Felix
Offstage, everything becomes a blur. I’m still processing what happened, that Jenna said she loves me in front of everyone, that she accepted me back into her story, and god, that means she believes in it—and us—again. Roxie is yelling “Oh my god! Oh my god!” over and over, and Leo grabs both Jenna and me by the shoulder and shouts “We’re coming with you guys in the divorce!” Phil herds us all out to our cars and I realize I’ve forgotten my cello, but Phil is talking right in my ear. “I’ll get it. You two need to get out of here before you get mobbed by the press. Shit.” He mutters a few more obscenities while security lets us out the back of the parking lot, and Jenna and I are only able to say a few words to each other before we both have to drive away.
“Meet me at home?” she asks, her eyes wide. Pleading.
“Of course,” I say. And then she’s gone, and I have the drive back to Orange to wonder what the hell just happened.
Jenna said she loves me in front of the whole world, but I’m still an addict with barely two months of sobriety. What happened on stage didn’t solve the problems, and worry gnaws at me. She didn’t think that through, not really. Will she still want me when things calm down again?
I arrive at Jenna’s house just as the babysitter is leaving, and Jenna stands in the doorway, watching me approach. I’m afraid she’ll have changed her mind, but she pulls me inside and locks the door and holds me up against the wall so tight that I can’t breathe. I don’t want to. And even though I realize as she presses against my chest that I’m still wearing the ridiculous sparkling shirt and the enormous silver cross, the imprint of which is now going to be emblazoned in my skin, I want to freeze this moment and not have to deal with anything that comes after.
“I’m sorry,” Jenna says. “I shouldn’t have given up on us like that.”
I gently push her back and look down at her. “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kept all that from you. It wasn’t fair.”
Jenna shakes her head. “But you made a good point. You have to put your sobriety first.”
I sigh and knock my head back against the wall. “I do. But addiction thrives in secret. Lying to you is never the best thing for my sobriety, even if I’m scared.”
Jenna gives me a sad smile and settles into my arms again. “Will you forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive. Can you forgive me?”
She nods against my chest, and then seems to realize herself what I’m wearing and moves the silver cross out of the way. Not that I care about that right now. God, I wouldn’t care if I was wearing . . . well, there’s actually nothing I can think of worse than these crazy green pants and loud gaping shirt. But it doesn’t matter. She forgives me. She loves me. She wants to be with me.
“But I still haven’t solved everything,” she says softly. “Alec’s right. I have issues, and I think it has to do with my past, and with Rachel’s death. Are you sure you want to deal with that?”
I run a hand through her hair. I’ll deal with anything if it means I can be with her. “I’m still an addict. I always will be, and clearly I have a long way to go toward handling sobriety well. Can you put up with that?”
“I can. Unless you go back to the drugs.”
“I won’t,” I say, and I mean it. I’m sure I’ll have more bad days, more cravings, even strong ones. I still have to taper down off the Suboxone in a year or so. I’ll always be an addict; that’s never going away.
But I can deal with it. I’ve stayed sober this long, and I can keep making that choice, one day at a time.
Still. “But if I ever did, you are obligated to immediately kick me out. For you and for Ty.”
Jenna looks up at me. “I’d have to,” she says. “And I would.But I believe you won’t do that. I still wish I could be sure, but I know I can’t, and I don’t want to be away from you while I figure it out.”
This is the best news I’ve ever heard, and I squeeze her, and then guide her into the living room where we collapse on the couch. “Are you sure about this? Are you sure you can trust me with Ty?”
Jenna nods. “I think part of me was using that need to protect him as an excuse, when really I was just afraid of getting hurt.” She sighs. “Are you sure you want to put up with me?”
“I’m sure,” I say, but part of my brain is panicking. I’m scared that tomorrow she’ll learn something else I’ve left out and I’ll lose her all over again. I’m worried this is all temporary, when what I want—what I’ve always wanted—is to commit to her and have that be real and permanent.
I don’t want to say what I’m thinking, but I do want to be honest. But how honest is too honest? Am I just going to push her away again?
I take the coward’s way. “How sure are you?” I ask.
Jenna squirms. “If you still have doubts, if you need more time—”
“No,” I say. “That’s not—” And I know then that the only way to communicate what I’m thinking is to just come out and say it. “I mean, do you still think someday you could marry me?”
Jenna whimpers and puts her hand over her mouth. I feel like an idiot asking her this when she just told me she’s still scared to be with me, but her whole body turns toward mine. “Would you really want that?” She sounds . . . hopeful.
The idea that she might cracks my heart open all over again. “More than anything. Do you think you could trust me enough to do that?”
Jenna nods. “If you start using again, I really will have to kick you out. But I don’t think it could hurt any more just because we’re married.”
She sounds almost apologetic about that, and I grip her hand in mine. “Okay,” I say, and I’m grinning like an idiot, which still doesn’t come close to showing how happy this idea makes me.
“We’re going to get married,” she says. She doesn’t add a someday to that, and I’m afraid if I point it out, some bubble is going to burst. But I think she notices, because she adds, “Is that crazy?”
“Yes. But I think I made an enemy of Kanye West tonight, so when it comes to crazy, I’m all in.”
She squeals again, and squeezes me tight. The surreal feeling hasn’t left, and I wonder if I’m like that guy from the end of Brazil, charging through fantasies that are all in my head. But no, I’m here with Jenna, and she’s real, and I’m real, and being with her is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Of course I want to marry her. For her, so she knows I’m in this. For Ty, so he can have the security of knowing I’m really sticking it out. And for me, to create something stable, a place where I’m safe, so I can keep working on recovery.
“I love you,” I say.
She smiles, and is about to respond when her phone beeps. She checks it. “It’s Phil.” She looks up at me with concern. “He wants to know what the plan is.”
“Shit. I have no idea.”
Jenna’s giggle sounds a little delirious, and I get how she feels.
“What do you want?” I ask.
She thinks about that. “I want to be with you.”
“You’ve got that locked in. What else?”
Jenna snuggles up next to me, and it’s a long moment before she answers. “I want to be honest. Real. Before I was telling a story, but I was guessing at it. Imagining what it might be like. And I believed, but it was still only a story.” She looks at me. “Now I have something real to fight for, and I want to sing about that.”
“Well, I’m in, and it sounded like Leo and Roxie are, too. Do you want to try to do the tour?”
Jenna looks panicked. “The tour next week? I don’t think I can—I mean, without Alec I don’t see how—”
“We could see if it could be pushed back a couple weeks. Maybe a month?” I shrug. “The venues might drop us, but they’re shitting bricks right now anyway—they’d probably rather have some show, even a delayed one, than none at all. We can have Phil pitch keeping us on, and we can do a different show. A real one.”
She blinks at me. “And you want to put this together in a month.”
I smile. “It’s crazy, right? But it’s an option.”
Jenna stares into space as if she’s overwhelmed at the very prospect. “Alec might beat us to it.” She glances at her phone again. “But Phil says the preliminary buzz on the internet is that a lot of fans are siding with me.”
“I bet they are, after what Alec pulled.” I squint up at the huge light-up marquee letters, A and J. “Do you know where to get those? Because I’d like to get some for Alec. Specifically an F and a U.”
“Ha,” Jenna says. “I thought you were going to want an F for Felix.”
“That’s definitely not what that F is for.”
Jenna laughs, and then grows serious again. “I have some songs I could polish up. Ones that are more gritty and honest, and didn’t fit with the AJ sound. But there’s not enough to fill a whole concert.”
“We could play some classical. We could do some covers. And we could tell the real story. Our story.”
Jenna’s face lights up. “That would be amazing. Do you think it’s possible?”
“Pitch it to Phil,” I say. “It doesn’t hurt to try.”
Jenna looks down at her phone, but she hesitates. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, let’s do it. Put together a tour-ready show in three weeks? All while spending plenty of family time with Ty and each other? Sounds totally doable.” Jenna laughs, but I mean it, and from the way she’s smiling, I know she believes me. “The Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour.”
We’re both laughing at the enormity of this ridiculousness, but it feels good. It feels right. Neither Jenna nor I are people who do things halfway.
We’re in this.
“Okay,” Jenna says. “I better not pitch this to Phil over text. I need to call him.”
“Go right ahead.” I glance toward the stairs. It’s late, and Ty is no doubt asleep. “Can I do one thing while you call?”
“What’s that?”
“Can I tell Ty?” I ask.
“You want to wake him up?”
“Is that awful?”
“No,” she says, smiling. “Go ahead.” She taps her phone to call.
I make my way up the stairs and into the doorway of Ty’s room. The kid is fast asleep in my old cello case, with his hands across his chest like a vampire, and a blanket wrapped around his legs. I kneel next to the cello case and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Ty?”
It takes him a moment to wake up enough to look up at me. He stretches out, pressing the top of his head to the case. “Felix?”
“Hey, kiddo. I’m back.”
Ty sits straight up, his eyes wide and his hair sticking in all directions. “Are you going to be my dad again?”
“Yeah. For real this time. Your mom and I are going to get married. Is that okay with you?”
He nods. “And then you’ll be my real dad?”
I don’t want to get into the details of the differences between stepdads and real dads, and I’m hoping eventually, once I’ve proven I can stay sober, Jenna might consider letting me adopt him.
“Yeah. If that’s okay with you.”
He looks skeptical. “I thought you said some broken things couldn’t be fixed.”
I smile. “It’s true. But it turns out your mom and I aren’t one of those things.”
Ty throws his arms around my neck and squeezes tight. Jenna appears in the doorway, phone still in her hand, and she looks at us and melts. I smile at her and she smiles at me, and I know.
I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.