by Neve Wilder
Six figures, within kissing distance of seven. It was more than I knew what to do with. I didn’t even know how to digest the amount.
I glanced up and met Kenny’s eyes as he smiled. “There’s a signing bonus included, which isn’t mentioned in that contract.”
“How much?” Byron asked, kicking back into business mode.
“A hundred K.”
Our career as Porter & Graves was good. I’d made enough to buy my own house, have a personal assistant, and pay off my mom’s mortgage, but this contract was… this was a nest egg for life, insurance that if I was smart with the money, there was never a chance I’d have to go back to scraping by. Ever. God, it was tempting. But there had to be a catch.
Kenny must have sensed my wariness. “You’re the powerhouse, Evan, the voice and the sound. And reliable. We’d really like to keep you. I’ve got artists and writers already falling all over themselves to work with you. One in particular I’d like to point you toward. I think you would both get along really well. She’s a writer and singer, too.” Just like Les, but he didn’t say that, seeming to want to avoid mention of Les altogether.
“Amanda Faulks,” Byron said immediately.
Kenny grinned. “Yes.”
“We’ll need time to talk about this.” Byron looked over at me to see if I had any input, but I wasn’t opening my mouth about that until I’d talked to him more in private.
“Of course. Take some time. And while you do, I’d love to set up a meeting between you and Amanda,” Kenny said, glancing at me.
“What about Les? He just gets discarded? His name is on the original contract, too.” I had a weird feeling in my stomach, some combination of butterflies and discomfort.
Kenny’s smile was less patient this time. “We’ll work that out with him ourselves and compensate him fairly.”
Why did I get the impression that it would be both less than fair and probably involve some strong-arming? Still, was that really my problem now, anyway?
“They’re wanting to make you and Amanda The Civil Wars, version 2.0,” Byron said, once everyone left.
“Obviously.” I chewed on my lower lip and shook my head. “I don’t even know her. They sort of made it sound like I could operate solo, too, though.”
“Yeah. But do you want to?”
“That’s how I started.” I wasn’t sure, though. The game had changed drastically since I’d woken up this morning, and it was hard for me to get a read on what my standing was.
“Amanda’s really good. The two of you would probably work really well together, like Kenny said. She’s driven.”
I knew of Amanda, and Byron was right. She was good. Better than good. She was up-and-coming and had stubbornly refused to ink any deals with major labels, so if MGD was dangling her in front of me, they must have done some ninja-level wooing.
I planted my elbows on the table and tugged at the roots of my hair, trying to make sense of the tangle of thoughts and emotions inside me. “I keep thinking about Les.”
Byron winced in sympathy. “Yeah. It puts me in a weird position, because I represent you both, and for you, this deal is good, and if you’re telling me you’re not going to work with him again, I have to advise you to take it. I’ll do what I can for him.”
I looked at him sidelong. “They underestimate him. They always have.”
“Agreed.” He nodded. “But they’re the ones with the bank account, so that’s on them. I’ll do my best to get him set up elsewhere if he wants, or if he wants out of the limelight, there’s serious loot he could make just writing.”
I knew Les, though, and he loved performing as much as he loved writing.
I launched from the chair and started pacing, staring out the window at the tiny parking lot and the row of buildings that made up the heart of Music Row, remembering when we’d first walked into Byron’s office, the thrill of knowing we were on the cusp of something good. Les had made me take a picture of him at the entrance, smiling so big and bright that even the stupid face he tried to make as I snapped the photo couldn’t overshadow his evident joy. “Fuck. These are great options. I’ve basically been given carte blanche to do whatever the fuck I want, so why don’t any of them feel right?”
I got the impression that Byron was choosing his words carefully when he replied. “The two of you have been working together on a deep level for years. Any change is going to be uncomfortable and feel drastic after that kind of partnership. It’s something of a rarity, whether you fully understand that or not, to have the kind of partnership you and Les have. So think about it. Whatever route you go, I’ll support you fully. And I do think you should meet with Amanda and see what kind of vibe is there so you’ll know.”
I put my head in my hands and stared down at the contract on the table. I’d told Byron the gist of what had gone down at the cabin. Not the nitty-gritty, but he got it. I thought that was why I felt his hand on my shoulder a handful of seconds later as he said, “I think you need to take more time. Only you understand the true scale of a decision like that.”
I met with Amanda the following week in a funky recording studio tucked away in Berry Hill behind a vintage shop. She was talented, smart, organized to a degree I could appreciate, and ambitious as hell, just as Byron had said. And she had that same enigmatic quality Les had that demanded your attention.
Right away, she filled me in on how she’d been building her following through targeted efforts that only appeared organic from the outside. Behind the scenes, she and her manager were busting ass. She’d followed our rise, taking cues from what worked and noting what didn’t, slowly positioning herself in the industry. Unlike us, when the big labels came calling, she refused them outright, and they’d been chasing her ever since. It was a good tactic, and she had a huge following on every social media platform she’d dipped her fingers into so far.
She was everything I’d heard she was and more. Her songs were incredible, and her voice was amazing. We tooled around for a couple of hours, kicking some song ideas back and forth, before I finally got around to asking, “If you’re so hell-bent on being stubborn, why’d you agree to meet with me?”
She leaned back in her chair and smiled, combing a strand of hair behind her ear. She was pretty in a haunting way, not classically, but a beauty with an echo that’d stick with you long after you walked away.
“Your show at Grim’s Gatlinburg. Someone posted a video of it, and that song—” Before she even said it, I knew the one she meant.
“That was actually Les’s idea. I’d never heard it before. Ever.”
“I could tell.” She paused. “There was this tiny moment when a flicker of panic passed over your face. I bet no one noticed it but me, but then you just locked into the song and it was phenomenal, and I thought, I want to write with somebody like that. I want to make music with somebody like that—somebody who gets me and what I’m about so instinctively that it doesn’t matter what the song is or what goes wrong, you can be relied on to pull it off every time. And it would take time, I know, to get to that level, but I think we could. It gets lonely sometimes, you know?”
I knew. Busking on Second Avenue, scorching under the sun, then playing the bar circuit that night before crashing in bed and doing it all over again, week after week, had been lonesome business. I understood completely, but I couldn’t help thinking of Les. What we had, what we’d built, and fuck if my heart didn’t start aching all over again.
I might be the voice and the sound, but Les was the soul of our music, and I didn’t know if I could just cut him out and replace him with Amanda. It felt like cheating, somehow, and I left the meeting with no more clue of what I was going to do than I’d walked in with.
Chapter 37
I stood in line for breakfast behind Mason, a twenty-three-year-old trust fund baby with an oxy habit who was on a shower strike for some reason. He smelled like a dumpster left out in the middle of a desert for a month, and as he pushed his tray down the line, stabbing hi
s finger in the direction of whatever he wanted, he canted a look over his shoulder and sneered at me.
“You’re ripe, dude,” I sneered back, and accepted a bowl of eggs from one of the line servers.
“Write a song about it, pretty boy.”
I chuckled bitterly at his glare. Mostly, we all got along. Everyone was too busy with the demons breathing down their own necks to bother being a dick. That didn’t mean there wasn’t drama every day—someone breaking down, threatening to leave, or actually leaving. I kept my breakdowns locked up tight, but Mason had singled me out in our first group session my first day. We’d gone around the circle introducing ourselves by our first names, followed by the line, “And I’m an addict.”
“You’re that swishy singer,” Mason had snapped out, giving me one of those false smiles that I thought was meant to make me feel like I was an infectious disease. It was clear he was using swishy as a slur, but was too much of a wimp to use something outright hateful.
“Mason,” Warren, our group counselor, had warned him with a sigh. “Check the judgment calls.”
“Bi.” I’d been hard into my hangover then, and my nerves were shot, nausea roiling like a whirlpool in my stomach. I was sweating buckets, but fuck if I was going to let some asshole sitting next to me in a rehab tear me down. “And for fuck’s sake, do you know how many douches like you have said the same shit to me and then begged me for my attention when we were out of earshot of everyone else? Get a new fucking game.”
I’d gotten the warning that time.
There were some decent folks here, though, like Mike and James, who I joined at a table after getting my breakfast. James was a producer. Mike did something in technology in Silicon Valley that didn’t make sense to me, and when I’d given him a confused look as he’d tried to explain, he said, “Just think robots.”
The days moved in predictable patterns, and we shuffled from group meetings to classes to individual therapists with three meals in between. I missed Evan constantly.
The first five days there, I focused solely on not cutting out through one of the side doors and calling an Uber to come get me and take me to the nearest airport. Or back to Vegas. I could live without drugs, but the prospect of never drinking again was unimaginable. Who wanted to live a life like that? I felt as if I’d joined a monastery.
I kept mostly to myself. I recognized a few other people in there. Showbiz types, musicians who’d suspiciously vanished off the scene, but I didn’t want anything to do with them. I just didn’t care. About anything.
By the seventh day I was resigned to being there and seeing it through. I wasn’t excited about it, but shit, I didn’t have anything else going on. I didn’t have a band. I didn’t have Evan. I was a binger, a glutton, an impulse with a pulse, a button too easy to push. None of that was news to me. But I’d always accepted it as my nature, and I didn’t think twenty days in rehab could change my course. Not when the times I’d been intervened on before had done little more than make me switch my intoxicant of choice from pills to something more socially acceptable that I could buy off a grocery store shelf.
When I got up to my room that night, I was relieved to hear the shower running because, lucky me, Mason was also my roommate. I’d gotten really good at ignoring his voice, but his scent was harder to deal with.
“About goddamn time,” I shouted, no clue whether he’d hear me or not. I stripped down to my boxers and collapsed into bed. The days were long here, beginning at 5:00 a.m., and so monotonous that I longed for the ten-o’clock hour when we were allowed to return to our rooms and either sleep or read from the facility’s library of paperbacks. I flipped through a Dan Brown book I’d gotten sucked into.
Forty-five minutes later, the shower was still going, so I got up and knocked on the door.
“The fuck you doing in there?” I sounded more hesitant than harsh, because my stomach was buzzing with uneasiness.
No answer. I knocked again—pounded, really—having visions of finding Mason’s lifeless body inside. People shared stories about suicide attempts and a few completions, even if the facility searched our suitcases and made us use plastic forks and spoons.
The lock clicked from the inside, so I turned the knob and pushed, exhaling in relief to find Mason sitting against the wall in a thick cloud of steam that whooshed out around me. He still smelled like ass.
He looked up at me, his eyes bloodshot and his skin blotchy.
“Want me to get someone?” I asked.
He shook his head roughly. “Fuck that.”
“What are you doing?” As the steam cleared, I noticed both his and my toiletry kits were upended, toothbrush, toothpaste, combs, and other stuff all over the floor. No razors. We got to shave once a week under supervision. His tube of toothpaste sat next to him. He nudged it. “Trying to will a tube of toothpaste into being a razor.” He gave me a thin, bitter smile and showed me his wrists. They were abraded and red, lined with shallow gouges where the edge of the tube had dug in just enough to well thin ribbons of blood.
I sat down across from him, putting my back to the sink counter. “They’re going to kick you out for that when they see it.”
He shrugged. “This is my eighth rehab. Someplace else will take me. Or my parents’ money, at least.”
I didn’t like Mason, but shit, he looked and sounded wrecked, and it pulled sympathy strings I wasn’t aware I still had. “Couldn’t you just try to get clean?”
“I have. Fuck. The first three times, I tried.” He glared at me. “I tried fucking hard, and it didn’t work. They say I don’t want it enough. Maybe they’re right.”
I bit my lip. “I don’t know, does anyone come in here wanting to get straight?”
“Sure. Mike does. He wants it so bad it’s like a halo around him; he’s always talking about plans for the future, wanting to come back and speak as someone in recovery in five years, ten.”
“Warren would probably say that’s dangerous projection.” We all knew the recidivism rates. They pounded it into our heads daily, right next to the idea that thinking we had addiction licked would be our downfall.
“Fuck Warren, too.”
My chuckle earned me another hot glare. “Sorry, I’m not trying to be insensitive, it’s just… I don’t know.”
“Did you want to come here?”
I had to think about that for a while. Eleven days in and I felt clear-headed the way I’d felt at the cabin, which made it all the easier for me to think maybe I hadn’t been doing so badly after all. That was how addiction worked, though. I’d been paying more attention this time.
“Yes and no. As soon as I got in here, I started to think I hadn’t been so bad off. Also, who the hell wants to entertain the idea that they can never put another drink or drug in their body again? At the same time, I was afraid if I didn’t do something now, I’d do something worse later and then be worse off than when I came in. So it’s not like I came in here with pure intentions, like ‘yeah, I want to get clean and sober forever and ever.’ I just felt backed into a corner, and I’d already gone right and left so many times that I guess I figured maybe it was time to try going up. People always forget that up is an option. Not just sideways or down.”
Mason snorted. “I’ll be back in again. Somewhere, somehow.”
“Maybe I will, too.” I shrugged. I didn’t know what the right answer was; I was just relieved as fuck he wasn’t a dead body on the floor. “But I hope not. I don’t really have anything else to lose at this point.” That wasn’t true. I could lose my house or my belongings, but I’d already lost the thing that mattered most.
“Your music’s not bad, you know,” he said. “My ex loves you guys.”
“I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be an apology for being a dick, but if so, accepted.”
“It isn’t, but take it however. I’m an unapologetic dick.”
Oh, how familiar that sounded. So much so that I smiled. “You still smell like shit, and you need to take that
fucking shower.”
He threw his head back and laughed, and then when he sobered, asked me if I’d stay.
“Sure, as long as it’s not some sexual ploy, which would be way too predictable since you’ve got sexual hang-ups coming off of you about as strongly as BO.”
He rolled his eyes at me, but I remained where I was while he stood, pulling his shirt off. His abdomen was littered with scars, hundreds of them that I caught just before I turned my head away as he shucked his pants and stepped into the shower.
The next morning he left, no warning. I came back to my room during a break between sessions and all of his stuff was gone. I couldn’t stop thinking about him that night, wondering where he’d gone, who had picked him up, when he’d be back. Or if he would. And it made me think about what I’d been doing while I was here, how I was coasting along and just getting by, counting down the days until I could leave. I was scared of who I’d be when I left rehab and scared of what I’d become if I remained the same. I didn’t know if there was a middle ground between that, but I didn’t want to be Mike, setting myself up for a hard fall, just as much as I didn’t want to be Mason, cycling through free falls. And if I didn’t want to be either of those things, it seemed like maybe it was time for me to start listening to everything the counselors were saying and actually try putting it into practice.
That afternoon was when I had my first taste of real peace. They called it riding the pink cloud, but they could’ve called it anything for all I cared.
As I sat in group a few days later, Hannah, one of the counselors, rapped lightly on the door and stepped inside. “I need to see Mr. Graves, please.”