That morning, she’d been reading us some of the tweets our fans had shared about the live radio performance. A lot of them were pretty stoked, which was awesome since we’d be back in Charlotte in late-November, and tickets for all our shows went on sale the next day. We were hoping for a good turnout in most of the cities we planned to hit.
And the tour would be nuts. It was twenty-six cities in six weeks before we’d head home to Durham for our final show at Leo’s bar, Devil’s Hangout. We wanted to play for our hometown crowd and show love for our fans from Duke, our alma matter, which had inspired the name of our album. It was like we were coming full circle in so many ways, going back to where it all began.
“We’ll do one song,” I said to Reese, the deejay of morning show, “just because we love the fans in Charlotte so much.”
“Damn, that is one heart-breaker of a smile, Zack,” Clarissa, Reese’s feisty co-deejay, commented, a smile aimed at me breaking across her face.
“I heard he’s single, Clarissa,” Reese said, lounging back in his chair, eyeing Clarissa pointedly.
He was just like every other rock station morning show guy we’d met while on the road; a little cocky, not as good looking as he wished he was, decently funny and loved music more than life. He did the morning show bits, but the music was why he’d gotten into the business. Clarissa was sharp and witty and didn’t really hold back. She played her part in their bantering duo nicely.
“I heard he’s engaged,” she countered, and they both turned to me.
“Well, which is it Zack?” Reese prompted, leaning forward, hoping to get the confirmation I was sure plenty of people wanted since I’d been a little bi-polar with my relationship admissions as of late.
“Leo’s engaged to a really awesome girl,” I threw out there in an attempt to change the subject, and Leo looked at me like I was insane.
Clarissa turned to him and winked. Then she turned back to me. “Yeah, we heard that, but it’s not very newsworthy since he didn’t pretend he wasn’t engaged when he really was. Rumor has it you’ve been lying to the media all summer when in actuality you’ve been engaged this whole time.”
Ah crap. I knew this was going to happen. Who gave a shit anyway?
“I don’t talk about my personal life,” I said stiffly, trying as hard as I could not to go off on the woman sitting across from me who I just knew I couldn’t trust.
“He hasn’t been lying,” Andrew chimed in, sounding annoyed as he took my side. I was sure he was thinking the same thing as me, since now more than ever he didn’t want his personal business to be aired for the world.
“No, that was you,” Derrick mumbled under his breath, and my head snapped in his direction.
He’d better not say anything, and I didn’t think he would. He was just toying with Andrew because he was upset. Why, I wasn’t exactly sure, but the two guys hadn’t spoken since Derrick found out about Andrew earlier in the week, aside from the cutting remarks Derrick kept making under his breath. He was seriously getting on my damn nerves, and I knew he was making Andrew feel like shit. I was about to have a Come to Jesus meeting with him if he didn’t knock it off – the comments and the drugs. They were making him hard to tolerate.
I ventured to guess he hadn’t slept at all the night before. He looked like shit. Fortunately he could rally and play with little to no sleep, but I was afraid he’d crash later when we needed him. We had our final recording session that day.
“Shut up, Derrick,” Leo growled under his breath, beating me to the punch
He was sitting to my right, and Derrick was next to him. We’d put Andrew on my other side to keep them separated.
“Ooh, what do we have here?” Reese asked, and I wanted to smack the gleam out of his eyes. He smelled dissention in the ranks, and he was like a shark in the water.
“So, the album’s called Devil’s Countdown,” I said, ignoring Reese’s question. “It’s going to be pretty amazing. We’ve been recording for the past two weeks, and we think the fans are going to love it. If you’ve been to any of our shows, you’ve heard three of the songs that’ll be on the album, but we’re also debuting a lot of brand new tracks.”
I was totally rambling as I spouted out the talking points Emily had armed me with that morning, but I had to deflect somehow.
“Is that right?” Clarissa asked, thankfully taking the bait.
“You know what’s not right? Keeping secrets from your friends,” Derrick said then, and Leo dead-armed him. “Ow, fuck man!”
Bleep! The station manager bleeped out Derrick’s expletive just in time.
“Shut. Up,” Leo growled at him.
“Okay, what is going on with you guys?” Clarissa asked.
“Nothing,” I answered quickly and looked back at Jonathan and Emily. He was glaring at me, giving me the sign to move things along, and Emily just looked panicked. “We’re just guys who’ve been best friends for years and sometimes we piss each other off. It’s when we write our angriest songs.”
Everyone in the studio sort of chuckled at my attempt at a joke.
“What’s the angriest song on the new album?” Clarissa asked.
I looked at Andrew who hadn’t said a word up until that point. “Shattered Crowns,” he said softly, and I nodded.
“What’s it about?” Reese asked.
“Pride. Stubbornness. Lost love,” I told him.
I’d written it when Emily and I had been broken up. She’d never heard it. It was going to be a bonus track on the album, and I’d wanted to surprise her with it.
“Is it based on real life? One of you have a bad break-up?” Clarissa asked, eyeing us all eagerly.
She loved the juicy shit we were spouting that we’d sort of pulled out of our asses. We were so far away from the talking points that Emily was going to ring Derrick’s neck when we were done. It was his fault we’d gotten stuck. He didn’t know when to be quiet.
“Yeah, it is,” I said. “I was with this girl, and I let her go. I didn’t realize what a mistake it was at the time. My pride got in the way, and when I wrote this song it was at a point where even though I wanted her back, I knew couldn’t give her what she wanted.”
“What did she want?” Reese asked, both him and Clarissa practically salivating.
“A fairytale life,” I said simply and finally looked up to meet Emily’s gaze just for a second, because the last thing I wanted was anyone noticing me glancing at her and figuring out the song was about her. Her eyes were wide. I knew she’d make me play the song for her later.
“Your life seems pretty magical now,” Clarissa said. “I mean, you’ve got an EP that everyone went nuts for, a song that went to number one over the summer, a new number one hit single two weeks running, you’ve got a new album coming out that’s predicted to top the charts, and you’ve got a teaser tour that is the predecessor to your nationwide tour next summer. What more could you want?”
“It has been pretty surreal,” Leo chimed in.
“So what happened to the girl?” Clarissa asked.
Damn. I was hoping she’d let it drop.
I shrugged. “I like to think that she eventually got her fairytale ending,” I said, being intentionally cryptic.
“So, can we hear the song?” Reese asked, dying to preview our new song on his show. It wasn’t going to happen.
“Sorry, not today,” I said, not even making eye contact with Jonathan, because even if he wanted us to play it, which I didn’t think he would, I wasn’t going to. No one but Emily was hearing it until the album came out. “But we will play Without You.”
Clarissa grinned. “I’m so in love with that song, so I guess we’ll take it. I know it’s a new listener favorite, so all of you out there just sit back and be patient while we take a quick break. When we return, we’ll have Liar’s Edge doing an acoustic version of their hit song Without You. Hold tight while we pause for station identification.”
I sighed and leaned back in my chair, not realizi
ng how tense I’d gotten in the past few minutes. Then I reached around Leo and slapped Derrick upside his head.
“What the fuck, Zack?” he growled at me as he rubbed the back of his head.
“Keep your mouth shut,” I warned him under my breath, causing him to narrow his eyes at me and pout. He knew I wasn’t messing around.
Jonathan burst into the studio at that moment. “How’s it going, guys?” he asked curtly, knowing full well how it was going. We all knew it was his way of warning us to keep our personal shit at bay.
“We’ve got this,” I told him, willing him to leave.
“You’d better have it,” he warned, eyeing me for a few seconds before he turned and left, leaving Emily standing behind him. She didn’t even look at me as she crossed the room and stood right behind Derrick.
“Derrick,” she said, glaring down at him.
He wouldn’t look at her, but he sighed. “I know, I know.”
Then she got down right next to his ear, so only Leo and I could hear, and hissed, “Do not pull that shit again. You just made it look like you all are fighting. I don’t give a shit what you think about anything. When you’re promoting Liar’s Edge, you promote the whole band. Put your petty shit to the side.”
Then she stood up straight, smiled at Clarissa and Reese who thankfully hadn’t heard her, and marched out of the room. I smiled, proud of my girl for being such a ballbuster.
When she got back outside, I saw Jonathan start to talk to her, waving his arms, his face telling us exactly how he felt, even if we couldn’t hear him. Emily was talking with him, probably telling him what she’d said, and then she put her hand on his shoulder as if to calm him down. I saw red. Her hand, the one that was wearing my ring, was actually rubbing up and down on his arm. I was sure she was telling him that we wouldn’t let him down, that I’d keep the guys in line, but did she really have to touch him while she said it?
“Okay, we’re back with Liar’s Edge, and in a moment we’ll hear them play their new, freaking amazing single, Without You, but first let’s take some listener calls,” Clarissa said.
Uh, what?
I looked at Emily whose eyes were wide, but Jonathan was motioning for me to turn back around. Taking listener calls was not part of the deal, and I was pretty sure Jonathan had decided to let us do that on his own. Well good, maybe now Emily would see what an asshole he was and how he only cared about himself.
“Our first caller is Darcy. Hi Darcy.”
“Hi! My question is for Zack.”
“Of course it is,” Derrick grumbled, and we all ignored him.
“Go ahead and ask your question, Darcy,” Clarissa prompted.
“Um, okay, uh, what’s your favorite song off of the new album?”
“That would have to be Without You. It’s a great single. If you haven’t downloaded it, get it now.” I said, knowing it was what Jonathan wanted me to say.
He’d told us to promote the hell out of the single as it had been steadily climbing the charts over the past two weeks since it released. And with Lost Chances holding steady at number one and Jump still in the top thirty, we were in a really good place.
“Alright, thank you, Darcy. Next up is Grayson,” Reese said. “Go ahead with your question.”
And that’s how it was for the next five minutes. Fans asked us random questions about ourselves and the album. I got asked out three times, and one girl asked for Derrick’s phone number, which he actually started to recite before Reese muted his mic.
“We have time for one more question,” Clarissa said. “This is Pierce.”
“My question is for Andrew,” he said, and I turned to see the color drain from Andrew’s face. I wondered what that was all about.
“What’s your question, Pierce?”
“Andrew, are you gay or straight?” he asked, and I almost started choking, not believing someone had asked him that, but the guy wasn’t done. “Because, if you’re gay, I totally want to go out with you.”
Derrick barked out a laugh, but thankfully he didn’t say anything. I think he knew Leo and I would take him down if he outed Andrew on the radio.
“That wasn’t a question,” Leo said, obviously trying to deflect the attention from Andrew who I was afraid wouldn’t be able to speak.
“He asked a question,” Reese reminded us, and Andrew got even paler.
“Nah, he just looks pretty, so people ask him that all the time,” I said, pulling Andrew into a headlock to make him snap out of his panicked trance. We had his back, but he couldn’t freak out like that if he didn’t want people to actually know he liked guys. “He’s a huge fan of the ladies, sorry Pierce.”
It was half true.
“Damn,” Pierce said before he was disconnected.
“Alright, when we come back from this break these guys will have guitars in hand and will be ready to rock out for us,” Reese said and slid his headphones off. He turned to us. “Sorry about that last question. When we screened him, he wasn’t planning to ask that, but you can never predict what will happen when you get someone on the air.”
“It’s fine,” I told him, as Andrew fiddled with his guitar strings.
He’d bolted up from his seat as soon as the commercial break had started and was hunched down by his case in the corner of the room.
“Your boy seemed a little panicked there,” Reese commented, no doubt trying to get me to admit something that wasn’t mine to share.
“He just doesn’t like interviews,” I explained, and I was at least half-right.
When we returned from the commercial break, we jammed out one of the most awesome acoustic versions of Without You we’d ever played, finishing the interview on a wicked high note before we got out of there as fast as we could. I knew we’d exposed ourselves more than we’d intended, and we’d hear about it all the way to the studio.
“Zack, ride with me,” Jonathan said, and there wasn’t a question in his statement. It was a command.
“But I have my truck,” I said, knowing it was a lame excuse.
“Give Leo the keys,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at me as if to say, ‘You’re not getting out of this that easily’.
I sighed as I tossed my cousin the keys. “I’ll see you guys there.”
Emily came out of the building and walked across the parking lot toward me. She’d left behind some merchandise and had been talking to the station manager while we’d all filed out. I wondered if she’d said anything to him about the question and answer portion of the interview that she hadn’t been looped into. Or maybe that would be between her and Jonathan.
“Nice save,” she said, smiling at me.
“I seriously pulled that out of nowhere.”
“I know. I could tell, but it was good.”
“Did we come off like assholes or amateurs?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure. I think on one level, you all showed that you’re human, but on the other hand you came off a little unprofessional.”
I shook my head. “Fucking Derrick. I swear, I’m going to kick his ass out of the band if he keeps this shit up.”
She cocked her head to the side.
“What?”
She hesitated before saying, “At this point, I’m not sure that’s not the worst idea out there.”
I was shocked that she’d said that. Sure, Derrick was an idiot and he’d embarrassed us in the interview, but he was our drummer. He’d been with us since the beginning. He was one of my best friends. I wasn’t kicking him out of the band.
“That’s not an option,” I said firmly.
She shrugged. “Then you need to talk to him. I’ve been dealing with his shit all summer, and I know that’s what you pay me to do, but quite honestly, he’s a little out of control. And he’s using again.”
I knew Emily’s emotions toward Derrick were a little heightened since he’d been sleeping, and doing God knows what else with her sister for the past two weeks, but she couldn’t let that affect her judgment. Ke
ely was an adult who could make her own mistakes if she wanted, but if Derrick had gotten her into drugs, I could sort of understand Emily’s stance on him.
I sighed. “I know he’s using. I know what he looks like when he’s been partying too much, and he’s looked like that all week. I’m sorry he dragged Keely into his world.”
Emily’s face darkened. “I’ve talked to her like nine times about him, but she won’t listen. She’s so stupid to hang out with him. She’d better not be doing anything hardcore. What’s he into?”
“Coke. It’s always been his go-to party drug.”
“And yours?” she asked, which I thought was sort of below the belt.
I hadn’t done anything wrong last time I checked. I figured a part of her probably blamed me for Keely even knowing Derrick in the first place.
“Until the day Lily was born, yeah, it was, if you want the truth, but I haven’t touched the stuff in years.”
“Good,” she said, the rigid girl she’d been when I’d first met her coming out.
She’d never been a big fan of drugs, which was probably smart. I had a hard time remembering what I’d done, or honestly, who I’d done when I was high. I’d also probably lost a considerable amount of brain cells in the process.
“Now I’m just addicted to you,” I told her, trying to be cute.
She grinned and wrapped her arms around my waist as she looked up at me. Apparently I was forgiven. “Aww, that was sweet. Nice save, Easton.”
I shrugged. “It’s just what I do.”
“Okay, I have to go. Sierra and I are taking Lily to the park today. Good luck with Jonathan,” she said, raising up on her tiptoes so she could kiss me.
“What does he want to talk to me about?”
“The interview, Derrick, Andrew. All the band BS.”
“Great,” I muttered, and she kissed me again.
“Love you, baby,” she said before she turned and walked toward my truck. The guys were dropping her off before they headed to the studio.
Broken Fairytales Series Box Set (Broken Fairytales, Buried Castles, Shattered Crowns) Page 81