Backstage Pass: Behind the Music (2 page)

By the time the plane’s wheels touched down, I was filled with such amazing lightness that I practically floated off the plane. The Miami humidity infused me in the transition from plane to tunnel and I skipped all the way into the terminal, not even caring that I looked like a dork.

The swarm of passengers carried me down to baggage and I was
about to step on the escalator when I spot him. He hadn’t seen me yet and I took a quick second to duck behind a tall collection of plants to watch him. He shifted the sweet bouquet of flowers to one hand and dug his phone out, probably checking the time or to see if I’d texted him.

His face f
ell and he scanned the crowd, looking awkwardly unsure of himself and nervous. A few people in the crowd pointed and whispered like they recognized him and I realized he was probably going to get swarmed if I made him wait much longer. I let that light feeling fill me up again and strode confidently to the top step. He spotted me and his face lit up and he rushed to the bottom of the escalator.

I waved. He was
cute, all bumbling and nervous. Seeing him like this made me all the more grateful that I’d done what I did on the plane so this trip could be about where we were headed, not where we’d been. He held the flowers out to me and I took them and held them to my chest. “They’re beautiful, thank you.” I quickly hugged him before he could step away.

“
I can’t believe you’re here.”

“
Me neither.” I wanted to add “Dad” onto the back of the declaration, but it got hung up in my throat. I wasn’t sure that I was ready to bestow that on him again, but I couldn’t call him by his name either.

He looked
at me for a long time and tears sprang to his eyes. People started to crowd us and I knew we were on borrowed time. A couple of phones click and I was all too aware we are the center of attention. There was no reason we needed to hang around the baggage carousel for any longer. “I don’t have bags.”

He grip
ped my hand. “Great. Let’s get out of here.”

I shift
ed my backpack higher and he scanned the tightening crowd, then pushed briskly through a small opening just as people began to ask for his autograph. We raced through baggage claim, dipping and dodging clusters of people. The faster we went, the more attention we gathered, until I felt like the whole damn airport had noticed us.

The exit doors are only
a hundred yards away, but everyone passing through them had turned to find out what all the commotion was about. He tightened his grip on my hand and took a quick right down a narrow hallway I hadn’t noticed.

I glance
d over my shoulder hoping to find nothing but empty space, and I was shocked to see just how many people were pursuing us. “What do they want?”

“A
nything they can get; an autograph, a button off my shirts, a lock of my hair.” His breath was coming fast and frantic and the clamp of his hand tightened around mine, scaring me. “I’m sorry about all of this. I really thought we could get in and out fast enough that only a few people would notice. Unfortunately, they’re like predators and the minute you start moving, the more they start to notice.”

Okay
, that must be a horrible way to live a life if this was his day-to-day. I felt bad that he must have to deal with this all the time, and not just at airports. This must be his life whether he’s at the grocery store or getting his hair cut. Suddenly, I had a new appreciation for his life and the cost of fame.

He pushed through a door at the end of the hallway and it dumped us into an underground parking area
. I glanced behind us just as the door swung shut, but the horde was still coming with a relentless determination. My quick movements bumbled the bouquet and it fell.

I
lurched to a stop but he didn’t let go of my hand, yanking me forward. “Leave it.”

“But . . .
”

“
I promise I’ll get you a new one, a bigger one. We need to keep going if we want to stay ahead of them.” Lines strained the corners of his eyes. He was not kidding about the severity of this situation, but even so, I couldn’t help feeling like we were in a bad B-movie zombie flick. Laughter bubbled up in my chest as we started running again. Everything about the situation was so unbelievable that it was silly. He tossed me a grin and just like that, we were simply dad and daughter.

I was back to the lightness that I’d had on the airplane and the feeling that whatever we managed to become was going to be okay. We might not be who we’d been back when I was ten, but that had built a foundation that I couldn’t deny, or regret, or dismiss. Just because I’d forgiven him didn’t mean that I agreed with how he’d handled it, or that I
was glad we’d been apart for all those years. I just realized that it meant we were willing to try to let go of the pain to have a future.

And I
could do that with Jesse too . . . If I wanted.

Three more l
efts and a right dropped us out of another hallway where a single black limo waited.

“
I should have just stayed in the car and picked you up in this.” His laughter started to fade and I didn’t want to see it go because I wasn’t ready to let those serious thoughts weigh me down just yet. I needed lighthearted right now. I wanted to be filled with those bubbles of joy again.

I
tugged gently on his hand. “But then we would’ve missed all the excitement.”

He open
ed the door for me and I scrambled in just as the main garage door burst open to a ravenous horde of fans. He leapt in beside me and the driver peeled out, clearly no stranger to this type of situation.

“So what else do you have planned for us this weekend?” I
slumped in the seat, exhausted and yet too buoyed by the joy of the adventure to let the crazed fans get the best of us.

He grab
bed my hand and looked over nervously. “I was afraid to jinx it by planning anything. I wanted to make sure you were really coming.”

I
wasn’t going back there, not to my past, so I leaned forward with a smile and squeezed his hand. “Let’s start over, okay?”

He
flinched, surprised at my suggestion. “Uh, yeah. Sure. Sure! I’d like that.”

A warmth spread
in my chest. I was pretty sure I was going to like this new version of us. “Then how would you like to spend the weekend?”

He exhaled. “How about if we play it by ear and just do what we feel like when we feel like it?”

“Sounds perfect!” And it really did. I liked the sound of no expectations, plans, or goals. We could let this thing—whatever it was and was going to be—build all by itself until we figured out who we wanted to be to each other.

The driver wound us through the streets of Miami
and I admired the view. “That was crazy back there at the airport.”

He shrugged. “That’s a pre
tty standard day for me. But yeah, takes some getting used to.”

I tried
not to think about Jesse being in the “getting used to” stage. “How long did it take?”

“Oh man, couple years, maybe more.”

“Mmph.” With a baby on the way, I definitely didn’t have room in my life for that kind of chaos. Which made fixing things with Jesse seem impossible, even to let him have a role in the baby’s life if I decided to keep it.

“Whatever happened to that guy I saw you with at the concert?”
he asked innocently.

My eyes teared up and I quickly looked out the window,
blinking them away before I answered. “We didn’t work out.”

“
Oh. Sorry to hear that.”

An awkward silence filled the car and I kne
w he instantly felt bad about dousing our fun mood and I search for something to say that would get us off this track of questioning, and quickly. “How’s this tour going?”

“Normal. Lots of late
nights and rowdy chicks, er—groupies.”

“It’s fine, D
ad. I’m no stranger to the scene, and it’s part of your life, which means it’s also part of your future.”

He blew out a huge breath and shifted in the seat so we almost faced each other. Before he started
speaking, he grabbed my other hand and held them together in both of his. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to hearing you say that. I’m going to try really hard, Sasha. I want this to work between us.”

“You’re my dad.” Tears burned my eyes. “And that’s that. I want the past to be forgotten. It has no place in our future.”

He kissed the backs of my knuckles. “How about some ice cream and a day at the beach for starters?”

“I’d like that.”

He told the driver the plan and we pulled into the Dairy Queen drive-thru. I hadn’t had a Blizzard in a decade, but we’d done it every Sunday for my entire youth. I guess some things just don’t stay in the past, no matter how hard you try. I was okay with the good things coming along of the ride, but none of the bad.

The driver dropped us off in a nearly deserted parking lot of a
beach and pulled a bag of random beach stuff out of the trunk and handed it to Dad.

I laughed an
d shook my head. The driver shrugged. “Gotta be prepared.”

“Thank goodness.”

Dad and the driver had a short conversation—probably about how to keep strangers away from us while giving us a bit of peace—then he led me to the beach and I sucked a huge glob of my Oreo Blizzard off my spoon. The heat was perfect; not too hot, not too humid. I tipped my face up to the sun and closed my eyes. This was what I’d needed and I hadn’t even known it. When I opened my eyes, Dad was waiting, hand outstretched. I laced our fingers together and sat down on the blanket that he’d laid out for us. Awkwardness settled around the moment and I dumped the sand from my shoes and set them aside. “Must have a few spoons in here.”

He laughed, and it was that nervous high-pitched laughter again. I patted the back of his hand. “This is nice.”

He took a wobbly breath and I could tell he was wrestling with some of the same stuff I’d already let go of. I wasn’t sure if guys had to talk it out like we did, but I hoped he could get to an okay space about us before I left and went back home. He smiled at me and I was transported back in time. It felt good and right to be here with him now.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing since I saw you last.”

“Like when I was ten?” My voice was screechy and high pitched and I quickly reverted to a panicked state. I wasn’t equipped to handle the psychologist side of this relationship stuff if the simplest comment could send me reeling.

“Or not.” He laughed. “But I feel like we should be talking about something.”

He was probably right, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to ruin this with talking. Because somewhere along the way, that was going to lead us to the past and I didn’t want to be there again. Not yet. “Tell me about your new record.”

His face softened instantly and he
looked wistfully out over the waves. “This is the first time I’ve really been able to focus on the music. Not the hype, not the tour, just the music. I hate to say it,” he grabbed a fistful of sand and let it sift through his fingers, “but I almost can’t wait for this tour to end next week so I can get back to the recording studio.”

It wa
s weird to hear him say things that I knew were so true for Jesse too. And I’d watched them both get into that trance with the music that shuts everyone and everything out—both good and bad. I’d never had anything like that in my life. I mean, yeah, I love the music too, but I’d never been able to reach the plane of transcendence that he and Jesse could. But it didn’t make me jealous that they could, only in awe. “You really love the music, don’t you?”

He grinned
and set his chin on his shoulder, tipping his face to look at me. “It never gets old. Music was my first love, and if I’m honest, my only love.”

“Hey!” I shove
d playfully at his shoulder.

He swayed
away, then back, until our bodies bumped together. “You’re different. A love for a kid is something that can’t be compared to anything. It transcends love for everyone and everything.”

My fingers fl
ew to my belly and I caught them before they landed. I shoved them back in the sand. “I guess that’s good.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s really hard to live up to. A ki
d thinks you can’t do any wrong . . .”

I should have said something soothing or forgiving or understanding, but there was truth in his statement and it was part of why I was here. I had held him to an impossible standard and
then when he fell—like any person invariably would—I’d been unwilling to forgive.

And I’d done that same thing to Jesse, I realized with a
searing pain. Not that he could be excused even one tiny bit for making a shit decision, but maybe in healing this situation between me and Dad, I could notice what I needed to do differently in my next relationship—whenever I got around to that after raising a kid.

I lifted my fingers out of the sand and cupped my belly. Right now, I had one relationship to figure out and that wasn’t going
to be easy. I wavered again about whether I had what it took to raise a kid on my own or if I should give it up for adoption to a home with two parents and some sort of stable future. Maybe the fact that I couldn’t even make the first decision should have been a red flag for me. I just didn’t know what to do at all. Part of me wanted to find out what it would be like to have a kid like me, who’d thought this guy next to me had walked on water since the moment I’d met him. “Guess I’ll find out all about that in nine months.”