Writing Our Song:A Billionaire Romance

Chapter 2


I was up so late sending text messages to my friends from under the covers of my bed that I slept-in the next day. When I wandered into the kitchen and sat down at the table, my cheeks were actually hurting from all the smiling and I wondered if I had been grinning while I slept.

My Dad looked up from the local newspaper he was reading and raised his eyebrows as he lifted his cup of coffee. My Mom gave me a quick smile from the sink where she was doing some dishes.

“Morning. Check this out, you made the papers, can you believe that? ‘Local band Apollo Gone set the stage alight with their crowd-pleasing covers’.”

“No way! Already? Let me see!”

“Your dad said you were amazing, honey, good job,” said my mom.

“Thanks,” I said, scanning the article for the paragraph or whatever on us.

“Yes, she really was,” said my dad, “all eyes were on the stage, it gave me ample opportunity to steal from all the stands immediately behind the crowd. I’m keeping the cash for myself, but you two can choose your Christmas presents from the loot. You’ll have to fight over the candied apple and the Seattle Shipbuilders commemorative ash tray.”

“I call dibs on the ashtray,” I said. “I’ve been looking for a new hobby. It’ll help me get that Janis Joplin voice down too.”

“By ‘hobby’ you mean collecting ashtrays and you’ll get the voice by yelling about how much you love ashtrays, right?” asked my dad.

“Of course, what else?” I asked.

“Can’t think of anything. I hope the apple keeps alright for half a year, Kate,” he said.

My mom looked over with a slightly bemused look on her face. She’d never quite ‘got’ the sense of humor that my dad and I had developed between us. She was always, unintentionally, just on the outside of the jokes.

“I’m getting the scissors, this is one for the scrapbook,” I said.

“Be an angel and wait for me to finish reading the whole thing,” said my dad, pulling the newspaper back to his side of the table once I was finished.

I stood and set about making myself a bowl of cereal, still unable to wipe the smile from my face. When nobody was looking I pinched myself and it hurt. It was real, last night really happened!

When I was about halfway through my breakfast, my mom finished with the dishes and made herself a cup of coffee. I took a few good breaths through my nose, enjoying the scent. I’d tried coffee before but it wasn’t for me. The smell though, that was good stuff.

My mom leaned over my dad and read from a different page for a while before sighing. My dad glanced up at her and then followed her line of sight to the article she was reading.

“Tech guru Mitchell White sells company for reported three hundred and eighty million dollars,” he said.

“I bet he doesn’t have to steal from hot dog stands to make ends meet,” she said.

“Maybe not, but you don’t amass that kind of wealth without crushing the dreams of a lot of other people on the way up I bet.”

I began to eat faster, trying not to draw attention to myself. It seemed like arguments about money had become more common between the two of them lately. They rarely flared up into full-on shouting, but I couldn’t help but notice the snide remarks that had become more common in their conversations.

When I had asked if there was anything wrong, I’d been told that everything was fine and it wasn’t for me to worry about. That didn’t help with how uncomfortable it was for me when they went so cold on each other. It was especially sad because I’d also seen the way they looked at each other when they forgot about everything else, and that was a beautiful thing.

Still, they had no intentions of making me part of the conversation and damned if I wanted to be a bystander if it did escalate into an argument so I finished my cereal in record time and excused myself. I had much happier things to think about today.

I escaped back to my room and shut the door, opening my closet and pulling out just about every single piece of clothing I owned. Tonight, I had to look perfect. I was about three hours into trying different combinations and texting my friends when I heard a knock at the bedroom door.

“Come in,” I called.

The door opened and my dad peeked around the corner, giving me a funny look as he saw the devastation of outfits that hadn’t made the cut for tonight.


“Your gig was last night, you wore the sparkly skirt, remember? Here, I have proof.”

He held out the article from the newspaper and I took it, setting it down on my desk to deal with later. I had a sudden thought that shot through me like an electric shock, I’d never been on a proper date before… would my parents even let me go? I gulped and turned back to him.

“Dad… uh, can I go out tonight?”

“On a school night? Where to?”

“It’s Blair, he’s… asked me out. On a date.”

My Dad’s eyes widened for a moment in silence before he took a deep breath. It felt like a million years before he said anything, during which time I felt what could only be described as terror. Please say yes, please say yes, please say yes I repeated over and over again in my mind.

“Didn’t we say you weren’t allowed to date until you were sixteen?”

“No. I don’t think we ever talked about it.”

My dad looked confused for a moment. “Who did I say that to then?”

“Dad! Be serious for once. Please, I really want to go!”

“OK, OK. Look, I am being serious, my honest gut reaction is to say no and go make sure my shotgun is still in good working order but… oh boy. This is all a bit sudden for me. Let me think.”

“But can I go?”

“What did I just say? I think I’m out of my league here, maybe you should talk to your mother. “

“Dad, no! Can’t you just say yes?”

“This… you’re just growing up so fast, Bea. OK, look, you’re not a kid anymore and I know you’ll just jump out the window if I lock you in here but I really think you should talk with your mom, get a female perspective on dating.”

“Dad…”

“Here’s how we’ll play it. I’ll tell her I’ve already implied you can go, but I haven’t. If she says no, then it’s a no from me too.”

“Dad!”

“Bea, it’s not ‘no’ forever. It’s not even ‘no’ this time yet, just give your mom a chance.”

“Oh boy. OK,” I said, deflating down to sit on the edge of my bed.

My dad left the room and I looked down at my hands in my lap as I began to wring them nervously. Things had never been quite right between my mom and I. Apparently after I was born she had something called postnatal depression, which led to all kinds of problems and it went undiagnosed for a good couple of months.

It wasn’t her fault or anything, from what I’d heard it happened to a lot of women, but she was so exhausted and sleep deprived during those early days that it was always my dad that had come to cuddle me when I woke up crying in the night. By the time she got the help she needed and was able to cope, I was already officially a little daddy’s girl.

That was all well before my first memories of course and I couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been, for want of a better word, a ‘satisfactory’ mother. She gave me everything I needed, she wasn’t mean, cruel or unfair but sometimes it felt like she was just going through the motions. Sometimes it felt like maybe she hadn’t forgiven me or my dad for what she had gone through, or for how close he and I were.

My looks came from my mom, everybody always said how alike we were, but everything else seemed to come from my dad. My sense of humor, my taste in and love of music, my outlook on life, all him. I usually knew what I was going to get out of a talk with him.

I didn’t want to have this conversation with my mom, I had no idea where it was going to go, what she might say or do. Another thought made me cringe, what if she decided this was time for the birds and the bees talk? I’d learned all of that in school, the last thing I wanted was to listen to my mom go over it again.

Footsteps approached from the hallway and I tensed up before she knocked and walked in at the same time. I gave her a tight-lipped smile, feeling a mild blush rising on my cheeks.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh Bea… I’m sure you’re as nervous as I am. Did your dad give you a pep talk like he did for me?”

“Yeah,” I chuckled, “sort of.”

It was an unexpectedly light-hearted start, I dared to hope that it might go well as she cleared a spot for herself to sit down on my bed. After sitting down, she looked at my scattered clothes as if hoping to find some cue-cards before sighing.

“I don’t know about this, Beatrice, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why?”

“You’re too…” she paused as if realizing something for the first time. “I can’t believe you’re fifteen.”

“Closer to sixteen.”

“OK… you’re not too young. I’m kind of surprised you haven’t already been dating. Did I really say that?” she asked herself.

“So is it alright if I go out with him?”

“Are you sure you want to date this one? These high school boys… there are some real…” she paused before adding in a low voice, “…a*sholes.”

“I’m pretty sure… he seems nice and-” I stopped myself before mentioning how hot he was, “-well, he seems nice. I’ve spent a lot of time with him at band practice, so he’s not just some random guy. How did you decide you wanted to date dad?”

I knew my parents had met in high school, but had never heard my mom’s take on it. Hopefully getting her to reminisce about a relationship that had obviously lasted the distance would get her on board.

“Hmmmm. Talk about history repeating,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know. Your dad played the guitar in his band too, I had to fight tooth and nail to get to the front of the crowd just so he’d see me, notice me. I didn’t have the talent for singing that you do, so that wasn’t an option.”

My mom sighed and her eyes turned upwards as if watching some movie being projected inside her mind for a moment.

“Well, he noticed me, and he was so good-looking, so talented, so charming… well, what hope did I have? It was just so exciting to be around him, all the promises he made about how big his band was going to be, he was going to take me all over the world and we’d live in a mansion.”

Of course I’d known my dad played the guitar, he’d been playing it for me my whole life. He said that when I was a baby I used to try to pull my own ears off when he played but I soon became more enthusiastic and started singing along, first making up my own words but then learning what the official ones were. For some reason he never really talked about his days in the band too much and I wasn’t sure why.

“What happened to all that?”

“Lots of things, all at once. They actually got offered a pretty decent contract to produce an album. With the backing and marketing of the record label they actually might have made it to the big time.”

“They said no? Why?”

This was completely out of the blue for me, I couldn’t believe my own dad might have given up his opportunity to be a rock star. The disappointed look on my mom’s face said she wasn’t a fan of the way things had played out either.

“The record label said they needed the band to make some alterations to their songs to make them more…uh… ‘commercially viable’ I think was the phrase they used. Well, the four of them got right up on their highest pedestals, the ones only musicians seem to have, and said that the request was an insult to their artistic integrity and the record label could take it or leave it.”


“No way!”

“I said something similar, actually. We argued about it, I asked him what about all those promises he made and he said that they, the band, held all the cards, they were the ones with the solid gold music, the record label would almost certainly agree to their terms. I begged him to at least, you know, soften the stance a little bit, tell the record label there was some wiggle room in the terms.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“No. This was all happening back in April of eighty seven, I started feeling kinda under the weather and went to the doctor. I expected to leave the office with a prescription for some kind of, I don’t know, motion-sickness pills or something. Instead I left with a stunned look on my face.”

“Me?”

“You. When I told your dad he decided that he wasn’t sure about the rock star lifestyle and being a father. He decided he’d wait and see what the record label said, and if they declined then he’d start looking for a ‘real job’ so he would always be close.”

“The record label declined then?”

“Yep. Turns out that the unknown band with no previous albums proving a track record of success doesn’t actually hold all the cards. Your dad got a job in sales, worked his way…uh… up to middle-management and here we are, still stuck in Seattle.”

My mom looked around my chaotic room as if it was a summary of everything that was wrong with the only city I’d ever lived in and let out another one of her sighs.

“So, to answer your question,” she said, “I wasn’t thinking rationally when I decided to date your dad.”

“But mom… it’s dad…”

“I know, and I love him. I guess I didn’t put that very well. I mean love, or that other ‘L’ word that will not be spoken of, isn’t rational.”

The conversation stalled for a moment and I looked back down to my hands in my lap, still inwardly terrified that she might say no. I’d wanted to get her thinking about the times when dating goes right, not all the things that can go wrong, and it looked like I had failed.

“So… can I go out tonight?”

She had a thoughtful kind of look on her face and instead of answering she stood up and walked towards the door. For a few seconds I thought she was actually going to just walk out of the door without saying another word, leaving me sitting there in the middle of all my clothes, but she paused at the door and looked back.

“I know you’re your father’s daughter, Bea, but sometimes I still see myself in you and I don’t want you to get hurt by another musician with false promises. We were meant for bigger things than this, you and I.” She gestured around the room.

“But Mom…”

“You can go out, honey, just remember that they can only hurt you if you let them. And you’ve got school tomorrow, so be back by ten.”

I was so relieved and overjoyed at the answer that I hardly registered the time I had to be back. It would make dinner and a movie pretty difficult to fit in but if the date was as amazing as I thought it would be then, well, excuses could be made for being late. I stood up and rushed over to give her a hug, a move that caught us both by surprise. After a long pause I felt her arms reach around my back and give me an unsure squeeze.

“Thanks, Mom.”

“It’s…um. Look.” She pointed. “That top with your pink skirt, those shoes and he’ll be eating out of your hand.”

After she left I laid out the clothes she had mentioned on my bed and had to agree, that would probably work nicely. I spent the rest of the day getting dating advice from my friends, and worrying about how much or little make-up I should wear.

Trying to think of things Blair and I could talk about was strangely agonizing considering how much time we’d already spent together, how much we had in common with music and being part of the same band and all. Darrin gave me a knowing smile when he came over to pick up his drum kit, which brought the blood to my cheeks and turned my lips into nearly invisible thin lines as I clamped my mouth shut. I hoped I’d be more under control by the time Blair picked me up.

I was ready maybe an hour ahead of time, sitting on the edge of my bed with sweaty hands busily texting to friends, and I didn’t even hear him pull up. The first inkling I had that he had arrived was when I heard a knock at the door.

It was imperative that I make it to the door first, before my dad could get there with some embarrassing joke that would probably send me into a mess of shamed tears. Mission accomplished, I called out that I was leaving and slipped out into the twilight with Blair.