Page 79 of Dear Rockstar (Dear Rockstar 1)

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?”

I smiled at Aimee’s suggestion, also a time-honored tradition, although maybe we were a getting a little too old for it. It was like watching cartoons on Saturday morning—you could see yourself doing it and knew it was silly and immature, but there was something familiar and undeniably comforting about it anyway.

Aimee was a writer. She’d been the editor of our high school paper until part way through our senior year, when she’d ended up in treatment for her anorexia. Her imagination knew no bounds, and she loved to tell stories. It had started one night during a sleepover like this. We’d stayed up watching MTV until two in the morning, waiting for Tyler Vincent videos, drinking Tab and eating Funyuns. Neither of us could sleep, too excited for the concert the next day.

That’s when Aimee had first asked, “Want me to tell you a story?”

And she had, a story about meeting Tyler Vincent, but not just meeting him. We rescued him from some dangerous situation, for which he was immensely grateful, and of course rewarded us immediately with lifetime access to all his shows. As we grew older, the stories got better—far more involved, sometimes bordering on dirty, depending on her mood and our level of tiredness, which inevitably broke down our inhibitions—but whatever happened, Aimee was always nice enough to let me have Tyler in the end for a happy ever after.

“No, not tonight.” I rolled over in my sleeping bag toward her bed with a sigh.

“Whatcha thinking about?”

Things I shouldn’t have been thinking about.

Tomorrow was the Tyler Vincent concert and we had front row seats and the only thing I could think about was Dale.

“Nothing.”

“Liar.” I heard her smile. “Did I tell you Matt asked me to his brother’s wedding?”

Only a few hundred times.

“I know. I helped you pick out the dress remember?”

We’d spent less and less time together this year, often only seeing each other at the lunch table and talking on the phone a few times a week. Aimee was busy with her first real boyfriend—ever—and I was busy with Dale. And Tyler.

“Can you believe we’re old enough to get married?”

I froze in the dark. “Did Matt… propose?”

It was quiet and then she burst out laughing. “No! Oh my God, no. Can you imagine?”

---