Sometimes the storybooks lie.

They're not telling a story, you see, they're telling a moral. An ethical lesson for little boys and girls, so they turn your best friend, your lover, into a predator, and paint you as the helpless prey.

It wasn't like that.

He wasn't a wolf in sheep's clothing, and I *certainly* wasn't a sheep. He wanted me, I wanted him. I don't see what the big deal is. If I had been forty, no one would have commented on a nine-year age gap.

Fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one -- they're only numbers. He sniffed me out from the crowd, pulled me to the forefront, and if it took a little longer for me to reach stardom working with him than it would have alone, well. It's not like he dragged me off my path to fame. I got there in the end, didn't I? If I stopped to smell the roses, it's nobody's business but my own -- and his, of course.

There's an interview, trapped on film somewhere, where Chris says he was impressed by the speed with which I picked up German. He doesn't tell you *how*.

He doesn't talk about the long, cold nights, lying underneath him, panting, breathless, my fingers stroking through his hair, brushing it off his forehead, threading through the hair on his back, hair that I didn't have yet, on his back, and his chest, and lower. He doesn't talk about the sweat and the moaning and the harsh, gutteral endearments that he mouthed in my ear, that I screamed back at him, later, losing myself in the language, the moment, the man inside me. He doesn't talk about how I woke in the mornings, wrapped safe and warm in his arms, and if my throat felt a little raw, it was only from saying I loved him.

Nine years, four of them with stolen kisses, stolen moments, and they were every one of them worth it.

His eyes would glitter in the darkness when he looked down at me, great big beautiful brown eyes, and I was reflected in them, in him, a part of him. Always his.

I can't remember not wanting him.

I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame, and I've been fluttering round him ever since.

Sixteen, and legal in Germany, and the kisses, the soft caresses and whispered nothings finally turned into more. For a year and a half, he'd been calling me sweetheart, darling, baby, when no one else was around, and I was aching for it. Not a lamb to the slaughter, just *his* lamb.

I grew up in his arms.

Eighteen in the States, and we finally told the others. Lied to them, even in the truth-telling, because as much as I trusted the three of them with my life, this was different. They wouldn't understand, Chris said, and he was proven right, in the end, so we told them it was new. I was eighteen, and they couldn't do a thing, except ask us to be careful in public, and it was glorious, fighting free of expectations, of Lou, and I belonged to no one but Chris, and everyone knew it who mattered.

Nine years, and you're bound to slip up sometime, or at least, I am. Nine years with him, and it wasn't enough to prepare me, and the thought of a lifetime without him leaves me cold. I'm lost in the forest, with no way home.

We're not alone together now -- the others are always watching, or my mother, or the shrink, or someone. They can't lock him up, because I won't press charges, but they can keep us away from each other. Threats and rumors will go a long way in this business.

When I look in the mirror in the morning, I see the same boy I've always been, but without his hands on my shoulders, his nose nuzzling my neck. When I undress at night, there's no flash in his eyes, no tongue licking at thin, chapped lips. When I lie in bed alone, I whisper German to myself, liebchen, liebling, Schatz, but it isn't the same without his chest against my back, his words rough in my ear, his teeth, scraping my collarbone.

Sometimes the storybooks lie, and sometimes they tell things wrong. Not every story ends with a happily ever after.

But some of them.

Some of them ought to.