Desiree stood backstage, her heart pounding furiously in her ears. The percussive beat of it nearly drowned out the sound of the audience cheering in anticipation- it didn't, of course. It would have taken a lot more than that to drown out the sound of thousands of fans, screaming their heads off with excitement, all for her sake and her sake alone.

God, it was still so hard to believe...

She'd performed in front of large crowds before, of course. She'd been on an American tour the previous summer, and the audience sizes at every show had been respectable at the very least. It was amazing what a tremendous difference a few short months could make, however.

Since that last tour, Desiree had released a new album (appropriately titled “Starrstruck,” a reference to her last name and sudden rise to fame,) and had had three hit singles with “Not the Girl You Think I Am,” “Hearts Beating as One,” and “Wild Side,” all of them skyrocketing up the charts quite rapidly upon release.

Fittingly, she'd then embarked upon a world tour in promotion of the album, the tickets to most U.S. shows selling out in a matter of days after being put on sale. Never before had she performed for audiences in such numbers- all of her scheduled shows for the present tour had sold tens of thousands of tickets, with a few of the largest venues seating in excess of a hundred thousand fans.

This thought was mind-boggling to her- to think that a girl who'd gotten her start playing popular song covers in her bedroom and putting them online could have risen to such astronomical heights, in such a short period of time. It was dizzying, to say the least, and more than a little bit intimidating.

Of course, she knew, she couldn't really take total credit for all that she'd accomplished. She'd obviously worked very hard to get to where she was, sweated and strived and busted her butt trying to become as good as she could be at what she did. The simple fact of the matter was, though, that she really couldn't have gotten here simply of her own volition, without the abundance of help she'd been given along the way. There were plenty of talented young women whose passion and songwriting ability rivaled her own, playing their hearts out and doing everything they could to promote themselves online to no real end, other than that of disappointment and shattered dreams.

How many people, she wondered, would be forced to face reality in time, and be made to give up their dreams due to nothing more than their personal lack of privilege in life?

She sometimes felt a little bit guilty about this, and tended to question her own sense of self-worth as a result.

It had been sort of like she'd cut in line in front of the rest of them, hadn't it? In a manner of speaking, anyway...

It was true she was hard-working and talented, but she knew that her wealthy and well-connected father was likely as responsible for this almost inconceivable level of success as she was- quite possibly, a whole lot more so.

When she'd first started making videos, it hadn't been anything a whole lot more substantive than her screwing around in her bedroom with her acoustic guitar, playing middling versions of some of her favorite songs- a mix of material ranging from classic rock to modern pop songs, and even a few obscure tracks from other countries that she was really quite fond of.

By the time her father had taken note of her rising, though modest, success, her YouTube channel had gotten to the point of a few thousand subscribers- more than she might have anticipated, considering how low her expectations for the whole endeavor had been.

“People seem to like you,” he'd said, speaking less with parental enthusiasm than the tone of a businessman, contemplating a potential investment.

“Yeah, I guess so,” she'd said, smirking a little bit, trying to remain modest.

“How would you like to go further in putting yourself out there?” he'd asked her, seeming to have considered and planned this for some time before asking her.

She hadn't known what he meant, exactly, until he offered to pay her for studio recording time and a manager to help her boost her popularity.

It had all been downhill from there, so to speak...

She was, of course, grateful for all that her father had done for her. Though her family was wealthy, she'd always been a modest and level-headed young woman, never imagining herself of such esteem. She wondered whether she truly deserved it, though she told herself she was simply being modest.

Still, though, she sympathized with all the dreamers out there from less rosy circumstances than her own, who would never really be propelled to such stellar heights in life despite their best efforts.

She wished she could do more for people like them, who at the very least deserved an opportunity to shine, to expose themselves to a wide audience and let them decide for themselves whether they were deserving of success.

Of course, the music industry didn't really work like that- it was a lot more about who you knew, and how well equipped you were at promoting yourself, than it was about how good or knowledgeable or passionate you were.

She'd tried, during her previous tour, to get a few smaller artists to perform on tour with her, opening acts to wet the audience's pallet before she took the stage.

“You know, to give some lesser known singers and bands a chance,” she'd pleaded optimistically, thinking that giving such performers a chance to play at large venues was a great way to give back to the musical community, as well as, in her mind, to compensate for the aforementioned “cutting in line” that she'd been guilty of in her rise to stardom.

The concert organizers had explained patiently, but condescendingly, that she was far too big for something like that. The people hadn't come to see some two-bit nobodies that no one had ever heard of, they had come to see her, and to foist such mediocrity on her eager fans really wasn't a fair thing to do- especially considering the exorbitant prices they'd all paid for tickets.

She'd gotten what they were saying, but it really didn't make sense to her.

She was too big to promote other artists?

The fact that she'd gotten so big was the whole reason she wanted to promote other artists!

In the end, though, she'd known it was a losing battle. Despite being their main attraction, she somehow didn't feel as though she had a lot of leverage with which to impose her will, and as such it was probably better just to keep silent about the matter and learn to pick her battles.

She would simply have to figure out some other way to give back to such aspiring acts in time...

“Desiree, you're on in five,” came a voice over the intercom in her green room, suddenly yanking her out of her reverie.

She blinked, refocused her attention momentarily on the boom of the audience, then snapped back to the guitar in her arms. She strummed a few bars of “Now That You're Gone,” the final track on Starrstruck, and muttered aloud a few of its lyrics. She misspoke one of them absentmindedly, but the error suddenly gave her an idea for a new song- or at least, a part of a song.

She rushed over to her bag in the corner of the room, and yanked out her notepad, where she regularly jotted down such musings and ideas for later.

“Don't know where it all went wrong...

Or were the signs there all along?”

It was an okay start, but then she got into a groove, scribbling out line after line, riding the wave of inspiration with renewed enthusiasm.

She loved it when things like this happened...

Ideas would strike her like a bolt from the blue, sometimes fully formed or else damn near close to it, and she would work frantically to capture said lightning in a bottle, getting the whole thing down on paper before it flitted like a butterfly clean out of her mind.

The inspiration for “Wild Side” had come to her in just such a fashion, and she'd wound up writing and recording the whole damn thing in three days' time, only for the song to then go on to mind-boggling success.

“One minute, Ms. Starr,” came the voice over the intercom again. “You might want to come out now and get ready to go on stage.”

This startled her. Four minutes seemed to have gone by in about thirty seconds' time, thanks to the sudden and alarming stroke of inspiration. She was feeling so energized, she seriously wanted to get this thing hammered out while it was still fresh in her mind. It felt like another potential hit on her hands, and if not that, then simply a damn good track to be included on her next album. It was somehow, at once, personal, romantic, philosophical, and catchy, with all parts occurring in just the right measure to create the ideal kind of alchemy she tried to strive for when crafting her songs.

Holding her breath, as though diving into the song, she hurried to cram several more lines onto the page of her notebook, eventually getting to the point where the words were no longer full sentences, just little fragments to serve as points, which she hoped she would have the sense to recollect and piece together again later on.

She could already hear the melody in her head...

But no, no, she stopped herself. She needed to get her mind out of this fertile, inviting place, and focus on the task at hand. Thousands of loyal fans were out there, gripped on the edge of their seats for her to walk out onstage, and it would be selfish of her to let them down.

She turned out a last couple of words then forced herself away from the notebook- then came running back over to it, as an especially clever and effective phrase suddenly flashed inside her mind. Then, at last, she made her way to the door, grabbed her guitar, and stepped outside.

“Okay... Let's do this...”

It didn't take her long at all to become distracted again.

Less than a second, in fact...

She gasped at the sight of a man standing outside her dressing room door, a man she'd never seen before, but who immediately took her breath away.

“I'm sorry, did I startle you? They told me I should be back here...”

Her mouth opened and closed, and she struggled to form words.

“Oh, um... No... I just...”

She was about to ask him who he was, but it was quickly apparent from his black jacket- wrapped around a broad, hulking, and not at all unattractive body- that he was security.

“I'm Julian,” he said with a sympathetic smile, clearly feeling bad about having spooked her. “Julian Hansen. They assigned me as your personal protection, after those fans snuck backstage and tried to get into your dressing room on the last tour.”

She blinked- this was news to her.

“What- they never told me about-”

“Oops,” he said, with a slight laugh. “Maybe I wasn't supposed to either...”

She laughed, then rolled her eyes.

“God... It's going to be a while before I start getting used to all of this...”

“That's the limelight for you I guess,” he said with a shrug.

She smiled, and found that she didn't really want to walk away from him. She knew she had to be on stage, and she really didn't have anything else to say- but there was something magnetic about him, something that made her want to linger there in his presence for- well, for a while longer, at least.

“I'm Desiree, by the way. But... I guess you probably knew that...”

He laughed. “Hmm, I never could have guessed,” he teased, as now chants of “DESIREE, DESIREE, DESIREE,” were ringing out among the audience beyond the stage.

She giggled.

“So, have you had a lot of experience- um- keeping people from swarming backstage? I mean, should I expect it to happen a lot?”

“Actually, this is my first time working concert security,” he said, “So I can't exactly say from past experience. I worked at malls before, and at a few other private venues.”

“Oh,” she said. She privately wondered whether a mall cop was adequate security for guarding a world famous pop star from her thousands of ravenous fans. But, she supposed, the concert organizers surely knew what they were doing in that regard. And in any case, it wasn't like he was her only line of defense- there were dozens of other hulking men standing guard around the arena. He just happened to be the only one standing outside her door, and she decided that he was far from the worst protection a girl could hope to ask for...

“Although,” he added, “I have managed to survive working several Black Friday sales. If I can get through something that grisly, then guarding you should pretty much be a piece of cake, I imagine...”

She laughed aloud at this.

“Well then, it sounds like I'm in good hands...”

He gave her a smoldering grin, and she found herself blushing in spite of herself.

Oh God, was she actually flirting with this man? She hadn't really been intending too, but... Well, it was like that magnetism thing again. He was just so charming, and inviting... With his short blonde hair, his rich tan skin, and those hypnotic blue eyes of his, which seemed almost like marbles, peering deep into her soul. He was unshaven, with a crop of dark stubble along his chin, which made him look more rugged than unkempt. His body, though concealed beneath its black jacket, was obviously a sturdy and muscular one, his chest broad, his arms thick and powerful, every inch of him looking like sheer masculine perfection.

She suddenly felt her legs becoming rather week beneath her...

Being from a wealthy environment as she was, it was fairly expected of her to only breed with those of her own kind- and that was doubly the case now that she was independently successful, and not just riding the coat tails of her father and his wealth. The men she should be interested in were all high society types, men who owned businesses and traded on the stock market, or at the very least were successful artists or some such thing as that.

She shouldn't be swooning over some working class stiff in his thirties, who, as far as she could tell, had accomplished nothing more in his life by this point than a career as a security guard.

But she was swooning over him, very much in spite of herself, and in spite of all the training and programming she'd had drilled into her mind for as long as she could remember.

“I... I, um...” she tried to say, but then realized she didn't genuinely have anything to follow it up with.

Thankfully- mercifully, at that moment the dressing room down the hall opened, and Julian turned his beautiful face away from her to watch her bandmates stepping out. Desiree did the same, watching Jason, her keyboardist, make his way toward the stage without a glance in her direction. Shade, her drummer, meanwhile, gave her a mischievous glance over his shoulder, and shouted out:

“better get a move on, your majesty! Your public is waiting!”

She laughed, and Julian did the same.

“That's Shade,” she told him, and he nodded- he quite obviously must have known this, she thought, though thankfully he was gracious enough not to point out the fact.

“Well, I better go,” she said, “Apparently my public is waiting...”

“It sounds like it,” he nodded. “Break a leg! Not really, though, because that's the sort of thing I'm supposed to keep from happening. It'll be my ass if you do it for real.”

She laughed, and gave him a twinkling wave with her fingers.

“Bye,” she said, gripping her guitar, and making her way toward the stage.

He watched her as she went, feeling ever so slightly lighter than air, his heart beating in his chest to nearly the extent her own had been.

She had no way of knowing that his own feelings during that whole experience had run parallel to his own...

God, he thought. Had he really just been flirting with her?

Where did the lines get drawn between small talk, and banter, and flirting, anyway? Of which was he guilty, and did it really matter?

She was way out of his league, he knew. So beautiful, so talented, and so- let's face it- wealthy.

But still, refused to wholly believe that that twinkle in her eyes whenever she looked at him had been nothing but his imagination. There had been something there between the two of them, something almost palpable. And it left him feeling like- hell, what did it leave him feeling like?

Really, it was a feeling he couldn't remember having experienced since his teenage years, harboring crushes on girls that were built up to the status of goddesses in his mind, and thus would always be vastly beyond the level of what one might think of as “attainable.”

He sighed, and shook his head.

Why did he torture himself like this?

What did he think, that the multimillionaire pop star who could have any man in the world she wanted- men with far greater prospects than he would ever have- would settle for a scruffy, washed-up nobody who stood outside her dressing room before her performances?

No, he didn't really think that... But he nevertheless allowed himself to believe it.

Her eyes, after all, had been so beautiful as they peered into him, gazing with an intensity that practically made his throat hurt to consider in retrospect. Her lips had been painted a gentle pink, beautiful and glossy, and throughout their entire conversation the urge to lean in and kiss them had become more and more difficult for him to suppress.

He would never do such a thing, of course, not without consent. It had simply been a desire, and he knew from that point onward that it would be one that lingered and haunted him, day and night, with no likely possibility of real world fulfillment.

He sighed, and shook his head.

Well, he shrugged. If nothing else, he had to admit that watching after an international pop star on her world tour and casually flirting with her outside her dressing room was a hell of a lot more interesting than standing guard outside the footlocker, sniffing out misbehaving adolescents and various potential shoplifters.

He'd always wanted to break into the music industry, and at least this way he got to stand on the periphery of it- even if, as with Desiree, there was no realistic path for him to make his way from the doorstep and in through the front door.

Just then, he heard the largest swell of applause yet, this one lasting for minutes on end, seeming as though it might reasonably never end.

Desiree, he knew, would have just taken her first few steps onto the stage, and presented herself to the crowd.

At that moment, it all felt more ridiculous than ever- there was no way that a girl like her could be possessed by a single individual, to the extent he believed necessary for a relationship between two people to truly stand a chance of working.

Desiree Starr belonged to the world...

“How's everyone doing tonight?” Desiree spoke into the microphone, and there was another spike of applause and otherwise rabid fanfare, before the first loud burst had even come close to dying down.

As surreal as it had all been up until this point, the scene now hit her like a bag of bricks. She couldn't even see with total clarity into the audience beyond the stage, blinded as she was by the lights overhead flooding down upon her. But she could vaguely make out the size of the crowd- the masses of people towering overhead, row upon row stacked so high up that that she felt like an ant in their presence, small and insignificant, despite being the one they'd all expressly come out tonight to see.

Wasn't it strange how the mind worked?

She could feel her heartbeat racing, growing steadily faster and faster, to the point that she was practically in a state of full on panic.

I can't do this... I can't do this... her mind was telling her, despite the fact that she'd put on such performances so many times before, and that this should reasonably have proven to her that she could.

What had changed?

The size of the crowds?

The pressure not to fail, which she suddenly felt certain she might do?

Maybe it was just the time away from touring, the months she'd spent recording and recovering her strength, setting her too greatly at ease, and making it hard for her to jump back into the swing of things so abruptly.

I can't do this... I can't do this, her mind kept repeating, and for a brief, horrible moment, she truly believed this to be the case.

I can't play tonight... I'm just standing here like an idiot, paralyzed by fear, and I can't get out of it. All these loyal fans paid so much to see me, and I'm letting them down. This is it... This humiliation is the end of my career... A quick, embarrassing ending to my quick, embarrassing career.

Her hands were getting tighter and tighter around the neck of her guitar, her fingers trembling, her throat becoming painfully dry. She could tell that Jason and Shade were staring up at her, wondering what the hold-up was, waiting for her to get started.

But she couldn't get started...

She simply couldn't- she was stuck. Incapable of doing anything except standing there like an imbecile, her spinning mind trapped in the confines of her stiff, trembling body.

But then a thought appeared inside that same anxious mind.

An image...

Two blue eyes.

Gazing at her as they had, minutes ago, as she made her way out of her dressing room.

Julian's eyes...

They eased something inside her. Mitigated the tension.

She suddenly felt completely safe, completely secure and looked after.

Her nerves settled. The tension in her muscles eased away, and she felt her shoulders lowering, as though she'd just been unfrozen from a block of ice. Accordingly, she shivered very slightly, and the next thing she knew she was capable once more of concentrating on the performance at hand.

She blinked, and was aware of the audience still cheering for her. She was aware that she still had an endearing smile across her face, and that, apparently, no one had taken any note of her extended freak out. Well, probably the backstage crew had suspected it, but not the audience. They, rather, had risen to a fever pitch, confusing her fleeting breakdown for a theatrical pause, providing her with just the relief she needed as she recovered her sanity.

Slowly, thankfully, she lowered her head to the guitar in her arms, and placed her fingers softly on the strings. She stood in this pose for a moment, drawing out the tension, trying to blend the action in with that first long pause, and make it seem as though the full period of her stalling had been planned all along.

Then, at last, she allowed gravity to pull her arm downward, and let the strum of a single note pass from her guitar.

“Yooooou're...” she began, holding out the word for a long moment, and the audience went deathly silent for a moment, hanging on the edge of their seats. She smiled at this as the word faded out, and after a breath, finally belted out the song's first line.

“...not the boy I thought you were,

The only thing that's sure

And I'm not the girl you think I am

so perfect and so pure...”

The crowd lost their minds.

Desiree coasted on, the smile on her face now sincere, and her heart now racing with excitement, rather than the crippling anxiety that had occupied it up until the present point.

She made her way adeptly through the song, sliding back into her old routine like someone riding a bike for the first time in years- it all came back to her with astonishing clarity once she made her way past that initial speed bump of recollection.

From “Not the Girl You Think I Am,” she went directly into “Hearts Beating as One,” and spent the next two hours playing through some of her most popular tunes. From “Lion Inside” to “My Own Way,” from “Wild Side” to “Heartbeatz,” and all the best stuff from her first two albums, as well as some of her favorite cover songs, some of which had been instrumental in getting her to where she was today.

The crowd was electrified, screeching with enthusiasm as she hopscotched from tune to tune, scarcely taking breaks between the songs as their energy flowed into her. The louder they cheered for her, the more encouraged she was to keep on going, to double down on her own performance, to give each and every person in that audience the show of their lives, and make sure every last cent they'd paid for their tickets here tonight was made totally and completely worth it.

At last, once the whole of the setlist had been burned through without her even truly realizing it, she found herself on the final song of the evening. Shade and Jason made their way discreetly offstage, the spotlights on them dimming and instead fixating solely on Desiree herself. It was a bit abrupt, having to transition from the high voltage energy of the night up until now, to the slow, gentle, cool down that was the final song.

She swapped out her electric guitar for the wooden acoustic one with which she'd been practicing backstage, and slowly began to strum out the first few chords of the very song she'd been practicing- a stripped down, acoustic version of “Now That You're Gone,” which she'd meticulously worked out to sound just right in its current iteration, considerably distinct as it was from the album version of the song- which sounded good, but was far more produced than this. Not overproduced, exactly, but recorded and assembled in a way that was slightly less intimate than the rawness of Desiree and her guitar, performing in isolation, the woman and her instrument almost like a singular unit.

“Ever since you left me

And left me on my own,” she began.

There was a burst of applause from the audience, then everyone died down, listening to the quiet finale, letting the pure feeling of her voice and guitar pierce them like a knife.

She rode the hills and valleys of her song, caught up in the emotional flow of it, nearly bringing herself to tears as she tapped into the pain and hope that had brought on its original composition.

And all the while, as she sang, and as it had been throughout the entire performance that evening, through every song, it was a singular vision which glowed inside her mind. The same set of glowing blue eyes staring back at her from the depths of her mind, making her short of breath, while also simultaneously giving her life.

The eyes of the man she'd only just met, and about whom she knew next to nothing, aside from her primitive, instinctual feelings for him.

And all the while, this same man stood backstage, his eyes closed, his ears piqued as he listened to the beauty of her voice, the movement of her fingers over the guitar strings, totally unaware that every note, every syllable performed that evening had been performed with him in mind...