by Abby Jimenez
“Too early to call Ernie,” I said, already knowing what he was thinking.
Jason picked up his phone from the sink, dialed, and hit Send anyway.
He stalked out into the bedroom and I followed him. “Jason, it’s like four a.m. there.”
He turned and put the call on speaker and held it between us.
Ernie picked up on the second ring. “Good morning, kids. Calling me from Graceland?” he said groggily.
“Are they putting me on another tour?” Jason asked.
There was a pregnant pause.
“Eh, fuck,” Ernie mumbled. “Give me a second.”
Ernie muttered something muffled to his wife. A few moments passed and then a door shut in the background. “Who told you?”
“Is it true?” Jason asked.
“Look at it this way, you have job security.”
I shut my eyes for a long second and when I opened them, Jason’s face looked like an apology.
“Technically it’s not a new one,” Ernie said. “It’s the same tour, extended. It’s a good thing. Means you’re in demand. I was fighting for another soundtrack for you to keep you in LA, Patty Jenkins fell through, though, and the deal got fucked. You’re not writing and you’re not recording. They’re not gonna let you sit pretty and do nothing, my friend. And you’re hot in Tokyo right now.”
Jason and I looked at each other, having a silent exchange. He dragged a hand down his beard. “Ernie, I can’t do another one of these. This schedule’s fucking ridiculous. I haven’t been able to rest my voice in months, we’re exhausted.”
I stared at him. He wasn’t exhausted at all—this was 100 percent for me. And it was the first time he’d really admitted that he wasn’t happy with what was going on.
“Yup, well, it’s bullshit,” Ernie said. “But unfortunately it’s what you signed up for. If you give them an album, I can get you six months off the road instead of three to produce it. They’re only giving you the three in hopes that you actually write something, otherwise they’d just keep you going.”
Jason’s eyes went sorrier still, and he sat heavily on the edge of the bed.
He couldn’t write. It was bad before we went on the road, and now it was the worst it had ever been. I don’t know how they expected him to summon creativity under these conditions.
“And since I have you two on the phone, I gotta tell you something else,” Ernie said. “And I’m gonna warn you, you’re not gonna like it.”
Jason looked up at me and we waited.
“They booked you in Amsterdam for Thanksgiving. And you’re going to Paris for Christmas.”
What little was left in my tank bled out.
Chapter 36
Jason
♪ i don’t know what to say | Bring Me the Horizon
The light drained right out of Sloan’s eyes. She blinked at me wordlessly for a few seconds, then turned and walked slowly into the bathroom.
“Ernie, I gotta call you back.”
I hung up and followed her. She was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat with her face in her hands and I crouched in front of her. “I’m sorry, Sloan.”
I didn’t know what else to say. I was sorry. I was sorry every fucking day out here.
This wasn’t a life. She was run-down and bored. She missed her friends and her family. I did what I could to make it fun for her, but being on the road was just fucking brutal.
She didn’t take her face from her hands. “I just need a minute to process this,” she said quietly.
She’d been looking forward to going home. She missed Kristen, and she wanted to do that commission. It was all she talked about. And now it had just been ripped out from under her.
What kind of fucked-up cosmic joke was it that my passion involved constant motion and travel, and hers required total and complete stillness?
“Hey.” I put a kiss on her knee. “Maybe we can go see the Louvre?” I said hopefully, knowing that they’d probably have me running to the next thing and it wouldn’t happen.
She must have known it too. She didn’t reply.
“Sloan…”
She took a deep breath and pulled a piece of toilet paper from the roll and wiped at her nose. “Okay. It is what it is.” She sniffed. “We can’t change it. So how much longer?” Her beautiful eyes were bloodshot. “How long is your contract? When it’s over, Ernie can renegotiate your terms, right? We can ask for better schedules? More control?”
“Yes, but…” My heart sank at what I was going to have to tell her.
When I got my record deal, I’d been ecstatic. Most musicians got a single album offer with an option to renew if the artist did well enough. You got offered two albums if the label had faith in you. Very few got the offer I did—and I’d gotten it because they’d accurately foreseen what was happening to me now: stardom.
Ernie had warned me it would tie me to them, but I didn’t care. I’d landed one of the top labels in the world. I wanted to be tied to them. I wanted to be Don Henley famous.
I wasn’t afraid of the work. I couldn’t even imagine the scenario in which I wouldn’t want to be represented by one of the most powerful forces in the music industry. Ernie had negotiated great royalties and perks—my advance was more money than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. I knew they’d push me hard, but I was single, I was used to being on tour, the road didn’t bother me, and writing had never been an issue for me, so I had no doubts that I could produce what we agreed upon.
And now everything was different.
I couldn’t write. There was Sloan to consider. Lola was hanging over my head like a fucking guillotine. This record deal was crushing me under its weight, and all I wanted now was something in the middle. Manageable fame and success that would still give me the possibility of a life—because that was not what this was.
She waited. “How long?”
I shook my head. “It’s not a set time frame, Sloan. My contract is for four albums. The soundtrack was one. I need three more.”
“All right. And how long will that take?”
I paused before I answered her.
She licked her lips. “Six months? A year each? What are we looking at?”
“The average time between albums for most musicians is three years.”
The news hit her like a smack. She actually recoiled from it.
“Three years?” she breathed. Her red eyes dropped to her lap, moving back and forth. “Three years, Jason?” Her gaze came back up to mine. “Each?”
“I know it’s a lot—”
The color drained from her face. “And you can’t write,” she whispered, the reality of our situation truly sinking in. “It could be nine more years of this? More?” Her eyes begged me to tell her it wasn’t true.
And I couldn’t.
With nothing to say, I got up, feeling like I had to do something to make this better, but there was nothing to do. “I’m starting a bath for you.”
I ran the water in the Jacuzzi tub and poured in the hotel soap. “You’re staying here today. You’re sick.”
She didn’t argue with me like she usually did when I tried to get her to leave me to do something for herself, and I couldn’t tell if that was a good sign or a bad one.
I stood her up and started to undo the belt of her robe. She looked dazed. She wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
Her blond hair was tied in a sloppy bun on top of her head. She never wore it down anymore. She rarely put on makeup, she didn’t get her nails done. I didn’t care one ounce how she looked. She was beautiful to me no matter what—but I cared what it meant. She wasn’t taking care of herself.
She was deteriorating out here. I felt like I’d taken an orchid on a road trip and it wasn’t thriving. I was watching it wither, its petals falling off, and there was nothing I could do about it except take it back home and plant it. And now that wasn’t going to be possible.
She coughed miserably and I managed to actually feel worse than I already did.
>
“I’ll bring your breakfast in here,” I said. “And then you’re going back to bed. Come on.”
I helped her into the tub and went to the room, grabbed the chair from the desk, and rolled it into the bathroom so she could use the seat as a table. Then I ran her food in and set it up. The whole time I was looking at my watch because I was already running late. I needed to be here for her, take care of her—at least be around when she was ready to talk about what had just happened—but I had to be at a fucking radio station instead.
I kissed her forehead goodbye before I left and she didn’t say a word. She didn’t even lean into it.
Zane drove and I called Ernie from the car. I cradled the phone with my shoulder and tried to rub the encroaching headache from my temples.
He picked up on the first ring. “Did you know that you can see the sunrise right through the sliding glass doors of my living room if my wife makes you sleep on the couch?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I shouldn’t have called so early. I’m sorry the wife is mad.”
“One of my wives is always mad. It’s how I know I’m alive. How’s Sloan? She taking it okay?”
I peered out through the window at the rainy streets of Memphis. “No, she’s not. She’s sick. She’s tired. She’s not happy.”
He scoffed. “What the fuck’s there to be happy about? This road shit sucks.”
I rubbed at my eyes tiredly. “It’s like I’ve wanted this my whole life and now I have it and I just want it to fucking be over.”
I pictured him doing his head bob. “Well, you’re a victim of your own success. You have to tour while people wanna hear you play.” He let out a long breath into the phone. “You know, you do have choices here, my friend.”
“I’m not breaking up with her.”
“Well, that’s definitely a choice, but that’s not what I was about to say—and I’m a little offended you think I’d suggest that at this point. That’s your first wife we’re talking about.”
I snorted.
“You can bite the bullet and record the bullshit they wrote for you.”
I groaned.
“Hey, it’ll get you started. Speed up the end date. It’s that or the other thing, and you definitely don’t want the other thing. There are only two ways out of a contract. You fulfill it, or you get dropped. And they’re only gonna drop you if your career’s gone to shit. I don’t see that happening, unless you have some kitten-drowning video out there that I don’t know about.”
I closed my eyes and lolled my head back on the headrest.
“Look,” he said. “Give her a break. Send her home for a few weeks.”
I lifted my head. Send her home?
Even the thought of being on the road without her made my stomach plummet. She was the only thing keeping me sane out here. I was a prisoner of my fame now. Trapped in a bus or a hotel room unless I wanted to sign autographs—which I didn’t. The shine had worn off that months ago. I didn’t mind being sequestered with Sloan, but without her? She was my whole world. My best friend. Sending her away sounded like a jail sentence.
“What does Sloan like to do?” he asked.
I squeezed my temples. “She likes to cook. Paint. See Kristen.”
“Okay, then that’s what you arrange. She needs a vacation from this shit. The burnout is real, and you’re not even overseas yet. You drag Sloan to the UK like this and she’s jet-lagged and miserable, and she’s gonna end up going the way of my second wife, packing up and leaving your ass for your drummer while you’re at sound check somewhere in Berlin.”
I nodded wearily.
“And she’s sick?” he asked.
“She’s been sick for weeks,” I admitted. I probably should have made sure she went to urgent care, but she hadn’t had a fever and it wasn’t exactly easy to get away.
“I’ll send a rock doc over to have a look at her.”
“A what?”
“A rock doc. A musician’s physician? They’re on call for tours. They come to you. There’s a guy in Memphis I like. I’ll get him over there. He’ll patch her up—antibiotics, a shot of B12, she’ll be right as rain. I’ll do that and you figure out how to get her home for a few weeks.”
I let out a long breath. “I guess it’s a good idea.”
“Of course it is. All right, I gotta go. I gotta bring the wife a mimosa and a credit card in bed or my back might never recover from this couch.”
“Why don’t you just turn off your phone?” I asked tiredly.
“Because I need to be there when my clients call. What you’re doing is a hell of a lot harder than what I’m doing. If I would have had an agent who answered the phone to give me relationship advice when I needed him, I might still be married to my first wife. And that was the only wife I ever shoulda been married to.”
There was a serious pause in the silence. “Take care of her, Jason. You won’t get another one.”
Chapter 37
Sloan
♪ Keep Your Head Up | Ben Howard
Zane brought DayQuil and NyQuil. I took the NyQuil. I needed to sleep. I needed to not think about what Jason had just told me. It was too enormous and far-reaching to even comprehend in my current state.
A decade.
This would be our life for the next decade.
I wouldn’t see Oliver grow up. I wouldn’t paint. I wouldn’t even have a home. What would be the point? We’d never be there for more than a few months.
And there was no other choice. I wouldn’t ever leave him. That was the most final thing of all. Our fates were bound—what happened to him happened to me.
The way my body cried for sleep after this news scared me because it felt like before, when I used to sleep through my depression. Only this time I hadn’t lost anyone but myself, swallowed whole by Jason’s career.
I waited until it was 6:00 a.m. in California, and I called Kristen.
“God, you sound like you have the black lung,” she said, when I launched into a coughing fit instead of saying hello.
“I know. I’ve been super sick.” I wiped my nose with a tissue. Tucker pushed his face under my arm on the bed like he knew I needed it.
She snickered. “Did Jason offer you the penis-cillin yet?”
“Uh, what?”
“Men think their penis is the cure for everything. I swear to God, I could have some terminal disease and Josh would be over here bouncing his eyebrows like, ‘Gurl, I know what you need.’”
My snort of laughter thrust me into another coughing fit.
“So how’s the groupie life?” she asked once I’d recovered.
I gave her the recap of the last week since I’d talked to her and told her what had happened this morning.
“Damn,” she said. “That sucks. What are you gonna do?”
“Nothing. What can I do? It’s his job.”
“The guy’s like a nomad. You’re just going to walk the Earth with him for the next ten years?”
“It won’t be the whole time,” I said defensively. “We’ll get breaks.”
“I should have known when you told me the dude lived in a trailer that this wasn’t a put-roots-down kind of guy.” Oliver fussed in the background. “You do not travel well either. Remember in the ninth grade when Mom took us to Coronado and your nose bled the whole time?”
I snorted. “And she kept saying, ‘This is truly unacceptable, Sloan,’ like I was doing it on purpose?”
We fell into laughter again and my mood lifted a bit.
“Look,” she said. “If this was Josh, then I’d go full nomad too. If you love him, do what you gotta do. But try and take better care of yourself.”
“I don’t even know how to take care of myself out here.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “And I miss you guys.”
She paused for a long moment. “We miss you too.”
We talked for a few more minutes and then the NyQuil kicked in. When I hung up with her, I did feel a little better.
M
aybe she was right. Maybe Zane was right too. I had to figure this out. I needed more sleep. I needed to exercise and eat better.
Ernie had really pushed for driving at night instead of the day and sleeping in the bunks on the bus. Jason thought it was a good idea too, but we’d tried it a few times and I couldn’t get used to it. My mind couldn’t relax knowing I was in my pajamas on a freeway somewhere. It was just weird. And I could feel the braking and turning into parking lots and I kept waking up.
But if we did that instead of staying in a hotel every night, we’d have the days free of travel to actually do things. We’d wake up in our city instead of running out of hotel rooms at 5:00 a.m. and driving all day to get there. Maybe we could even sightsee now and then, go to restaurants. Then we’d eat better and I could get moving again.
I let out a sigh as I climbed under the covers and bunched the pillow under my head. I’d tell him when he came back that I wanted to give sleeping on the bus another try. I couldn’t keep doing the same things and expecting different results.
I fell into one of those cold-medicine slumbers. The kind where you float through the black and don’t dream.
When I woke up, Jason was there sleeping next to me, an arm draped over my waist.
It took me a few moments to blink away the confusion. The room was pitch-dark, but I could see the sunlight etching the sides of the curtains. He was supposed to be gone until tonight, running around doing media and then at his sound check.
I sat up on my elbows. The clock said noon. I’d slept five hours.
Jason stirred and opened his eyes. “Hey, you’re up. How are you feeling?”
“Groggy. What are you doing here?”
He brushed the hair off my forehead and kissed it. “I canceled my day.”
“You canceled your day?” Ugh. His publicist was going to be so pissed. “Jason…”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t cancel my concert. But we’re staying in today. We’re going to lie in bed and watch crime shows. Zane’s picking up food from the highest-rated restaurant in Memphis, and I have a doctor coming to see you in an hour.”