22. Zak
Zak had fallen into a ritual of watching the sunrise with Chase on their separate balconies. Sometimes they talked, sometimes she workshopped guitar parts to get his opinions.
The morning of their first and second shows, Zak sat on her patio lounger in quiet contemplation. Trying not to think about the night before. About Chase’s bare chest. The way his lips felt on her cheek, the way his stubble grazed her skin. How unfair it was that another person’s smile had the ability to tie her stomach into inescapable knots.
Her first and only love was Saint of Spades. The band was her everything, and when it came to dating, no man had ever wanted to stick around once they realized she wouldn’t budge on her passions to make time for relationships. No one had ever understood why she zoned out in the middle of conversations, why she regularly neglected basic responsibilities like work, chores, and making herself look presentable.
And she, in turn, had never cared to explain herself. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever had a true crush. That kind of attraction had always been fleeting, far-between, and easy to cast aside.
That was what made it especially confusing when Chase slowly consumed her thoughts like nothing ever had before. Two months ago, she was writing off her interactions with him as a necessary evil, then a curiosity, and now she looked forward to being around him so much that she practically held her breath in anticipation of the sound of the sliding glass door to her left.
Every morning she told herself today would be the day she let go of those feelings before she did something stupid, like act on them.
There was the competition to worry about, and the future of her band. Both things that made wanting him illicit, and had her wondering why she couldn’t stop thinking about him like she had every other man. She’d been surrounded by four decently handsome guys whom she got along well with for seven years, and never once had she looked at them the way she looked at Chase when he walked out just now.
Admiring the glow of morning on his skin and internally melting as her eyes cataloged every freckle scattered across his crooked nose, his cheeks, his forearms.
He wore a white T-shirt, but she knew now that he had freckles along his chest, too. She wanted to curl her fingers under the hem and pull it over his head, slowly. Wanted to trace a path up to those freckles with her lips… or to trace a path down with her tongue and be just as nice to him, for once, as he always was to her.
His smile made her so weak that she was glad she was already seated, or her knees might have given out.
“Morning,” he said, his voice gravelly and low from sleep.
She raised her coffee mug. “Cheers to Episode One.”
He sucked in a breath. “Cheers to hopefully not humiliating you and the rest of the band on TV.”
They each took a sip together. Another routine they’d slipped into.
“You haven’t humiliated yourself yet. What makes you think today will be the day?”
Chase stretched back in the lounger and crossed his hands behind his head. She tore her wandering eyes from his flexed arms and settled them on the tip of his nose. A body part that couldn’t possibly get her in trouble.
“Of course you’re going in confident like that,” he said. “You’ve been doing this your whole life. You could play your backlist blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back.”
“Only if it was my strumming hand.”
“Modest.” He smirked. “But that’s what I mean. Are you forgetting how new this all is to me? Two months ago, I was job hunting for something that would take me out of the spotlight.”
Zak pulled her sunglasses over her eyes. “I hear you were quite the shower singer at the time, though.”
“God save me the day you and Lydia get to share an actual conversation.”
She tried not to read into that comment, she really did. Even if it sounded like he was thinking about bringing her back to his apartment and introducing her to his family. Obviously, Chase wasn’t the only one who needed to make a verbal vow to keep things platonic.
Pull yourself together.
“Well, you’re wrong if you think I never have imposter syndrome,” she circled back. “How could I not? I’ve been putting my name out there everywhere for seven years and I have nothing to show for it. Even now. The show is an amazing opportunity, but it’s not a guarantee that we’ll have any success afterward. The music industry is like a roulette board. You might win big one moment and lose everything the next.”
Chase rolled onto his side facing her, and something about the movement felt inexplicably close from twenty feet away. As though he were lying next to her.
“Well, I can’t speak for the music industry, but I can speak for the fact that you’re the last person in the world who should feel like an imposter. You’re always so zoned in—do you even notice the way the crowd singles you out, out of everyone in the band? The way people stop what they’re doing just to watch your solos?”
Her forehead crinkled. “What are you talking about? We haven’t played as a whole band in front of a crowd since Link died.”
Was he bullshitting her to make her feel better?
His eyes blew wide before he winced.
She had caught him in a lie, but it couldn’t be that one. Chase was too smart to try to sugarcoat her anxiety with the most obvious fib in history. Which meant he had seen one of her shows. Just not one that he’d been in.
“You saw us play.”
Chase gave a nod.
“That’s how you knew about Link.”
“I was at one of your shows, before he died. I meant to tell you at the reunion when I saw you,” he explained. “But then…”
“I was hostile and unreceptive, yeah, yeah. I remember that part.”
She waved a hand, then held it to her chest. Stuck, mentally, on the image of Chase coming up to her that night to tell her he had seen her band, and that he loved her music. An image so different from the one she’d conjured up, where he must have stopped by to gloat and tease her about all the terrible decision-making that had led her to become the West Coast’s biggest failure of a bartender.
The pause in their conversation felt like it lasted forever, as she went back and tried to rewrite their history in her head. Tried to remember exactly what he had said and reflect on it, knowing what she knew now.
“When?” she asked, too frazzled to think of anything else to say.
“Sometime in May. I was in a dark place for a long time after moving back home. Everything about my life was different, but it was like being back at the start. In the same city I left. I started going to Jerri’s a while ago. I was sick of sitting around the house, but couldn’t deal with the thought of someone recognizing me. So I picked somewhere that looked safe, and I sat in the back row. And one night, you were there.”
“You came back? To see us again?” she pieced together.
“Yeah, that’s when Jerri told me. He’s a real dick, by the way.”
Every bar owner she knew was a dick, but she could break that bad news to him later.
“I thought you were amazing,” he said. “I thought your whole band was amazing. And I thought if I tried again, maybe I’d have the guts to talk to you.”
A pang of tenderness shot straight through her heart. She was grateful for the two railings and fifty-foot drop separating them because this time, she wasn’t sure if anything else could have stopped her from kissing him.
“It’s part of why I’m so freaked out to be on stage with you all. Link was special. You all had something special, together,” Chase continued. His chest rose and fell. “You know when you hear a song and it feels like a glimpse into your soul? Like the person who wrote it was writing to you? That’s how your music made me feel that night.”
“You’re special, too,” she said, but cut herself off there.
If she fell into thinking of all the ways Chase was special, it would be impossible to climb out of that pit by standing on the one reason she couldn’t have him.
The reality of on-stage performances was something no novice could imagine.
To start, stage lights were hot. It didn’t take long for it to feel like they were burning holes through Zak’s skin. A person could spend their entire life outside under the sun’s rays and still be struck by how warm it felt under lasers and spotlights.
Then, there was the common point of anxiety: what about the audience? Hundreds—thousands, for the lucky ones—of eyes on the band. Watching every interaction, every movement, every mistake. The nice thing about those searing lights was the way they made all other pressures disappear. People became maroon and navy and violet shadows filling limitless space. And it wasn’t like anyone near the amplifiers could hear a word the concertgoers said anyway.
Zak had been so nervous before her first live performance, at sixteen, she thought she was going into cardiac arrest backstage. But soon after stepping out, she realized how cathartic it could be. It didn’t matter how big the crowd was because it always felt like just her and her guitar up there.
She thought about telling Chase that story before they stepped past the curtains, as she watched his face go blank staring at the band who went before them, but she couldn’t find the words. Then another thought popped into her mind: she didn’t want to color his first experience with her own. She wanted him to go through every emotion, including the nerves and nausea and self-doubt.
This was a moment he would remember forever. It was the moment he would know if he could picture himself in the role once the show was over.
Only he could decide if this was what he wanted his life to be.
So, she reached out and squeezed his arm to remind him of their conversation earlier. To remind him she believed in him, and that she was there.
“?Que estas haciendo?” What are you doing? Edge shot her an inquisitive look that made her drop her hand.
Just because Chase knew how she felt about him, that didn’t mean she needed to broadcast it to everyone else.
Dallas looked her up and down as well, but nowhere near as perceptively. “By the way, nice dress, Z. You look—”
“Sexy,” Alex interjected with a sharp grin.
“I was going to say bangable, but sure. Same difference.” The highest order of compliment Dallas’s lizard brain could muster, no doubt.
Chase took a deep breath through his nose, while she pretended not to think about the many words he had used to describe the same dress last night.
Zak curled a hand over the sheer panel on her waist. “You’ve known me for over seven years, and I’ve never once looked bangable?”
“Nah.” His nose wrinkled. “‘Cause most of the time you’re giving me that look my mom used to give me when I brought home my report card.”
She scowled.
“Yeah. That one. Hey, what song are we playing again?”
Zak could kill him, but they still needed someone to play the other guitar part, so she punched him instead.
“Ow.” He rubbed his bicep. “Kidding, obviously. Where’d your sense of humor go?”
“I left it back home,” she said. “I don’t need a sense of humor while I’m here. I need to win.”
“‘Kerosene’.” Edge side-eyed Dallas. “Because I’m not convinced you were kidding about not knowing the song.”
Round One was themed “Openers”. Songs that would be good concert or album-starters. Something energetic, easy to follow, and with a flair that showed off a band’s signature style. “Kerosene”was their most formulaic original, relying heavily on a catchy bass riff and, now that they had him, Chase’s vocal range.
The stage crew finished the sound check, then their band was called out by the host, C-lister Dave Barker. Known for his roles in family Christmas movies and that one time he threw a tantrum in an ice cream shop when he found out they had discontinued his favorite brownie sundae.
Saint of Spades took their places on stage before three judges, each looking sidetracked until the cameras were on them.
Zak’s cheeks hurt from fake smiling after exactly sixty seconds, but she sucked it up. These people decided where her career went from here. They were about to tell her if she was good enough or not, and she had never received a favorable answer to that question before.
But it probably didn’t matter how pleasant she appeared, because everyone was focused on Chase. He was the story they were interested in, and as she had warned him, people cared about the story most of all.
“I must admit, this is one of the most shocking twists we could have seen, at the very beginning of our inaugural season,” said judge Neil Pritchard, leading man for a UK-based band that put out one platinum rock album nearly twenty years ago before splitting up.
“Saint of Spades,” judge Kennedy Dylan, songwriter and pop-rock princess, said the name of their band like it was too many syllables for her to waste time on. “Coming on this show after experiencing so much tragedy was a bold move. I wonder if it will all pay off.”
“You haven’t been together as long as the other bands here, haven’t had the chance to develop your sound. Are you sure you have what it takes?” said the final judge, Dom Schwartz. A Tribute Records talent acquisition executive, no doubt here to ensure a favorable outcome for his label during the finale.
Zak bit the insides of her cheeks. How fortunate one of her best friends had died so the Amped screenwriters could put together a compelling script about it.
Chase gave his best camera-ready smile, but they were cut.
They ended up standing there for thirty minutes. Re-filming the intro two more times, so the judges could deliver their lines with the optimal combination of drama and sympathy.
Finally, the cameras were rolling on them. Ready for that first song, which they received a cue for into each of their earpieces. Edge and Dallas started off for a few bars, and then the rest of the background music kicked in. A loud, raging harmony. Chase’s voice rose in volume, bringing the first verse to life:
“Aching feet and burning eyes
Bruised like the night sky
Wanderer, I pace through the streets
Forgot who I was, lost who I am
I see the flooded road ahead”
It was one of her first songs, a piece of her heart that she had penned in the backseat of her car in a Cracker Barrel parking lot.
She stole a glance at the judges’ booth as they played to see what the “experts” thought, but it was difficult to tell when they all wore the same mask of feigned awe. Acting like they had never heard Chase sing before and didn’t realize what he was capable of. Everyone on the TV studio’s payroll seemed committed to the narrative that it was a spectacular circus trick for a professional athlete to also have a set of pipes.
Pride washed over her, hearing Chase’s sound shine after all the time she had taken to help him find it. His voice had a sprawling range and beautiful, evocative tone that belonged to only him. One that brought her back to the uninhibited way he had belted into that karaoke microphone.
He was giving this his everything. He gave everything his everything. So what would it be like if he stayed? What would it feel like to have his everything?
“Cooling sweat and stinging tears
Another hour, another year
Oceans of blood over pavement and earth
Glad you got your pleasure first”
Zak’s solo was brief but flashy. Her fingers flew from the bottom to the top of the neck, raining down on the frets with surging emotion. The rush that came from being exactly who she was meant to be in this moment.
Riding an adrenaline high, she stole center stage beside Chase and locked eyes with him, signaling for him to follow her lead. He sounded perfect, but he stood at the mic stand like someone had nailed his feet to the floor.
It took some exaggerated jumping, thrashing, and hair whipping, but eventually she got him to move with the music. To move with her. Because it was her Chase paid attention to, his eyes ablaze, his lips curved into a smile, as they fooled around on stage.
Once she was confident he wouldn”t freeze up again, she backed off. Hoping distance would dissolve the heat between them as they launched into another repeat of the chord sequence for the chorus.
“I would light myself on fire
If it numbed the pain
I could ignite like kerosene
Float away like smoke and ash
Come down like acid rain
Make you suffocate”
They let the final chord ring. Blurring, buzzing. Once the sound dissipated, applause faded in.