Chapter 7
BILLIE
“I can’t believe Adam’s back.” Bailey shook her head as she stared over the fence at the back of Adam’s house. “Are you going to go over and talk to him?”
Since coming downstairs from my hiding spot in my old room, I hadn’t said a word about the return of our prodigal son, and so far, neither had my sisters, but of course, leave it to Bailey to bring it up.
“Finally, fuck,” Birdie cursed beneath her breath in an exasperated tone that I had never heard from my baby sister, the Zen Queen. Both Bailey and I spun to see what could have provoked our saint-like angel of a sister to cuss.
It wasn’t that she never used bad language, she did, but never with a negative connotation. It was always positive. You fucking did it! Fuck yeah. Abso-fucking-lutely. Birdie didn’t have a negative bone in her body.
“Carly!” Birdie called out.
Carly was huddled with her cheer team, the last of her partygoers, the rest had gone home. The girls’ heads all turned at the same time.
“Check your TikTok notifications.”
“My notifications?” Carly looked down at her phone and screamed which set off a domino effect of all of her friends circling her phone and screaming.
“What’s that about?” I asked my baby sister.
“I asked Dylan to post a TikTok for her on his stories with the band. He was supposed to do it this morning. One thing, I asked him for one thing.”
Bailey and I exchanged a “trouble-in-paradise?” look. If it were anyone else, Birdie’s reaction would be a simple annoyance, for Birdie, it was burn-the-house-down. That was practically her cursing him out and calling him a piece of shit.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Birdie closed her eyes, inhaled slowly through her nose, and exhaled through her mouth.
Whoa. Two fucks in under five minutes.
“What?” Bailey and I chorused.
“He didn’t even sing Happy Birthday. That’s all I asked him to do.”
“I’m sure it’s fine.” I couldn’t believe I was actually sticking up for Dylan the Douchebag. “Did he say her name? That’s all she’ll care about.”
Birdie handed me her phone.
I played the video.
Dylan looked like he was in a hotel room and had just woken up. To the camera, he said, “Hey, to my niece, Carly! Happy Birthday!”
“It’s not even with the band.” Birdie motioned to the phone.
“He called her his niece, that’s gonna be huge for her,” Bailey assured her.
“Where is he?” I squinted, thinking I saw a reflection of an arm in the bed beside him.
“New York. He’s recording.”
He was always in New York or Los Angeles recording, or he was on tour.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him in person.
Not that I cared. If it were up to me, I’d never lay eyes on Dylan Hart again.
He put zero effort into his relationship with Birdie, and it really pissed me off.
He promised her the world and delivered her a sidewalk at best. My sister was too forgiving.
“Well, you can talk to him tomorrow.”
Birdie’s new bridal line was being featured in The Vow, and the photo shoot was tomorrow at the boutique. Dylan was flying in for it so they could get a photo together for the interview.
“Oh, he’s not coming,” she stated matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean, he’s not coming?” Bailey and I both gave each other another look.
“Some producer he’s been waiting to work with is only in town tomorrow, so he can’t fly in.”
I wanted to shake my sister and ask why she put up with his behavior. He constantly made promises he never kept. I couldn’t remember the last time he followed through with anything.
The two had been dating off and on since high school.
And from the very beginning, Dylan was just not good enough for Birdie.
Plain and simple. Rock star or not. He’d always struck me as an insecure guy who needed the spotlight and adoration of others.
Granted, he’d been able to get that adoration, but I worried what would happen when it eventually faded.
I wasn’t even convinced he liked my sister, let alone loved her.
I honestly believed the only reason Dylan was still with Birdie was because of the optics.
His only number ones were written about her.
His fans knew she was Birdie from “Morning Star,” “Love in My Scars,” and “Price of my Luck.” And his first breakout hit, the song that made his career and was still the band’s top selling and streaming money maker, “My Little Birdie,” had her name in the title.
His entire career was built on those love songs. She was his muse.
Even I had to admit, his songs were beautiful. It was too bad he was such an asshat.
Their relationship inspired hundreds of thousands of TikTok edits.
Fans found high school photos all the way up to the current day of the two of them.
But I hadn’t ever seen Dylan take any interest in Birdie, the person.
Not since he was trying to get together with her, that is.
And I had always believed that his interest in her had more to do with his cousin/best friend being in love with her than with Dylan actually caring about her, but I’d never shared that opinion with my sister.
My phone buzzed with an alarm indicating it was time to go.
“Gotta go.”
“Where?” Birdie asked.
“I have a date," I explained.
Thanks to my stalking, I’d totally forgotten about my date tonight, but when I was upstairs hibernating in my old room, I got my calendar reminder. I almost cancelled, but it was a concert at a venue I liked, and I figured, might as well get back up on that horse.
“Are you seriously not going to go over and talk to Adam?” Bailey’s eyes were as big as flying saucers.
“I will.” Maybe. “Later. I’ll let him get settled.”
Birdie and Bailey both stared at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You guys were so close,” Birdie ventured softly. “You were like best friends.”
“Twenty years ago,” I reminded them. “I haven’t seen him in twenty years.”
They both just continued staring at me. Frustration bubbled up inside of me.
If they knew what happened, that we’d kissed, no, more than kissed, and then he left and never spoke to me, maybe they wouldn’t be looking at me like I was somehow the bad guy in this.
They always had loved him though, worshipped him, really.
I didn’t blame them. I didn’t have to defend my actions to them.
“I have a date.” I stood and grabbed my purse.
“Where are you going?” Bailey stood as well.
“The Fillmore.”
Birdie’s face lit up as she rose to her feet. “Oh, who are you seeing?”
“The Old 97’s.”
It was one of the few times that I hadn’t been asked to go to dinner.
Although the guy was a promoter, so it was sort of his schtick.
After a quick Google dive, I’d found about two dozen photos of him at shows with women.
It didn’t bother me that he took women to shows, but I was not going to be posing for any photos to be another notch on his social media belt.
Seeing all of them had almost been enough to make me call off the date, but I really did like the Old 97’s, so I figured might as well give it a shot.
My sisters both pulled me into a hug. The affection gene had skipped me.
Or maybe it had just gotten disconnected when I lost my mom, I wasn’t sure.
I did remember hugging her a lot before she died and loving those hugs.
But after she was gone, even hugs from Grandma Betty, who was known for her world-class embraces, felt uncomfortable.
Bailey and Birdie didn’t suffer my same discomfort.
After telling them I’d see them bright and early for the shoot, I headed through the house and down the front steps, and on the way to the car, I told myself not to glance over to the Knight house.
I could see out of my peripheral vision that the moving van was gone, in its place was an SUV, and the garage door was open.
Everything in my head was screaming to keep walking, face forward, eyes on my Tesla, and do not glance right.
It seemed there was an even greater force that caused me to act on my base instinct and turn my head.
When I did, I found Adam was kneeling in his garage, white t-shirt, jeans, and a ball cap on backwards, putting some furniture together. Everything sort of happened simultaneously. My head turned at the exact moment he looked up, and we both froze.
I had a minor out-of-body experience. One minute I was Billie Bliss, workaholic with a black belt in emotional repression, and the next I was inexplicably starring in my own sports drink commercial, but instead of glistening athletes, there was Adam Knight in faded Levi’s, a white t-shirt, and a backwards Giants cap, assembling what looked like a bunk bed in his garage.
My breath caught in my throat when he wiped his hands on a blue shop rag, and then—no exaggeration—stood to his feet, backlit by the late afternoon sunlight, looking like the unholy love child of a Marvel superhero and an Abercrombie Adam at eleven, riding his bike in circles around the block while pretending to be chased by the FBI; Adam as a gangly thirteen-year-old, accidentally breaking the mailbox with a wayward firework; Adam at almost eighteen, on the day of his high school graduation, coming over early for me to fix his tie.
Adam now was none of those Adams and all of them at once.
His jawline was sharp enough to cut glass and covered in the kind of scruff that made me want to reach out and touch it, just to see if it was as soft as it looked.
His shoulders, always broad, had somehow gotten broader.
And his forearms—holy mother of Hemsworth brothers, the forearms—they were tan, tattooed, and dusted with dark hair and veins that stood out like little blue highways every time he flexed.
He wasn’t even doing anything sexy. He wasn’t fixing a car or throwing a football or swinging a hammer.
He was just…there. Assembling furniture, a drop of sweat made its way down the side of his neck, which, for reasons I will not examine too closely, made me feel faintly religious.
All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears and my shallow breaths.
I didn’t realize that I’d stopped walking, but I must have because my feet were no longer moving when he lifted his right hand, and his lips curled in a half-grin as he said, “Hi.”
It’s not that I could hear the word down the driveway. His voice didn’t carry over the noise of the kids playing in the backyard, Mrs. Cable’s TV, and a car alarm from a nearby street, but my memory of his voice filled in the sound.
I found myself saying hi back. Sort of. I opened my mouth and tried to reply, but no sound came out.
His grin widened as he began walking towards me, never breaking eye contact.
If there was a world record for Most Intense Staring Contest Ever, he would have just shattered it.
Everything felt like it was happening in slow motion.
With each step he took, my heartbeat got louder and faster, like the Jaws soundtrack. Bud-dum. Bud-dum. Bud-dum.
As he approached, my hands had gone numb.
I was clutching my purse hard enough to leave permanent indentations, and my Apple Watch buzzed, probably because it thought I was experiencing a cardiac event.
For a second, I considered just ducking behind the mailbox or making a run for it, but that would have meant breaking the only rule left in my dignity playbook: Do not, under any circumstances, let Adam Knight know you are still in love with him and you have been since the first day that you met him.
I was on the porch sobbing, and all of a sudden, a boy came and sat down next to me. “Hi, I’m Adam. I’m your neighbor.”
I looked up and gasped when I saw him. I didn’t gasp because I was surprised he was there, he’d just introduced himself.
I gasped because of his eyes. He had the warmest, kindest, prettiest brown eyes I’d ever seen.
I didn’t know why I loved his eyes so much at four years old, I just knew the first time I looked in them, I wanted to look into them forever.
Any other six-year-old boy probably would have frozen, turned around, or not known how to handle a crying girl, but not Adam, he asked, “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
Even though I had butterflies in my belly, the grief I felt for my mom overrode them, and I broke down again, sobbing. “I miss my mom.”
“Did your mom leave, too?” he asked.
“No, she died while she was having my baby sister.”
“Oh, my mom just left,” he stated plainly.
I nodded, and tears flowed from my face. I cried, and cried, and cried. Then he just sat beside me on the porch and was quiet. He didn’t talk, didn’t tell me everything was going to be okay, he didn’t tell me anything, he just sat beside me while I bawled.
I don’t know how much time passed. Five minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes, or ninety minutes, before Grandma Betty called me in for dinner.
He just hopped off the porch and said, “See you tomorrow.”
I stood up, wiping my face, and he was halfway across the yard before he turned and asked, “What was your name?”
“Billie.”
His face split in a wide smile, and I saw that he was missing one of his front teeth. “Like Billy Joel?”
“You mean Billy Joelle? That’s my middle name.”
“No, I mean Billy Joel. My mom’s favorite singer was Billy Joel.”
“Oh, I’m named after my Grandpa Bill.”
He nodded. “See ya tomorrow, Billie Joel.”
I was in love from that moment on.
When he stopped about a foot in front of me, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He was real. Adam Knight was really in front of me again after twenty years.
I forced my face into what I hoped was a casual, neighborly smile.
I probably looked like I’d just suffered minor facial paralysis, but it was too late to fix it.
The silence between us stretched. I thought I’d have to be the one to break it, but then he cleared his throat and said the most Adam thing possible: “Hi, I’m Adam, I’m your neighbor. ”
Why? Why did he have to say the same thing he said to me all those years ago? Fuck, it was not going to be easy to stay mad at him.