Chapter 14.
Chase—or Austin
I wake up when the bus is still moving and it’s still dark.
Can’t even say how much sleep I got. Probably next to none. It could be five or six in the morning, barely a couple of hours since I got off the phone with TJ.
And how can I sleep when I’ve got him swimming happy laps around my brain?
Each time he hops out of the water, droplets trace down the lines of his body.
He gives me playful smirks before diving back in for another lap.
And I just take it, unable to stop him, over and over again, his sexy laps around my every thought.
I’ve got Glorious in my grip before I know it, sitting up at the edge of the bed, notebook open next to me.
“Sexy laps around my every thought …” I scribble out the lyrics, a chord, maybe F major 7.
“Diving back in for another lap …” I close my eyes and see him again, swimming around and around, the graceful way his arms move, the breaths he sucks in each time his head turns for air, and these teasing looks he gives me, face flushed, lips curled at the corners.
“Happy laps around my brain …” The lyrics keep changing.
It’s a few minutes later when I step out of my room and find Fiona at the side table with the curtains drawn open, blowing on a mug of coffee.
“Another new one?” she asks tiredly. The sun has broken the horizon, lighting up the world after that dark night full of storms. “You’re on a roll lately, huh. ”
“You can say that.” I slide onto a seat next to her and push my notebook over the table. “What do you think?”
She squints over it, still blowing her coffee. “I like the chord progression. Unusual.” She keeps reading. “Lyrics are classic you.” Her posture straightens as she reads on, as if my notebook serves better in waking her up than what’s in her mug. “Wow. How long have you been sitting on this?”
“Just wrote it early this mornin’. After wakin’ up.”
Her eyes flick up to mine. “Seriously? This is hot shit, Chase. Like … really hot. I can hear the music soft. Or I can hear it slap.” After another glance at the notebook, she leans back with a sigh, coffee cradled in her hands, studying me.
“Something’s up with you. I can smell it all over your face. ”
I smirk. “Can you now?”
“You never sleep with your door closed.”
“Had Glorious out. Didn’t want to disturb you,” I lie.
“Never stopped you before.” Her eyes narrow. “You look … up to something.”
“When am I not up to somethin’?” I snatch back my notebook. “Think the boys will be up for addin’ another hot new number to tonight’s show? Maybe not as an opener, but perhaps at the top of the second act?”
She gives it a thought, then surprises me with, “Nah. I don’t think so.” She nods at the notebook. “You should send us off in the middle of the show. Have a moment of just you and your guitar and the audience. Sing that sexy bitch solo.”
“Solo?” I frown. “Haven’t done a solo number in two tours.”
“We’ll bring it back. Between the acts,” she suggests.
“Me, Raj, and Wily will step away. Naomi can lower everything but the spot on you. One or two songs, tops. Maybe a slowed-down solo version of ‘Easy Path to My Heart’, too, which you seem to love playing lately. Then we return for the rest of the show.” She smirks. “Ian’s so gonna hate you.”
“Or love me,” I suggest as reasonably. “I mean, he ain’t against us makin’ changes. Just … blindsiding him with ‘em.”
“Like you did the last show with the ‘Quicksand’ number.”
“Well …”
“And the adjustments we made in the show before that. And ‘No Fool For Love Songs’ that came outta nowhere. Is that what you’re calling it? I think just ‘No Fool’ has a better ring.”
From within a bunk comes Wily’s voice: “Full name. With the ‘Love Songs’ part. Don’t shorten it. And I dig the solo section idea. Now will you guys kindly shut the fuck up? Still sleeping.”
Fiona and I share a look. She rolls her eyes, and I slap shut my notebook and head back to my room to make more tweaks.
Fast-forward to half the day later after we’re loaded into the venue, Dee and Naomi and the other crew members are roped into the solo section idea, and I’m met by a completely blindsided Ian.
“What am I even doing here? You wanna tell me? Please?” he asks in the wings when I’m scratching out some lyrics last minute in my notebook.
His voice is edged in both humor and blood-boiling agitation.
He’s keeping it together impressively well, considering I did exactly what I said I wasn’t going to do: blindside him.
“You’re writing solo stuff now? Added a solo section in the show? ”
“I ran a new song by the others,” I tell him, “and they thought it works better as a solo number. More intimate.”
Ian tries to play it cool. He’s trying so, so hard to play it cool. “You don’t think I see what you’re doing here? Bringing back Old Chase one scheme at a time? Are you gonna start booking bars and restaurants again?”
“If the food’s good,” I say, then elbow him. “Just kiddin’. Have you heard the new song? Played it in the green room for Dee.”
He peels off his glasses and rubs his eyes. After half a second of looking like he wants to scream, he surrenders with a soft nod. “Yeah. I heard it. Beautiful … It’s beautiful. But Chase—”
“See? Even you can’t deny it. Best song I’ve written in years. And it happened just like—” Snap. “—that.”
He gives me a look. “Modest much?”
“It’s easier to brag about when it barely feels like I wrote it.” I slap a hand to his back. “Remember how I used to say that? Best songs, they feel like I don’t even write ‘em? They just … come right outta me. Like they’re …” I smile privately. “… drawn out of me by someone else entirely.”
“Like a muse?” Ian turns to me. “Is that what this is? You’ve got yourself a secret muse, Chase? Some guy in the wings?”
I smirk, don’t answer him, then wiggle my notebook.
“You can call this ‘Old Chase’ or ‘small’, but I’m about to prove Old Chase can be just as big as New Chase.
He’s still me. I’m still him. And together, big or small, we’ll make it to the top.
” I give Ian a wink, another slap on the back, then return to writing away in my book.
He steps back, studying me, looking afraid.
I pretend not to notice.
And when we’re out on that stage later, after “Love Burden” ends and everyone is screaming and whistling and throwing their wishes at us through their joyful eyes, Fiona, Raj, and Wily quietly depart the stage.
The spotlight glows over me and my stool.
“Got somethin’ a little special for you guys and gals tonight,” I say into the mic.
“Just you, me, my Glorious … and a brand-new tune. This is called ‘In Your Ocean’ …”
I caress Glorious to my body, then wait, fingers hovering over the strings. A tiny shard of fear grows in my heart. The audience watches, waits, breath held.
Do I do this? Are they ready?
Am I?
Then my fingers drop, hitting the first F major 7 chord that shatters and mends the soul in one precious strum—and I sing.
I don’t know how else to describe how I’m feeling other than there’s a dozen more songs inside me ready to spill out.
Can’t say if this music already exists in a spiritual form and is just waiting to be discovered, or if TJ really is inspiring all of this in me.
I could sit on the bus and write twenty songs a night, for as full and on fire as my heart feels right now.
Dee says she swooned—and for once, I believe her. Rob calls it “totally somethin’ else”, and I see it in his eyes. Even Locke, the lead singer from Soul Biter, tells me it hit him in the gut.
With tomorrow off, we spend the night in another hotel, and somehow our whole crew nab up nearly a whole floor.
Until well after midnight, most of the doors are left open, people wandering between rooms up and down the hall.
The energy is unmistakably electric. There’s a sense in the air of conquering the impossible.
Or it could just be me projecting my own feelings of triumph on everything and everyone around me.
“Think you gave me a new hit,” I tell TJ on the phone, kicked back in a chair in my room, feet up on the bed, facing my opened door.
The noise of everyone laughing and partying in neighboring rooms and out in the hall is audible.
Didn’t want to close my door and shut it all out just yet, like I’m basking in today’s last ray of sunlight.
“Wrote a song when I woke up this mornin’, first thing. Audience devoured it.”
“Really? Will you play it for me tomorrow?”
“Hmm, maaaybe.” I chuckle. “Where are we meetin’ up?”
“I was thinking, um …” He lets out a tiny sigh, stopping.
He’s so cute when he’s indecisive. “Hey, listen, anywhere I can drive my ass to in a rental sounds perfect to me. You can suggest meetin’ up at a gas station and I’m there.”
“First off, no, and gross. Second, um …” He clears his throat. “I was thinking … since I know who you are now and all of that … maybe I should … finally show you who I really am.”
I lift an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I haven’t lied. Not exactly. I just haven’t shared the full truth.
You don’t really have the complete picture of who I am.
Not from just your tiny experience of me behind the counter at an ice cream shop.
I … more or less do that for fun. I never fully explained the, um … big family business I keep mentioning.”
I chuckle. “What is this business? Your family part of the mob or somethin’?” When he says nothing, I go silent, face flattening. “Uh, your family’s not part of the mob, are they?”
“No, no. It’s more … well … maybe it’s just better you see. Only if you want to take a trip back to Spruce tomorrow. You’re an hour south tonight, I think you said, right?”
“Actually just half an hour from our new hotel … and if I make liberal use of my lead foot.”
“Don’t get in trouble!” he hisses at me.