Hammers, Strings, and Beautiful Things

by Morgan Lee Miller

  Blair Bennett’s only twenty-four but already has an impressive résumé. A sought-after songwriter, she’s written an arsenal of hit singles for other artists. Now she’s ready to conquer the music industry with her own band, and touring with the biggest pop star in the world, Reagan Moore, will get her exactly where she wants to go.

  It’s a lot harder than Blair expects, especially when she has to cope with the loss of her grandfather. She develops a close bond with Reagan, whose quick wit and easy charm keep her on her toes. As their attraction blossoms, Blair shows Reagan how to have fun again despite her fame, and their impulsive adventures ignite feelings neither can deny.

  Everything would be fine, if only Blair could keep it together. But her unhealthy ways of dealing with her grief and her troubled past jeopardize not only her budding music career but her relationship with the only woman she’s ever fallen for.

  Hammers, Strings, and Beautiful Things

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  Hammers, Strings, and Beautiful Things

  © 2019 By Morgan Lee Miller. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-63555-539-4

  This Electronic Original Is Published By

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, NY 12185

  First Edition: October 2019

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editors: Barbara Ann Wright and Cindy Cresap

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Tammy Seidick

  By the Author

  All the Worlds Between Us

  Hammers, Strings, and Beautiful Things

  For Julie

  Chapter One

  “Alanna, I can’t do this anymore,” I said, and my telling her this had nothing to do with the cocaine I just bumped before she came into the green room.

  “Blair, it’s gonna be fine,” she said, clasping her warm hands around mine. “This show is no different than all the other ones you’ve done. You’re going to be great. This is what your grandpa would have wanted.”

  I closed my eyes and resisted the urge to take my hand back. The more I put up a fight, the worse this whole conversation would be, and I already had been putting it off for a month. Even if her hand squeezed mine in the most nurturing way, even if the dark silver in her eyes sparkled with support, this needed to happen. I couldn’t have a girlfriend right now.

  “No, it’s not that,” I said, a knot of emotions tightening in my throat. “I meant us. I can’t do us anymore.”

  There. The words slipped right off my tongue and now hung in the open.

  Her grip around my hands loosened. “What?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She took her hand back. “Are you seriously breaking up with me?”

  “I’m sorry. I just…I can’t be in a relationship right now.”

  “What? I mean, where is this even coming from?”

  “I’m going through my quarter-life crisis, and it’s not fair for you to go through it with me.”

  She raised a skeptical brow. “So…you’re trying to save me from you?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “How heroic, Blair,” she deadpanned.

  She had every right to be pissed at me and tell me to fuck off. For the past five months since my grandpa was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer, she had stood by my side. She made her shoulder available for me to cry on and went to the hospital with me because I knew I couldn’t handle watching the cancer eat him alive by myself. She was there for me and my mom while we planned his memorial service, cooking us food and doing everything she could to make it a little easier for us. She’d slept in my bed every night since he’d died, spooning me to sleep. She refused to leave me, knowing how much his death crippled me, and how did I repay her? By breaking up with her. It was awful. I knew it was awful, but my gut told me I had to do it. I knew what the right decision was. I needed to focus on me and take care of me, and look how well that was going.

  “I’m not trying to be heroic, Alanna. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

  “By breaking up with me? After everything we went through?”

  “How am I supposed to make you happy when I can’t even be happy? I barely have a handle on my whole life right now. Clearly.”

  “I don’t buy that. You’re about to go on tour with the biggest pop singer in the country. You have a record deal. How many hit songs have you written for how many artists? I think you have a perfect handle on your life right now.”

  “That doesn’t lessen the blow of my grandpa dying.”

  “I was there for you the last five months, getting, like, three hours of sleep some nights because I was at the hospital with you. I took an exam on two hours of sleep the night he died because you needed me, and I wanted to be there for you. I’m very well aware of how shitty things are right now, but they’re going to get better. I told you that you wouldn’t have to go through this alone, and you still don’t have to.”

  My dad was never in my life, so my grandparents took my mom and me in. Gramps was the dad I never had. Just five days before, I serenaded two hundred people who came to Gramps’s funeral to my own rendition of “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. He was still fresh in my mind. The clothes hanging in his closet still smelled like him. His last glass of water still sat on his bedroom nightstand. The last record he listened to was still on his record player. With him gone, I could hardly get myself out of bed. I could hardly go through a day without drinking or smoking weed, and most importantly, I couldn’t even sit down at the piano and write a goddamn song. Writing was my therapy. Sitting at the baby grand piano or fingerpicking Gramps’s ’77 acoustic Hummingbird guitar cured me from whatever emotions were weighing me down. Instead of a diary, I wrote songs in my brown leather notebook. But I had felt so much over the past few months; it was like the words congealed into the knot constantly in my throat. I had nothing to contribute to my notebook. My therapy wasn’t even working for me. If I couldn’t even seek out the things I loved, how could I possibly be in a relationship? My life was still toppling into a disintegrated heap.

  “Is this because you wanna hook up?” she was gutsy enough to ask.

  “Oh my God, no,” I said with a raised voice because her accusation was so ridiculous. Hooking up was the last thing on my mind. Cancer ruining your family doesn’t really make you horny. Alanna and I used to have amazing sex. I guess that was what happened when you chased each other down for four years. All the tension we held in for so long exploded into months of blissful sex until my grandpa got sick, and nothing made me in the mood anymore. So, this definitely wasn’t about hooking up.

  “I can’t believe you even think that,” I continued.

  “You’re running because this is somewhat serious? Because we’ve been together for a year? After everything we’ve been through, you wanna end it?”

  “How can you not see that I haven’t been myself? I’m tired of feeling this way, and I need to focus on myself.”

  She got up from the couch as she dabbed h
er face. “You haven’t been able to sleep by yourself for the past week because you didn’t want to be alone, but now you actually want to be alone?”

  All those sleepless nights provided me with clarity. Yes, I wanted to be alone.

  “Alanna, you’re not even trying to understand where I’m coming from. Have you really enjoyed our relationship for the past few months?”

  “No, I haven’t,” she answered with another eye wipe. “But life happens, and it gets shitty. It doesn’t mean I stopped loving you or stopped wanting to be with you. But clearly, that’s what it means for you.”

  “Alanna—”

  “If this is what you really want, Blair, then fine. I’ll leave and set you free.” I rolled my eyes. Nope, she wasn’t going to try to understand where I was coming from at all. “You have a nice tour. I really do hope you find the happiness you’re looking for.” The anger in her voice didn’t convince me that she was sincere. Right as she twisted the door handle, she turned back around with her eyebrows tighter together as if she was preparing for one last punch to the gut. “By the way, you’re not fooling anyone. I know you’re on coke right now. Real nice.”

  My stomach dropped. I just broke up with the girl who knew my darkest secret. Not even Miles, my best friend and bandmate, knew about the coke or the other times I did it in my life.

  My heart thrummed faster in my chest. “What? How did you—”

  “He would’ve been really disappointed in you, you know.”

  “Don’t bring my dead grandpa into this.”

  “You’ve been self-destructing for months, and I still stayed by you.”

  “I never asked you to. I’m not some studying material for your thesis, okay? I don’t need you to save me.”

  Things I just learned: breaking up with a girl currently getting her master’s in social work would bite you in the ass.

  “Fuck you, Blair.” She wiped her eyes, but the tears wouldn’t stop staining her face. “Seriously. Fuck you. You know, you never drank as much as you do now until your grandpa started getting sick, and now that’s all you do. If you don’t want your life to fall apart, how about you stay sober?”

  And then she slammed the door shut. I rubbed out the tension in my face and then downed a shot of Southern Comfort and strapped my blue-green Fender electric guitar around my body as Miles came back from the bathroom. This happened every show. His nerves were like black coffee running right through his body, and even though we’d been performing together since high school, he still had the preshow bowel movement.

  “Sorry,” he said, sweeping his brown hair out of his face before he snatched his drumsticks off the couch. “I’m just thinking about how we’re going from playing for two thousand people tonight to, like, ten thousand people in a few weeks, and it’s really getting to me.”

  “You need to eat more cheese. We’ll make sure to pack up the fridge with that. And Imodium.”

  His honey-colored eyes met mine, and clearly, a breakup showed on my face because his eyebrows creased when he studied me. “Did something happen? I saw Alanna crying in the hallway. She didn’t even say hi to me. She ran past me.”

  I plucked a couple of strings on my guitar, making sure everything still sounded in tune, even though I tuned the guitar about a half hour ago. If Miles’s preshow bowel movement was his nervous habit, then overtuning my guitar was mine. “Oh, yeah, I just broke up with her.”

  His mouth dropped. “What? Just now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “In a green room?”

  “Yup.”

  “Ten minutes before our show?”

  “I know it wasn’t ideal.”

  “Jesus, Blair, this is a big deal. Are you okay? You sound kind of cavalier about the whole thing.”

  I shrugged. “I’m fine. Just kinda numb. She hates me. She doesn’t get why I did it, and she really didn’t want to even try to get it.”

  “Did you tell her you’ve been feeling off for a while?”

  “Yeah, I also think that’s a given with the whole no sex and no writing thing.” I hopped off the couch and made my way to the door. We would be called to take the stage any moment.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Yeah, we’re not playing ‘Finally’ tonight or, like, in the foreseeable future. So tonight, let’s do a cover of ‘My Friends Over You.’ I think it fits my mood right now.”

  He placed his hand over his heart. “You know early 2000s songs are my weakness.”

  “I know, it’s half of the reason why I chose it. Now, let’s go rock this.”

  Miles and I formed our band senior year at our LA art high school. We’d been doing shows for six years, starting with college parties, to local restaurants and venues, to opening acts for smaller musicians, to now shows with a few thousand people packed into them, soon to be sold-out arena shows all over the country. Every show we’d done in the last six years, I was able to step on stage and leave whatever crap was inundating my mind backstage. So, this show was no different. Since Gramps took a turn for the worst, we canceled all of our shows leading up to the Reagan Moore World Tour. It was our first show in four months, and I was determined to give it my all. Nothing was going to hold us back. Not the death of my grandpa, who would have sworn at me if I sulked and sucked because of him. Not because of Alanna. Not because of anything.

  The second we stepped on stage and the music we made poured through the speakers, the lights flickering on us and hearing two thousand fans singing along to our songs, it enhanced the high already running through my body. I forgot all my troubles, focused on the thumping music, the crowd, and making sure that the four months of not performing didn’t take its toll on us. If we were going to open for the American leg of Reagan Moore’s world tour, we couldn’t settle for anything less than perfect for our comeback show in Silver Lake.

  I worked the crowd more than usual and even crowd-surfed, which was always a thrilling time. It was even better when you were high. When I crowd-surfed during our cover of “My Friends Over You,” I absorbed all the vitality from the crowd as their hands gracefully glided me over them. The warm rush of adrenaline pumped through my body as the music blasted through the speakers and enhanced their singing and cheering. When the show ended, sweat dripped down my face and stuck my shirt to my back. That was how you knew when you had a good show. You felt as if you got back from the gym on cardio day.

  Afterward, I powered through the coke comedown while chatting with a few fans by the merch table, taking pictures with them, signing some autographs—and I even signed my first boob, so that was the highlight of my night. With the enhanced high feeling that got me through my performance came the enhanced low feeling. At least there was one thing I learned from my general education classes in high school and college that I could apply to real life. For every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction, and I’m pretty sure that when Newton came up with that, he meant being high on drugs. The high made me weightless and soar, and then when I came crashing down, it made me sink as much as I soared. The past few months squeezed on my chest; Alanna’s cries stung my eyes. The emotions I kept suppressing to satisfy the fans balled up in my throat.

  That was my cue to head back to my mom’s. At least we had each other to lean on, and I really needed my mom just to scoop me up in her arms.

  I’m not sure how I made it all the way back to Irvine from Silver Lake. I kind of drove mechanically on the 5 until I snapped out of my long daydream as I parked the car in front of the house I grew up in. I rested my head against the headrest; the radio faintly played through the speakers. I inhaled a deep breath to collect a few more moments for myself before I endured walking into a house barely recognizable without Gramps inside it. I let the radio continue to play because pure silence was something I didn’t think my wandering mind could handle at the moment.

  “This is WQRD, who is this?” the radio announcer said in the typical announcer cadence.

  “This is Ashley. Oh my G
od, did I win?”

  “You are caller twenty-one. Congratulations! You just won two front row seats to the Reagan Moore concert!”

  Her screaming brought a little smile to my face. It was a nice reminder, given really shitty circumstances, that people were so thrilled to see the show Miles and I were going to open for. That was a positive I was going to cling on to like a security blanket. It reminded me that excitement was around the corner, that in two weeks, I’d be traveling all over the country with my best friend, performing in front of tens of thousands of zealous fans every night with the biggest name in music. That was something to look forward to. It was enough to twitch a smile out of me, knowing how excited Gramps had been when I told him the news.

  “How do you feel, Ashley?” the announcer said.

  “Amazing! I’m so excited! I couldn’t get tickets because they sold out so fast.”

  “Lucky you and a friend will sit front row for the first show in Las Vegas for the Reagan Moore World Tour with opening act Midnight Konfusion. They’re supposed to be great. You’re going to have a great time, Ashley.”

  “Ah! I’m so excited!”

  As Ashley screamed off air into a mattress sale commercial, I stared at the Spanish-style house, preparing myself for the vast emptiness that now made up the inside. Walking in and not seeing Gramps drinking a Johnnie Walker neat in front of his bookshelf, which housed hundreds of records, nodding to the music playing through his stereo headphones was still weird to me. It was a sight I’d seen every time I came home at night. It was his bedtime ritual. And for the past two weeks since his death, I hadn’t gotten used to the empty chair and the silent record player.

  Actually, it broke my heart every time.

  I remembered back when I was a teenager and all those nights I snuck out of the house, creeping out of my window, butt sliding down the roof, and then leaping from the roof to perfect the two-story jump with my worst injury only being a sprained ankle. I was a little shit in high school. I had friends to meet up with and girls to make out with. But only once did I get caught sneaking out. This particular time, I ventured out to a party because this really hot junior wanted to make out with me. She was the kind of girl in high school you lusted so hard after that the lust would never go away, even long after you graduated. Sometimes, Dana Bohlen sprang into my head, and I ruminated about the furtive moments we shared and felt equally nostalgic and turned on at the same time. I was sixteen, and a hot “straight” girl wanted to fool around with me. Sign me right up, which I did. Pronto. But after Dana Bohlen and I used each other to satisfy our needs, I crept back into the house at one thirty in the morning, stopping dead in my tracks in the dark kitchen when I found Gramps in that computer chair, full-sized headphones around his neck as he searched the bookshelf for a new album. The lamp on the end table was the only light on the first floor, casting weak rays up the twenty-foot ceiling.