Dirty Little Secret

Chapter 1

2007

I'm getting too old for this shit, he thought to himself, before laughing softly. How many times had he said that very thing on stage? The thing is, he was way older than everyone thought, but then that was his dirty little secret, with only Richie knowing the whole truth about him. He probably would have never chosen this profession, had he known he and the band would end up being so big. Yes you would, he told himself, music is in your blood. But, he had never expected fame to be such a big issue. Now, he had to use one of his powers constantly, masking his true appearance so that no one would wonder why he didn't age, only dropping the facade when he was behind closed doors or asleep, not being able to hold the spell while relaxed in slumber. In his world it was called a glamour, the spell that he used to make himself look older, so that no one would guess the secret. However, simple vanity kept him from actually making himself look like your average 44 year old man. He could probably pass for 34, because he just couldn't make the 44 stick after he looked in the mirror. Now, that was a myth about his kind! He really did have a reflection, and that had been sometimes curse, sometimes blessing. In the eighties, it had been a curse, some of those clothes and hairstyles. Geez, what had he been thinking? There was a lot about him that the world took as fact, but was really the greatest fiction, worthy of Dickens himself. The world thought he was born in 1962 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. In fact, he had been born in 1562 in a small village in Italy. He had become what he was now at the young age of 25 and would never appear to age again, unless of course he used the glamour. The world also thought he was married with four children, when in fact they were hired actors. He should have never got into acting; it just made his face more familiar to people. And, he admitted to himself, you're really not that good at it anyway.

"Enough," he said aloud to the empty hotel room, before picking his wine glass up and walking to the big window to look out at the lights of the city winking at him in the darkened night sky. He ran his fingers through rumbled blond hair as he stood at the window. What city was this? Hell he couldn't remember, Oh yeah, Minneapolis. He had to quit this quiet self-introspection before he let it drive him to that dark place he went to sometimes, more often now than ever before.

He let his thoughts drift to the woman in the bedroom of his suite. She was his usual fare, long blond hair, blue eyes, legs for days, and her breasts were way more than 'a hand full', but her brain was less than a head full. He chose those kinds of women from the multitude who came to see him and the guys in concert because they didn't wonder about the unusual mark on their neck the next morning, just took it as a hickey from a rock star and took their 'trophy' home. He never felt guilty about feeding from them, because he gave them what they wanted and they gave him what he needed. He would send this one on her way in the morning just like he had all the others, a smile on her face, a great memory, and a plea not to tell anyone about what happened so that it didn't get back to his "wife". There was always the occasional problem, a woman who gave herself away as a blabber mouth, that he would quickly realize would tell the next person she encountered about her night with him, and not care if it was a gossip reporter or not. Those women he had to use another of his powers on and erase her memory of what happened. He couldn't bring himself to completely erase their memory but he made it fuzzy enough they wouldn't remember it well enough to know if it was fact or some drunken dream. The woman in the next room was married, her husband away on a business trip. He liked those most of all because he knew they wouldn't let out the juicy details of what had happened in his bedroom, not wanting their husbands to divorce them over a night of wild passionate sex with a rock star. Or as he liked to refer to it . . . "An exchange of bodily fluids." He still had a hard time not laughing out loud when he would make that statement to some reporter in an interview. Oh, if they only knew!