Chapter 3
I let Sheldon and Geoffrey deal with the shitshow that was pre-tour paperwork. Mapping out dates, visas, sorting accommodation, getting plane tickets – that was so far out of my comfort zone it was almost kind of laughable.
Shep, Mira, Annabelle and I focused on finishing the mix of the album with our producer, Archie.
There were worse ways to spend our days than bumming around his studio, The Sunset.
It was small enough to feel intimate but big enough to make you feel like you’d really made it.
The hallways were all painted in washed out pastels and lined with framed discs; sales plaques of the albums that Archie had worked on.
Reliant’s debut, Tearaway , was wedged between two Forever Fading Echoes platinum records.
That’s where Mira and Annabelle found me, two weeks after I agreed to go on the Burning Bright tour.
I was nursing a coffee that tasted like an unholy cocktail of lighter fluid and rocket fuel and staring at our gleaming gold disc.
Archie was fucking crazy about keeping the studio clean; my tired eyes were staring back at me from a half dozen success stories.
“Whatcha doing?” Mira asked, bumping me with her elbow. Annabelle stepped by me to come to a stop on my other side. I raised my arm on instinct, smiling into my coffee when she laced her arm through mine.
“Reflecting,” I replied, taking another sip of my coffee. Sara had been up at four singing about dolphins and I could already feel exhaustion creeping in even though it was only 10:30.
“On our incredible success or your torrid summer of love with Sebastian Jacobs?” Annabelle added, peering at me through her pale blonde fringe.
I’d told them both, the morning after Sebastian had shown up at the house.
Shep had known me the longest, was a brother in all but blood.
He’d been one of the first people I met in LA, I trusted him with my life.
It made sense to tell him first. But there was no way in hell I wasn’t going to tell the girls.
Mira and Annabelle had been part of the reason I’d started dating Sara’s mom, even though I was still reeling from being on the road with Sebastian.
They’re such incredible women, strong and talented and smart and sweet, that I was sure if I could find a woman like them, I’d get married and settle down in a heartbeat.
It was a fallacy, of course, but for a good few years there, I was hopeful that maybe I wasn’t the heathen my parents had preached about while I was still in fucking Pampers.
“Neither,” I shrugged. “Both,” I conceded. “Whatever.”
We’d just released Tearaway when we went on that tour with Burning Bright.
Mira had only joined the band on her 19 th birthday, two weeks before we started recording.
Shep, Annabelle and I had put out a couple of EPs under the Reliant band name with session drummers, and they’d done much better than we expected.
They were pretty decent too and combined with all the live shows we did in and around LA, we’d been able to catch the eyes and ears of our label.
They stumped up the money to get us into The Sunset to record with Archie.
He was pretty in demand by then, having produced Forever Fading Echoes’ platinum-selling, record-breaking, pants-shittingly good debut album.
What I liked about Archie, apart from the fact that he had dimples when he smiled, was that it didn’t matter how much money our label offered him.
He didn’t agree to produce our album until he’d listened to our EPs and met us in person.
(We made the label pay for dinner at some ridiculous high-end restaurant in the city, the kind of place where they have someone on staff just to fold the napkins into elaborate statuettes, it was awesome.)
“Does Sebastian know that you refer to your epic love affair as “whatever”?” Mira asked, fluttering her dark lashes and heaving a sigh so heavy it pushed her boobs against my side.
“God I hope so,” I quipped, smiling at her before taking another sip of my coffee. “You gonna tease me about this forever, or what?”
“Or what,” Annabelle confirmed with a solemn nod. “Max, Maximilian…”
“My name is not Maximilian.”
“Maxi-pad, Maxxie,” she continued, unperturbed. “I thought the most exciting thing about you was how you mysteriously appeared in LA one day, fresh from the Midwest and determined to be a rockstar.”
“Utah is not considered the Midwest,” I pointed out, grinning in spite of myself.
“Fuck off, let me continue my ramble.”
“Alright, continue,” Mira and I were both fighting laughter now, but Annabelle was on a roll .
“But no, really the most exciting thing about you is that you’re secretly gay and you had a months long – MONTHS LONG – affair with the brat prince of rock’n’roll, Sebastian Jacobs, who now goes to fucking Fashion Week and is on billboards in Times Square.”
“Fucking poser,” I muttered under my breath, earning a pinch from Mira. I was trying to stop voicing negative opinions about my future tour mate, so whenever I said something like that in Mira’s presence, she’d pinch me. I had bruises everywhere.
“I’m pretty sure being secretly gay in LA isn’t that exciting,” Mira added, leaning round me to look at Annabelle. “The closet out here is so big it’s practically a walk in.”
I snorted into my coffee, making them both squeal. Annabelle leapt back in a desperate attempt to protect her new Vivienne Westwood shirt from getting stained. I really loved them both.
“Can’t we just stay here mixing the album forever?” I asked them as they started coaxing me down the hallway to where Archie was waiting.
“No,” Mira replied, slapping my ass as she sauntered by. “The album is fucking epic, the tour’s gonna be even epic-er…”
“Epic-er is definitely not a word,” Annabelle told her.
“Well it should be. Point being, things are falling into place, Max,” Mira hit me with one of her all-knowing looks, her hazel eyes soft when they met mine. “Stop trying to hold everything so tightly, ok?”
“Yeah, ok,” I nodded. She was right, of course – I had to stop over-thinking everything. I trusted my abilities as a musician, that was one of the few things about my life that I was absolutely, 100% sure on. Tour or not, Sebastian or not, I was born to do this. I just had to shut up and do it.
◆◆◆
“Just shut up and do it, superstar,” Shep laughed at me from across the room, his newly painted, cherry red bass glinting in the light.
I huffed at him, puffing out air from between my pouting lips in an attempt to mess up the carefully positioned “beachy waves” that our hairstylist for the day, Kerry, had spent at least fifteen minutes fussing over.
“I saw that!” Kerry yelled from where she was standing by our makeshift “hair and makeup” table .
We’d finally turned in the completed mix of our new album, Dark Horses , to the label. They’d picked what the first single would be, and hired one of our friends, Donnie, to make a music video.
Donnie was pretty chill and had a great eye, especially when it came to behind the scenes footage. He was usually a documentary filmmaker but dipped his toe in the music video pool on the odd occasion. Shep and I knew him from way back when we all used to hang out at the El Sereno skatepark.
We just wanted to do a performance video at our warehouse practice space, and the label agreed that it’d be a good way to whet everyone’s appetites for the upcoming, yet to be announced tour.
The band hadn’t really toured since Sara was a baby, and even then we hadn’t done anything too extensive.
I was only willing to be gone for a couple of weeks at a time, first on a US tour, then abroad, but nothing like what we were going to do with Burning Bright.
The tour dates had all been finalized – we’d start with some festivals in Australia, before hitting New Zealand and Japan.
Then it was back to mainland Europe, the UK, Latin America and up into the US.
My stomach fluttered every time I thought about it, a combination of dread and excitement that I’d yet to properly quantify .
Donnie was hanging out with the camera men, squinting at our freshly designed back drop and tilting his head, as if trying to imagine what we were going to look like when we finally dragged our asses over there.
I was so busy pulling faces at Shep that I didn’t even notice the door opening. It wasn’t until I realized the room had fallen silent that I looked up, once again letting myself be blindsided by the unwanted, unwelcome and distinctly uninvited presence of Sebastian Jacobs.
He wasn’t alone, this time. Thank god for small mercies, right? Nope, he had his whole band in tow. Eddie, Jet and Steve all stepped in after him, having the good sense to glance around nervously as they did.
I never had a problem with Sebastian’s band mates.
They were good guys, talented in their own unique ways.
Jet was a hell of a guitarist; he’d been kind enough to teach me a few riffs back when we’d been on tour.
I’d been classically trained with an acoustic so I could play at my parents’ church, but Jet played an electric guitar like he’d come out of the womb shredding solos.
I’d been grateful for his time and his patience.
They were all incredibly loyal to Sebastian though, so when he and I spectacularly fell apart, they’d fallen in line with their frontman just like my band had fallen in line with me. I couldn’t grudge them that, not when I’d been so thankful for my friends when they did the same thing.
“Pretty sure we didn’t put out a casting call for extras,” Mira said, her stormy eyes tripping coolly down Sebastian’s lean, designer clothes clad frame.
“We were in the neighborhood,” Sebastian replied, already smirking. “Thought we’d stop by. It’s wonderful to see you again, Mira. It’s been too long.”