Bo & Ember

by Andrea Randall

As I stepped in, I winced at the scalding heat. Bo must have seen the look because he quickly reached around me and turned the heat down.

  “You okay?” I asked, my voice barely louder than the falling water.

  He nodded. “I am. Sorry about that.” He slid his hands down my sides, resting them on my hips as he pulled me into his body.

  I wrapped my arms around his torso. His back was cool from being away from the water, but his chest was warm. As I rested my cheek against his collarbone, I resisted the primal urge I had to ask follow-up questions. We were done talking about Tyler and whatever the hell had happened. For the time being.

  Once we were dressed and downstairs, we were able to quickly eat the food I’d prepared earlier before someone buzzed at the gate. The sound was slightly foreign.

  “You closed the gate when you came home?” I questioned. We rarely had it shut during the day.

  Bo grinned, eating the last of his seaweed cracker. I knew he didn’t like them that much, but I appreciated the effort. “I didn’t want to be disturbed this afternoon. I missed you, too.”

  He left the table and walked to the intercom.

  I lived in a house with an intercom. And a gated driveway.

  “Yes?” Bo spoke in his typical business-casual tone.

  A loud voice crackled through the speaker. “Beckett with Grounded Sound.”

  With a crease between his eyebrows, Bo clicked the buttons to unlock the gate.

  “Do you know anyone else named Beckett?” he asked.

  “No. Do you?”

  “I don’t even want to know one Beckett,” he grumbled.

  I laughed. “Grow up.”

  “I’m serious.” He walked behind me and pinched my butt as I cleared my plate.

  A minute later there was a knock on the door. I followed Bo into the entryway and couldn’t help but chuckle as he opened it and there, naturally, stood Beckett Roth.

  “Hey guys.” He always sounded like a pumped up surfer just off the waves.

  “Beckett.” Bo nodded and pulled the door open, stepping aside to let Beckett in. His eyes shot to me and I felt implored to ask the million-dollar question.

  I gave Beckett a quick and friendly hug first. “What are you doing here?”

  Beckett stuck his hands in his pockets and smiled broadly. “A week after you guys signed with Grounded Sound, I had an offer from Yardley at the New York office. So, I moved back there. She hired me as a sound engineer and last week asked me if I’d be interested in your album as my first project.”

  “Wow,” I forced myself to sound cheerful and supportive, “congratulations! I’m surprised no one told us … including you.”

  I caught Bo’s lightning-quick grin as I grilled Beckett.

  “Well,” Beckett answered nonchalantly, “I wanted it to be a surprise.” He stood up straight and smiled comically large. “Surprised?”

  Bo

  Surprise, indeed.

  Beckett didn’t want to surprise Ember; he wanted to make sure he secured his first job, and he knew that would be risky had I known he was assigned to the project ahead of time.

  For the first two days of recording with Beckett, we worked through a lot of sound checks and some of our ready-made songs—ones that Ember and I had sung a million times and wouldn’t need a lot of work. It didn’t take Beckett long to get used to the control room, which made very good use of our time.

  Ember and I didn’t have a discussion about Beckett, because Beckett wasn’t the issue. It was me and my archaic jealousy. I’d told Ember weeks before that I was over any unjust animosity I’d had toward Beckett. That was, in part, because I hadn’t seen him in several weeks. Out of sight and out of mind.

  I hated that he knew things about her that I never would. I couldn’t tell Ember that, either, because then she’d push me on my deal with Tyler, as she called it. Since I didn’t want to go there, Beckett was off the table.

  Beckett clicked on the mic in the control room. “Ready, guys? Take ‘Lovin’ Me Down’ from the chorus. Ember, when you’re singing the high notes, don’t pull back on the guitar. Match your intensity there, k?”

  Ember nodded. “Will do.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught her flex her hands twice. Even though we’d spent the last year and a half playing all over the West coast, two things were different now. First, Ember was playing a lot more guitar than she had with The Six. Second, we hadn’t played much in the past few weeks since the move back home. Her fingertips were raw from three days of nearly nonstop playing as she worked to get her calluses back.

  “Ready?” I asked her, avoiding discussion about her certainly burning skin. It would just make the pain worse if I brought her attention to it.

  “Yep. One, two, one, two, three, four…”

  Ember and I began humming the intro to the chorus. “Lovin’ Me Down” was a song we'd worked on over the last six months. It was one of the few we’d written without Regan’s vocal or instrumental part, so it didn’t require any reworking for recording.

  Ember rocked her shoulders and half her mouth curled into a sexy grin as she leaned toward the mic.

  I was high, oh so high. The tears brought me to the edge.

  But you’re lovin’ me down, baby, lovin’ me down

  Off that dark, dark ledge …

  It’s no surprise that we wrote this song together to try to make some musical sense out of a rocky time in our relationship. We’d split up, made mistakes with other people, Rae died … it wasn’t great. The one thing that did get us through all of it was our deeply rooted and intense love for each other.

  It was that love that allowed me to ask her to leave after Rae’s funeral, that love that let her, even though it hurt. It was the love that gave us time to heal while we were apart. And, that love that brought us back together and made us stronger every day.

  Mmm, girl, I begged you to go, I begged you to stay…

  When I entered the song, I found myself lost in our relationship. The early ups and downs and the smooth sailing ever since. I was one lucky bastard, and I intended on spending the rest of my life paying that luck forward to Ember. She deserved the best of me every single day.

  The song ended, and Ember winked at me from behind her mic. The sight of her with headphones on, holding her guitar, filled me with peace and joy.

  Before I could say anything, Beckett infiltrated our private moment. I realize we were in a studio recording our album, but the intimacy between Ember and me was always intensified when we were in the studio.

  “Excellent, guys, really. You’re making my job far too easy.” Beckett clicked off the microphone, removed his headphones, and made his way into the studio.

  I reached for Ember’s hand, but she whipped around as Beckett opened the door.

  “Really, Beck? You’re not just saying that?” She lifted the strap of her guitar over her head and set it against its stand.

  “November, I don’t get paid to just say things. Trust me. Just saying anything other than the truth would get me fired. That was fantastic. You guys are way ahead of schedule. I wouldn’t be surprised if the label began pushing for a small spring tour, rather than waiting until summer.”

  That got my attention. “Are you serious?”

  Beckett seemed a lot less annoying when he was discussing the advancement of our music career.

  He nodded and shoved his hands in his pockets. It’s like he could never have a conversation with his hands anywhere else. “Oh, hell yeah. In fact, when Yardley comes up tomorrow, she’s going to talk to you guys about plans for the Grounded Sound website. You’ve seen it, right?”

  I nodded quickly, encouraging him to get on with it. Ember watched our interaction with a bit of tension on her face. I hadn’t given her reason to think I’d be anything but a pain in the ass about Beckett. That was about to change.

  “Well,” he continued, “demand for you two has been crazy. Ever since the vineyard show.”

  “Right,” I agreed
. “The traffic on The Six’s website went crazy the night after we performed.”

  “Yardley’s web design team has your page ready to launch. She wants to check a few details with you, but even the second they announced they’d signed you, their traffic has increased almost threefold.” Beckett eyed Ember with a proud peacock grin.

  Ember stood and stretched. The bottom hem of the long sleeved brown shirt she was wearing rode up, exposing a few inches of skin on her stomach. Beckett’s eyes stayed on hers, which made me hate him a little less.

  “How the hell have I missed this explosion in popularity?” Ember said, somewhat sarcastically, as she rolled her neck back and forth. Every movement of hers seemed uncomfortably sexy in the presence of other men. I knew that was all in my head, but I didn’t want them eyeing her the way I did.

  That was the blessing and curse of marrying the most gorgeous woman in the universe, I guess.

  Beckett sat on a nearby stool, arching a mischievous eyebrow. “Because you’ve been up here playing house.”

  “Shit,” Ember sighed, “isn’t that bad? Shouldn’t we be out, like, connecting?”

  “No. It’s fucking brilliant.” Beckett leaned forward, taking his hands from his pockets and leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “The counterculture lovers signed to a big record label, living all Salinger-like in New Hampshire while recording their debut album in their love nest? Do you not see the romance of it all?

  Ember hung her head, shaking it back and forth. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Nope,” Beckett asserted. “Brill-i-ant.”

  “We’re not really even the counterculture ones.” While Ember had surrendered a bit more to her upbringing over the last year, it was still a hard pill to swallow at times.

  Beckett snapped his fingers and pointed an inch from Ember’s nose. “Don’t. Don’t even say that. Ever. Your music, your look, your name … it’s counterculture. It’s going to sell. Big. Look at the Top 40 artists this week. Christ, look at the top ten. You’ll see it dominated with real singers who can actually play an instrument. Auto-tune is as foreign to them as genetically modified chicken. These are your people. You are their people.”

  Jesus. Beckett knew his shit.

  Ember turned to get my opinion. “Are you hearing this?”

  I grinned. “Quick, let’s go upstairs and compost something.”

  Beckett laughed, but spoke seriously. “That’s the right idea.”

  “I don’t want to be dishonest…” Ember wrung her hands, looking at me pleadingly.

  “Babe,” I stood and walked over to her, “it’s not dishonest. We had fruit and seaweed for lunch. You grew up on a commune and went to an Ivy League school as an act of rebellion. It’s a gorgeous story how you emotionally reconciled with your parents and fell in love again with the lifestyle you’ve always known.”

  Ember twitched her lips and arched her eyebrow suspiciously. “How do we explain you, then?”

  I shrugged impishly. “Plot twist?”

  As Beckett chuckled, a familiar voice trailed down the stairs and into the studio.

  “What? The broody millionaire jock-turned-philanthropist? Ah the possibilities of how to explain him.” By the end of his sentence, Tyler was smirking in the studio doorway.

  “Oh, who the fuck asked you?” I teased.

  Ember’s face lit up. “Hey, you! I was wondering when I’d hear from you again. I thought you were blowing me off. Oh. Tyler, this is our sound engineer, Beckett. Beckett, this is Tyler.”

  Beckett turned his back to me to shake Tyler’s hand. After the introductions, Beckett headed back to the control room to grab the files he needed. Tyler gave a minute nod in Beckett’s direction, raising his eyebrows hopefully.

  I shrugged, highlighting my ignorance about Beckett’s sexual orientation. All I knew about his sex life was he’d slept with my wife when they were seventeen. Ember seemed to think Beckett had slept with Yardley, but I tried not to think about Beckett sleeping with anyone.

  Tyler nodded approvingly, then turned his attention to Ember.

  “I’d never blow you off. Not my style.” He winked, causing me to roll my eyes, then continued. “Anyway, I figured since I hadn’t actually seen Bo since you’ve been back, I’d bring some of my plans here and we could go over them together. I thought you were only recording in the evenings, though. Is this a bad time?”

  Ember nodded to the control room. “We’re actually done for the day. Beckett’s got a conference call for work so he’s heading back to his hotel. We’ve actually got friends coming up for dinner tonight, but I need you to meet Monica. She’ll freak.”

  Honestly, I’d forgotten about our dinner plans. Time and space seemed to shift imperceptibly when I was in the studio. We hadn’t seen Josh and Monica since we’d been back, and I was really looking forward to seeing them.

  Tyler looked slightly unsure as he addressed me. “Are you sure? I don’t want to crash your plans.”

  I moved over to where he and Ember were standing and put my hand on his shoulder. “The more the merrier. What’s the point of a house this size if we don’t fill it with people from time to time?”

  “Well then,” he smiled, “let’s go upstairs and I can show you what I’ve come up with.”

  “You guys go ahead,” Ember said. “I’ll be up in a sec. Just gotta talk to Beckett about something.” She turned on her heels and bounded into the control room as Tyler and I left the studio and headed for the stairs.

  Tyler and I sat at the corner of the dining room table, and he pulled out his laptop. “That’s an insane studio you’ve got down there, Bo. Really impressive.”

  “Thanks. I had it built a couple of years ago. Three, I think? I can’t remember anymore.”

  I used to reference time by things that happened before my parents died, and things after. Once Rae died and Ember and I got married, though, benchmarks got fuzzier and I no longer knew if I should anchor the hourglass in the tragedies or the happy moments. I knew my therapist would tell me it wasn’t healthy to dwell on anything negative if I wanted to train my brain to focus on the positive, but that was textbook advice that didn’t seem to translate into real life functioning for me. I hadn’t connected with her since I’d moved back to Concord, though I realized I should schedule an appointment soon.

  “Yeah,” Tyler sighed, “guess it’s been a long time since I’ve been here, huh?” He ran his thumb against the corner of his mouth and looked down. I don’t know if the movement was conscious, but I consciously chose to not respond to it.

  By not responding to it, though, Tyler and I were thrust into this short burst of incredible silence that made both of us shift in our seats.

  I cleared my throat, not wanting to dwell. “So, want to show me what you’ve got?”

  “Wait!” Ember shouted from the top of the stairs. “Don’t start yet!”

  Tyler laughed and his signature bright smile returned to his face. “She’s awesome, man.”

  I smiled as all the tension left my shoulders. “Yeah. She is.”

  Ember stormed into the room and sat next to Tyler so she could better see his laptop. “I leave you two alone for three seconds and you’re going to try to design the house without me?”

  “What’d you have to talk to Beckett about?” I asked, leaning forward so I could see what Tyler was pulling up.

  “Oh, some marketing stuff for us. I’ve been chatting with Monica and she gave me some ideas I wanted to run by him. Live podcast interviews, sample tracks, live recording feed … he left out the basement door. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Her face was pink with excitement. I knew it was going to be a tough transition with all the life changes we had going on at once, so it was a relief to see her smiling like that.

  “Excellent ideas. What’d Beckett think?” I was impressed with Ember’s initiative on the business side of things. She seemed hesitant when it came to anything outside the studio.

  “He th
inks they’re all great ideas. I told him we’d talk to Yardley tomorrow. I just wanted his impression.”

  Tyler whistled. “Wanna switch gears here?” He pushed his laptop away from him to give us a clear view of the screen.

  “Sorry,” Ember whispered with a giggle.

  “It’s okay, you’re safe from detention,” Tyler teased back.

  Once Ember focused her attention on the screen, she gasped. “Wow.”

  I squinted my eyes, tilted my head, and looked around the room. “That's … that’s this room?”

  Tyler nodded, eyeing me cautiously.

  “Wow is right!” I smiled at the possibilities that lay before us.

  With his interior design program, Tyler had a full mockup of the dining room. When he pushed a button, we got to see a “live” transformation of the room as he saw it. The table we were sitting at disappeared and a wider, more country-looking table took its place. The wallpaper was replaced with a pale yellow that made it look like the sun was shining through the windows. The wall behind us slid out of the way and made way for a sunroom addition. I was floored.

  Tyler took a deep breath and spoke in the most professional voice I’d ever heard from him in real life. “I know it’s a lot. So just take a minute and look. We’re able to consider the small sunroom because when your parents remodeled the kitchen and made it wider, it created this short alcove of unused space outside. If we put a sunroom there, it won’t really be a loss of yard because you can use it year round. We’ll insulate the hell out of it and put a small wood stove in the corner, here.” He tapped the trackpad and a wood stove appeared.

  Ember sat back in her seat. “This is beyond anything I could have imagined. I was excited for a new table and fresh paint.”

  “Well, this is kind of what I do.” Tyler smiled almost bashfully as he continued staring at the screen.

  “We have a couple of choices for the kitchen,” he continued. “We can leave it as is, or we can move some things around so you can have two entry points to the sunroom since they’ll share a wall…”

  For the next hour, the three of us discussed the bottom floor renovations of my childhood home. The living room would receive cosmetic treatment and some built in shelves carved into the wall. My office would be rearranged to fit two new desks, allowing Ember and I to have a shared professional space. Ember protested, saying she didn’t have anything that she needed a desk for, but Tyler told her she’d regret it if she didn’t have it. He said at the basic level it would be a place to leave her computer at night, since he wanted to keep all electronics out of the bedroom.