Page 37 of Wicked Destiny

Beau’s apology wasn’t a slick, secretly-about-himself kind. He took himself apart. For hiding me and being a coward. He cried in the specific ugly way a big man does when he means it.

Somewhere in the midst of everything, he told me the truth. “I love you. I can’t live without you.” Flat, terrified, a confession to a crime. “I’ve tried. I don’t want a life you’re not in and I know I’ve got no right to ask because you deserve a man who isn’t running out of decades—”

“Stop.” I put my hand over his mouth. “I don’t want someone my own age. I want you.” I made myself say the thing I needed him to hear. “I’m done being your secret, though. I’ll take the age gap and the public scrutiny, but I will not take the shadows. We do this out in the open, or we don’t do it at all.”

The universe, it turned out, was two steps ahead of us.

While we were up in his suite rewriting our whole future, a photo was tearing around the internet. Someone at the festival caught the kiss.

Beau Bixby, grunge god, silver fox, grieving widower, wrapped around a young girl who reads as about twelve in festival glitter.

By morning it was everywhere. We found out when Carter pounded on the door to Beau’s suite.

The thing about his fame I didn’t fully understand until I watched him take the news is this: He didn’t panic. Or lunge for damage control. He scrutinized the picture of us and something in him went quiet and sure. Almost like his worst nightmare about our relationship had manifested at last and it turned out to be freedom.

He phoned his manager. Then both kids. Finally, the band’s PR.

Instead of an apology, his people released three sentences, which made me cry when I read them:

He loved his late wife with his whole heart and always would.

He’d unexpectedly found love again with a remarkable young woman.

He would not be discussing, defending, or apologizing for the private life he has every right to live.

Two days in and, truthfully, it’s not been pretty.

The worldwide press did what Beau was most worried about. He’s the impressionable widower and I’m a gold digger. A groupie. Fame-hungry child, cautionary tale, punchline in seventeen languages. Strangers who will never meet me hold strong opinions about my body, motives, and soul.

His son Theo doesn’t seem bothered, but Billie called and screamed at him for twenty minutes before hanging up. Her reaction is carved into him. I can see the daughter wound festering under all the rest.

What his team didn’t count on, though, is me.

Even though I’m only twenty-two, I’m the one who grew up sharing my day-to-day on social media for an audience of my peers. I know something Beau and his fifty-something bandmates don’t quite believe yet.

It ends. It always ends.

There will be a fresher scandal, a newer outrage, a next horrific thing. The internet has the attention span of a fruit fly, and the surest way to lose is to feed it.

Our plan is: we don’t hide. Hiding looks like shame and we are not embarrassed to love each other. At the same time, we’re not going to covet the spotlight. There will be no staged photos, no clapbacks, no weepy People magazine confessional.

We lay low. Live our real life and let the haters scream into a void. One day the void will go quiet.

For now, I’m finishing his European tour at Beau’s side. His Europe. Not hostels and three-euro wine. We stay in five-thousand dollar suites like this one. He’s the singer of one of the most famous bands in the world with his own security detail. Plus, the hotel make sure we’re shuttled through service entrances by more large men in dark suits.

We’re safe. Protected.

Back in Seattle we’ll sort the rest. Harder logistics. His kids. My law school. The whole impossible gorgeous puzzle of a shared life.

Loving someone means letting them love you back.

eighteen

Three Months Later

The Four Seasons in Beverly Hills has a way of making a catastrophe feel catered.

We’re at a corner table on the garden side, screened behind a wall of potted Ficus the maître d’ arranged without me asking.