by Zoe Lee
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Acknowledgements
About The Author
PYHO
Fifteen Nights
A Perfect Fit
Hidden Tracks
By Zoe Lee
Obligatory Disclaimer
It must be mentioned that this is, in fact, a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Please purchase only authorized editions.
All songs, song titles and lyrics mentioned in the novel are the property of the respective songwriters and copyright holders.
Pour Your Heart Out, Fifteen Nights, A Perfect Fit, Hidden Tracks, Maybelle County and all properties within are copyright © 2016 by Zoe Lee Books and Foolish Endeavors, LLC.
This is for my daughter, who learned to read while I was writing this.
CHAPTER ONE
Seth
Seth stood at one of the windows in his attic studio, curtains pushed apart to watch a lightning storm flash and sizzle over the treetops of the forest preserve north of his house.
The power had finally died after blipping in and out. If there was thunder, it wasn’t audible with the windows closed. Silence was not a state his life was in very often, so every subtle groan of the three-story house he had grown up in was like a vibrato note sung by a baritone. Every scritch of the maple and red cedar trees crowding the house was like the screech when sliding up an acoustic guitar’s strings. Every beat of his heart was a kick drum.
Loneliness seeped into the near-quiet that he usually filled with music.
He’d known today would be rough, that he wouldn’t sleep tonight, because it was Hedda’s birthday—no, because it would have been Hedda’s birthday today. Their best and worst times were a vortex of joy, pain, and grief, making him nauseated and clammy.
On the past would-have-been-birthdays, he had reminisced that he was Hedda’s from the minute they met, lusting after each other’s creativity as much as each other’s bodies. For years, they’d been romantic partners and a musical duo that wrote and performed, ate and sweated, made love and had threesomes and moresomes, and traveled the world together. They had done it all together from eighteen until six months before her death, when she’d left him.
He’d been reeling from the breakup, feeling like nothing worked without her, when her death slammed him sideways. From that moment on, he had been someone else. That was why, on the past would-have-been-birthdays, he had thought about how good his life was, even if it wasn’t what he imagined they would have forever. He just took some time to appreciate the simplicity of his small-town life here in Maybelle County.
But today, for the first time, he was angry with Hedda for walking away from what they had after refusing to explain it further than a stoic, This isn’t what I want anymore, for me or for you. What had she wanted that he hadn’t been giving her, and how could she have believed that he wouldn’t have given her anything she wanted? What had she wanted for him that she had thought them being together personally and professionally was preventing?
He dug his fingers into the muscle over his heart.
With a jolt of fury at his melancholy, he slammed through the house until he was outside. He shook his wayward curls back and settled his noise-cancelling headphones on like a headband, turning on a playlist of angry punk rock songs as he started walking.
Don’t be like this, Seth, he could hear her tsk with her accusatory German accent, a matter-of-fact yet rambling manifesto she’d proclaimed on Ibiza, the ecstasy kicking in or wearing off. Life isn’t boring, so life is good, ja? Seasons change, your world expands and then contracts, you fall in love and go new places and return to favorite places. You write a song and you play piano and you fuck an interesting person and you eat empanadas and you drive a boat. There are wars and there are orgies and bad politicians are re-elected and inspirational people die of broken hearts. And the whole thing stops and starts and repeats infinitely, and you can hear the melody. And you’re alive, I’m alive, we’re all alive, and you’re moving, I’m moving, and so how can it be a bad life?
“I’m moving,” he muttered.
It was true in the literal sense—he was tromping alongside the train tracks now—but he had a flicker of doubt whether Hedda would agree that he was moving metaphorically, though.
There was an itch in his throat, a sudden urge to open it and sing it out.
Although he was on the stretch of Apple Road that was a strung out, drunken row of industrial buildings, sound would carry to nearby houses if he just stood there and sang.
So he studied the buildings—a hangar, an old shipping depot that was nothing but a sheet metal overhang, and the original bottling factory for Archer Orchards. He scuttled down the embankment and angled across the overgrown field until he was in the factory’s parking lot, the asphalt spider-webbed and sprouting weeds.
He took out his cell and used its flashlight, circling the factory cautiously until he found the service bay door unlocked. He pushed it up and climbed in, sending the light in arcs all over.
And then, there was too much crawling under his skin, so he tugged off his headphones and belted out one of Hedda’s very favorite songs, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”.
Of course the acoustics were perfect.
With slow, unrelenting power and control, he took in a breath until his lungs were totally expanded, ribs delineated against the surface of his skin. Joy at the feeling pricked him and he sang another of her favorites, Florence + The Machine’s cover of “You’ve Got the Love”. It had been so long since he’d used the full strength of his lungs and vocal chords, so long since he’d used the full measure of his skills as a singer. It was exhilarating. He kept going, belting out a medley of her favorite songs, until he thoughtlessly began to sing one that they had written together in the early days, while they were still at Juilliard.
Grief buckled his legs and he hit the concrete, face dropping until his forehead cracked against his knees. He hunched there, eyes wet, until he could move again.
He ran home, breath see-sawing because he was emotional, not because he was out of shape. Stripping right there in the kitchen, he filled a large mason jar with ice water and took it with him into the bathroom, putting it on the windowsill while he showered. Once he’d sloughed off the sweat and tears, he turned off the water and collapsed on his stomach in his bed, where he kept grieving until he dropped off into an exhausted sleep.
CHAPTER TWO
Seth
Seth was slumped in a chair at his gate at the New Orleans airport, his head on the top edge, the thin strap of fake leather bowing
with the weight of his skull like a hammock.
His memories of the week he’d spent here for the Voodoo Festival were like a wrinkled white tee shirt that had been twisted up haphazardly before being dyed. Bright spreads of colors that overlapped and bled together displayed the joy and connectedness of performing with three jazz bands and catching up with old friends over Cajun food and dancing. The patches where all of the dyes blended together into murky dark brown was a gradient of fear, like there had been for years before he went onstage or right after he came offstage. And there were white spaces where no dye saturated the shirt, moments of solitude or quiet contentment, when he’d felt like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Since he only did one or two bigger gigs like this per year, he was rough around the edges today, drained, his mind sluggish and overtired. So he heaved himself up, slung his bag over one shoulder, and headed down the terminal until he found a coffee kiosk.
While waiting in the long line, he idly wondered how many weeks, if not months, he’d spent in airports and train stations arriving, departing and connecting from place to place.
He ordered his coffee and shuffled like a zombie to the other end of the counter to wait.
“Seth?” one of the baristas called.
He took his drink with a grateful smile and shuffled just far enough away to allow the next person to get their order before taking the first sip, so hot it nearly burned his tongue.
“Seth!” someone called.
“I already got my coffee,” he called back without looking back at the baristas.
“I can see that,” the person huffed, from right beside him now.
Seth raised his head sharply to find a beast of a man with a bleached undercut grinning at him, all neon white teeth, canines sharp. He blinked a few times in complete surprise, grunting when his former bandmate thunked into him.
“Hey kid,” Trentham said, hugging him. “Fancy meeting you here.” They stepped apart and Trentham shook his head before he pointed at the tables in the food court. “Come sit,” he invited in his mellow, commanding way. “Unless your flight’s boarding soon.”
“No, no, I have an hour. Let’s go sit,” Seth agreed, trailing Trentham to an empty table near the wall. They fell into opposite seats, Trentham’s legs sprawled wide and Seth’s stretched out under Trentham’s chair with the ease of long familiarity. Seth had joined Downbeat shortly after Hedda’s death and played with them for two years. But, he realized with a pang, he’d done a shitty job of keeping in touch. “I didn’t know y’all were in town,” he apologized. “I didn’t miss a show of yours while I was here, did I?”
“We’re running ragged on a twenty-city tour,” Trentham explained with a happy sigh.
For years, Seth hadn’t had a home, just a backpack, a guitar case, and a few storage units. It had been exhilarating and life-affirming. He had loved nearly every minute of it. By the time he’d come back to Maybelle and asked his brother and sister if he could move back in with them, he knew he was tired, ready to lay his head down on the flattened pillow on his childhood bed and melt into the soft mattress until he was revitalized.
So the idea of a twenty-city tour had him shaking his head and saying with some easy self-deprecation, “Meanwhile, my one-week trip here is running me ragged.”
“We came here just to hang out and chill. Don’t know how we missed you, though.”
Seth took another sip of coffee. “I was just sitting in with a few jazz bands.”
Seth was worried that Trentham would say something way too serious for an airport food court, but after a careful breath, Trentham nodded and deliberately leaned back. “You still running your family’s restaurant with your brother and sister, then?”
“Uh huh,” Seth confirmed, almost gratefully. “They moved out, though. My brother’s got a serious girlfriend, my sister got married. It’s good my parents retired out west and don’t seem too concerned with any of us or I’d be afraid they’d play matchmaker.”
“Still single, like you were before?”
“Not like before,” Seth said, rolling his eyes. “Now I can’t sleep in unfamiliar beds. But I do it a few times a year to travel for things like this, to play with friends. It’s… good to go home though, to my extremely expensive bed and the routine of living alone.”
“Guess we ain’t twenty-two and unstoppable idiots now,” Trentham laughed.
Amusement flowed through Seth, his eyes crinkling. “You’re responsible. Boring.”
Scowling good-naturedly, Trentham shoved Seth’s leg lightly with his knee. “Shut up, kid,” he grumbled, “you’ll ruin our reputation before we’re even done making one.”
“Y’all seem good.”
“We’re all doing good,” Trentham assured him, leaning over to steal some of Seth’s coffee. Seth knew it was an understatement; Downbeat was going full-tilt towards stardom if they could keep up the momentum. “Montalvo’s got a couple more kids now and they’re with us some of the time, so that’s changed the whole dynamic, you know?”
“You’re going to be unstoppable soon,” Seth murmured.
Trentham snorted, just as terrible at taking a compliment as Seth, and rambled on about how many stops they had to go on the North American leg of the tour.
These stories had once been Seth’s life too, when he was a full-time musician and songwriter. Hearing the tiny hitches in the rhythm of Trentham’s words when he had to take a quick detour to explain who a new person was pricked at Seth. But it had taken him years in Maybelle to get to a place where he could do something like the Voodoo Festival. He knew that Trentham and the others didn’t begrudge Seth his regained equilibrium, even if his creative output had more tenuousness, anxiety, and tenderness than before. Just like Seth didn’t begrudge them that they were about to catapult up to a height he hadn’t reached.
He drank his coffee and listened until he couldn’t wait another minute if he wanted to use the restroom and board with his group. “It’s time for me to get to my gate,” he sighed.
“Oh,” Trentham said, shaking his head and lumbering to his feet. They hugged again, a little fiercer and longer than the first one, and then Trentham scratched his blond stubble before blurting, “Listen, we’ll be in Chicago for Pitchfork and we’re getting in extra guys. Gin’s been messing around with things to see how it’ll work. So I think you should come.”
Too much had nearly tripped him up when he was with Downbeat, and the separate songs had been melded together into a mash-up. He couldn’t be sure where one song had ended and the next began, so he was afraid—even though he knew it was irrational—that if he traveled too much, he would be sad and his creativity would start to shrivel up again.
Then again, it had been six years since he left Downbeat; it was easy to look back now and make that mash-up loom big and ominous. God knew he was well aware that he was more comfortable with himself now than he had been back then.
A cascade of cravings to play with them again shivered down Seth’s body like the vibrato in a cello solo full of longing, the notes swelling until he gasped quietly, “Okay.”
Trentham squeezed his shoulder, so different from his gruff public persona and his ripped as shit edgy look suggested, and smiled brightly. “Get ready for a crazy group text when I tell the others,” he warned happily. “It’s going to be fucking great to have you, kid.”
He nodded and offered a small smile, not ready to be as fervent as Trentham yet.
Then he headed off, refocusing his thoughts on how much he was looking forward to being home. As soon as he got in, he was going to his sister’s for dinner. Leda was loud and sassy, her husband Jamie was a rock who lived to provoke her, and her stepson asked a question a minute with his dad’s intelligence and Leda’s suspicious nature. Their house was always covered in projects, hampers of half-folded clean laundry, and science experiments; it was like only the good parts of their childhood, improved by Jamie’s endless patience.
Seth needed all of that r
ight now, after the utter freedom of performing, the anxiety of being away from home, and the surprise of seeing Trentham. He didn’t notice that he was humming an old Downbeat tune he’d written while he went to the restroom and boarded.
CHAPTER THREE
Astrid
“Happy twentieth anniversary of the pilot of Space Star Cadet Twelve!” the moderator exclaimed from his perch next to the table on stage.
The auditorium erupted into applause and some screams as the cast and showrunner walked onstage like a flock of birds, waving and blowing kisses as they found their seats.
Astrid, who had played the comic relief, smiled broadly out at the audience as she sat in the second-farthest spot from the moderator. Being cast in the show had changed the trajectory of her whole life, so she would always give it the respect that it deserved. But if this event were at a major convention, then she wouldn’t be relaxed and ready to enjoy the celebration like she was right now. Luckily for her, this was a small event with only die-hard fans and, because she wasn’t an actor anymore, she was under no pressure to be on.
The moderator gushed, “It’s so good to see you all together again!”
“It’s so good to see you!” one of the leads gushed back.
“Let’s start the night off with one of our favorite moments!”
Behind Astrid, the screen lit up and a clip started.
Hooking her arm over the back of her chair, she twisted to see her seventeen-year-old self on screen. She was standing at parade rest, wearing red armor, a hideous derivation from both Stormtroopers’ and Power Rangers’ costumes. It had been a lark at the time, nothing to be embarrassed about, and now it made her nostalgic for an era when she had been so thoughtlessly certain of her beauty, no matter if it were in that armor or nude.
Now, she was almost forty and hadn’t acted in over fifteen years, although she certainly hadn’t faded into obscurity, and it was honestly refreshing to see this clip instead of footage of her captured by paparazzi. Watching the clip of the cadets hatching a prank on their squad leader, who was of course a douche on a power trip, made her laugh.