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“And when you say deal with the situation...” Abigail hesitated, raising an eyebrow at Apollo. “You mean...”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Apollo snapped as if whatever he was commanding her should be obvious. He shooed her out of the room. Then, fixing his gaze on me, he spoke calmly. “I find I’m not in the frame of mind I thought I would be for our meeting today. Perhaps we can take a raincheck?”
“S-sure.” I tried to sound unfazed by what I’d just witnessed, but I was clearly rattled.
He thrust my recording device into my hand. I assumed it had been destroyed in the chaos, but he had apparently been so kind as to preserve it for me. “I’ll see you later, Luna Black.”
The way he always used my full name, or ‘Ms. Black’, always made me feel a bit icky, but following what I’d just seen, it positively made me shiver. I don’t think I even managed to stammer out my own greeting – I just left, letting the door shut of its own accord behind me.
In the elevator, I looked down at my hand. The little blinking redrecordlight was still flashing away there. I stared at it for a moment before I realized what that meant. Whatever had just happened in there, I’d gotten it on tape. I quickly hitstop, as if someone might notice and chase me down, and slid it into my pocket.
Luna:I’m done with my meeting. Are you free?
Sylvester:Yes, I’m at my office. I’ll send you the address.
I was slightly in a daze. Before I knew it, I was walking into Sylvester’s office, with little recollection of how I’d made it there.
Sylvester walked over to greet me, something like concern creeping onto his face. “Luna, are you okay? You’re always rather pale, but you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I’m – er – I – ah...” I was more rattled than I’d realized. The consequences of repressing most of my feelings for a number of years were coming back to bite me in the ass.
“Come on, take a seat.”
I didn’t move, so Sylvester brought one of the comfier padded chairs over behind me and guided me into the seat. I sat there stiffly, my arms still clutching my small bag to my chest, protectively.
Sylvester murmured. “You’re tense.” He gently lifted the bag strap off my shoulder and slid the bag out from my arms, putting it carefully onto the floor next to my chair. His voice was so deep and soothing. “What happened, Luna? Did someone hurt you?”
I shook my head. I realized my breathing was slightly rattling. I didn’t feel like I could take in enough oxygen. Tears, stupid tears, sprung to my eyes, but my vision was blurry and I didn’t feel enough in my body in that moment to care about how embarrassing it was to cry in front of Sylvester.
“It’s okay. You don’t need to tell me. Let me play you some music while you recover.”
Sylvester sat on the floor next to my chair, so he was sideways on rather than facing me, and started scrolling through his phone. Eventually, he made a satisfied noise, and the speakers that surrounded the room started up. I noticed the opening of the first song immediately. He was playing the albumLow, by David Bowie. “Any particular song?”
I managed to get the words out. “Speed of Life, please.”
“On it.” A few seconds later, the song changed to my request.
I focused on the instruments and synths in the music – it was an instrumental, no vocals, and I’d always found it relaxing, despite how odd a song it was. Eventually, blinking, I came out of whatever trance I’d been in. I was still fragile, but the music grounded me. Always had.
I looked at Sylvester, who seemed quite content just sitting on the floor by my feet and listening to the song, too. He glanced up when he saw me looking at him and smiled – a warm, comforting smile that transformed his face so much that I almost felt we were both teenagers again, listening to music in his tiny bedroom, where we’d had to sit knee-to-knee on the bed as there wasn’t enough space on the floor for two people.
Except we weren’t teenagers, and I wasn’t in Sylvester’s home. I was in his gigantic office where he ran his gigantic entertainment business. We were no longer equals.
Still, he had done something nice. “Thank you.” It was difficult to say those words to him.
“No problem. Do you want to talk about it?”
I shook my head. “Let’s get the meeting started.”
Sylvester sprung up from the floor. “Over here, then, please!”
He led me over to his desk, which was huge, just as the rest of the office was, and framed him with the light flooding in through the windows so he was a silhouette for most of the meeting.
I took him through the basics of how a ghostwriting memoir collaboration worked, how our meetings would be structured, and the schedule and timeline of my own part of the collaboration – the writing. He nodded and agreed to everything. In that way, he was very unlike Apollo, who’d had about a hundred questions to each tiny detail about the process, and many,manysuggestions as to how we could tweak the process for optimum performance. Strangely, in the end, our working routine had turned out quite similarly to the one I initially proposed, but he had seemed satisfied that he’d dabbled in it, so I didn’t let him know this.
“At this point, we’d normally do personal introductions, but we already know each other, so... maybe we can ask each other any questions we want to know at this time?” I had a question in mind.
“Sure. I don’t know if I have any questions for you just yet. None that wouldn’t break your non-disclosure agreement regarding my brother, anyway.” Sylvester grinned as if he were joking, but there was an unusual seriousness in his eyes. Apollo’s memoir really had rattled him and his brothers.
