Chapter 6 Keeley
Keeley
As I drive home, I try to ignore this weirdness between me and Jane and focus on what I can control—and that is how hard we fight Label.
Before he was a CEO, before he even started producing, Landon Banks was the first drummer I obsessed over as a kid.
He was one of those musicians who was just fun to watch and also incredibly good at what he did.
When we got the deal with Label, having a chance to work with him as a producer felt like a dream come true.
And then I got to know him. Landon knows his shit when it comes to music, but he’s also slimy and entitled, and no one calls him on it because he’s talented.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s produced some of the biggest names in the industry, and he inherited his position as CEO from his millionaire father.
He absolutely took advantage of our naivete as starry-eyed teens to lock us into a horrible contract that gave him total control over us.
Never meet your heroes. Mine sucks ass.
Maybe my decision to clear my schedule wasn’t so foolish.
Because now, I have nothing but time to fight for the band.
I’m no lawyer, but that’s what twin brothers with law degrees are for.
I’m just about to ask Siri to call Oliver when the Jacob Collier album I’m playing suddenly pauses and Jane’s name comes up on my console.
So much for focusing on something else.
“Hello?” I ask, pulse pounding despite myself. I don’t know why she startled me.
“Keeley? I’m sor-sorry to bug you, but everyone else is going out and…and I didn’t know who else to call…” Her voice is frantic, tearful, and it makes me sit up straighter. I grip the wheel tighter, trying to focus on the road and the conversation at the same time.
“Jane? What’s wrong?”
She gasps, letting out a sob. “I think my house is flooded? What do I do?”
Oh no. That sucks, but I still let out a breath at the knowledge that she’s not in immediate danger.
Still, even in a catastrophe, this type of emotional reaction is so unlike Jane—she really must be exhausted.
Maybe our friendship is strained right now, but I can take some of this weariness off her shoulders.
Because the universe is feeling extra ironic today, my brother isn’t the only useful Cunningham family connection. My dad is an insurance claims adjuster, and I was a star at Take Your Child to Work Day five years in a row. I know exactly what she needs to do.
My mind scrambles as I think through the scenario. “You need to try to shut off your water main if you can access it safely. Do you know where it is?”
She hiccups, trying to contain herself. “Yeah, it’s outside under the back porch steps.”
My shoulders relax a little. It’s a lot safer if she doesn’t have to wade through the water. “Okay, so go shut that off.” I hear her walking around on the sand around her home, and she lets out the cutest little huff as she turns off the water.
“Okay, that’s done.”
“Good job. Now you need to call your homeowner’s insurance right away. They should have a twenty-four-hour claims line, and they can help you get a restoration company out there to address the immediate damage.”
She gulps, her voice steadying. “I’ll call them when we hang up.”
Good. She’s focusing. “Can you get to the second level without walking in the water?”
She makes a humming sound. Now that I’ve given her some actionable steps, Jane is sounding a bit more like herself. Even her tone is more measured, and I feel myself relaxing with her. “Yeah, I can get in through my upper deck,” she says.
“Okay, go pack some bags. Once a restoration company is out there, you might not be able to get into the house, so try to get anything you might need for a while.” But if her ground floor is flooded, she won’t have access to her kitchen or her living room or…
shit, her basement music room full of instruments and priceless mementos.
I don’t bring that up right now.
“Right. So I’ll call insurance, then book a hotel,” she says.
That sounds so wrong. I know Jane likes to be independent, especially after what she went through with her family, but a last-minute hotel room in her part of LA is an unnecessary expense. She doesn’t need to waste the money. And, well…with how distressed she sounds, I don’t want her to be alone.
I blurt the words before I can regret them. “Don’t be silly. You’ll stay with me.”
“I couldn’t possibly…”
“Jane. Stay with me. There’s no reason to pay for a hotel.”
“Okay…” She trails off. “If you’re sure?”
“As soon as I get home, I’m getting the guest room ready, so don’t waste my time.
” I try to keep my tone teasing even as I clench the steering wheel, and her responding laugh makes it feel like things could be normal between us again despite our fight.
I just wish it were under better circumstances.
“Fine, I’ll stay with you. But promise you’ll kick me out as soon as it gets to be an imposition.”
“I promise,” I say, but we both know I won’t. I can’t imagine a world where Jane Mercer would be an imposition. Despite all this weird, fresh tension between us, she’s still one of my favorite people in the world.
As soon as I get home, I get to work.
Over the next couple of hours, while I wait for Jane to show up, I scramble to clean my condo.
It’s not dirty, but with my ADHD, things tend to end up in the wrong places.
So I tidy the laundry from the kitchen chairs, then throw all of the piles of unsorted junk mail into the recycle bin.
Once that’s done, I vacuum the carpets and sweep the floors and put fresh sheets on the guest bed.
The bed where Jane Mercer will be sleeping for the foreseeable future. God, help me.
I put unopened bottles of shampoo, conditioner, body soap, and face wash in the shower of my guest bath.
I place clean, thick towels on the bar fresh out of the dryer.
I light a couple of vanilla candles: one in the kitchen, and one in the bathroom.
For a moment, I wonder if I’m too obvious, keeping that scent around me at all times.
But before I can snuff them, the bell rings, and I hurry to let Jane in. She squeezes through the door, overloaded with canvas tote bags and two giant rolling suitcases.
“How did you get those down your steps?” I ask, in lieu of a greeting. Jane’s face is a little tearstained, but there’s a grim determination in the set of her jaw that tells me everything I need to know. She called insurance. They’re taking care of it.
And now she’s here.
Jane moves one bag with her hip. “I got down very carefully.” Then she laughs.
“I know this is a lot more than a week’s worth of clothes, but I was so nervous to leave anything that I packed up as much as I could.
I just thought it would be easier, instead of the possibility of having to go back, or worse, go buy stuff. I don’t own very much anyways.”
Jane’s a careful spender. She’s probably got most of her wardrobe in those two suitcases, including her shoes.
“I totally get it. You can do laundry whenever—I have one of those tiny stack sets in the hall closet, but it does the trick.”
She swallows. “Thank you. Where should I…”
And then I realize: Jane hasn’t been in my new place yet.
We always go to her house. Maybe it’s because of her proximity to the ocean, or just the beauty of how well decorated her home is, but it’s a lot cozier than the stark minimalism I adopted when I got this place last year.
I never felt the urge to do much with it, so other than a few odds and ends my mom always brings whenever she visits, it’s completely impersonal—except for the third bedroom I set up as a soundproof practice space.
And as I’m looking at the starkness of it all, hyperconscious of what she’s thinking about it, I realize Jane is just waiting for an answer.
“Uh, sorry, guest room is down the hall,” I say, gesturing in the general direction. Jane doesn’t hesitate to wander down there, and I just stand, awkward, in the entry.
“It smells great in here!” she says, and I flush, grateful she can’t see me. I’m sure if she saw the look on my face, she’d know at once that it’s all because of her.
Desperate to do something with my hands, I hurry over to the kitchen and pour her a glass of water, then one for myself. I down the drink, trying to calm my nerves. When that doesn’t work, I start to fiddle with one of my fidget rings.
It’s not weird. A woman is just staying in my apartment. Not a woman, a friend. Jane. This is fine.
When she emerges from the spare room, I hand her the water.
“Oh my gosh, thank you! I couldn’t get to my kitchen,” she says, taking a long sip. Her throat bobs distractingly as she swallows, and I grip the edge of my kitchen counter to steady myself.
“I figured as much,” I say.
“How are you feeling?” Jane asks.
“What?” I blink, confused. I’m not the one who just dealt with a house flood.
“Your headache?”
“Right,” I say. Because that was the only lie I could come up with.
After making no progress at the band meeting, I just didn’t want to see Jane dancing at LuLu with Riker, which was a silly worry, given that she also declined the invite before I even had a chance to do so.
But I’d already decided how I was going to respond at that point. “I totally forgot—guess it went away.”
“That’s good,” she says. She sets down the water glass and crosses her arms, awkward. “Look, I know this is a major imposition, and things have been tense between us, and—”
“Jane—” I interrupt, but I stop when she gives me a look.
“Can we just talk about our argument?”
I swallow thickly. The last thing I want to do is add stress to her night by rehashing that conversation. “You had a rough night. We can talk about it later.”
She rounds on me. “Please, Keeley. These last few days have been killing me.”
I resist the urge to rub my temples. I don’t have a headache yet, but having this conversation might just give me one. I don’t respond.