Chapter 53

“Phew… I’m pooped.” Snagging a gingerbread cookie off the plate on the hearth, Dawn sank down onto the couch and leaned back against the headrest.

I chuckled. “I don’t blame you. Just watching you made me tired.”

She bit the head off her gingerbread man and chewed it thoughtfully. “Pro tip,” she said, swallowing. “Next year, pick toys with fewer parts.”

I looked at the four-foot-tall Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sewer lair playset sitting on the living room floor in front of the Christmas tree. Dawn had spent the past half hour putting it together for Mason, muttering cuss words under her breath whenever one of the many pieces fell apart. “If I remember correctly, you picked that one out.” I could picture her standing in the aisle at Toys “R” Us, smiling as she told me how much her son Michael had loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when he was Mason’s age.

“I know.” She sighed. “It was more of a mental note for myself.”

“Maybe we should have just left it in the box and let him try to figure out how to build the thing himself,” I said with a smile. “It’d be a good learning opportunity for him.”

Dawn laughed but shook her head. “My parents always took Santa’s presents out of the packaging so we could play with them right away, and my ex and I did the same for Michael.”

“It’s a nice tradition,” I said, nodding. “Of course, that’s easy for me to say when I’m not the one crawling around on the floor, trying to fit a bunch of little plastic pieces together.”

Christmas Eve was both a fun and frustrating experience for me. While I enjoyed watching Dawn play Santa Claus, filling stockings and setting up Mason’s presents under the tree, I hated being reduced to the role of the most unhelpful elf ever. I had prided myself on being fairly handy before the accident, but now, between my low mobility and lack of finger function, I was pretty much useless when it came to assembling toys.

“Oh, come on, give yourself some credit,” Dawn chided me. “You’re good at reading directions and holding parts for me.”

“The directions were just pictures,” I said flatly, giving her a look. “Don’t patronize me, Dawn. We both know I just sit here and stuff my face with cookies while you do all the work.”

She flashed me a crooked smile. “Well, you’re better than me at deciphering the damn pictures. Sometimes those are more confusing than words! Plus, you provide moral support.”

“Moral support,” I repeated doubtfully. “Sure.”

Dawn didn’t reply, just popped the last piece of cookie into her mouth and chewed.

From the front hall, I heard the grandfather clock signal the top of the hour, chiming twelve times. “It’s midnight,” I said, smiling at her. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.” She smiled back at me, then stifled a yawn. “Should we call it a night?”

I took one last look around the festively-decorated living room, my eyes lingering on the lit tree in the corner, the presents piled underneath it, the new toys arranged in front of it, the three stuffed stockings – now too heavy to hang – leaning against the fireplace, and the half-eaten cookie I had left lying on the plate on the hearth. “Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “I guess we’d better get to bed.” Truthfully, I would have liked to stay up a little longer, but Dawn still had to help with my night routine before she could go to sleep, and I knew Mason would wake us both up at the crack of dawn.

“So, you had a nice time with Natalie’s family?” Dawn asked as she started my stretches. “Mason talked so much on the way home that I barely got to hear your side of the story.”

Lying on my back in bed, I laughed. Mason had practically launched himself into Dawn’s arms when she’d picked us up at the airport that afternoon. He had told her all about his adventures on the farm and his new friend Liam and showed her the toys he’d gotten from Natalie and her parents. “I’m glad he had a good time. I did, too, for the most part. It was nice to finally meet Nat’s folks.”

“What did you think of them?” Dawn wanted to know. I couldn’t tell if she was genuinely curious or just trying to make conversation.

“Her mom’s amazing. She was so sweet and welcoming to Mason and me. Her dad is… I dunno.” I stared up at the ceiling, trying to find the right words to describe Bill. “He was kinda hard to read. Sometimes he seemed friendly, but he also intimidated me. I don’t think he’s thrilled that his daughter’s dating a guy like me.”

“A guy like you, meaning what?” Dawn asked, frowning as she bent my right knee and brought it to my chest. “An older man? A single dad? A famous person? A disabled dude?”

I shrugged. “All of the above? I dunno. I just got the vibe that he doesn’t fully approve of our relationship. He said some things that were kinda condescending and ableist, but I don’t know how much of it was intentional and how much was just ignorant.”

Dawn’s frown deepened. “What things?” She lowered my right leg back to the bed and picked up the left.

Of course, in the moment, I couldn’t remember many of Bill’s specific words, only the way they had made me feel. “He just made these little underhanded comments… like about how much stuff I brought with me… and about Natalie having to ‘haul me around like a sack of potatoes’ when she helped me transfer. He took Mason for a ride on his tractor and offered to hitch up his livestock trailer to the back and tow me along, too. Stuff like that.”

“What?” Dawn’s eyes widened as she brought my left knee to my chest. “I hope he was just kidding…”

“He might’ve been, but I couldn’t tell. That’s what I mean about him being hard to read.”

“Hm…”

“He grilled me about religion, too,” I went on, gazing up at the ceiling while Dawn worked on my hips. “Of course, he wants Natalie to be with a godly man. We went to church with them yesterday, so hopefully I scored some points with him there.”

“I’m sure you did. You know, he probably had some preconceived notions based on what he knew about you before he met you. People hear the word ‘quadriplegic’ and picture someone like Christopher Reeve, paralyzed from neck down with a power chair and a ventilator and all of that. They hear the word ‘celebrity’ and think you’re gonna be some entitled snob who punches paparazzi and trashes hotel rooms just because you can.”

“But how could I punch someone if I was paralyzed from the neck down?”

Dawn shook her head. “That’s not the point. What I meant was-”

I knew what she meant; I just liked giving her a hard time. “Be honest,” I interrupted her, grinning. “That’s how you thought I was gonna be before you met me, isn’t it?”

“No, but only because I asked around before I took the interview,” she admitted, grinning back. “It wasn’t hard to find folks from around here who had met you themselves or knew someone who had. I talked to a few of them, and no one had a single negative thing to say about you. The consensus was that you were one of the nicest, most down-to-earth and humble celebrities they knew – or knew of. And they were right, thank god. I wouldn’t have wanted to work for the other kind of ‘celebrity.’”

I smiled, touched by her description of me.

“Anyway,” she went on, lowering my left leg to the bed. “My point was that Natalie’s dad may have assumed she would have to do everything for you, but you proved him wrong. He may have assumed you would be a pompous asshole… but you proved him wrong.”

“I hope so,” I said, letting out a sigh. “Things have been going so well with Natalie. I would hate for her family to be the thing that comes between us.”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” Dawn assured me. She finished my range of motion exercises and got me ready for bed, removing the rest of my clothes, hooking up my catheter, and positioning my pillows around me. “Need anything else before I go?” she asked after making sure my phone and water bottle were within reach.

“Nah, I’m good. Thanks. Now go get some sleep before the little gremlin in the next room wakes us up at the crack of dawn,” I said with a grin.

“I’ll try,” she replied, smiling back. “Goodnight. See you bright and early.”

“‘Night, Dawn.” I watched as she walked to the door and turned out the light, plunging my bedroom into darkness. When she left, shutting the door on her way out, I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But, despite how tired I was from traveling back from Georgia earlier that day, the anticipation of Christmas morning kept me wide awake for another hour or two. I physically couldn’t toss and turn, so I just lay there with my mind spinning until my waking thoughts finally transitioned into dreams.

I dreamed of a white Christmas. In my dream, I was walking through the snow, carrying a stack of presents from my car to the door of the cabin I’d once called home. I could see my dad waiting for me on the front porch. He smiled and waved to Kristin, who was a few feet in front of me. I followed the trail of footprints she’d left in the snow, looking forward to finally being able to introduce her to my father.

But with every step I took, the cabin appeared to be farther away from me, rather than closer. Kristin walked toward it, getting further ahead of me while I struggled to keep up with her. A frigid wind whipped across my face as the snow fell faster, quickly filling Kristin’s footprints before burying them altogether. I watched them fade away as the snow grew deeper and deeper on the ground. My legs felt even heavier than the boxes in my arms as I fought my way through four-foot-tall drifts. With the snow piling up past my waist, I could barely walk.

The next gust of wind was strong enough to knock me off my feet. The boxes flew out of my hands as I fell backward, landing flat on my ass in a snowbank. Already half-buried in the snow and numb with cold, my body wouldn’t cooperate when I tried to climb back to my feet. I lay there like a turtle trapped on its back, trying – and failing – to flip myself over. “Kristin!” I called as the snow continued to fall. In the last few seconds, the blizzard had become so thick that I could no longer see my wife, my father, or the cabin. In fact, I could barely see my own hand in front of my face as I frantically tried to clear the snow from it. My frozen fingers felt useless, unable to bend or flex in order to brush the snow away. I fought for breath as it filled my mouth and nose, blocking my airway. “Dad!” I choked.

“Dad!” I was startled awake by the jolt of something heavy landing on my chest. “Dad, wake up!” Small fingers poked at my face, trying to pry my eyelids apart. I opened my eyes to find Mason sitting on top of me. “It’s Christmas!” he called, shaking my shoulders.

I must have been sleeping so deeply that it took me a few more seconds to become fully awake and oriented. At first, I was relieved to find myself safe and warm in my own bed, the memories of my nightmare melting almost instantaneously into the depths of my mind when Mason reminded me that it was Christmas morning. But, for just a moment, I also forgot that Kristin was dead and that I was disabled. I tried to sit up, tried to toss back the covers and swing my legs over the side of the bed, tried to spring to my feet and race out to the living room like I had every Christmas I could remember before the accident. But, of course, I could barely lift my own head off the pillow, let alone get out of bed on my own. The brief struggle to get up brought some of the details of my dream floating back to the surface.

Reality struck me with a crushing blow when Dawn, rather than Kristin, padded into the room. “Merry Christmas!” she said cheerfully, raking one hand through her unruly curls.

For a moment, I felt like crying, but I forced a smile onto my face and echoed her greeting, not wanting to ruin anyone’s morning by recounting my nightmare. It was always depressing to wake up from a dream in which I was walking around and immediately be confronted by the fact that I would never walk again. I often dreamed I was still able-bodied, although my disability occasionally manifested in strange ways – like being partially buried in deep snow with frostbitten hands and feet, unable to move or feel much except for the little shockwaves of pain shooting through the parts of my body that had gone numb.

I could feel the neuropathic pain kicking in now as my nightly pain pills began to wear off. “What time is it?” I wondered, glancing at the nearest window. Judging by the lack of daylight filtering through the crack between the drapes, it was well before dawn.

“Almost five-thirty,” Dawn replied through gritted teeth as she gave me an apologetic grin behind Mason’s back. “I tried to get him to go back to bed, but he’s too excited to go downstairs and see if Santa’s been here. I told him we had to wait for Daddy to get up first.”

Nodding, I turned my attention back to Mason. “We’d better get Daddy up, then,” I said, smiling through my pain.

Dawn moved as quickly as she could through the most important parts of my morning routine – medications, bladder care, and a few basic stretches to stop my stiff muscles from spasming as she helped me put on a pair of plaid, flannel pajamas that matched the ones she and Mason were wearing. The whole time, Mason watched from the doorway, bouncing on the balls of his feet and begging us to hurry up.

“We’re going just as fast as we can, buddy,” I told him, desperately longing for the days when I’d been able to hop out of bed and into my clothes in no time at all.

Once I’d finally transferred to my wheelchair, I rode downstairs in the elevator while Dawn and Mason took the stairs. We met in the living room, where Dawn and I watched as Mason discovered what Santa had left for him. As much as I appreciated all that Dawn had done to make the morning special, a part of me still wished Kristin could be there instead. But then, I knew there was probably a part of Dawn that wished she was watching her own son open presents instead of mine.

When Mason finished playing with his new toys from Santa, we exchanged the wrapped gifts we had gotten for each other. For the first couple of years she’d lived with us, I had watched Dawn pretend to be surprised when she opened gifts from Mason and me, gifts she’d either gone with me to get or helped me unbox after they arrived in the mail. But now that Mason was older and more capable of helping me carry things through stores, cut open packages, and wrap presents, we could actually surprise her.

“Oh my god!” she exclaimed as she held up the faded black t-shirt she had taken out of one of the gift bags Mason had given her. The front of the shirt featured the cover art from Def Leppard’s Hysteria album, while the back had a list of tour dates from their 1987 world tour. “I bought a shirt just like this when I saw them at Rupp Arena back in ‘87!”

“On Halloween, right?” I replied with a grin. “Harold and I went to that show, too.” I had just turned sixteen and gotten my driver’s license a few weeks prior, and I’d felt so grown up and cool, taking my cousin to a rock concert without our parents. I remembered Brian being disappointed that his folks wouldn’t let him go with us, but Aunt Jackie had put her foot down, insisting that twelve was too young for her precious “baby duck” to see a band like Def Leppard. She had always babied Brian more than Harold.

“That’s right! Small world,” said Dawn, smiling back as she rubbed the hem of the shirt between her thumb and forefinger. “Is this vintage?”

I nodded. “Bought it on Ebay.”

“That’s so awesome! Thank you!” She turned the shirt over and laid it across her lap, trailing her finger down the list of tour dates on the back until she found the Lexington show. “I was seven months pregnant with Michael at that show, so I bought my old shirt nice and big. That shirt got me through my last two months of pregnancy, when hardly anything else fit, and the first few months of motherhood, when I was still too fat to fit into most of my regular clothes, too poor to go out and buy new ones, and too tired to give a damn,” she said, chuckling. “It got real crusty from the constant barrage of baby spit-up. I think I finally threw the thing out when it started falling apart from being washed too many times.”

I laughed as I listened to her talk, trying to picture Dawn rocking out to Def Leppard as a young, pregnant woman. It was crazy to think she had been at the same concert I’d gone to over twenty-five years ago. I wondered how many other times our paths had crossed without us realizing it, not knowing that we would end up living under the same roof in this unconventional arrangement that had become our new normal.

“Well, hey, now you have another one.” Clearing my throat, I tipped my head toward the gift bag sitting on the floor in front of her and added, “There’s something else in there, too.”

“Really?” Raising her eyebrows, she reached into the bottom of the bag and fished out a folded piece of paper. “Kevin!” she cried, her jaw dropping when she realized what it was. I had gotten her a pair of tickets to the Vegas residency Def Leppard was doing in the spring. “This is incredible! I heard they’re performing the whole Hysteria album!”

“And you’ll get to hear it from the front row,” I replied, smiling at her.

She blinked in disbelief as she took a second look at the tickets. “Are you kidding me?! How did you get these?? I heard most of the shows have already sold out!”

I chuckled. “I’ve got connections. Did you know the producer of that album, Mutt Lange, wrote and produced a song for us back in the day?” Actually, it was our old friend Max Martin who had hooked me up. When Def Leppard had announced their residency back in November, I had reached out to him for help getting in touch with their team, knowing he had written a song for them more recently than I’d last talked to Mutt Lange.

Dawn gave me an incredulous look. “I did not know that! Why haven’t you ever played it for me?”

“‘Cause, honestly, it’s horrible,” I admitted, shaking my head. “But if you wanna see the Backstreet Boys channel our inner hair band, look up the music video for ‘Just Want You to Know.’”

“You know, I can’t say that’s something I’ve ever had the desire to see, but now you’ve got me curious,” she said, reaching for her phone.

“I wanna see!” Mason jumped up from the floor, where he’d been messing around with his new Ninja Turtle action figures, and curled up next to Dawn on the couch. I cringed as I wheeled myself over to them, knowing there were some parts of that video that probably weren’t kid-appropriate. But I also knew that telling Mason not to watch would only make him want to see it more, so I held my tongue as Dawn pulled up the video on YouTube and pressed play.

Dawn snorted as Nick appeared on her screen in his Sphynkter t-shirt and acid-washed denim jacket. “Nice mullet.”

“Medical terminology defines the group of muscles located near the central anus as something quite different than it is to the American youth these days,” said the news reporter standing next to him.

For just a second, I had a flashback to my time in the intensive care unit, when the attractive, blonde neurosurgeon who had fused my broken neck back together a few days before did an exam to determine the severity of my spinal cord injury. “First I’m going to insert my finger into your anus,” I could still hear her saying as I inwardly cringed in horror. “Now I want to see if you can clench your sphincter muscles, like you’re holding in a bowel movement.” The fact that I couldn’t clench any muscles that far down meant that I would have many more similarly embarrassing experiences ahead of me, but, of course, I didn’t yet know that at the time. That moment marked my introduction to the absolute worst part of being paralyzed.

“Uncle Nick’s picking his nose!” Mason’s laughter brought me back to the present.

“I know,” I said, managing to smile as I watched Nick flick away an invisible booger. “Uncle Nick had some nasty habits back in the day.”

Dawn laughed as the rest of us pulled up in our black T-top convertible, which I was driving. “Oh my god! The outfits… the hair… the mustaches! This is bringing back memories.”

“Is that you, Dad?” Mason asked as a close-up of me spitting over the side of the car appeared on the screen.

I chuckled at the sight of my mustachioed self sitting behind the wheel, wearing a black mullet wig, sunglasses, and a baggy, white tank top. “Sure is, son.”

I had just as much fun watching Mason’s reaction to the video as I did watching the video itself. His eyes grew wider and wider as he watched the scenes of us partying in the parking lot. “Is that Mom?” he asked when he saw me sucking face with a curly-haired brunette – one of the parts I had forgotten about until it popped up on Dawn’s phone screen.

Cringing, I shook my head. “No… not Mom. That was just an actress we hired to be in the video. But your momma knew about her,” I added quickly, wanting to make that clear. “She knew Daddy was just acting… just playing pretend. None of this is real, you know. It’s just like the video I showed you where Uncle Nick was a mummy and Uncle Howie was Dracula…”

“And Brian was a werewolf!” Mason’s eyes lit up. Of all of our old music videos I had shown him, he loved “Everybody” best – mostly because of the monsters but also because he could spot his mother dancing with us in the ballroom scenes.

“That’s right.” I returned my attention to Dawn’s phone as the video transitioned to the scenes of us as the fictional hairband Sphynkter.

“Oh my god!” Dawn giggled, bringing the phone closer to her face. “You look good with long hair and guyliner.”

I chuckled. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll grow it out again sometime – let it get really long so I can donate it to Locks of Love or something…”

“That’s a good idea,” she murmured, her eyes glued to her screen as Nick made love to the microphone. “Damn… I never really understood why your fans go so crazy for Nick, but I think I get it now. If I was a teenager in the nineties, and y’all had looked like this, I would have been a Backstreet Boys fan, too.”

“You like the Axl Rose look, huh?” I replied, laughing.

She nodded. “I like that Gene Simmons thing you’re doing with your tongue, too,” she said, smirking at me.

I refrained from joking that she wasn’t the first woman to tell me I had a talented tongue, remembering that my son was in the room. “So, what do you think of rockstar Dad?” I asked him.

Mason gave me the side-eye. “You guys look weird.”

Dawn and I both burst out laughing. “Yeah, we do,” I admitted. “The eighties were a different time.”

“I miss that era, though, not gonna lie,” Dawn said with a wistful sigh as the video ended. She smiled at me, echoing Nick’s last line: “That was awesome.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling the same way. I would have given almost anything to go back to that time – and to my old body – even if it was just for one day.

Setting her phone down on the armrest of the couch, Dawn cleared her throat. “Looks like you have one more gift left to open,” she said, pointing to a flat package lying on the floor near where I had parked my wheelchair.

“Is that for me? Will you get it for me, Mase?”

Mason scrambled off the couch to fetch the present and placed it in my lap. “Can I unwrap it for you, Dad?” he asked eagerly as he stood in front of me.

“Sure, bud,” I replied, knowing how much he liked to feel helpful – and how much faster he could open presents

“Careful,” Dawn told him in a warning tone as he tore into the wrapping paper. “This is a one-of-a-kind item, remember?”

“One of a kind?” I repeated curiously as Mason pulled off the paper to reveal a hardback picture book. Once I got a good look at the cover, I understood what she meant. The title at the top read:

My Dad Rocks!
(And Rolls!)

And the hand-drawn illustration in the middle showed a dark-haired man in a wheelchair with a little blond boy on his lap who looked remarkably like Mason and me. I glanced back up at Dawn in disbelief. “Did you make this?”

She nodded, pointing to the words I’d overlooked at the bottom of the cover:

Written and illustrated by Dawn Leeuwenhoek and Mason Richardson

“We worked on it together – didn’t we, Mase?” she said, smiling at him. “I wrote the words, but Mason helped me come up with the ideas. I drew the pictures, and he colored them. Then we had it professionally printed and bound, so it would look like a real picture book.”

“It is a real picture book,” I replied, a lump rising in my throat as I ran the side of my thumb across the glossy cover. “I can’t wait to read it. Will you help me turn the pages, buddy?”

“Sure!” said Mason, climbing onto my lap just like the little boy on the cover.

“He can read it to you, too,” added Dawn.

As Mason opened the book, I was suddenly overcome with a swell of emotion that made me want to cry. It seemed like just yesterday that I had held him in my arms and read him bedtime stories with Nick sitting next to me to turn the pages because I didn’t have the dexterity to do it. Somehow, in the blink of an eye, my little baby had become a big boy who could hold the book, turn the pages, and read the words by himself. He was growing up so fast.

“My dad rocks,” Mason read, using his finger to point to each word on the first page. It had a picture of me on a stage, performing with the Backstreet Boys. Dawn had drawn us in our signature, all-white outfits, like we’d worn in the “I Want It That Way” video. She had obviously used an old photo of us for reference; I smiled at the sight of Nick’s floppy, center-parted curtain hair, which Mason had colored yellow, Howie’s slicked-back ponytail, Brian’s curls, and AJ’s fedora. I was the only one who looked the same way I did now, sitting center-stage in my wheelchair with a microphone clutched between my hands.

“He also rolls…” The opposite page showed me pushing myself through a park while Mason walked beside me. “Sometimes, we roll together,” the next page said above a picture of the two of us riding bikes, Mason on his two-wheeler and me strapped into my hand-cycle.

“Dawn, this is incredible!” I exclaimed as I marveled over the level of detail she had put into the illustrations. “I didn’t know you could draw like this – or write, for that matter.”

“Me neither.” She shrugged, smiling sheepishly. “I mean, I’ve always liked to doodle, but I’ve never tried to do anything like this before. But now that Mason’s in school all day, and you’re so much busier with work and Natalie, I figured I needed to find a new hobby for myself. This is what I’ve been working on during my downtime for the past few months.”

I imagined her holed up in her room, sketching and writing away while Mason was at school. I had been so focused on the exciting new things in my own life – new album, new house, new relationship – that I hadn’t even noticed or wondered what Dawn did with her time when she wasn’t cooking, cleaning, or taking care of Mason and me. “Wow,” I said, feeling guilty. “I guess I wasn’t paying much attention.”

“Well, considering it was supposed to be a surprise, I kept it a secret from you.” She flashed me a good-natured smile. “I’m just glad this one didn’t let it slip,” she said, giving Mason a playful nudge in the shoulder.

I could tell she’d had him practice reading the book with her. He knew nearly every word of it. The cartoonish pictures that accompanied each page of text helped, too. They showed the two of us spending time together, doing all the typical father-son activities we had figured out ways to do, despite my physical limitations. Dawn had drawn me pushing Mason on a swing, tossing a beach ball back and forth, floating with him in the pool, playing with his toys, driving him around in my truck, cuddling with him on the couch, reading books to him, and tucking him into bed at night. She had captured the best parts of our relationship, portraying me as a doting father and Mason as a son who absolutely adored his dad and didn’t care about his disability, which was the whole point of the sweet, simple story she had written.

It was a good thing Mason could read it by himself because, by the end, I was too choked up to get a word out. Tears poured silently down my cheeks as the last picture of me leaning in to kiss him goodnight blurred before my eyes. While I knew I was far from a perfect father, it made me feel good to see myself the way my son saw me. For almost five years now, I had mourned the father-son moments I would never get to share with Mason. But Mason had no memory of me the way I’d been before the accident; he didn’t know what it was like to have a “normal” dad or realize how much he was missing out on. To him, this was normal. Dawn’s sentimental gift served as a gentle reminder to be grateful for the things I could do instead of feeling sorry for myself over the things I couldn’t.

Wiping my tears away, I cleared my throat. “What a beautiful book,” I said, tipping my chin to kiss the top of Mason’s head. “Thank you both for this.”

“You’re welcome.” Dawn beamed, her cheeks blushing pink.

“Seriously, this is amazing,” I added as Mason climbed down from my lap. “You should try to get this published, Dawn.”

“Oh, please,” she said sarcastically, rolling her eyes. “It’s nowhere near that good.”

“It has a great message,” I argued. “I don’t know the first thing about publishing books, but Nick’s going through that process right now with the memoir he’s writing. Maybe I’ll ask him about it.”

Dawn shook her head. “Seriously, don’t. I appreciate the compliment – and the offer – but that’s not why I wrote this. It was only meant for you and Mason. I have no desire to become a published author – and even if I did, I would want to do it on my own, not because the Backstreet Boys used their connections to make it happen for me.”

“Well… okay. Just as long as you don’t apply that same logic to Def Leppard tickets,” I said, smiling.

“Oh, hell no! I will happily exploit any connection you’ve got when it comes to Def Leppard,” she replied with a grin. “Speaking of which, are you gonna play me the song Mutt Lange wrote for you guys? Or am I gonna have to google it?”

“Oh god,” I groaned. “Trust me – you really don’t wanna hear it.”

“Oh, but I do. I guess I’m gonna have to google then.” She reached for her phone again, her fast fingers flying across the keyboard. “It’s Gotta Be You?” she asked after a few minutes of frowning at the screen.

I chuckled. “I forgot he co-wrote that one with Max. It’s not bad, but the one he produced on Backstreet’s Back is the biggest piece of crap we’ve ever put on an album.”

Dawn laughed and kept looking through the page of search results she had pulled up. It didn’t take her long to find it. “If You Want It to Be Good Girl (Get Yourself a Bad Boy)?” she asked, giving me a dubious glance. “Based on the terrible title alone, I’m guessing this is it.”

I said nothing, neither confirming nor denying it, but braced myself for the inevitable, knowing she was about to play it anyway. A few seconds later, the living room was filled with the obnoxious sound of a teenage Nick’s nasally voice screeching, “If you want it to be good, girl, get yourself a… bad boy!”

It was actually pretty funny to watch Dawn’s facial expressions as she listened to the song. I laughed as her eyes widened during the line, “If you really like it hot, get someone who hits the spot, honey.”

“Wow… pretty risqué for a nineties boyband,” she said, raising her eyebrows at me. “Who was that singing?”

“Nick.”

“How old was he? He sounds like a baby!”

“Sixteen? Maybe seventeen?”

Dawn’s jaw dropped as she cringed. “Ew… that makes me feel uncomfortable.”

I nodded. “Told ya it was bad.”

“I dunno,” she said, a smile stretching slowly across her face as the first verse transitioned into the chorus. “I’m kinda digging it!”

I hoped she was kidding… but just like with Natalie’s dad, I couldn’t tell for sure.

***

Author’s Note:

Here’s a fun little behind-the-scenes tidbit for you.  Dawn’s gift to Kevin in this chapter was inspired by a gift my grandparents gave me when I was fourteen, the same year I discovered fanfiction.  Every year, I wrote and illustrated a short story for the Young Authors program, a writing contest that school districts across my state participated in.  A winning book was selected from each class, and from those, one winner was chosen to represent the school district at the statewide conference.  I won for my class every year from fourth grade through eighth grade, and in eighth grade, I finally won first place for the whole district.  Winning that contest was one of my biggest childhood accomplishments and, without a doubt, motivated me to continue writing fiction as a hobby as I grew up.  (I started writing fanfic the following year.)  While I never shared my fanfic with them, my grandparents were always supportive and encouraging of me as a writer.  They had my story professionally bound into a hardback picture book that I still treasure to this day.  Here are a few photos of it for the fun of it.  (I’ve always been a better writer than drawer, as evidenced below… 🤣)

   

Fittingly, this was the first of the many medical drama/romances I’ve written over the years.  I was still in my Lurlene McDaniel phase and had figured out that books about serious topics tended to be taken more seriously by the Young Authors judges, so I wrote a story about a boy with cancer that was heavily inspired by my favorite Lurlene book, Don’t Die, My Love.  Unsurprisingly, it’s incredibly cheesy… but if you’ve read any of my early fanfics, it fits right in, LOL.  I posted the text of the story on my site many years ago, and you can still read it on the Dreamer’s Sanctuary Archive here.