Chapter Five. Sam
chapter five
SAM
Lizzie Ford is a lot of things. The mother of our son. The co-owner of New York City’s most delicious bakery. My best friend.
But right now, she is primarily a pain in my ass.
“Nope!” she says, swatting my hand before it lands on one of the milk tarts on a back counter. Her thick pepper-brown braid swings over her shoulder as she turns back to her cake batter. “No dessert until you see reason.”
Little does the world know, this is how “punk rock” my life is now.
When Ben is in school, I spend most of my days in the back of Sugar Harmony getting bossed around by Lizzie and her wife, Kara, who opened this hybrid Scandinavian and West African bakery based on their grandmothers’ recipes just before Ben was born.
It’s my favorite place on earth, even if I have to check most of my free will at the door.
“I helped make them,” I protest.
Lizzie raises her brows at me. “Licking the emptied-out bowl does not qualify as ‘helping.’ Now give me one good reason why you won’t hear Twyla out on this.”
By “this,” Lizzie means the call from Twyla that I was dumb enough to take on speaker in front of her after I got home from Lightning Strike last night.
If I had any idea that Twyla had spent the evening conspiring with Isla, I might have changed my damn number before I heard her say, “Good news! We’re pitching you and Mackenzie to the label as a duet. ”
The call was over too fast for me to protest, but lasted just long enough for Lizzie to latch onto the idea like a dog with a bone.
“If you’d seen Mackenzie last night, you’d know she would sooner strangle me with a guitar string than work with me again,” I tell Lizzie.
She tightens the strings on her bright blue Sugar Harmony apron. “Are you saying that because it’s true, or because you’re secretly chickenshit?”
“Hey,” I protest. “I play all the time.”
New York is a city full of “if you know, you know” places, and one of them is the back room at Sugar Harmony.
At night we convert it into a speakeasy where I started holding open mic nights a few days a week, no phones allowed.
My old bandmates Divya and Rob started inviting friends, who invited friends of friends, and now it’s a mix of newbies and regulars every week.
Lizzie smirks from under the brim of her baseball cap. “I meant about getting Mackenzie on board.”
Fun fact: Lizzie only got half a psychology degree before she quit for culinary school, but will never let me, Kara, or any of our friends forget it.
Fortunately, I am spared any more of her cross-analysis by someone opening the back door. Unfortunately, it’s Twyla herself.
“Don’t worry,” she tells me, sweeping in with a loud orange- and-red ensemble, complete with a giant butterfly brooch. “I’m too magnanimous for an ‘I told you the fuck so.’”
“Told me the fuck about what?” I ask.
“Don’t be coy,” she says, flashing her phone screen at me.
Sam Blaze not so Waters-proof after all?
Mackenzie and I generated enough headlines in our rivalry to paper-mache the Empire State Building, so the terrible pun is no surprise.
The image just under it is another story.
Someone caught us mid-embrace. Her face is mostly concealed by my shoulder, but there’s a little crease between her brows—one I only ever saw a handful of times.
“Oh,” I manage.
Twyla lets out a disbelieving snort. “Look at you pretending you don’t have internet.”
Lizzie winces on my behalf. “We blocked Sam’s name on our phones and all the laptops. Little eyes and ears.”
Little eyes and ears that didn’t need to be reading headlines about the dad they didn’t even know about for the first four years of their life.
Particularly headlines like BLAZE RUMORED TO HAVE DOZENS OF OTHER SECRET KIDS!
! and Lizzie’s personal favorite, AN ANALYSIS OF THIS DECADE’S LINGERIE TRENDS, BASED ON UNDERWEAR THROWN AT SAMUEL BLAZE ONSTAGE.
“Did you come all the way downtown to torture me with this?” I ask Twyla.
“That’s just a bonus. I came here to take a look at the cupcakes. Or did you forget that your favorite manager is turning fifty?”
I doubt there’s a soul in Manhattan who doesn’t know about Twyla and Isla’s joint fiftieth birthday party this weekend.
Not only did they rent out several floors of a building for the night, but the invitations were sent with massive masquerade masks that were “required dress.” Half the music industry was Instagramming about it before they could type out an RSVP.
“I heard a rumor,” I say.
Lizzie heads back to grab the cupcake design sampler book. My hand is halfway to the counter when she calls from the office, “No treats for Sam!”
I grab a milk tart that’s too ugly for the display case, breaking it in half and winking at Twyla. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Twyla takes her half. “Only if you care to explain the origins of this… Doritos muffin?”
“Ben special,” I explain, lifting one of them up from the experimental batch for her inspection.
A “Ben special” is really just shorthand for “somehow Lizzie and I created a kid who hates sweets.” Every week he comes up with a different “dessert” we help him make—pepperoni cinnamon rolls, mac and cheese scones, even an ill-fated lasagna cake.
We’ve gathered that he doesn’t like to eat these “specials” of his half as much as he loves to watch customers react to them on the shelf.
“Horrifying,” Twyla declares. “I must have one.”
I grab one from the pan and hand it to her, cutting right to the chase. “If you think an article is going to sway me on this, you’re wrong. Stunning as ever, but wrong.”
Twyla flips her hair appreciatively, but doubles down. “That’s because you haven’t read the comment section. Fans think you’re up to something. They want you to be up to something.” She taps the phone adamantly. “The draw the label wanted—it just got handed to us on a silver platter.”
I occupy myself with taking the now-empty batter bowls to the sink.
“Mackenzie hasn’t performed in two years,” I point out. “The last thing that’s going to get her on a stage is me . ”
Twyla’s lips thin smugly. “So you do want to perform with her.”
Of course I do. Nobody in their right mind would pass up the chance to perform with Mackenzie. But performing with Mackenzie comes with a price, and that just might be my damn sanity.
But Twyla’s playing hardball. She reaches over and shuts off the sink before I can start scrubbing.
“I’ll cut right to the chase here,” she says. “The label thinks you’re both a risk on your own. It’s why they haven’t relaunched Mackenzie yet, either. But this—this has potential. This has people talking.”
She’s got my attention now. I know why they’d consider me a risk—I’ve made it very clear that I have no interest in touring the way I did before. But Mackenzie was born for the stage. She’s as sure a bet as they come.
I open my mouth to protest, but Twyla puts a hand up and walks back over to the counter.
“You have exactly the amount of time it will take me to finish this unholy muffin to try to tell me I’m wrong.”
It’s a damn good muffin, so I don’t have a second to lose. I lean against the sink and face her.
“Reason one: I don’t want to leave the city. We could never go on tour.”
Twyla waves me off. “Mackenzie’s not interested in touring.”
That’s hard to believe about a girl who took Instagrams on the international legs of our tours like it was her second full-time job, but I’ve got more in my arsenal.
“Reason two—our styles won’t match.”
The new music I’ve been playing at the open mic nights is much calmer. More acoustic than punk rock. The command Mackenzie has onstage is anything other than quiet, and only a fool would ask her to be.
“It’s been two years,” says Twyla. “You’re not the only one who’s changed their style. I think they’ll be a perfect match.”
Damn it. I don’t want to hear that. Because if it’s true, it’s going to make this whole thing even more tempting.
Thankfully, it doesn’t change my ace in the hole.
“Reason three,” I say, making sure to hold her gaze. “Mackenzie Waters hates my guts.”
Twyla’s lips thin. “Well,” she concedes. “There is that.”
In my defense, Mackenzie hated me before I did anything to deserve it.
Before the rivalry started, even. The day we first met Thunder Hearts was coming off a set at a music festival.
I hadn’t meant to watch, but Mackenzie was impossible to look away from.
All sweet-faced and sharp-eyed, delicate and wild-haired, tearing up and down the stage like it was a playground and shouting some of the most beautiful lyrics I’d ever heard at the top of her lungs.
At the end Mackenzie stuck her tongue out at the crowd and tossed her mic to a stagehand, the screams pitching to impossible volumes as she and the band ran off the stage.
I should have been threatened. Candy Shard was losing momentum just as Thunder Hearts was headed for the moon. But I was every bit as riveted as the crowd.
“Go wait outside the Thunder Hearts trailer, will you?” Twyla asked me. “I’ll get the rest of the band.”
I knew the plan. Twyla and Isla decided it was best for the bands to meet and come up with a few ideas for how to stoke the fire on the “rivalry” that fans were starting to buzz about after some interviews we’d given.
It’s why we were closing the festival even though Candy Shard hadn’t performed in it for years.
Despite taking my sweet time, I somehow beat everyone to the trailer. I leaned lazily against the door with a cigarette in hand, knowing full well what I looked like—not just self-assured, but cocky. A little too at ease.
But Mackenzie wasn’t even looking at me, focused on Isla, who handed her a water bottle and a half-open Take 5 bar. “Did you hear that fucking riff Serena did, holy shit ,” Mackenzie was crowing. “We’ve got to get into the studio and rerecord with that.”
Isla didn’t answer, her lips curled into a smirk at the sight of me.
“Mackenzie, you know Sam,” she said.