Chapter Twenty-Seven
Molly
After surgery, it doesn’t matter how well it went, you always wake up feeling like hell. Your mouth is dry and your vision is blurry. You’re disoriented and confused and sometimes you’re in pain. I discovered today though that the cure for most, if not all of that, was to wake up with Brock at your bedside. His face when I opened my eyes was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.
“Hi,” I croaked. My throat was still sore from the breathing tube they’d put down during surgery.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said with a dazzling smile. “How are you feeling?”
“Euphoric,” I told him.
“There you go with the big words again,” he said. “Are you sure you’re not an English major?”
“I don’t know why I’m not,” I said. “Speaking of words, before I came into surgery you said a few to me…”
He leaned in close to the bed then and kissed me on my lips that had to be hard and dry and then he said, “I love you Molly.”
“Those were the words I was looking for. Does it seem a little desperate that I’m wearing a gown split up the back and lying in bed when I ask you to say it?”
He laughed again. “I think you’re still feeling the juice,” he said.
“Maybe a little,” I admitted. “But mostly, I’m feeling the love. I love you, Brock,” I said.
Then I closed my eyes and drifted off again. I don’t know how much time passed, but I felt Brock’s warm lips on mine again. I smiled and said, “My prince.”
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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.