Chapter Fifteen. Mackenzie
chapter fifteen
MACKENZIE
Turns out after navigating all these old and new feelings for Sam, navigating traffic out of New York City is a breeze.
Before I know it, we’re at a rest stop halfway between New York and Boston, pumping gas into my old Jeep.
I should probably have gotten rid of it long after I bought it as a teenager, but it’s easy to go incognito when today’s car looks like tomorrow’s scrap metal.
“I almost forgot.” Sam sliding into the passenger seat in a pair of worn-out jeans that hug all the right places is a sight on its own. Then he has the audacity to hand me a loaded pastry bag. “Ben’s Creation this week.”
I split the croissant open. Inside is a glob of chocolate, pretzels, and peanut butter that would put Willy Wonka to shame. I press a hand to my chest and turn to Sam.
“Did your dessert-hating son make me a Take 5 croissant?”
It’s the first time I’ve gotten a full Sam grin for the whole drive.
“Sure did,” he says. “Trying not to take that personally when the kid turned his nose up at my birthday cake last month.”
I take a bite that’s nothing short of heavenly. Lizzie and Kara don’t know how to miss.
“Mmm,” I say, licking my lips. “Tastes like betrayal.”
Sam checks the windows, then leans in to kiss the chocolate off the corner of my mouth. “Huh,” he says. “Dunno. Gonna have to check again to make sure.”
I’m expecting him to go for the croissant, but instead he kisses me, slow and deep, his tongue skimming the chocolate off mine. I let out a laugh of protest and he doubles down, his teeth grazing my lower lip.
“Hungry?” I ask as he pulls away.
His grin settles into a smirk. “Starved.”
But by the time we’re merging back into the freeway, Sam’s jaw is set again.
He checks his phone the way he has the entire drive, opening his messages app over and over like he’s waiting for the whole thing to fall through.
I’m weighing whether to bring it up when something makes him let out a low whistle.
“Shit,” he says. “Did you see the news about Tick Tune?”
My stomach lurches, but I keep my voice steady. “What news?”
Sam goes quiet as he scrolls. My eyes stay on the road, but my fingers stiffen on the wheel.
“Looks like they’re selling to some sketchy new streaming company. If artists don’t claim their songs or fully delete their accounts, they’ll have all the rights to anything they’ve ever posted. Even songs they already pulled.”
It’s shady as hell, and we both know it. But Sam doesn’t even sound surprised. Just resigned. We’ve been in the industry long enough to see people jump rope with morality when it comes to artists and their rights.
But I assumed Tick Tune was separate from that. Nobody was making any money. Rights were never supposed to be involved. It was the people outside of Tick Tune I thought to worry about, like the label that screwed over Rocket.
“Most of the artists are anonymous, though,” I say weakly.
Sam nods, still reading. “That’s why people are pissed. Guess if you want to claim your work you have to identify yourself. Otherwise, they just own the rights to your stuff forever.”
My heart sinks. Not for myself, but the other artists on Tick Tune.
People have plenty of different reasons to use an app where their music is fleeting.
To get things off their chest, like I have.
To practice somewhere they won’t feel judged.
To try to get a modest following, so they can leverage it into a deal if they decide to come forward.
If they delete their work, they lose all their stats—all the comments and streams and followers. And even if they find some way to keep a record of them, some of the artists on the rise will lose their momentum. They can’t all possibly jump ship to a label at once.
But if they don’t delete it, someone else gets to steal it. And no matter how uniquely weird my position is here, it’s no mystery what most artists would choose.
“So people are just taking their stuff down,” I say quietly.
“They’re trying,” says Sam, blowing out a disbelieving breath. “According to Serena, the app has conveniently started glitching.”
I blink. “According to my Serena?”
Sam closes out of the browser and sets his phone on the console. “She’s the one posting about it. She’s pissed.”
This tracks a little too well. Serena may be allergic to letting anyone help her, but even when Thunder Hearts only had an inch of clout, Serena was using it to look out for other artists.
Rocket is only the latest example—there’s no saying how deep a lawyer must have gone into that contract that screwed him over to find a way to let him be one of her opening acts.
But that doesn’t prepare me for what Sam says next.
“She’s calling out Tick Tune and Seven.”
For a moment all I can hear is the traffic and the beat of my own heart between my ears. When I speak, my voice is remarkably calm. “What’s Seven got to do with it?”
Sam just shrugs as he leans back. “Seven announced the last song today, right when the sale was announced. And the song is set to drop the day the change takes effect,” he says, with a faint disappointment.
Jesus. I couldn’t have timed that out worse if I tried.
“And you think she’s going to go public right then, and capitalize off it,” I realize.
“Makes sense. I mean, what else would she do?”
My actual options are clear, because there are only two. I can immediately delete the account. Let the seventh song stay buried, and stay out of this before it starts.
Or I could release the seventh song now. Let it play for a few days, get the closure everyone is expecting before the change takes effect, and delete it then.
But it doesn’t feel right. Pulling a stunt like that would only pull attention from the artists this will actually affect. Whatever is happening here is a whole lot bigger than me.
“I couldn’t say.”
There’s no reason to worry Seven will get traced back to me, but my heart is still jackhammering. I want to pull the car over and yank out my phone. I want to read every word of what Serena’s written to Seven when she can barely look me in the eye.
“Well, we better brace ourselves. Seven’s about to be our biggest competition.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, trying not to smile. “What makes you say that?”
“She’s the only alternative writer on your level right now. Hell, her lyrics sound like she took a Mackenzie Waters master class,” he says.
A manic, bubbling laugh escapes me. Jesus. Good thing I never want to spin this singing thing into an acting career.
“That last one especially. I don’t know if you heard it, but it was brutal.”
That’s the one I wrote for the last man I dated when we were on tour. I don’t think of him much now; writing the song really did cure me of it. But of all of them, he lasted the longest. Nearly a year. I thought he was it for me.
Not because we had anything special. Just because he didn’t leave. He was ambivalent most of the time. Bored of me, even. After the tumult of all the other guys I was with, it felt like a relief.
But it wasn’t love. It was the first time I broke something off. It hurt worse than the others in some way, because I had nobody to blame for the wasted time but myself.
“I heard it,” I acknowledge.
Sam’s head turns to look out the window, so his voice sounds far away. “That lyric where she cuts off after ‘almost.’ The pause after it. It’s uncanny how you know exactly what she means.”
“The lock without the click,” I say, without thinking.
Sam turns to me in surprise. “Yeah.”
His eyes stay on me. I swallow hard. “Well. At least we’ll have a head start on her,” I say lightly.
“But she’s got the market cornered on heartbreak.”
“Says the original heartbreaker,” I tease.
Sam is quiet for a long moment, his gaze shifting from me to the front window. I don’t think anything of it. We’ve had a lot of long pauses on this drive. I can’t even imagine the kinds of things going through his head right now—I’ve just tried to give him the space to talk if he wants.
Enough miles pass that when he straightens up and looks over at me, I think he will.
“I got around, but I didn’t—break hearts,” he says quietly. “I was always clear I could only do casual. Everyone I was with wanted that, too.”
“Okay,” I say, too stunned to say anything else.
There’s nothing defensive in his tone. If anything, he sounds unsettled.
“I just—need you to know that,” he says. “If I thought someone might get hurt, I didn’t get involved.”
I bite the inside of my cheek again.
“Is that why you steered clear of me?” I’m teasing, but I’m not. “You were worried I was gonna fall for you?”
Because if that was his little plan, it didn’t work. He stayed away from me, and he hurt me anyway.
My throat tightens. No, he didn’t , says the little voice in my head. The one that’s been interrupting me for weeks. The one that made it so hard to write Seven’s last song.
Sam was no saint, but he never meant to hurt me the way I got hurt. That part I did all on my own.
“Nah,” says Sam. “I was just afraid you’d kick my ass. You hated everything about me.”
“Not everything,” I protest.
Sam lets out an unexpected laugh. “Well, shit. That’s a relief.”
I don’t mean to say anything else, but we’re so separate from the rest of the world that it’s almost too easy to be honest.
“It was just—all that partying and the women and rolling up to rehearsals hungover. You did whatever you wanted and everyone thought you were so cool doing it,” I say. “It drove me up the wall. It was like you didn’t even try.”
And I’d spent my whole life trying. Trying to get my parents’ attention. Trying to get boyfriends to stay. Trying to prove Thunder Hearts deserved the hype we got right off the bat, when it made us easy targets for people like Sam to brush off in the first place.
Trying to earn my place, when Sam took the one he had for granted.
“I’ll let you in on a secret,” says Sam. “I was trying really hard to look like I wasn’t.”
I glance over at him. Our eyes only meet for a split second, but I see it anyway—that flash of recognition. Maybe I didn’t hate Sam because he wasn’t trying. Maybe I hated Sam because I could tell he was, and he was a hell of a lot better at it than me.
“But staying away—it didn’t mean I didn’t care,” says Sam, his eyes still on me. “I did. I do.”
Now I’m the one who’s quiet. Turning the words in my head over and over, holding them up to inspection. Looking for the holes in them, for the tiny tears. For the evidence that he doesn’t really mean it and he’s just saying the same things the other six did before they turned into Seven.
“I did, too,” I say softly.
Sam goes very still.
“I do ,” I add.
But I can’t say anything more than that. No matter how I feel about Sam, I can’t give that much of myself away yet. With every song I’ve posted as Seven, I’ve started trusting myself more and more, but I’ll never get to post that last one about Sam now.
I need to close the old book with him before I open a new one. I don’t know how long that will take, but this much I do know—Sam could very well lose interest in this whole thing before I get there. And that might hurt more than anything that’s come before.
It’s uncanny, the way Sam seems to read my mind.
“Good,” he says, stretching back like a cat. “Because you’re never getting rid of me now.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask wryly.
“Afraid so,” he says. “You can’t go writing songs like that with me and ever expect me to settle for anything less.”
I smile. I don’t have anything to say to that. I’m proud of what we’ve written so far—my words feel sharper and brighter with his melodies pulling them along.
“So,” he says slyly. “Are we gonna write another one or what?”
I planned on us making up for the time later. But if he needs the distraction right now, well—so do I. Anything to block out the whir of the Tick Tune news and Serena’s posts and the songs I’m going to have to pull, and the one that will never see the light of day.
“Right now?” I ask, just to make sure.
Sam grabs his phone. “No time like the present.”
I check the clock on the dashboard. “We might run out of road before we finish,” I warn.
“Ah, Mackenzie, I’m not worried,” says Sam, with a slow grin. “You’re always taking me for a ride.”