Sometimes the tabloids get it right, and if you believe Journey guitarist Neal Schon and TV personality Michaele Salahi, the rumors about their affair are all true. The pair recently spoke openly to The Daily Beast about their relationship and set the record straight about when they met and how the scandalous last few months have really gone down.

“It’s like a fairy tale. It is, it really is,” Schon said. “I’m very happy, very happy after waiting for her for 15 years." The couple were interviewed together and separately, and both confirmed that they met and dated before Salahi married her White House party-crashing husband Tareq Salahi. The fem-Salahi says her long battle with multiple sclerosis forced her to choose the more stable of the men nearly 15 years ago.

So how did the romance catch fire again so suddenly earlier this month? It sounds like things didn't move quite that fast. The two had been secretly communicating for over two years. That's long before Schon reportedly married Ava Fabian in July of this year. There's some doubt the Paris wedding was legally binding however, and Schon wouldn't comment on it.

Things reached a figurative climax when Schon sent the Salahis tickets and backstage passes to a Journey show near their home in Linden, Va. Before Tareq recorded the footage of his wife kissing on Schon that's now circulating all over the internet, the estranged lovers had a few private moments. “What happened was … she takes off her wedding ring, OK, right in front of Tareq—takes it off,” Schon tells The Daily Beast. “And then she proceeds to come into my dressing room where I’m sitting down. I have tennis shoes on and she’s, like, nine feet tall over me.”

“And she looks down at me like she’s standing on stilts and says, “I love YOU. And, that’s never gonna change. And when that happened I said, ‘Get over here! This has taken 15 years!’” That night Michaele almost left on the tour bus with Schon but decided she wasn't that type of woman. Instead she waited nine days and then decided to leave her husband. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I realized I was hurting myself.”

She says she left everything behind and didn't even pack a bag as she caught a flight to be with Schon. After a phony kidnapping scandal, her still-husband has come to realize his wife is truly gone.

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