20. Zak

Days passed before the next time Zak was alone with Chase.

She wasn’t avoiding him, per se, there was just a lot going on and a good portion of it involved having a camera crew on stand-by. Which was convenient, because she did need something to take her mind off him, and there was no better chaperone than an entire nation’s worth of at-home viewers.

The first week so far had been packed between hair and makeup appointments, photoshoots, re-filming their audition song with their new lead singer, and getting their first two songs performance-ready for next week.

Amped was broken into three segments of three episodes. The first two rounds of each segment were recorded back-to-back, with a third, live round filmed two weeks later. The format provided a songwriting buffer for contestants, an editing buffer for the production team, and plenty of time for the celebrity judges to jet back and forth from wherever else they needed to be.

At the end of Episode Three and Episode Six, three bands would be eliminated—one by viewer vote, one by the judges’ vote, and one by whichever rotating guest star popped in to bolster their image with heartwarming advice clips. Leaving behind the final three to battle it out in episodes seven through nine.

Zak, for one, could not wait for some washed-up industry baby to tell her their opening song was too repetitive, too heavy, too outdated, too out-there. Or one of the million other critiques she was brainstorming as she sat out on the balcony making the slightest tweaks to her guitar part. Not a single person in the audience or judges’ panel was going to notice the changes, let alone appreciate them, but she would never forgive herself if she didn’t spend what little free time she had in pursuit of perfection.

For all the jokes Zak used to make about not having any personal space at the apartment, she had no idea what to do with it now that she had a bed and a bathroom and a big empty room all to herself.

She had never lived alone. Not since those few months she spent in her car before moving in with Alex, Dallas, and Link. It was an intense quiet, an endless reserve of hot water in the shower. A soft mattress which quickly informed her that she had back pain in her early twenties.

The worst part was that she didn’t know what to do with herself when everyone turned in after a day full of work and a night full of exploring the city.

Her second evening alone, she fell asleep for an hour in the garden tub listening to classical radio and emptying an entire bottle of champagne by herself. On night three, she played her guitar for so long, just to fill the silence, that she broke a callus. Chase and Dallas, in their adjoining rooms, probably hadn’t heard the music, but they had heard the slew of foul language that flew out of her mouth afterward.

If she woke up early enough, she would play outside like she did back home. Today she rose at some ungodly hour, when the slightest hint of sunshine was just beginning to cast a glow around the skyscrapers. Between that and the streetlamps reflecting off of steel and glass, it was plenty light enough to read her notes.

The view was better here than from her apartment. There was more greenery, more activity. The weather was cool enough for a sweatshirt, and the sidewalks were already stippled with people on their way to work.

“I liked the one before that better.”

Zak jerked in her seat and fumbled her guitar. She saved it before it hit the concrete, but not before it knocked over her cup of coffee. She cursed as hot liquid spilled onto her bare foot.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” Chase leaned against the railing of his balcony. He held out his own white ceramic mug, the hotel’s logo gilded on the front. “Here. You can have mine.”

“You did not scare me.” She propped her guitar up in the second chair, collected her empty cup, and walked over to meet him.

“Oh, yeah?” His humored gaze followed the river of spilled coffee pouring off the ledge, into the bushes below. “Sorry to distract you, then.”

For that, he owed her no apology. She needed a distraction from messing around with a crowd-favorite number they’d played at countless gigs already, but now she had a new problem: what was going to distract her from Chase?

She took his mug and poured half into hers before handing it back. “Cheers.”

“Don’t you have to cheers to something?” he asked, clinking rims with her over the railing.

“Cheers to… distractions,” she tossed out.

“Cheers to you not avoiding me today. Hopefully.”

She picked a random building to focus on. “I haven’t been.”

Okay, so maybe she had been avoiding him, but only in situations that involved her being alone with him. Like she was presently.

She retreated to the safety of her patio chair and tried to picture him as one of the other guys.

“Could’ve fooled me.” Chase sat in his own chair, facing her. “But if I have to get up at the ass-crack of dawn to hang out with you, then so be it. I woke up early for years, for less important things.”

So hanging out with her was more important than hockey training, but she wasn’t sure what the start and end points were on his spectrum of importance. His statement could mean anything, she told herself. Just like the way he was looking at her could mean anything.

Stop it. You work with him. Think about work.

Zak grabbed her guitar. “So, you think the other version was better?”

“Yeah, but I only heard part of it. Run the other ones back for me?”

That, she could do. Playing guitar qualified as work.

Zak wasn’t here to make friends. She was here to get exposure, and, at best, to sign a record deal. Making friends had never been a priority of hers at home, so it certainly wasn’t going to be a priority in a competitive setting.

Evidently, hers was not a unanimous mindset, because the woman sitting next to her in the waiting room would not shut the fuck up.

“I love your look. Very 70s-inspired. How do you get your hair like that?”

Zak’s lip invertedly curled. “By forgetting to brush it.”

“Oh.” This lady giggled. Actually giggled.

Zak released a deep breath and sat back in her chair to stare at the speckled ceiling tiles in Suite E. The room reeked of lemon cleaning products, and there was an instrumental piano cover playing softly in the background. Neither of which did anything to calm her ahead of filming her first interview.

“Well, I’m not really a morning person either,” came the most chipper voice in the world again. Someone needed to learn how to take a hint.

“No offense, but I don’t believe you.”

She giggled again. What on Earth was so funny? “My name’s Izzy. Sartori. Well, actually, it’s Isabella, but nobody calls me that except my mom and grandma. Plus, Izzy just works better for the band. Isabella is so monarchy, so Queen of Spain. And, I mean, I’m not even Spanish. I’m Italian, but you could probably tell because Sartori is like a flashing signal with a siren screaming, ‘Hey, I’m Italian!’ Except, to my family in Italy, I’m just American. Anyway, dropping the last name, Izzy is more… metal. Ya know?”

“Sure.”

Zak dropped her chin and looked at Izzy because, for one, it was apparent that she wasn’t squirming her way out of the conversation with a few clipped remarks. And for two, the other woman was hard to ignore when she was wearing a rainbow polka-dotted pantsuit. She was petite, with a head full of long, curly, candy-apple red hair that popped against her olive skin and cognac-brown eyes. In her fist was a water bottle because, obviously, she didn’t need any caffeine.

“What’s your name?” Izzy asked.

“Zak.”

“Oo, now that’s fit for a rock star.”

Isabella was way too overjoyed to be talking to a stranger in a waiting room, but maybe being trapped with her wasn”t the worst thing in the world. At least Izzy’s kindness seemed genuine, which was more than Zak could say for anyone else she’d interacted with here.

Izzy let that train of conversation dissipate for all of two seconds before she nodded to where Zak’s fingertips tapped the armrest of her chair. “Drums?”

“Lead guitar,” she answered. Then remembered how conversations worked. “You?”

“Vocals and bass,” Izzy said, then rattled on about her band, Abstraction, for a little while. They were a four-person metal group out of St. Louis consisting of her sister, Gemma, on keyboard and rhythm guitar, along with their drummer, Jensen, and guitarist, Bobby. They’d all met in college when Izzy was working on a degree in organic chemistry that she finished but never used. Although now, she had the periodic table memorized and could name any alkane, cycloalkane, or bicyclic compound on sight… whatever the fuck those were.

The wait time started to fly by, and that probably had something to do with the way words zipped out of Izzy’s mouth at five hundred miles per hour, but it was nice, in a way, to meet someone new. Someone around her own age, who also loved music. Someone who was making it very, very easy to get to know her.

Zak caught herself realizing how crazy it was that she was sitting here, for the first time in her life, surrounded by people who had one massive interest in common with her. People like Izzy, whom she could relate to on some level other than “Work sucks,” or “The weather’s great today,” or “I love a good cheeseburger.”

“I’m rambling, aren’t I?” Izzy hid her mouth behind a hand decked out in a pound’s worth of rings and bracelets. “I’m so sorry, I do that all the time. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah—oh my god, you’re probably sick of me already. But it”s so nice to meet another girl for once. Someone like me. Other than Gemma, but sisters don’t count, especially when you practically have to force them to join your band.” She smiled shyly. Like there was anything shy about her.

Zak wasn’t sure the two of them were as alike as Izzy may think, but the other woman would figure that out on her own soon enough.

“So, tell me about you now.” Izzy propped her chin on her fist.

Funny, Zak felt like she’d already told Izzy everything there was to know about her. Her name. That she played the guitar. Check, and check.

“Where are you from? Oh wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess… Boston? No? That’s right, you don’t have the accent. Maybe Minneapolis? Am I warmer or colder?”

“LA,” Zak said just to get her to stop.

“Lucky you! I love California. Home is nice and all, but so is not being landlocked. We have a river, which is pretty but definitely different from a beach. I’m not going swimming in that water. The lakes are better for that type of thing.” Izzy waited quietly for all of five seconds. “So what about your band? What made you guys audition for the show?”

Zak had never been so grateful for the sound of a door opening. Someone on the other side called her name and she shot out of her seat like it was padded with hot coals.

She offered Izzy a friendly wave goodbye, thinking that was it, but Izzy grabbed a pen off the magazine table between them and wrote a number down on the inside of Zak’s forearm. “I’m in room 824. Give me a call sometime! We’re thinking about having a watch party here in a few weeks.” Izzy flashed her another beaming smile. “You should come, bring the band. If I haven’t freaked you out, that is.”

She was more fatiguing than freaky, but Zak kept that comment to herself. She decided not to offer up her own room number in return though. No one with that amount of energy needed the freedom to contact her at any time. “I’ll think about it. Nice meeting you.”

Kind of.

A thousand dollars per episode. Plus meals. Plus lodging.

That was the chant Zak had looping through her brain since they hit the forty-five-minute mark of filming her private interview. Before now, she didn’t think a video diary entry could be any more grueling to make than a written one. How na?ve she had been.

There was nothing candid about the entire experience. Sergio and his PR intern stood at the harsh line where darkness met blinding studio lighting, positioned so that whenever Zak answered a question from them, she would be responding to the video camera lens as well. She sat on a faux Victorian-era velvet loveseat against a damask backdrop, back arched unnaturally, legs crossed, and chin tipped outward as they had instructed her.

“What was your life like before auditioning for the show?”

“Fine.”

“What do you think of the other contestants so far?”

“They’re fine.”

“How is your band recovering after the loss of your original singer?”

“We’re fine.”

There must have been dozens of questions pitched to her so far, and every single one of them sucked. Her answers must have sucked, too, because Sergio’s intern kept asking her if she could “elaborate” or “explain what that means.”

It wasn’t that she was too shy to speak her mind, it was that she knew how this worked. Reality TV wasn’t recorded, it was curated. She was here to make music—not to tell the entire county about every intimate, scandalous, and heart-wrenching moment in her life.

While filming the audition, she and the others had busted out their most humble expressions as they explained to the judges how winning Amped would be a life-changer for them because they had no money, even though it was all worth it to live in the sunshiny, sparkly City of Angels. How their hometown was the inspiration for their band name, rather than teenage rebellion and gambling.

This time, no one was here to do the wordsmithing for her.

“Do you think Chase Payton is cut out for the role?” Sergio took over for the intern, deviating from the questions on their clipboard.

“What’s your deal with Chase? You have a hard-on for the guy or something?”

So, she wasn’t entirely over the incident from their first day in New York.

Sergio looked bored. “Answer the question.”

Zak’s brows knitted together. Did they really think she’d shit-talk a member of her own band on national television? “Absolutely. I never would have asked him to join the band if I didn’t think he was cut out for it.”

“What about his accident? You don’t think it’ll affect his performance?” Sergio ventured. “Most other contestants here are known for putting on theatrical shows.”

“Good thing this isn’t the fucking theater.” Her elbows locked as she grabbed the edge of the couch cushion. “What a stupid question. Chase is an incredible singer, a natural performer, and nothing can change that. Beethoven couldn’t hear. Stevie Wonder can’t see. Rick Allen’s got one arm and he’s a better drummer than guys with both. Who gives a shit if Chase is missing a leg? I don’t care about what happened to him and neither should anyone else. It has no bearing on who he is out on that stage.”

“It sounds like you have strong feelings about your lead singer. Is there more to your relationship with him?”

This was all inflammatory now, designed to pull an emotional response out of her. Sergio could not have made it more obvious. Something about the topic of Chase had gotten more words out of her than any other interview question so far, and they were capitalizing on it. Better to keep her mouth shut from now on.

“Care to comment?”

Zak frowned. “No comment.”

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