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“That’s what I have so far,” he said, stilling his fingers and looking at me warily. “What do you think?”
“It’s amazing.”
His eyes lit up. “Yeah?”
I nodded slowly. “Better than the last album.”
“That’s what I thought!” He got up and paced around like the excited fool he was. Then, he turned back to face me with fear and uncertainty. “I didn’t give you a choice with the last song, Blaire. And I didn’t think it was fair to just record this, knowing how you felt about the last one.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to make sure you were okay with it.”
“You don’t get to choose when inspiration strikes, Campbell.”
“I know but…”
“It’s okay,” I finally said. I looked down at the phone in my hand. The secret that was hidden in that video. He’d done that for me just because he’d thought I’d asked. For no other reason. Could I really deny him a song that would help his career? I met his eyes again. “You can record it.”
He blew out a relieved breath. “Oh, good. I was going to lay it down with Weston later this week if you were okay with it.”
“Weston? Really?”
“Yeah, we’ve been hanging out. He’s a cool guy. Plus, he works in a local studio. You can swing by to hear it if you want.”
I gulped and drew back. I couldn’t fall further for this man. He’d hurt me once, and he was surely leaving again. No matter what he thought. LA was his home now.
“Maybe.”
He heard my refusal in the word and just nodded. “Well, if you change your mind,” he said, taking my phone out of my hand and typing into it, “here’s my number.”
Then, he smiled down at me, and it took everything in me not to reach up onto my tiptoes and drag his mouth down to mine. He was gone before I could do something stupid, and I flopped back on the couch.
“I am so screwed.”
11
Campbell
“What do you think about this?” Weston asked.
His fingers moved effortlessly across the keys. He pulled sound from the instrument in a way that I’d never encountered. Cosmere’s keyboardist, Michael, was good at keys, but Weston had a completely different ear. He wasn’t playing for mainstream music. He was just a professional who had done a lot of work. Thus, the sound was so much more dynamic.
“Fuck, man. That’s it.”
“Are you sure?” Weston looked back at me. “I could do something like this.”
Then, he tried a slightly modified rhythm that I also liked, but it wasn’t quite right for this song.
“No, the first one. But hang on to the second. I have an idea for that one.”
“Okay. I’ll record it, and we can lay it over what we have so far.”
I nodded at Weston as he set up the recording for the keyboard section. It felt fucking good to be back in the studio. Especially this studio. Even though it made no sense. I’d always wanted that LA studio, where everything was moving fast and my career was on the line. I’d wanted that life.
Now that I had it, being in this small space—at LBK Studios, in downtown Lubbock, where the only thing that mattered was the music—felt revelatory. How had I ever worked out my songs in LA? It was exhausting and hardly the best place to get out of a creative rut.
It’d made sense with the first album when we walked in on a creative high, but now, we were exhausted from tour, and the record label was demanding more and more from us. We were superstars with everything we’d ever wanted, and suddenly, I wished for just a sliver of downtime. An ounce of breathing room to rediscover what I loved about all of this.
Sitting in Weston’s small studio was giving me that feeling again.
Weston finished playing and then headed back into the booth. A few minutes later, his voice came through the speakers. “Hey, dude, your phone has been ringing nonstop. Looks like it might be an emergency.”
I furrowed my brow. What kind of emergency could be happening?
I left my guitar, grabbed my phone, and saw that the missed calls were all from LA. My manager, publicist, a guy at the record label, Santi, and Viv had all called in the last half hour. What the hell was happening?
“Uh, maybe it’s because of this,” Weston said.
“What?”
He passed me his phone. “Someone sent this to me while we were recording.”
I took the phone. On the screen was Blaire’s video of us doing the “I See the Real You” challenge. Already, the views were in the millions.
It had been two days since we’d recorded the video in her house. Two days that I’d been waiting for her to post it. Two days that I’d thought maybe she’d changed her mind.
After all, I’d spent years keeping her out of my spotlight. I’d never confessed who the song was about. I’d hinted that it was about someone, but I respected her privacy. And she never said that she wanted to be known for it. Now, here we were, with this video. It was incriminating, to say the least. It looked like we were half-ready to rip each other’s clothes off. And I’d considered it. If she had looked at me like she was half-interested, I would have. But instead, I had seen fear and hurt, mixed with desire. Those were things I couldn’t…wouldn’t touch.
