Epilogue
Two Years Later
Holly
So much had changed since Xavier had put that ring on my finger. We’d gotten married only six months after. Just like the proposal, there hadn’t seemed much reason to wait any longer. We were both so eager to start our lives together. The wedding had been small, and we’d obviously had it at my father’s church. It was important for me to have it there, and for me to have everyone that I loved around me. My father had performed two roles that day. He’d walked me down the aisle as my father and had also married me as my pastor. Everyone had burst out laughing as he moved from one position to the next on the day. It had been a fun wedding, with lots of love and laughter in the room. Even Ryan had been invited, and he’d shown up with his new girlfriend who seemed smitten with him. As it turned out, he’d taken my words very seriously and had spent some time trying to improve himself. He still talked a lot, and the talk was mostly about himself, but he also looked at his new girlfriend in a way that he had never looked at me. I was happy for him. In a way, him being so horrible to me had shown my father how good Xavier was for me.
I’d moved in with Xavier right after the wedding. It was nice, but the place was small and didn’t feel like the sort of place we wanted to live together in as a couple. It felt too much like a bachelor’s home. We spent some time looking around and eventually found a place near the city. It was still a small home because we decided that we didn’t want anything too big, but it was our home, and that made all the difference in the world. It was close to work for me, but still close enough for Xavier to get to work too. And, as promised, we were at my dad’s every single Sunday. We attended his church service and then went back to his place for a late breakfast. Every Sunday we all sat around his living room, drinking his milky tea and catching up. Xavier had admitted to me how he’d hated my father’s tea, but he now looked forward to it each week. We both believed that there was something magical about that tea.
Kenny and Andrea had the most beautiful little baby girl that I had ever seen. Her name was Francis, and the moment she was born we knew that Kenny would be changed forever. He’d found what he wanted in life, and there was no way he was ever going to go back to the life he’d had before. The only thing that he hadn’t given up was his smoking, although he’d cut down to only a few a day, and he never smoked around the baby.
Two years had passed now, and I was sitting in the living room at my father’s house. All three of us were wearing our big Christmas sweaters again. It was now our third Christmas of wearing them. It was a good thing that mine had been so big. It sat tight on my ever-expanding belly.
“You like Santa now,” Xavier said as he patted my stomach.
I chuckled. “I look like I ate Santa, you mean.”
I was pregnant with twins, and my stomach was so big that I couldn’t even see my feet anymore. I rubbed my belly sadly.
“I’m going to miss this you know.”
“Really? But I thought you said it was so uncomfortable,” my dad said.
I laughed. “It’s terribly uncomfortable. But amazing all at the same time. It’s hard to explain. I guess you have to be a woman.”
“Well, you look like you’re about to pop so you better make the most of this time, then.”
“Two more weeks! I still can’t believe I’m having twins.”
“I still can’t believe I’m about to be a grandfather. Am I really that old now?”
I chuckled. “You’re going to be amazing. I . . .”
“What’s wrong darling?”
I looked at my father and Xavier in panic.
“I’m so embarrassed. I think I just wet myself. I’m so sorry. This is so awful. I constantly need the toilet, but I usually get there on time.” I couldn’t believe that I’d just done something like that. My face was flushed as I looked at my father and Xavier.
Xavier looked at me. His eyes were wide. “Uh, Holly, I think your water just broke.”
“My water?!” I exclaimed. Then I burst out laughing. “I thought I had peed.”
Once the laughter had subsided, I realized what was actually going on. I was about to have a baby. Two babies. It was two weeks early, and I suddenly felt completely unprepared. Thankfully, we had a hospital bag all packed and ready in the car due to advice from a friend who had gone into labor early. We’d only put the bag in a few days ago.
“Oh my God, we’re having babies!” I yelled.
We all scrambled into the car in a nervous flurry. We kept laughing, but I knew it was because we were all so scared.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said as we got to the hospital. “Can’t I just keep them inside me?”
Xavier chuckled. “You can do this, Holly. You’ve got this!”
I wanted to shout at him and tell him that he had no idea what I was going through, but I didn’t want to be one of those women. Poor guy was probably nervous enough. And he was right. I had this! I had gotten through a lot of things in my life, and I could do this. I took his hand, and we made our way inside.
It all seemed to happen so quickly for me. I barely had time to think about what was going on once we were inside the hospital. I just followed the doctor’s orders and let people tell me what to do. Xavier was by my side the whole time, squeezing my hand, while my father waited outside. I imagined him pacing up and down the hall while he waited for the call to come inside.
When I heard the babies cry, my heart swelled with joy. I’d always seen mothers get emotional at that part in the movies, but I never truly realized how good it would feel until that moment. Before that, you’re holding your breath as you wait to find out that everything was okay.
“Well, it looks like I was wrong about the gender,” the doctor said. “Which is amazing because we’re almost never wrong anymore.” The doctor had told us that we were going to be having a boy and a girl and he seemed pretty sure of it.
“You were?”
The doctor seemed embarrassed. “I’m sorry for misleading you.”
I laughed. “Don’t be sorry. I’m just so glad that they’re alive and healthy. That’s all that matters. They are healthy, aren’t they?”
He grinned. “They certainly are. You have two beautiful little boys. Congratulations, Holly and Xavier.”
The doctor and the nurse walked over, each carrying a little baby boy. They gave one to me and one to Xavier, and we both chuckled as we looked at them.
“They look just like you,” I said to Xavier.
Xavier laughed. “Little firemen.”
“Please, can you call my father?” I asked the doctor.
My father came in moments later, tears streaming down his face as he saw the two little boys in our arms.
“Both boys,” I said as my father kissed me on the forehead and told me how proud he was of me.
“Oh, darling! You did so well. Two little boys. Looks like you’re outnumbered in this family. All these boys to protect you.”
“Have you got any idea what you’re going to name them?” the doctor asked.
Xavier and I had been talking about names for a while, but nothing had felt right. Suddenly, though, I knew exactly what I wanted to name them. I nodded.
“You thought of their names?” he said, an edge of surprise in his voice.
I smiled. “Ben and Tommy.”
“Oh Holly, really?” he said. The emotion in his voice was palpable. Ben and Tommy were incredible men who had fought hard to save the lives of so many people in the community. It seemed only fitting that we honored them in this way.
“Really. Beautiful names for two beautiful boys.”
“Our little fighters.”
The nurse walked by and smiled at us all. “You have a beautiful family,” she said.
I looked at Xavier, my father, and the two new members of our family. I imagined them the following year on Christmas day, each with their own little sweater.
“I have the best family.”
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MY ROCK BOX SET
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.
MY ROCK #1
Chapter One
Elly
I had been telling myself all day that I was a professional, twenty-two year old woman and silly, old crushes should be just that…..but my infatuation with Tristan had gone a little bit deeper than just a silly crush. Granted, I was only twelve when I first discovered his boy band, called Uptown Boyz, but from the ages of twelve to fifteen, Tristan, the leader and oldest member of the band, was my everything. I went to sleep every night and woke up every morning to his beautiful face. I had borrowed our neighbor’s ladder one day when I was home alone and I’d tacked my poster of him to the ceiling above my bed. It was the best birthday present I ever got—my best friend, Lucy, knew me well. It was there for two years and I don’t think either of my parents ever even noticed it.
I carried my lunch in an Uptown Boyz lunchbox. I had to hide it in my backpack all through middle and high school because I got a lot of flak about it, but I still carried it to show my dedication. I spent every dime I was able to save from my allowance and babysitting gigs on their new CD’s, and every little girl fantasy I had about growing up and getting married casted Tristan in the starring role as the groom.
I can’t even describe how devastated I was when I heard they broke up. I can still recall exactly where I was and what I was doing. I was at the mall with Lucy, just hanging out at the food court, when I heard some girl say that Uptown Boyz was no more.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I’d asked her. My heart was pounding and my head felt light.
“Uptown Boyz broke up.” She delivered the news with a shrug of her shoulders. As though this was no big deal.
“Are you sure?” I asked, convinced this had to be a mistake or some stupid hoax. They are always saying celebrities have died when they are alive and well—I held out hope that this was the same kind of thing.
She rolled her eyes and took on a condescending tone. “Yeah, I’m positive. I just heard it on the radio before I came in here. The DJ said that Tristan Rogers was going into rehab for, like, the third time, or something ridiculous like that. The rest of the band just got tired of him always screwing up.”
It was like a slap in the face. “But without him, they wouldn’t have been anything. They’re glorified back-up singers,” I told her. Lucy was pulling on my arm, trying to get me to get serious about shopping. I spent the rest of the shopping trip in a haze, unable to focus on anything besides the breakup. Then I went home and fixated on it the rest of evening. In truth, it took me months to quietly recover, but I finally did, and I moved on…or at least I had thought.
Until that night. There I was, seven years later, sitting in a back corner of a seedy bar called Huggys that I’d otherwise never had gone inside of. Why was I there? Because I’d read in a tiny, obscure ad in the L. A. Times that Tristan Rogers was playing this bar with his new band. I had tried to resist. I tried telling myself that I was much too old and mature to dwell on old boy-band crushes. I obviously hadn’t listened, because there I sat. I had come alone for fear of tarnishing the view people had of me. My friends were mostly young professionals in the music and television business and I couldn’t think of one of them who would have approved of this place or the people I was now surrounded by—not even if I tried to play it off as some adventure into irony.
I sat with my back to the wall on a high stool, sipping my Jack and Coke, hoping that Tristan would come out soon so I could satisfy my age-old curiosity and go home. I had looked him up off and on over the years, searching for any information about him or his band. I didn’t obsess over him any longer, but every now and then when I got bored, I just checked to see if I could find any information about him. What I’d been able to find had been snippets here and there about the band. This one got arrested and that one came out as being gay—all of it pretty typical, but none of it helpful. But the information on Tristan was few and far between. The first couple of years after the band broke up, he’d gotten out of rehab, dated an heiress for a while, and then a B-list actress. He’d gotten picked up on a DUI and had to serve community service and do rehab again. Sadly, his music seemed to have all but died. The day I saw the ad about his band in the bar, I wasn’t looking for him at all. I had actually bought the paper to look at job openings, and, when I had opened the paper, there it was. I let my over-active imagination think that maybe it was fate and that was one more silly reason that I found myself sitting in a bar that was the namesake of a brand of diapers.
The advertisement hadn’t mentioned Tristan’s previous connection to Uptown Boyz. It advertised his new band as “new age rock”—a far cry from the kind of music he used to sing. I ran my finger around the rim of my drink, waiting. The lights in the already dim bar went down and a spotlight lit up the stage. A woman that looked to be about thirty-five with long, obviously bleached platinum blonde hair and dressed in black from head to toe came on the stage. She was so thin that it wouldn’t have even taken a strong wind to blow her over, just a light breeze. She walked up to the microphone.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, hello and thanks for coming to Huggys tonight. I’m Mandy Silva, the owner of Huggys, along with my hunky husband, Ray, who is over there behind the bar.”
I glanced over at the bar. The only bartender that I’d seen tonight was a young stud that looked like he should have been the star of Magic Mike. He was still the only one behind the bar. I looked from him to the skinny, slightly torn up woman and I had to wonder what the attraction was.
“I hope you’re all having a great time and getting your drink on. We have a real treat for you tonight, so I won’t stand here and bore you any longer. Without further ado, I give you Tristan and the Mister Rogers band.”
The lights started changing colors and smoke floated up from beside the stage as a drummer, and a bass player took their positions on stage. The audience clapped, some hooped and hollered, and I waited for Tristan. The band fired up and it was a good two minutes into the song before he came bursting through a curtain hung along the back of the stage. If I hadn’t known it was him, I would have never recognized him.
First off, he came out screaming and banging on his guitar. I’m assuming the noise he was making was supposed to be singing, but it didn’t sound anything like the beautiful voice that I remembered. Secondly, the four young men that made up the band the Uptown Boyz were famous not only for their extraordinary talent at such young ages, but for their sense of style. They were trendsetters for tweens, and when they performed, they usually wore starch white or brightly colored t-shirts and casually faded designer jeans. Tristan always wore a silver cross that dangled from his neck and stood out against whatever color shirt he happened to be wearing. He never took it off back then. Their hair was always stylishly mussed or spiked up and they had that scrubbed, fresh-faced look that mother’s and little girls both loved.
Tonight, he wore jeans, but instead of a designer brand, they looked like he’d borrowed them off of one of the homeless men I’d seen on my way into the place. They had huge holes in them—not stylish ones—and they hung low on his hips, like he’d dropped a pants size since he’d bought them. He wore them tucked into his lace-up black leather motorcycle boots that ended just below his knee. He was also wearing a plain black t-shirt and the silver cross necklace was absent. His arms had tattoos from shoulder to wrist and his hair was messy, long and greasy. His face was still familiar, and still handsome, but a lot thinner than it used to be. His arms were still muscular, but it was very lean muscle. If I had to put a label on his build, I’d have to say where he used to be somewhat stocky he had become wiry.
Seeing him that night, there and in this state, was somewhat….surreal.
He sang a few of his screaming, head-banging songs, still slamming his hand up and down against his guitar and between each set he’d slam down another drink or two that someone off stage would hand him. The whole show was more slamming than singing, and every memory I had of him was pretty much shattered. Dejected, I took money out of my wallet to pay my tab and stood up. At that exact moment, he finally slowed things down and strummed his guitar beautifully as he sang a ballad. His voice was raspier than I remembered it, but I could finally hear the old Tristan—the one I fell in love with as a girl. He proved that he could still really sing when he wanted to.