The Rock Star's Daughter (24 page)

Just like, I realized, my father.

"Let's go in my room," Jake whispered.

"I don't think that's a good idea," I said,
although part of me really did want to go into his room with
him.

"Taylor, come on," he said, a little louder.
"You're it for me. I really like you. I want us to be together,
like, forever."

I looked directly into his brown eyes and
realized that if I were to spend the night with Jake, and go off to
Japan with him, I would always just be the girl with Jake. Just
like I had been that night. I still felt ashamed at how I had been
made to feel, killing time on the dance floor, and knew that the
decision to stay with him that night was going to be one I would
regret.

And then I realized something shocking: maybe
I had more in common with my mom than I had ever acknowledged
before.

Surely she had fallen head over heels for my
dad because he was handsome and famous. And at some point early on,
maybe when she found out she was expecting me, she must have
acknowledged that if she stayed with him, she was always going to
be the girl with Chase. If she had aspirations of starting her own
band or having her own life, living in Chase's shadow wasn't going
to make her happy.

All summer long I had been comparing my mom
to Jill, and had considered my mom the weaker of the two, the one
who had gotten stuck with a kid outside of the warm glow of the
limelight. The one who had to beg for tuition to send her kid to
boarding school. But my mom lived life on her own terms. Jill lived
her life on my father's terms. My mother had been the stronger of
the two, because she had refused to stick around while my father
fanned his ego with the attention of other women.

All summer long I had been imagining that
having Jake for a boyfriend would make my life perfect. I had
convinced myself that he and I were like two peas in a pod because
of our similar backgrounds, and had assumed an intimacy with him
because he understood so much about me. But the harsh reality was
that life on the road was a dream. As soon as he and I were in a
different setting, a real setting, everything was different. Now
that I had seen first-hand how he reacted in real life, I didn't
like how I felt.

"I'm sorry, Jake, I really am," I said
quietly. "But I think I want to go home. I'm not ready for this.
I'm scared."

"Taylor," Jake coddled me, kissing me softly
again, as if trying to bribe me with kisses. "Come on, you know you
want this. If you didn't want this, you wouldn't have come home
with me."

His manipulation was working. I was tempted
to just keep quiet, and do whatever he wanted. But this wasn't how
I had imagined my first time with a boy. I had always pictured
being with someone like Todd, who I knew well, in a place where I
felt safe and knew the next day that things wouldn't change. That
I'd still have a boyfriend.

With Jake, I had no idea what would happen in
the morning. He could tell me that I couldn't come with to Tokyo
just as easily as he had told me that I could. He was just a kid,
like me. He could send me back to the hotel and I'd never see him
again, and if I were to lose my virginity to him my heart would be
broken all the more.

Luckily, I heard my cell phone ring in my bag
again.

"Really," I insisted. "I want to go home. I
really like you but this just isn't right."

Jake leaned back a little, switching tactics.
"I waited all summer to be with you," he claimed. "I don't
understand what's going on. I thought you wanted to be with me,
too."

"I did," I insisted. "But this is just all
wrong. I want to go home."

A few more minutes of begging and resistance
passed, and then I finally stood up and put my purse over my
shoulder.

"I'd like to leave, Jake, and I'd really like
for us to stay friends," I added.

Jake took his car keys off the hook in the
wall near the door and we left the house. The sky was pink from the
rising sun. It was almost 5 AM. I watched his house grow smaller as
we backed out of the driveway, wondering how things might have
turned out if I had agreed to spend the night there.

Out on the high way, Jake cursed at his
dashboard.

"I'm really sorry but I have to get gas," he
said. He pulled off at the next exit and into the first gas
station.

I hopped out of the car with my purse hoping
to find something decent to eat in the mini-mart. I hadn't really
eaten a dinner and it was nearly morning. An energy bar and water
were going to have to hold me over until I got back to the
hotel.

Jake was standing at the magazine rack,
flipping through a cheap gossip rag. I held up two bottles of water
and asked, "Ready?"

But Jake only slightly nodded, completely
engrossed in whatever he was reading. And then, with a little bit
of horror, I caught a glimpse of the front cover of the magazine in
his hand. It was a picture of me and Bijoux Norfleet on that
terrible day in Virginia Beach, below a large glaring title that
read, "DADDIES' GIRLS GONE WILD."

"Oh my god," I muttered. I picked up another
copy off the rack and flipped through the story, which unbelievably
enough was on the third page, which meant it was somehow considered
big news. And there I was, a solo shot of me holding a plastic
bottle right beneath a huge picture of Bijou spread out across the
entire width of the page. The picture of Bijoux featured her
topless on the boat, stretched out and smiling, with red rectangles
carefully positioned by
Expose Magazine
's graphic designer
over her boobs. In my picture, someone had erased my bikini strings
to make it appear as if beneath the photo's crop mark I was likely
topless, too.

"Jake, this is nothing," I muttered,
continuing to read the small paragraph of copy that accompanied the
photos.

Virginia Beach was taken by storm when the
daughters of Pound front man Chase Atwood and guitarist Wade
Norfleet *pounded* its shores. Bijoux Norfleet, 18, and fashion
world darling Taylor Atwood, mixed it up with young male locals and
took a power boat out for a spin on the July 4th weekend.

My heart was thumping erratically in my chest
and I could feel my scalp starting to break out in a cold sweat as
I read on.

"They were really wild girls," our source
tells us. "They were looking to party hard and couldn't keep their
clothes on."

"Jake, this isn't real," I said in a shaky
voice, and looked up to confirm what I feared – that he was looking
at me with disgust.

"Oh, so it's not you in these pictures?" Jake
asked sarcastically.

"Yeah, it's me," I began, "but I just went on
a boat with those guys. I didn't take my bathing suit off. Nothing
happened. My dad knew I had been drinking and grounded me."

Jake remained silent, closed the magazine and
put it back on the rack. "I really thought you were different,
Taylor."

"Different than what?" I asked. "Different
than Bijoux Norfleet? I am different."

"No, different than other girls," he said,
sounding really upset. His voice was low. I had never seen a guy
cry before but I wondered if I was about to. "You tell me you're
not ready for me, you're afraid of something – you don't even know
what – if we have sex, and then this? You're running all over the
country with guys? This is bullshit."

"Jake," I called, following him out of the
store.

"Miss!" The clerk called after me. I was
still carrying the two bottles of water and had to backtrack to set
them back inside the store on the counter.

"Jake!"

He was already in the car behind the driver's
seat and for a split second I was worried that he would drive off
and leave me in the middle of this part of Detroit alone. But he
didn't; the engine was idling and the passenger side door was
unlocked.

I climbed in the car and sat in the passenger
seat. I had a sinking feeling that the more I talked, the deeper
the hole I would fall into.

"Jake, you have to believe me that nothing
happened that day in Virginia Beach. And that if I'm not sure if
I'm ready to be with you, then I'm not ready to be with anyone,
because the way I feel about you…" I trailed off. I was a
relationship dummy but even I knew that nothing would scare off a
sixteen-year-old boy faster than I-love-you. And those words were
on the tip of my tongue.

"How do you feel?" he asked softly.

"You already know," I said.

"I need to hear it."

I took a deep breath. "I think I love you," I
confessed. "It's just been a confusing summer for me. Maybe under
different circumstances…"

I could see that he was still miffed that I
wouldn't sleep with him, and there was nothing I could tell him
that was going to make him feel differently.

When we pulled into the hotel parking lot, he
slowed to a stop without getting anywhere near the front doors and
let the car idle. I lingered in the car for a moment, really not
wanting our time together to end this way.

"Goodbye, Taylor," he said, forcing a
smile.

"Bye, Jake."

"Take care of yourself," he added.

And that was it. No promise to see each other
again, no hint that perhaps we'd meet again someday.

Jake and the gold Saturn pulled out of the
parking lot and I lingered and watched until it was just a speck on
the horizon. I felt strongly that this wasn't how he wanted our
friendship to end, either. I felt my lower lip trembling and could
only hope that he felt a little bit of regret about the way our
special night together had turned out.

Then my stomach sank, because not only was he
gone from my life, but I was going to have to go upstairs and face
my father and Jill.

CHAPTER
15

In perhaps the luckiest turn of events in my
life, my disappearance for the night had been mostly overlooked
because of other drama that ensued after I had left the
amphitheater in Detroit. My father had taken the stage with Pound,
and if I hadn't left during the first song with Jake, I would have
been present to see my father forget the words to My Angel. And
then announce mid-song that he hated that track and demand that the
band stop immediately and start playing December instead,
infuriating both the band and the lighting crew because that song
was a B-side that wasn't on the set list and had no stage
directions defined.

After stumbling through December, my father
literally tripped on the edge of the stage and fell into the first
row. In the press release that Tanya sent to a variety of
magazines, she claimed this clumsiness and unprofessional behavior
was a result of prescription drugs my dad had been taking for
migraines. But I knew the truth. My dad had taken the stage that
night totally drunk.

So when I got back to the hotel room that
morning from my night with Jake, expecting that Dad and Jill would
pulverize me on the spot, Jill was waiting up calmly for me on the
couch. The lights were off in the hotel suite and she sat quietly
with the television volume on low. The morning sun had risen and
there was no one else in our suite – no management, no band
members, no yoga instructors.

"Do you want to talk?" she asked as I entered
and quietly closed the door behind me.

"Not really," I said, sitting down on the
couch next to her instead of skulking off to my room. She looked
exhausted and worn out, still wearing jeans and her blouse from the
night before, her eye-makeup smeared.

"Your father is checking himself into a rehab
facility," she informed me. "Last night was a major wake-up call
for him. He's been drinking too much and lying to me, and it was
only a matter of time before something like this happened."

"Where is he?" I asked cautiously, hoping
that he wasn't in the suite's master bedroom, sleeping off a
hangover.

"He's at the hospital, and when he's
discharged later today, he's getting on a flight to Phoenix," Jill
said. "I gave him an ultimatum. Either rehab or a separation. I
can't keep going through this every time the band releases an album
and goes on tour. The rest of the tour is cancelled."

I sat quietly for a moment, taking this all
in. "Is this all because of the fight we had at dinner?"

"No, no, honey," she said. "He was very
intoxicated at dinner last night and made the mistake of thinking
he could pull off a show in that state. He made an ass of himself,
fell off the stage, broke his collar bone, and the entire band is
mad at him. He is terribly embarrassed right now, as he should
be."

"Why do you put up with him?" I blurted
without thinking. But really, I wondered. Jill was beautiful. She
could divorce my dad and surely walk away with a handsome sum of
money. Why would she put up with the humiliation of him always
flirting with other women, and prioritizing stardom over
family?

"When you love someone, Taylor," Jill began
slowly, "you love them for their faults as well as their attractive
traits. It's the whole package. Love is about sticking around when
there are more bad parts than good parts."

I didn't know what to say. With my dad away
in rehab, where was I going to go? Had he even been informed that I
had disappeared last night?

"We're going back to New Jersey," Jill
assured me, answering the biggest question on my mind. "We're going
to take it easy for a few weeks until you go back to school. You
deserve that, Taylor. You could use a little stability after this
crazy summer."

"OK," I said. Going back to New Jersey and
doing nothing for three weeks sounded like a relief to me.

Jill studied me up and down, and I instantly
knew that she could tell I had been out with Jake all night. "Are
you sure you don't want to talk?"

I sighed. "I just… I thought this boy really
liked me, and I really liked him, but then he took me to this club
last night, and I got the feeling that he was kind of lying to me
about other girls in his life, and suddenly it just didn't feel
right."