Page 43 of Before You Fell

My pen stills above the page.

Before I can answer, Phoenix directs his gaze at me. “What fucking lines is he talking about?”

His voice cuts through the room in that dangerous way men get when they are two seconds from becoming a problem.

Damon looks at him through the glass. “The first two lines of the third verse. Willow is fixing them.”

“No,” Phoenix says.

Damon lets out a breath, clearly annoyed. “They don’t work.”

“They do fucking work,” Phoenix says. “If she sharpens them, it fucks up the whole thing.”

“The label wants the verse to hit harder.”

“The label is not fucking singing it, are they?”

“No,” Damon says. “You are. Which means it needs to sell when it leaves your mouth.”

The room goes quiet in that careful way studios do when nobody wants to be the first idiot to breathe too loudly.

Jax leans back behind the drums, eyebrows raised as if someone just handed him front-row seats to a fistfight. Jett stands with his bass, watching Phoenix. Cruz stops picking at his guitar strings and lifts his head as a slow grin forms.

Phoenix ignores all of them, focusing his gaze on Damon.

“If she changes those lyrics, I’m not singing them.”

Damon laughs once, without humour. “You don’t get to make that call.”

“Pretty fucking sure I do when it is my mouth on the mic.”

“It is the band’s album.”

“And it sounds better when I’m not singing lyrics approved by men in suits who think heartbreak needs a cleaner hook.”

Damon steps closer to the glass. “We are tweaking it for God’s sake.”

Phoenix’s jaw shifts. “It doesn’t need fucking tweaking.”

“It does if I say it does.”

A hot, stupid thing moves under my ribs, because Phoenix is fighting for the lyrics. My lyrics.

Damon turns his attention toward me. “Willow, tell him.”

Phoenix’s voice snaps before I have a chance to agree with him.

“Don’t put this on fucking Willow.”

Damon’s eyes cut back to him. “She is the songwriter.”

“Exactly.” Phoenix’s stare is hard enough to bruise. “She wrote the lines. They work. So stop fucking sanding the teeth off every song she writes because the label gets nervous when something sounds honest.”

Cruz lets out a low whistle. “Well, shit. Tell him how you really feel.”

Jax points a drumstick toward the glass. “For once, the dramatic prick has a point.”

Damon ignores him. “Phoenix.”