Being in Dale’s arms and thinking about Tyler Vincent and my fantasies about living in Maine and becoming… more… It was just too strange. But I couldn’t share my journals with Dale either. There was far too much truth in them, things I knew he couldn’t accept, things I couldn’t tell anyone. Even Aimee. I started every entry with Dear Tyler, but it might as well have been Dear Diary or Dear Rockstar for that matter. It was just me getting my thoughts on paper, getting them out.

“Did he ever write back?”

“No. I got an autographed picture once. I don’t know if it’s even really signed by him. But that was it.” I really didn’t like talking about this with Dale. I liked keeping Tyler Vincent and Dale Diamond as far away from each other as I possibly could, both in my mind and in the real world. But Dale seemed determined to talk about it tonight for some reason. “Can we change the subject?”

“Don’t mind me. It’s just the irony. I fall for a girl whose heart already belongs to some guy who’s twice her age who she’s never even met. You have to admit, it’s probably the most bizarre threesome in history.”

“You would have been better off with Aimee.” The thought caused a sharp stab of pain in my middle, and if Dale had known, he would have been pleased.

“No,” he said. “That’s not true. She’s not you. I don’t want anybody else.”

“Why do you want to talk about this?”

“I guess I want to know,” he said softly. “Tell me why he’s so important to you. Make me understand it.”

Dale was quiet, waiting for me, and I groped for words, the right words, that would put my feelings for Tyler Vincent outside myself. There weren’t any, I found. They hadn’t been invented yet. I tried anyway.

“Tyler Vincent puts himself into the stuff he does,” I said, closing my eyes, trying to put it into words. “And I can feel him. Sure, I like his music, and that’s how it started. He carried me away, and I enjoy that... but it’s more. It’s his voice I hear in his lyrics, his music, even in his movies… and it appeals to a deep part of me... the creative, feeling part of me.”

I chewed thoughtfully on my lip.

“I can understand that,” Dale murmured, encouraging me to go on.

It was the next part that was going to be hard to swallow. Even as I thought about it, I was discovering things about my feelings I’d hidden from myself.

“He’s somehow become... everything to me. I’m sure some shrink would say it ties into my dad. I hate my stepfather, and there’s Tyler Vincent, someone I admire and respect, everything my stepfather isn’t and never will be. He’s such a great person, with a great mind, and a wife and three kids he loves more than life itself...”

“How can you know that?” Dale interrupted.

“I know,” I assured him. “I just know. And the worse my life got, the worse my stepfather got, the more I needed...”

I shrugged, my words trailing off. There wasn’t any more I could say.

“You know... what if he’s not as great as you’ve made him out to be in your head?” Dale asked. “I mean, it’s like you’ve created him in your mind. You took a puzzle and you filled in the missing pieces with your imagination, and maybe... maybe they’re the wrong pieces. You see what I mean?”

“Maybe.”

The door opened and John poked his head in.” I’m off to the staff party. You two ready for trick-or-treaters?”

“Sure.” I stood up, holding my hand out for Dale, and he took it, climbing off the bed and following me into the living room. John had set up a bowl of Tootsie Rolls for the trick-or-treaters.

“If you run out of candy, I left two rolls of pennies on the kitchen table.” John shrugged on a jacket, tipping his Crocodile Dundee hat in my direction. “G’Day, lil Sheila.”

I laughed. “Call us if you have too much to drink. We’ll come get you.”

“Not me.” John shook his head, opening the door, frightening two trick-or-treaters who were just about to knock.

I put two Tootsie Rolls into a Smurf’s pillow case, and two more into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s bag, closing the door as John made his way down the stairs.

“Smurfs?” Dale shook his head. “Whatever happened to Bugs Bunny? Daffy Duck?”

“Normal cartoons!” I agreed. “I turned on the TV a couple Saturdays ago, and I swear, I didn’t recognize one cartoon. I felt so old.”

“I know what you mean.” He sat on the sofa with the Tupperware bowl full of candy. “Saturdays were the best. When I was little my mom would...”

He stopped, stirring around the bowl and picking out a Tootsie Roll. I waited for him to continue but he didn’t. He never talked about his family, especially his mom. I knew his parents were divorced, but now I wondered if maybe she was dead?

I sat down on the couch beside him, reaching in and plucking out a Tootsie Roll, trying to make the question sound casual. “Dale... where’s your mom?”

I felt him stiffen beside me. He shoved the candy into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully, a good excuse for his hesitation.

“In Maine,” he said finally. “They split up. End of story.”

“It must have been hard,” I said. I’d never had to go through that. My father died in a car accident before I ever knew him, and my mother had married the stepbeast by the time I entered second grade.

He set the candy bowl between us, his laugh hard, bitter. “Not really. I hate my mother.”

“Why?” I watched him folding his Tootsie Roll wrapper into some shape on his thigh.

“Because... because she cheated on my father. Because she did it for years and never told him. Because—” He stopped and looked at me. “Because the jerk she was cheating with is still with his wife and kids and they have no idea it ever happened.”

“God,” I whispered. “How did you find out?”

“You really want to know?”

I nodded. He’d finished folding his wrapper into a miniature paper airplane and now he threw it with a vengeance. It sailed over the coffee table. “I walked in on them. This guy—he was my dad’s best friend—he invited us to go swimming in his pool. My dad had work to do—term papers to grade, I think—so just Mom and I went.” He unwrapped another Tootsie Roll and he spoke his next words around it.

“So we were playing around, and I got stung by a bee. Hurt like hell but I pulled the stinger out and went to get my mom.” He began to fold another wrapper.

“Then what?” I prodded.

Dale tossed his second little airplane. It nose-dived into the carpet.

“Well, I couldn’t find her for a while. I stumbled around—the house was huge—and happened to open a door I thought was a bathroom. Turned out it was a bedroom.”

I gasped. “You found them... actually... you know...?”

“Uh, yeah. There was no doubt about what they were doing.”

“Oh my God.” I threw my own little wrapper airplane. It hit the edge of the coffee table. “What did you do?”

“They were too busy to even notice I was there. I had to yell ‘Mom!’ three times and even then she just told me to get hell out. So I waited for her outside the door.”

“And?”

“They finished what they were doing.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Are you… sure?”

He glanced sideways at me and I shrank back.

“Very sure.” His eyes were dark with anger. “So then, my mother came out in her dress and high heels and walked past me like I wasn’t even there.”

“No way,” I exclaimed. “Did you tell your dad?”

“No.” He shook his head, lips pursed. “I didn’t know what to do. I talked to her and she told me to shut my mouth. Said it was none of my business what she did and I was old enough to understand.” He laughed bitterly. “Old enough to understand…”

He stopped talking as more kids came to the door. I opened it, handing them Tootsie Rolls silently. Dale continued eating them and making tiny airplanes.

I sat back on the sofa .“So when did your dad find out?”

“He didn’t.”

I gaped at him.

“She left him. She got the idea in her head this jerk was going to ditch his wife for her and she left us. Told my father some story about how she was unhappy. She probably was. Anyway, she never told him.”

“He still doesn’t know?”

“No and please don’t say anything. It would kill him.”

“How many people have you told?” I asked him softly. He threw his airplane and it joined mine, littering the carpet.

“Counting you?”

I nodded.

“One.”

I moved the bowl from between us and slid over until my hip touched his. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

“You should have to get a license to have a kid,” Dale said bitterly. “Some people were never meant to have any.”

“I’m glad they had you,” I said softly. “I’d be lost without you.”

He turned to me, his heart in his eyes. “I love you, Sara.”

I closed mine, feeling tears behind them. It was the first time he’d said it. The first time either of us had spoken anything like it out loud.

He tilted my chin up and I knew he was waiting for an answer, but I couldn’t. It filled every fiber of my being, my love for him. It was so big it eclipsed everything, even the one thing in my life I counted as the most important. I wanted to tell him, but the words seemed too small to really express how I felt.

Instead, I touched my lips to his. His mouth was soft and he tasted sweet—like Tootsie Rolls. He ran a hand down my hair to the small of my back, pressing me as close as he could. His mouth slanted across mine with more feeling than I’d ever experienced, and I let him kiss me, hard and long, my body thrumming and alive and full of him, oblivious to everything else.

“Oh, Sara.” His lips trembled against my neck. “Don’t do this to me. I can’t stand it. I can’t… I can’t…”

He kissed me again before I could ask or even catch my breath, but as suddenly as it had started, it ended and he disentangled himself from me.

“I’ve got to practice.”

He went to his room, shutting the door behind him, leaving me alone with a bowl full of Tootsie Rolls, wondering what in the hell had just happened.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Can’t sleep?” Aimee whispered in the dark. She was in her twin bed and I was on the floor in a sleeping bag, our usual arrangement when I slept over.

“No.” I was watching shadows on the ceiling, tree branches moving in the moonlight.

It was the night before a Tyler Vincent concert. Of course I couldn’t sleep. It was like the night before Christmas, only better, especially since Dale had procured front row seats.

But I wasn’t thinking about Tyler Vincent.

“Want me to tell you a story?”