammys and Emmys and have spent their entire year—fuck that, plural, years—working on their albums and movies and shows, really find it adorable, the way she drags it out like a juicy gum? I would like to do the same to her next time she gets checked for an STD.
“Hold it…just a little longer, Bella. Don’t you like the anticipation of it all?”
Jenna, squeezing my bicep, throws a glance at my bouncing foot.
Tap. Tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
The bloke in front of me—a newbie R&B producer who probably wrote two songs for Justin Bieber and now thinks he’s God—turns around and shoots me a death glare. I shoot him an I’m-alive glare. Toothy grin galore.
“And the Grammy goes to…Alex Winslow! ‘Harquebus’!” she shrieks into the microphone, and the camera zooms in on me, and I do the usual thing where I feign surprise and point at myself.
I get up and squeeze past Jenna and Blake, who are holding hands. Blake is on his phone—shocker—probably asking the babysitter how their daughter, Cecilia, is doing. Alfie is sitting beside me with his date—some girl from the British Big Brother—and Lucas and Hudson are all but making out behind me. On my way to the stage, I tap Will Bushell’s shoulder, and he gives me the thumbs-up. This doesn’t mean I like him, but I definitely don’t hate him anymore. Mostly, I’m relieved he didn’t steal the one thing that truly mattered.
Then again, if Fallon were Indie, I wouldn’t have fallen so far down in the rabbit hole. I would’ve stayed above water just in case I needed to save her, too.
I climb up to the stage. There’s always this weird notion up there, like the whole world is watching you, waiting for you to cock up. Fall on your arse, burp into the mic, or shit your trousers. The Grammys two years ago was such a disaster. The Prime Minister of England was recorded shaking her head and muttering, “Oh, Christ” when she watched the video of me representing our fine nation. Today, I want to get it over with as soon as possible.
Smiling at Bella and planting the usual, nice-to-see-you-but-please-no-mingling kiss on her cheek, I grab the Grammy and put my lips to the mic. This feels a lot like home. The bumpy metal against my lips. But the only home I’m interested in right now is on the other end of the city, and I’m eager to get back to her.
“Congrats, Alex. I loved your ‘Back to Life’ tour! My personal favorite.” Bella kisses my cheek again. Now I smile my I-heard-your-music-and-I’m-not-sure-whether-to-take-that-as-a-compliment smirk, then turn back to the mic.
“Two years ago, I took this stage and made a fool of myself. I snatched a statue that wasn’t mine from someone who deserved it—yeah, mate, guess your album wasn’t so bad after all.” I shrug and gesture to Will, who laughs softly and shakes his head. His date—a girl he met building a school in Madagascar or something—squeezes his hand as Indie so often squeezes mine. After Fallon finished rehab, she got sentenced to five years of community service, more or less, wrote the Bellamys sincere apology letters, and she is now living with her photographer boyfriend in Georgia and works as a yoga instructor, far away from Hollywood.
“But things have changed since then. For one thing, I checked into rehab.” Pause. “Second time is the charm, right?” People clap, snort, some nod knowingly. “The second thing that happened was that I wrote an album I don’t deserve the credit for. ‘Midnight Blue’ doesn’t belong to me; it belongs to her. And that leads me to the third thing—I met a girl. I fell in love with her, and she fell in love with me. I took her words and her soul and every single original thought and beautiful lyric she gave me, thinking I didn’t owe anything back. But this girl, she became my muse for a reason, and she busted my balls for being a selfish arsehole. This girl can’t be here today because she’s in the delivery room, giving me yet another gift I don’t deserve. Only now I’m going to make sure I come close to being enough for her and our baby. I came here to grab this statue because I couldn’t make it to the last Grammys—I was too busy groveling and rehabbing in order to win the girl back—but now I need to go back to her. You see, my girl is so selfless, she told me if I never showed up to my own party, then she’d leave me, and I can’t let that happen. So, here you go, Stardust.” I raise the Grammy in my hand and look at the camera. “Got us another ugly decoration for the bathroom. Can I come back now? I’d really like to save the therapy money for when our kid finds out I was at the Grammys when she was born.”
The room fills with more laughter, and everybody gets up and claps, and even though it’s nice, I’m done settling for nice. I don’t want anyone to pat my ego, and have no need to prove myself to anyone. I jump onto Craig’s motorcycle—he is waiting for me, double-parked on the curb behind the arena—and we speed through the traffic jams of L.A. and toward the only thing that matters.
Poppy has her father’s eyes.
Brown flaked with green and gold, they stare back at me with a mixture of mischievousness and curiosity, telling me I’m in for a lot of trouble. She curls her fists and yawns toothlessly before closing her eyes again, and I can’t stop looking.
Poppy Elizabeth Winslow is a fresh start. She looks it, she smells it, and she is it. We all eventually experience tragedy in our lives—loss of relatives, friends, and things that are important to us—but not all of us are blessed enough to be given great gifts along with our losses.
I am.
I am that blessed.
I’ve lost my parents and gained a husband and a baby. A family that’s not patchy, like The Paris Dress, but resilient, like Alex and me. Every Friday, I invite Nat, Craig, Ziggy, Blake, Jenna, Cecilia, Alfie, Lucas, and Hudson over for dinner. We laugh and eat and play board games like it’s 1993 and these people are not rock stars. And to me, they aren’t. They’re just…people.
And it will probably be a little sad to leave here and move to our new apartment—or rather, flat, above the Cambridge Castle. But we love the apartment. It’s full of soul, and only five minutes away from the thrift shop I have leased a few months ago and is now getting refurbished.
Alex Winslow asked me to marry him three days after he barged back into my life and into my shitty apartment. I guess I had it coming. After all, everything he does is in spectacular fashion and grand gestures. The proposal happened on the floor of my rundown condo, right after we had kitchen sex. I was letting the cool tiles soothe my sore skin and staring through the window at a tree when he said, “You know, we could be doing the same thing, but on a nicer floor if we just moved in together.”
I threw an arm over my face to muffle the sound of my laughter. “Yeah? You think we’ll be better off living in some fancy hotel in the middle of traffic-central?”
“I’m thinking somewhere gray and grim in the middle of Camden Town. Close to the tube. Buzzing with people and life and music. A flat with double-glazed windows.”
“Why double-glazed?” I whipped my head in his direction. He looked spent, sweaty, and delicious. He ran a hand through his brown locks and hitched one shoulder up. “Don’t wanna scare the tourists with your moans.”
I swatted his chest, and it was his turn to laugh.
“Seriously, half the time it sounds like I’m attacking you with a chainsaw when we’re together. So, what do you say, Stardust?” He rolled to his side, propping his head in his hand. “Move in with me?”
I opened my mouth with the intention of saying yes, because life was too short not to do what you wanted to do, when he beat me to it.
“Actually, forget it. I take it back.”
“You take it back?” I blinked, my stomach churning in disbelief.
“Yeah.” He crawled to me on his knees. “Moving in is not enough. I want everything. And I want it on fucking paper. Marry me, Indigo ‘Stardust’ Bellamy. Be my wife. Have my babies. We’ll even circumcise them if that’s what you want. Well, maybe not the girls. That’s a hard limit for me. Or maybe we won’t have children. How do you feel about children? Never mind. I don’t care. I just want to marry you. Make me a happy bastard, Indie. Say yes.”
I didn’t say yes. I giggled it.
I also told him that my middle name is Elizabeth, like Poppy’s—not, in fact, Stardust.
We got married in a rose garden in Kent. The roses were painted blue. I stuffed his private jet with all the people I loved—Natasha, a very sober Craig—who had to take time off from school after enrolling into college—Ziggy, Clara, Tiffany, Ollie, Grayson, and the rest of our tour friends, including Jenna and Hudson. I wore a Bohemian Forest wedding gown, and he wore a shit-eating grin he is still sporting every single day. Getting pregnant wasn’t a decision. It was, rather, a moment of insanity. We’d always used condoms, until one night, we didn’t. Alex said he’d pull out at the last minute, and he did—I had a stomach covered in semen to prove it—but I guess not enough, because a month later, I started getting violent reactions to the scents of coffee and cigarettes.
I quit the coffee.
He quit the cigarettes.
And now we have Poppy.
“Mate, I’m so happy you had her with someone fit. You really needed some beauty to dilute all the fugliness that’s your face. Poppy is gorgeous,” Alfie says now, in the hospital suite, staring at Poppy, who is napping in my arms.
Alex awards him with an elbow to the ribs before stretching his arms toward me. I’m still in bed, but I’m feeling better since he helped me take a shower. Poppy is nuzzling into my neck, and my heart is close to bursting from being so full.
“Can I show her off?” He gives me his magnificent shy smirk. It’s the kind that only makes a cameo once every few months, so I drink it up.
Three.
Two.
One.
“Of course.”
I told you, heart.
We’ve got this, heart.
Look how far we’ve come, heart.
It’s not the first time he’s holding our daughter in his hands and looking down at her like she’s a new world he wants to secure and nurture, but it’s the first time the realization hits me. We found our planet. Our home. The only place we want to be in.
That’s the thing about broken princes. Not all of them have to die. If their soul is whole, they sometimes survive.
Sometimes, they even grow up to be kings.
Mine did.
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