Rocked with Passion (A New Adult Rockstar Novel) (2 page)

“I’m sorry Sara. I’m so sorry. But I can’t do this to you. I can’t be with you now. I hope you understand. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Of course you won’t hurt me! I know you’re going. I know everything. Please!” I begged. I wanted this. I wanted him, even if it was just for this one night. Jonathan, however, shook his head.

“I’m sorry Sara.
It wouldn’t be right. It’s not right. You’re only fifteen. I came out here to tell you that I do care about you. You’re a beautiful young girl, and there will be a time when you will make a man enormously happy. But it’s not going to be me. Not now.”

Tears began to form in my eyes, and as a tear rolled down my cheek,
Jonathan wiped it away gently.

“Please don’t cry Sara. Please understand where I’m coming from. I care for you,
more than you know. I simply can’t do this to you. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Please take me home” I replied, and
Jonathan started the truck once more. As I took one last look at the ripples on the lake, I couldn’t help but feel that they were there because my heart had just been ripped out and thrown in.

As Jonathan pulled his truck up to the curb in front of my parent’s house, he told me once more: “Please understand Sara, I don’t mean to hurt you.”

I nodded numbly and got out.

“Good luck in Hollywood” I told him. “Goodbye.”

I turned around and went to the house without looking back. I could tell from the noise of the truck that Jonathan didn’t leave until a few minutes after I’d gone back into the house.

I loved Jonathan. That kind of rejection, him telling me that it couldn’t be between us... it tore me apart.
I had never been so thankful that my parents were early sleepers than that night. I snuck up to my room, making sure not to wake them, and collapsed onto my bed in a fit of tears.

They streamed from my eyes, an endless flow of sorrow, grief and disappointment.
The hollow, dull pain in my chest was almost unbearable. My heart had been completely broken, and that was the night I knew my life would never be the same. I had lost my first true love. The man who cared for me, the man who treated me like none of the others in my life did. He was gone, leaving for the West Coast in a matter of hours, after rejecting me for being a child.

I don’t know how long I cried for before my exhausted body succumbed to the day and I fell asleep.
When I woke up the next day, still fully clothed on top of my blanket, it took a few seconds for the previous night’s events to return, explaining the dull throb of pain I still experienced in my chest.

Jonathan had rejected me, and gone off to Los Angeles. Odds were I was never going to see him again. Well, maybe when Sally got married we’d see each other at the wedding, something like that. Who knew? What I did know was that right now I never wanted to see Jonathan Knight again.

My depression slowly turned into anger. Anger at his rejection, anger at his leaving for California, anger at everything to do with him. Then, slowly, that passed as well, and I began to accept what had happened. Looking back, I realize I basically went through all five stages of grief. But wasn’t that to be expected? After all, Jonathan was my first love. I thought he was my true love.

That was ten years ago. And sure enough,
I never heard from Jonathan again. Until now. I stared at the words on the page, penned by the man that had meant so much to me.

Of course, I knew what had happened to Jonathan.
Knight Blindness had originally not had great luck in Los Angeles. I heard from Sally that at one point they were even considering coming home, as they were almost broke and had no prospects. But, then one day Jonathan himself decided enough was enough. He managed to organize a meeting with a major record label guy (I’m not entirely sure how the music industry works) and they were signed. Their first single was an overnight success, and their second even more so. The Blind Knights’ first album sold more copies than any rock band’s debut album had since the early 90s. They were rock stars. No, they were rock
gods.

And now Jonathan Knight, the main singer and the man who’d broken my heart when I was fifteen, had written me to come and see him.

I read the words on the page once more.
Jonathan started off by telling me about the scandal one of the band members, Eric, had gotten involved in. Of course, I’d heard about it, as had everybody else in the country not living under a rock. According to the papers, Eric had cheated on his long time girlfriend with a stripper living in Las Vegas, gotten her pregnant and then paid for her to have an abortion.

Jonathan’s letter confirmed t
hat the story was true, and Eric’s girlfriend had left him. The problem was, it wasn’t the stripper who had leaked the story. The letter continued on with what wasn’t said. The girlfriend in question had happily accepted the abortion, and was content continuing her life in Vegas and seeing Eric on the side. In fact, when the story spilled, she was the most upset of everyone, as she was the one not used to dealing with fame and paparazzi.

Jonathan’s letter continued, telling me that the band conducted an investigation and hired a private investigator, and found that it was actually the head of the PR firm they’d hired to take care of all their public appearances and everything that had leaked the story to the media. She confessed immediately when confronted with the evidence, claiming that Knight Blindness had never been in the papers as often as they were then.

Nonetheless, the band immediately fired the company, and now they were in need of a new PR representative. And that was where I came in. After high school, I didn’t really know what to do. I wasn’t one of the super smart kids, so it wasn’t like I was going to go off to Princeton or anything, but I wanted a career. I went to community college, and on a whim, did a diploma in public relations.

I didn’t really have a lot of connections in the town, and as anyone who has grown up in a small town knows, connections are everything. Most people got jobs through their parents, but my mom, who worked really hard to make sure I had a good life, never really made it anywhere career-wise, and so I didn’t have a lot of connections by the time I graduated.

I tried to get jobs doing anything in the PR field. Hell, I even tried to get jobs in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus and even Chicago, but with the economy the way it was, I rarely got interviews, let alone an actual job. Meanwhile, interest on my student loans was starting to accumulate, I wasn’t able to find any work at all, and starting to get depressed about it. After all, I’d devoted a couple years of my life to this diploma. I didn’t want it all to go to waste. Eventually I went on the internet and read about starting my own business. After all, isn’t that the American dream?

It was a hell of a lot harder than I expected it to be.
For a while I was working 50, 60 and sometimes even 70 hour weeks just trying to drum up business literally everywhere I could. Things started working out for me eventually though, and thanks to the low overhead, I quickly managed to actually be successful at it.

So,
I was now running my own small PR firm in our small town in Ohio. Of course, it wasn’t like I was a superstar or anything. Mainly I just suggested to local business owners how to make attractive advertisements, or how to get some free airtime on the local radio station. The three major companies in town hired me to write the press releases they sent out every month or so, and that was enough to pay the bills, which was all I wanted.

What Jonathan was proposing though, that just completely ble
w me away. I read the next part of the letter aloud, just to make sure I’d gotten it right:

“I heard from Sally that you’re running a PR company in town, and a fairly successful one, which doesn’t surprise me at all. As I’m sure you can understand
, I’ve got reservations now hiring an outside firm. If you were willing, I’d like for you to come to Los Angeles and run the PR for the band. We’ll pay you well, of course, but right now we need someone with experience that we can trust that we know would be amazing at the job, and we want that person to be you. In fact, I want that person to be you. I’ve already booked you a ticket, in a week. If you’re interested, then please come and see me. If not, well, I’ll be disappointed, but I’ll understand.”

I sank into the couch and let the letter fall to the floor.
Grabbing the envelope, I pulled out the boarding pass for a first class flight to Los Angeles, dated about a week away. Suddenly I began to feel faint. Was this really happening? I hadn’t heard from Jonathan in a year, and he wanted me to suddenly pack my bags and go work for him? I mean, that was asking quite a lot, wasn’t it?

Of course,
there was another complication. I had a boyfriend now. Kevin was kind, thoughtful and the kind of guy you could bring home to mom. I met Kevin in college: he was getting an accounting diploma and we shared an elective class. We sat next to each other a few times, got to talking and the next thing I knew we were dating.

Now Kevin worked for one of my clients, as a junior accountant,
we shared a small apartment and were happily building our lives together. I assumed we would probably get engaged in the next year, then married and have a few kids by the time I turned thirty. After all, that’s what everyone did in this town. I was comfortable and settled in my life, happily going about my business, until this letter from Jonathan shattered everything.

Strangely enough,
a part of me considered not telling Kevin about Jonathan’s letter at all. Kevin and I told each other everything, and this was an
important
thing to want to keep from him. A few seconds later I decided I would tell him, but the back of my mind still nagged at me that my instinct was to keep it away from Kevin. Why was I doing that? Why had I even considered hiding the letter from Kevin? Was it because I secretly still loved Jonathan? Surely not. I couldn’t still love him. He’d ripped my heart apart at the lake all those years ago, I couldn’t still love him.

The one thing I had never told Kevin about was my love for Jonathan. He knew everything else about me: how I cried every night for a month when my parents got divorced, how I felt guilty about taking Katina Lowry’s favourite doll in Kindergarten after she was mean to me, how much I hated being chubby in high school.
Everything. Except for Jonathan.

I broached the topic that night as we ate dinner in front of the TV.
I didn’t really know how to bring it up, so I just went for it:

“Hey, I got a letter from Sally’s brother today, offering me a gig in LA.”

Kevin’s attention immediately turned from the sitcom we were watching to me.

“Really?
That guy from Knight Blindness?”

I nodded. “Yeah, you know that scandal they just had, well it turns out it was the head of their PR that leaked the story to get them more attention, so they fired the firm and need someone else.
He wrote me offering me the job, complete with a first class plane ticket to LA next week.”

“Are you going to take it?”

“Well no, I wasn’t really going to. After all, we have a life here together.” It wasn’t strictly true, I had to admit a part of me really wanted to see Jonathan, as much as I tried to deny it. He was still my first love, after all, even if he’d broken my heart.

“But Sara, of course you have to take it.
This is the opportunity of a lifetime! Can you imagine how much money you could make, how famous you would be in the PR world if you did it, even for a year or two? You could annihilate your student loan debt, you could start saving for things, like maybe a wedding in the future, that sort of thing.”

I had to admit, I was touched by Kevin’s reaction.
I had expected him to be lukewarm about the idea at best, since obviously it would mean the two of us being apart for quite some time.

“But what about us?
I mean, what’s going to happen if I go to LA?”

Kevin took my hands in his.
“Sara, I love you. I love you with all my heart. We’re meant to be together. If that means you’re going to have to spend a little bit of time away from me, and that we’re going to have to do things long distance, well so be it. I want to see you succeed. I want to see your business succeed. And this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that just needs to be taken.”

My head began to spin.
I hadn’t expected this reaction, and the more Kevin talked me into it, the more it made sense. This was a huge opportunity for my career. Who knew what it could lead to in the future? Honestly, I’d kind of been leaning away from taking the job until Kevin, being the supportive boyfriend that he was, started to tell me how good of an idea it was. I was so thrilled with how much Kevin loved me. Honestly, it almost hurt how much I loved his reaction. It was so nice of him. I mean, a few years ago a friend of mine, Katie, was dating a guy named Mark. She ran into an old friend of ours Pete, at a book store and they grabbed a cup of coffee to catch up on things, since they hadn’t seen each other in years, as Pete moved away in high school. Mark found out about it and blew up on Katie, eventually hitting her so hard he broke her jaw. All over a guy that Katie had never even come close to having romantic feelings for.