Chapter Text
All these people think love's for show,
but I would die for you in secret.
“Dad?”
“Tell me, love.”
“Do you think Dennis will sing Caramel at the beginning or at the end?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart” he replies after a few seconds. “But he’s going to sing it at some point, so don’t worry about that.”
Aurora seems satisfied with the answer, as she continues working on the cookies and hums something that, he assumes, must be another Dennis Whitaker song. At this point, he feels like he has heard his music so many times that he could probably name it even from the first chords. He doesn’t know much about him beyond the fact that he seems to play on a loop in every corner of the country. He hears him in supermarkets, in coffee shops, in taxis, and even in the hospital breakrooms when some resident leaves videos playing on their phone.
Aurora, of course, adores him. She adores him to the point of falling asleep hugging a t-shirt with Dennis’s face printed on the front and filling entire pages with crooked hearts around his name. So when she appeared in the living room one night with the tablet in her hands and her eyes wide with excitement to show him that he was going to give a concert in a city a few miles outside of Pittsburgh, Robby knew immediately that he was lost from the moment he heard that small, “can we go, dad?”.
It wasn’t a decision he made deliberately. Aurora was turning eleven in August, and he thought it might make a good birthday present. It wasn’t the first time she had asked him. Dennis had already done a show in the city the year before, but at that time Robby decided she was still too young for a stadium full of people, lights, and strangers. Now, even though only a year had passed, he felt his daughter was growing up too fast, and maybe this was the perfect opportunity for them to go to a concert for the first time.
The problem was that the tickets cost an absurd amount of money. That same night, he had checked the website several times, convinced he was misreading the numbers. Technically, he could afford them, because he had a job, and a very good one at that, where he was the chief of emergency medicine. But he also had a preteen daughter who needed new clothes every few months because she grew too fast, a mortgage, bills piling up on the kitchen counter, and an almost supernatural ability to find new expenses just when he thought he had stabilized their finances. Even the cheapest tickets were still insane.
Aurora, however, still seemed to live in a world where things could be resolved simply by wishing for them very hard, so he didn’t have the heart to tell her no. He didn’t want to see the disappointment on her face, nor be the one to crush something that clearly made her happy. So a few days later, he made the decision that he was going to do everything in his power to take tickets. And that was what led them to end up on a Tuesday at eleven-thirty at night completely covered in flour in the kitchen.
Robby had never baked homemade bread in his life. He barely cooked basic things and survived on hospital coffee and takeout, but now he was leaning over the counter watching internet tutorials while Aurora kneaded a completely misshapen ball of dough with far too much force. She had flour on her nose, on her cheeks, and even in her bangs, but she kept smiling as if this were the best night of her life.
The first attempts were a disaster, the cookies burned twice, and one batch turned out so hard that Robby was convinced they could be used as self-defense weapons. But Aurora kept insisting. Every night after school, they would settle into the kitchen together to try again. They made cheese breads, crooked brownies, bundt cakes that almost always sank in the middle, and chocolate chip cookies that were slowly starting to look edible. Afterward, they would wrap everything in plastic wrap, and Robby would take it to the hospital the next day, where nurses and residents would buy anything the moment they caught the scent of freshly baked sugar. Meanwhile, Aurora sold colorful beaded bracelets during school recess to help raise the necessary money for the tickets.
Dana was the first to notice what they were doing.
“Are you telling me you’re staying up late baking cupcakes to take her to see a pop star?” she asked early one morning, setting a coffee down next to him while Robby finished a medical record.
He didn’t even look up from the computer to reply, “Among other things.”
Dana let out a laugh before taking a sip of her coffee. Then she grabbed one of the little breads wrapped in plastic wrap that Robby had left on the front desk table and took a bite. She remained silent for a few seconds, chewing slowly, and finally nodded before saying, “I want two dozen of these for Friday.”
“Two dozen?”
“The banana and blueberry ones,” Dana clarified, pointing at him with her coffee. “My sister is coming over and these aren’t bad at all.”
That meant twice the work over the next few days, but also twice the money, and at this point, any progress brought them a little closer to the goal. Aurora practically screamed with excitement when he told her about the order that night. She spent an entire half-hour doing math on a sheet of paper, convinced they were already “almost there.” They weren’t, but Robby didn’t have the heart to correct her.
Aurora took all of it absurdly seriously. She had made little signs with colored markers that read Funds to go see Dennis and forced Robby to leave them on the hospital dining room table every time he brought something to sell. Some doctors bought out of pure cuteness. Others because, honestly, after weeks of practice, the cookies had started to turn out quite well. There were even residents who already placed specific orders before finishing their shifts, while Jack, straight up, started transferring them extra money every week just to tease Robby, saying he was “funding his goddaughter’s groupie phase.”
And yet, it took weeks.
Weeks of waking up early and staying up late cleaning flour off the floor. Weeks of Aurora falling asleep on the couch while Robby finished packaging brownies wrapped in parchment paper. Some nights he would arrive shattered after twelve-hour shifts, expecting to find the house in silence, and instead, he would see his daughter awake with her apron on and a huge smile saying, “we can make the chocolate ones today.” And even though he was exhausted, even though he felt his body couldn’t take any more, he would end up washing his hands and baking with her anyway, because Aurora smiled as if the whole world were right every time they did that together.
The night they finally gathered enough money, Aurora counted the bills three times on the living room table. Then she did it a fourth time, just to be sure. Robby watched her from the couch, too tired to intervene, as she carefully arranged each bill as if she were handling something extremely fragile, and when she finished, she looked up at him with an expression of absolute happiness.
“Are we really going?” she asked in a soft voice.
Robby looked at her for a few seconds before nodding.
He had never seen his daughter so happy. Aurora screamed so loudly that the neighbor’s dog started barking on the other side of the wall. Then she threw herself on top of him, wrapping her arms around his neck while repeating “we’re going to see Dennis” over and over, as if she still couldn’t believe it. Robby let out a tired laugh and held her against his chest, thinking that they were still going to have to keep baking for a little longer to get the money for transport and probably for food that day too, but honestly, he didn’t care at all. Aurora was jumping for joy in the middle of the living room as if she had just been given the entire world, and Robby knew he would do anything to see her that happy. Even if it meant working harder just to listen to Denis Whitaker sing for three hours in a stadium full of screaming teenagers.
“Harry Styles recently said on The Night Show that you are one of the people he would most like to work with. And the rumors about a possible collaboration with Taylor Swift have been growing for weeks. Is there anything in the works?”
Dennis smiles while adjusting the microphone between his hands. The backstage lights still leave small white spots floating in his vision after tonight’s show, which left his body exhausted in a way that is hard to explain. Outside, the crowd can still be heard screaming his name through the stadium walls, a constant mass of voices that seems to chase him even after he has stepped off the stage. Even so, he maintains that calm smile, despite the exhaustion he has learned to wear over the last few years.
“It would be a true honor” he replies calmly. “They are people who helped build the industry as we know it today, and I grew up listening to their music. Honestly, I can’t feel anything but gratitude when I hear something like that. I would love to work with them soon.”
The interviewer smiles immediately, clearly satisfied with the answer. “Thank you for your time. The show was incredible, thanks for having us.”
“The pleasure is mine” Dennis says, looking at the camera before raising a hand in farewell.
He takes barely a step out of the frame when he hears the journalist signing off to the audience behind him, and the smile vanishes from his face almost automatically, as if someone had flipped a switch behind his features. One of the assistants approaches right away to hand him a jacket, because it has already started getting cold in Toronto again. At the same time, someone tries to put a water bottle in his hand while another talks to him about the departure time for tomorrow morning’s flight. Dennis barely listens. His head feels heavy, his muscles are still tense after nearly three hours of concert, and his throat burns from singing in four different cities in less than a week.
“Trin wants you to post something on Instagram before you go to sleep” Francis reminds him as they begin walking down the stadium’s private hallway. “The photos from the show are already edited.”
Dennis nods without really looking at anyone. At this point, he feels like everyone wants something from him constantly. A photo, a song, a smile, an interview, or one more piece of something he already feels completely drained of. Sometimes he even thinks that it’s been years since anyone has spoken to him as if he were a real person. Well, Trinity does. But Trinity is also exhausted. She has spent weeks making sure the tour doesn’t collapse over their heads, and Dennis knows that right now, she needs to be more his manager than his friend. So he simply lets them arrange the jacket over his shoulders while someone checks schedules, another talks about interviews, and someone else asks if he wants some dinner before heading back to the hotel. Dennis replies in automatic monosyllables until he finally manages to get into the car.
Outside, there are still fans waiting behind the barricades. Some girls cry the moment he appears, while others hold up signs with his name and phones recording him from every possible angle. Dennis raises both hands and waves out of habit. As soon as the door closes, the silence hits him full force. And there it is again, that familiar feeling of loneliness.
It doesn’t matter if he sleeps in five-star hotels or absurdly expensive penthouses. It doesn’t matter how many people shouted his name for hours. At the end of the night, it always ends the same way: alone, exhausted, and too overstimulated to sleep.
The hotel tonight is huge, elegant, and completely impersonal. There are fresh flowers on the table, champagne that someone left prepared, and an incredible view of the illuminated city stretching out past the floor-to-ceiling windows. Dennis leaves his jacket on a chair and stands still in the middle of the suite for a few seconds, listening to the silence around him. Years ago, he would have killed for a life like this. Now, he can barely stand it.
He doesn’t even know exactly when he started thinking about the idea. Maybe after another awkward dinner with executives pretending to laugh at horrible jokes, or perhaps after seeing another article making up fake relationships just to generate headlines. He is simply tired of every conversation with someone new already being conditioned by who they think he is. All he wants is a break, as ungrateful as that might sound.
Someone who doesn’t want a photo, a story to tell, or VIP backstage access. Just a normal conversation. Something real, even if only for a little while. That is how he ends up sitting on the hotel bed at one-forty in the morning, creating a fake Tinder profile with the first name that comes to mind.
Theo.
Then he chooses a few old photos where he is barely recognizable. Simple images. A photo from behind during his last visit to Nebraska, another of his cat Magnolia completely stretched out on the couch, a mirror selfie where barely half his face is visible, and a photo of an open book next to a croissant and a cup of coffee. Nothing that looks like Denis Whitaker or that could easily be connected to him.
When he gets to the bio, he stares at the blank space for several seconds. He lies flat on his back on the bed, holding his phone over his chest while looking at the ceiling. He didn’t think it would be this hard to write something about himself. Something nobody knows. Something that truly belongs to him. He thinks about it for another minute before giving up entirely and simply starting to answer the app’s automated prompts.
A daily habit I have…
Answer: Always carrying a book in my bag that I end up never reading.
What I’m really looking for in a person is…
Answer: A normal conversation? I don’t know, what kind of question is this?
A fun fact about me that nobody believes…
Answer: I learned a foreign language completely on my own when I was ten because I was obsessed with the love letters my grandmother hid in the basement. It took me two years to secretly translate them.
Then he drops the phone onto his lap and thinks this is probably a terrible idea. But even so, he swipes his finger to begin.
The first profiles appear just a few miles away, though honestly, he doesn’t care much about that. Tomorrow he gets back on a plane heading to another city, and if he wanted a one-night stand, he definitely wouldn’t be using Tinder to find it. So he keeps swiping through profiles without much expectation. Some men appear shirtless, showing off abs in front of the mirror. Others have photos at fountains in Rome or holding giant fish in lakes. Some show more pets than faces.
Denis keeps swiping left and right almost automatically. He gives a heart to a few on impulse and is even surprised when he gets his first match. Others he simply discards. By this point, he doesn’t even know what time it is, but the app has ended up waking him up completely and, in a strange way, he even finds it entertaining. He settles himself better among the pillows and keeps swiping abstractedly until he comes across a profile that makes his finger stop mid-screen.
When creating the account, the app had asked him to choose an age range for the people he wanted to see. Denis didn’t even have to think about it too much. He had always liked men a bit older than him. He was twenty-seven and had dated forty-year-old men before, some even older. But the man appearing on his screen now probably exceeds that by quite a bit.
Michael. 50 years old.
Denis blinks once as he examines the main photo. The man is wearing a gray suit and sunglasses, looking off to the side as if someone had taken the photo without him noticing. He looks elegant. Attractive in a quiet sort of way. Denis swipes to the next image and frowns, surprised. Now Michael is in a living room wearing an old t-shirt stained with something that looks like flour, laughing while someone takes a photo of him with his glasses crooked on his nose.
The third image is the one that ends up bringing a smile to his face.
It’s a video clip taken from the audience during what looks like a conference. Michael is sitting on stage holding a microphone, wearing a nice shirt and looking ridiculously attractive, but the person recording zoomed in directly on his feet. He has one leg crossed, and his white sneakers are completely covered in drawings made with colored markers. There are suns, crooked rainbows, and a cat next to the word kitty written in childish letters.
Denis stares at the screen a few seconds longer than usual. Who on earth would use those photos to try and pick someone up on an app? But thinking about it, it should work for him, because somehow Denis is still there, looking at the profile instead of swiping it away immediately like he did with the others. After a few seconds, he snorts before looking back at the screen.
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