had white Jolly Rogers embroidered all over it and was paired with my signature mid-calf steel-toed Grinders. It was as if someone had handed Pippi Longstocking a big pair of scissors, a big pair of boots, and a bottle of forty-watt hair bleach.
What the fuck could this icon of rebellion and sex possibly want with me?
Hans kissed me back like I was the last canteen in the Sahara, and I decided that my self-doubt and jealousy had to stop. Hansel obviously loved me if he was willing to breathe this fluorocarbon emulsion1 bullshit and risk contracting HIV by kneeling in bloody shrapnel just to keep me from leaving him.
Until that moment, I hadn’t even known that kind of love existed. Skeletor would have chased me down, tackled me in the parking lot, and then dragged me kicking and bleeding over his shoulder back inside where he would have screamed at me until I started to believe that I was the asshole and apologized to him. Ding-Dong wouldn’t have even noticed I’d split until after he’d safely deposited at least a gallon of his semen into the hood rat with the media pass. But Hans—my sweet, sweet, beautiful, sensitive hung Hans—was the real deal.
And I didn’t care anymore what he could possibly see in me or how long it was going to take for him to find someone curvier or prettier or more metal to bone. I was choosing to trust, to believe that the fairy tale really could come true, and to open myself to the possibility that a motherfucking sex panther rock star with the face of a devil and heart of a saint might actually want me too.
Hans broke away from our kiss first. Breathing hard, he pressed his forehead to mine, clutching my face in his colossal calloused hands. After a moment, he asked with his eyes still closed, “Does this mean you’re staying?”
When I replied, “No,” his face crumpled like a tin can before I could get out the rest of my sentence.
I grabbed his chin and forced him to look at me. “No, I’m not staying tonight because I have school in the morning, and it’s already close to midnight, but I’m not leaving you, Hans. I swear. I don’t know what you see in me, but I’m yours for as long as you’ll have me.”
And with that, his expression flipped from devastated to perky in the blink of a kohl-smudged eye. It was adorable. He took my arm in the crook of his elbow and said, “Well then, allow me to walk you to your car, milady.”
The walk was magical. I’d parked a few blocks away from the club in a gorgeous recently gentrified antebellum neighborhood where I knew I would not only find a free parking spot, but could also possibly walk to and from said parking spot without getting chloroformed. Even though it was a good half-mile to my car, and trying to stroll through that thick, hot summer air felt more like trudging through quicksand, Hans and I might as well have been floating overhead in a love bubble built for two.
Although my relationship with Hans had been love at first sight—the way he swept me off my feet (literally) at Goth Girl’s party set the tone for our entire whirlwind romance—I had always secretly had one foot out the door.
No matter how perfect things were, a small, nagging part of my psyche was constantly whispering, He’s too good to be true. Rock stars aren’t faithful. He’s going to break your heart. Don’t get too attached.
But after seeing Hans on his knees before me in full-stage attire, that whisper was forever silenced, replaced by a pulsing, deafening need. For the first time in the eight months since I’d met Hans, I was all in, and all was right with the world.
Holding hands and cooing in hushed tones at each other, Hans and I turned the last corner on our way to my car. Just as the taillights of my trusty black Mustang were coming into view, Hans began leading me off the sidewalk and into someone’s perfectly manicured backyard.
Goddamn it.
Hans, like all bass players, had the attention span of a goldfish, so this wasn’t the first time that he’d been distracted by a few twinkling lights. I was quietly protesting and trying to tug him back toward the street when I looked up and caught a glimpse of the ethereal wonderland he was dragging me toward. The backyard of this particular