Good Man

"New Year's Eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights."
- Hamilton Wright Mabie



Six days, twenty-two hours and thirty-eight minutes after Billie Joe and Caroline shared a quiet, touching moment in the back, courtyard area of Ellis' McMansion, guests were gathered once more. This time, not for Christmas Eve, but for New Year's Eve.

The Christmas decorations had been taken down and replaced with those of blacks, whites and silvers that made every room pop with glitz and glamour. The dress code for the soiree was semi-casual but had to keep to the theme of the decorations. Guests could only wear black, white, silver or a mix of two or all three. White, fairy lights hung here and there along with a small mirror ball hanging from the center of the chandelier in each room that had one, which was basically every downstairs room. In the dining room, the table cloth was black, 800 thread count Egyptian cotton, the china was white porcelain with silver inlay and then a centerpiece of white poinsettias and silver candles gave the finishing touches.

As Caroline stood in the archway of the dining room, long after dinner had been served and guests were just about everywhere, she held a crystal champagne flute in her hand as she watched a string quartet performing in front of the rounded windows of the front gathering room. Dressed simply in a clingy and long-sleeved black top and a silver, pencil skirt and black, heeled boots, the 34-year-old woman felt severely out of place.

She had never felt this way about being at a fancy party even when she was new to the record company's party scene after first being signed to Reprise nine years ago. At least then she was surrounded by people like her; people in the music industry; musicians, producers, record execs.

This place, right now, in Ellis' stately Manhattan manor, she was surrounded by New York's old money and chic nouveau riche.

So not her people.

Thankfully she had her family and her best friends nearby for a bit of a mental escape.

"I kinda feel like if I step the wrong way everyone will look down their noses at me. Don't you?" came a male voice behind Caroline.

She turned her head and smiled at Tre who was now leaning against the opposite side of the archway as some fifty-something blonde woman with a French twist stepped between them. Caroline's eyes followed the back of the woman's head and nodded at Tre's comment. "Oh, yeah. You're not alone." Stealing her eyes away and over to Tre, she smirked, bringing the crystal flute to her lips and speaking into the glass. "Not my cup of tea, but hey. It's something new."

Tre shrugged, not won over by the simple rationalization. "I'm all for trying something new, but not this. I mean, don't get me wrong, Ellis sure knows how to throw a party and play the part of a hostess, but no amount of trying will get me into this. I feel like a monkey in a china shop."

"Don't you mean a bull in a china shop?"

Shaking his head, Tre looked to Caroline. "No, I mean monkey. A bull can't help but break the china because it's just big and clumsy like that. A monkey has more intelligence and can contemplate whether or not it will grab a china plate and throw it, or crap in its hand and whip it at someone's head. The urge to fuck off just because you can, that's what I'm feeling like right now."

"Well, you can't ruin Ellis' party, or her home. She'd murder you."

Sighing heavily, the 42-year-old drummer shrugged. "I dunno, Care. It might be a risk I might wanna take."

Caroline just smiled. "Don't," was her simple warning, holding up a stern index finger at her friend.

Pushing off the archway, she sauntered away toward Adrienne who was sitting quietly on a white sofa and a champagne flute matching Caroline's in her hands. Billie Joe sat next to his wife and the couple looked deep in conversation until the female Armstrong happened to look in Caroline's attention and wave her over. The younger woman didn't feel the need to tell Tre she'd be back or not as she left his side.

Tre just watched Caroline walk off, returning to his glass of Merlot. His eyes followed the movement of her dark hair swaying ever so slightly amid her casual gait, and then lower to the more pronounced sway of her hips.

And then he blinked. Once. Twice. A third time.

Why was he checking out Caroline's hips?

A fourth blink and he shook his head; downing a sip of Merlot and looking over his shoulder at guests in the entrance hall, chatting away.

He focused on a few men who were standing around, laughing about whatever ritzy Manhattan types found amusing.

But then he saw her.

Her head of usually chaotic and curly hair smoothed out somewhat into more of a natural wave; a black dress clinging to her body with little rhinestones adoring every square inch.

Parting his lips, Tre felt his mouth go dry and his heart pound mercilessly in his chest to the point that he could swear he could hear the blood in his veins pulsing the same way he played the drums.

"Giselle..."



Giselle stood demurely amid the crowd of party guests and immediately beamed as she spotted Tre, leaning against an archway and facing toward Billie Joe's large family room. Moving swiftly through the people ready for the New Years countdown, she reached Tre's side and linked her arm through his.

"Well, hello there, pretty lady."

"Hello," she replied with a grin.

"Done schmoozing with Billie's guests?"

Pulling her head back, Giselle frowned. "I wasn't schmoozing. I don't schmooze. I'm a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists don't schmooze. I was socializing."

"Whatever you wanna call it, are you done doing it?" Tre held her gaze which was bordering on annoyance.

"Why? You wanna leave or something? The countdown hasn't even started yet. It would be rude to leave now."

"I don't mean I wanna leave. I just wanted to know if I was gonna have you beside me for the rest of the night." Staring into her blue eyes, Tre smiled and reached a hand out to cup the side of her face before pulling her in for a kiss. "I gotta get all my 2010 kisses out of the way before it's 2011."

Giselle practically melted into Tre's kiss as his lips pressed gently and yet hungrily against hers. "Oh, but just think of the many years you'll have to kiss me..." she cooed into his mouth.

"It'll never be enough."

Dragging a hand up his arm, she gave a slight squeeze and leaned closer against him. The two of them stood there, just kissing and not caring if anyone was watching them. They were just two people, so in love, and reveling in being so close to one another, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.

Grinning from ear to ear as she eventually pried her lips from Tre's, Giselle stared at the shape of his mouth and then raised her eyes to his. "Now, that right there," she gestured to his lips with a pointed index finger, "is why I'm marrying you in two months." Touching the tip of her finger to the tip of his nose, she tapped it once and then smiled.

"That's the only reason? Because of how I kiss?" he questioned, a little on the impish side.

"Not exactly," she replied. "Not only do those lips kiss amazingly, but the voice that tells me how beautiful I look even when I don't feel like it comes from that mouth, creative and crazy ideas that form in your mind get expelled from that mouth and that tongue, just inside your mouth, behind those lips...it is so multi-talented," she explained with a chuckle.

"Oh, don't you know it," Tre remarked, wiggling his eyebrows and sticking out his tongue to wag it up and down.

Laughing out loud, she swatted him against the chest and turned her attention toward the television that was on as everyone else did just as the countdown to 2011 had begun.

"10...9...8...7...6..." everyone chanted, while Giselle and Tre stood so closely, side by side, that they looked like Siamese twins, joined at the waist, "...5...4...3...2...1! Happy New Year!"



Tre watched the head of curly hair making its way toward him and just as his heart skipped a beat and jumped up into his throat, his mood sank when he saw the face the hair belonged to. Some dark-eyed, Hispanic woman in her mid-forties came rounding the corner of the men chuckling away and smiled at someone behind Tre. She walked right by him and he followed her movements to see her walking straight over to Ellis to talk very animatedly about something or another.

Sighing, Tre brought his glass of Merlot to his lips again as his eyes scanned the gathering room for a clock.

The string quartet, for whatever reason, was playing Pachelbel's Canon in D, which is usually an instrumental piece used during a wedding ceremony. Tre frowned deeply because it was the same instrumental piece Giselle had walked down the aisle to on the day they had gotten married.

Pressing the rim of the glass to his lips and tilting his head back, Tre downed the rest of the Merlot in one swift gulp and ducked out of the archway and lingered away from the entrance hall; sauntering off toward the back of the estate to the rear staircase that led upstairs.

One hand holding his now empty glass and the other gripping the railing, the blue-eyed drummer disappeared up the steps.

Meanwhile, back in the gathering room, Caroline was seated on the arm rest of the white sofa, perched next to Adrienne as she whipped her head around toward the string quartet she had her back to. She frowned at how they chose to perform Pachelbel's Canon in D.

This was not the right occasion for that song.

Granted it wasn't technically a wedding song, it was still used primarily at weddings nowadays in place of the wedding march.

"Why the hell are they playing that song?" Caroline wondered aloud.

Adrienne followed the younger woman's gaze and shrugged. "It's a beautiful song," she remarked, not catching on to Caroline's suddenly sour tone.

"Beautiful, but wrong setting."

Billie Joe watched Caroline's mood go gray as she pulled herself up off the arm rest of the sofa. "It's just a song, Care."

"It's more than just a song..." with that, Caroline walked away, leaving the Armstrongs to look at one another, wondering what was wrong.

Step by step, from room to room, Caroline wandered, passing a Joey and Nicole talking discreetly as they sat side by side on the marble staircase in the entrance hall. She walked toward the back of the estate and found her way to the kitchen where a few caterers were cleaning up from dessert which had been served not long before. She smiled lamely at one of the caterers wearing a white, chef's jacket and pressed her nose against the window looking out toward the back courtyard area where she and Billie Joe had escaped to talk for a little while on Christmas Eve.

As her hazel eyes scanned the shrubbery, cascaded with little white lights, she squinted as she saw movement outside.

She was positive she saw a figure of someone lingering in the darkened corners of the yard.

A tall, lean someone.

"...Mike," she whispered, touching her hand to the window.



There was that smile that always reeled her in like a fish caught on a hook.

Caroline began to grin like a wild, Cheshire cat as she flew down the stairs to greet Mike at the front door of their home. His bags dropped from his hands to the tiled floor as lean but strong arms reached out and wrapped immediately around her back and pulled her tightly against his body. Her arms found their way, snugly around his neck and she just closed her eyes, inhaling the scent of his of cologne, shampoo and skin.

"Oh god, I missed you so much," Caroline cooed into his ear. She could feel his heart beating against her right breast, even from underneath his black, leather jacket, and she was positive that nothing felt more natural than that.

"I've only been gone three weeks," he murmured in response, leaning back slightly to look at her.

"Three, excruciatingly long weeks without you."

Mike grinned. "What are you gonna do when me and the guys go back on tour in two weeks for, like, the rest of the year?"

"Mourn," she jested, pouting slightly as she slinked out of his arms but settling on holding his hands.

"Don't be melodramatic."

"I'm not," she insisted. "I'm being very serious. I mean, sure, I'll have our son to keep me busy, but it won't be the same."

"You can always tag along for a few tour dates here and there. I know it'll be too much to drag MJ along without all the comforts of home, but we can manage it. We can juggle it."

Caroline nodded. "Oh, definitely," she agreed, very certain with her tone. "We can do anything we want."

Slowly, Mike raised an eyebrow. "Speaking of our son, where is he?"

"Napping. Finally sleeping through the night, thank god."

"He's doing that now?"

"Yup. Started going a whole eight hours, give or take, about two weeks ago. Right after you left." She then chuckled a little. "Perhaps he was so sad to see his daddy go that the only solace he found was by sleeping the time away till you returned to us."

Mike rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I'm sure that's it," he retorted sarcastically with a smirk to follow. "Well, if he's napping right now, I don't wanna disturb him and, well, since I haven't 'napped' with you since the day after New Years when me and the guys left for Japan and Australia, why don't you and I go 'nap' right now, hmm?"

Biting down on her bottom lip and just about pissing her pants in glee, Caroline's eyes glimmered with love, lust and mischief as she jumped up into Mike's arms and he caught her, expertly; like dancers performing a choreographed dance move.

Sauntering through the downstairs hallway and toward the kitchen, he held onto Caroline by wrapping one arm across her back and the other under one of her knees as her legs remained tightly around his waist and her arms around his shoulders. They kissed the entire time, barely once coming up for air until he reached the kitchen table and dropped her gently down onto it.

Parting her lips from his, she took in how kiss-swollen his were already and she grinned at the sight before grabbing the back of his head and pulling him back in for another round.

As their tongues dueled, their hands wandered here and there as Caroline's fidgeted with Mike's belt buckle. Whipping his belt off through the loops, she brought the belt up between their bodies and folded it over, only to proceed in giving it one, good smack together, like the crack of a bullwhip.

The gesture only fueled Mike on all the more as he literally growled at her and began to tug off her jeans.

And like that, the races had begun, so to speak. Their body temperatures rose several degrees almost instantly, their hearts began to pound in their ears, their breaths became more shallow and their fingers could not maneuver each other's clothes off fast enough.

Hooking her big toes into his pants after she'd successfully unzipped his fly, she shoved his pants off his waist and let them drop to the floor to pool around his ankles.

Leaning back and bouncing slightly on the table's wooden surface as Mike pulled her black, bikini style panties off, she grinned devilishly as she took in the sight of him.

"Going commando again, I see?"

"Are you complaining?" he wondered with a sparkle in his blue eyes.

"Oh, hell no," Caroline shook her head adamantly as she grabbed a hold of her husband's achingly stiff tool, both cooing at initial contact. "Quicker access."

Mike gripped his hands on her bare hips and slid her down the table so that his tip pressed against her entrance for only a mere second before he impaled her down onto him and she fell back onto the table and cried out as he went in at full tilt.

"Oh," was the only thing she could register to say as her mind began to see stars.

Leaning forward over her on the table, he wound an arm under her back and forced her to sit back up until her hands were gripping his shoulders so tightly he was sure her fingernails would break through his leather jacket he was still wearing and to his skin to draw blood.

Once again their tongues dueled, as if one was trying to best the other, while Mike would pull out halfway, and then push back in, building a gradual rhythm with his hot wife. As their ministrations continued, the more the friction was building, which meant the quicker their bodies moved together. Mike began to pull out almost all the way, only to slam back into her center, over and over until he listened to her breaths come out in more shallower pants for air and little mews of pleasure reverberated from the depths of her throat.

And then, all at once, her body went rigged and began to shake as her muscles tightened and fluttered around him and she all but turned to Jell-O in his embrace. Burying her face into his neck she rode out her orgasm as he continued to pump away inside her till he reached his full.

"Uh, oh...fuck..." he groaned as he spilled his warmth into her and his body shook hard, starting with that delicious bubbling sensation that originated at the base of his spine and shot out in every direction.

As they remained there for a moment, both as still as they could manage through the subtle, post-coital shuddering, they pulled their faces back and stared into each other's eyes and smiled.

"It's good to be home," Mike whispered as he pressed his lips softly against hers.

"Oh, yeah," she concurred. "Though, if this is what the sex is like after you only being gone three weeks, I can only imagine what it'll be like once we've been apart longer."

"The world will surely implode from the force of our mutual orgasms," Mike joked with a laugh that shone through his eyes as well.

"This world cannot handle the two of us together," Caroline quipped.



Her breath began to fog up the window as she saw a squirrel jumping from a tree branch causing the rather thin tree's entire being to shake as it touched down to the snow below and bound playfully away, deeper into the back of the yard.

So that was what she had mistaken as a tall, lean person.

Just a tree.

Her heart sinking slightly, Caroline turned from the window and smiled lamely once more at the caterers as she left the kitchen and found her way quite easily to the rear staircase.

One by one she took to the steps and made her way up to the third floor where the nursery was. She walked quietly and listlessly reached the room and turned the knob. And when she stepped inside, she was surprised to find Tre sitting in the rocking chair beside the crib Avarielle was asleep in.

He looked up at her and smiled as he stopped rocking. "Had to get away, too?" he questioned.

Caroline nodded. "Yeah." She turned her head toward the twins' cribs on the other side of 'The Pearl Room.'

"They're still asleep," Tre informed. "I checked. They're fine."

"Thanks," she replied, still walking over to their cribs to see for herself. She looked down at Rhiannon first, and placed the side of her right, index finger against the baby 9-month-old girl's chubby cheek. Caroline smiled, then did the same to Rhiannon's sleeping twin brother Lakota. "They're always so beautiful when they sleep."

"Oh, yeah," Tre agreed as he quietly pushed himself up to his feet, looked down momentarily at Avarielle, and stepped over to Caroline. "Like little angels."

"Mmhmm."

Looking at each other for a moment, they both ended up gesturing toward the nursery door with a shrug of their shoulders. A few steps later, they were outside the room and closed to door as stealthily as possible. In the distance, they could hear the party going on two stories below but it wasn't loud enough from where the nursery was to disturb their sleeping cherubs.

Mikey and Chloe, on the other hand, were slightly old enough to know what New Year's Eve was and both insisted on staying up with the big people. Caroline had obliged and left them in the care of the older kids, namely Estelle and Jakob, since Frankito couldn't be bothered to play babysitter and Ramona was spending New Year's Eve with her mother at a party in TriBeCa.

"I think the countdown's begun," Tre muttered, craning his neck slightly and narrowing his gaze in the direction of the front staircase. "Yeah," he nodded. "People are counting down."

Caroline focused on the voices bellowing out from downstairs and could only barely make out a few numbers here and there until all at once there was a distinguishable eruption of, "Happy New Year!"

That, followed by the sound of whistles, clinking of glasses and one random 'Woo!' Caroline was sure came from Billie Joe.

She turned her head back toward Tre and smiled. "We missed it. 2014 went and left us without a goodbye."

Tre snickered and then went serious as he continued to stare at her.

"What?"

"I thought I saw Giselle earlier. Downstairs in the entrance hall," he blurted, deadpan.

Caroline shrugged. "That's okay. I thought a tree in the backyard was Mike."

As Tre furrowed his brow, he couldn't help but laugh. "Well, at least I mistook an actual person for Giselle. You went the distance and latched onto tree."

"Yeah, well, what can I say? I strive for originality."

A moment of silence fell over them as she placed her hands on her hips and Tre subconsciously did the same.

"So, it's a new year. 2015. Halfway through yet another decade."

"Yep."

Another moment of silence.

Until Tre looked at Caroline and smiled only faintly. "Happy New Year, Carrie."

Bringing her eyes up to Tre's, she couldn't help but warm at the nickname she never really liked but for some reason had found herself welcoming whenever Tre called her it. Returning his faint smile with one of her own, she replied, "Happy New Year to you, too, Frank."

Tre looked down just then, bit his lip and did not register that he was moving closer to her until his nose almost touched hers. "Yeah," was all he spoke before placing his lips to hers and holding them there. He didn't move at first, but then deepened the kiss and snaked a hand around her waist to rest on the small of her back.

Caroline was a little surprised by the gesture at first but didn't mind it.

It actually calmed her mind at the moment.

So she returned the kiss as she closed her eyes and leaned her chest against Tre's, gradually removing her hands from her waist and reaching them up to rest on his shoulders.

And how odd, that they were kissing on New Year's Eve, when it was a New Year's Eve, nine years before, where they shared their first kiss...and then some.