5. Chapter Five
Chapter Five
Willow
By the time the tour ends, I have three songs written and a chest full of things I’m too exhausted to name.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway. Songs. Not wounds. Lyrics. Not all the ugly little pieces Phoenix left behind when he walked out of that green room with a blonde on his arm and my hand print still burning across his cheek.
I went back to my hotel room that night, took off my boots, sat at the end of the bed and wrote the first song until the sun came up, because that’s what I do.
Phoenix breaks something. I make it rhyme.
By the time I walk into the studio a week later, I have coffee in one hand and my notebook tucked under my arm. The studio is cold. Black walls, polished concrete, expensive leather couches, and gold records mounted on the walls behind.
Damon is already at the console, crisp shirt, perfect hair, soulless expression. Beside him, the sound engineer sits behind the board, headphones around his neck.
Jax is sprawled across the couch, one arm draped over his face, drumsticks dangling in his other hand. He looks half-dead, which means he is probably only one cup of coffee away from being unbearable.
Jett sits at the other end of the couch, head down, the bass pick moving between his fingers. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Cruz leans against the wall with his guitar, dark hair a mess, shirt half-open, and mouth curved in that lazy, filthy way that makes every woman in a ten-foot radius forget she has standards. He looks up when I come in.
“Morning,” I say.
“You look tired, Songbird,” Cruz says.
“And you look like a fire hazard. We all have our thing, right?”
Jax lifts two fingers in greeting from the couch. High effort for a man like him at ten a.m.
Jett looks up, smiling.
“Hey,” he says quietly.
“Hey.”
The coffee cups are multiplying. Someone’s jacket is on the floor. I can tell it’s been a stressful morning.
Damon glances up from the console. “Tell me you brought the other two songs.”
He sets his coffee down and steps into the live room like a man who’s already decided the answer is yes.
I drop my bag on the couch—in the space between Jett and Jax—and unzip it.
“Yeah, good morning to you, too, Damon,” I mutter.
Jax makes a sound that’s close to a laugh.
I’ve barely pulled out the lyric sheets when Damon snatches them from my hands.
Cruz is watching me from the wall. “So where the fuck have you been hiding?”
“My apartment.”
“What were you doing? You completely disappeared on us.”
“I was just writing,” I say.
Jett looks up. “You good?”
“I’ll live,” I say.
Damon looks up from the pages. “These are exactly what we need. Have you already given them to Phoenix so he can start on the music?”
I give him a smile. It’s restrained and professional, though what I really want to say is, “no, Damon, because every song I have written for this band has gone through you first. I write the lyrics, hand them to you, you decide if anything needs changing, and then you pass them to Phoenix for the music. It was the same three days ago when I gave you the first song sheet, and now we’re all here to record it. ”
Instead, I smile and go with: “No. I thought I’d stick with the wildly uncomplicated system where I hand them to you and then you ask me whether I handed them to Phoenix.”
Jax coughs into his fist.
Cruz looks down at his guitar, grinning.
Jett’s mouth twitches.
“Fine,” Damon says. “I’ll give them to him.”
“Great,” I say.
The door opens and Phoenix walks in looking as if the night chewed him up, fucked him twice, and spat him out near sunrise.
His black jeans sit low on his hips. His shirt is half untucked, wrinkled to hell, with the top buttons open enough to reveal the chain at his throat and the edge of ink disappearing beneath the cotton.
His hair is a messy disaster and he wears sunglasses inside the studio because apparently shame needs UV protection.
The smell of cigarettes, stale whiskey, expensive cologne, and sex he’s not even decent enough to hide emanates from him.
“Look at that,” Jax says from the couch. “The dead can walk.”
Phoenix slides the sunglasses down just enough to observe him over the top. His eyes are bloodshot.
Cruz grins. “Rough night?”
Phoenix’s mouth curves. “Depends who you ask.”
Damon looks up from the lyric sheets. The muscle in his cheek jumps once. His eyes flick to the clock on the wall, then back to Phoenix.
“You’re late,” he says, his voice flat and pissed.
Phoenix lifts one shoulder. “And yet, somehow, the world kept turning.”
His eyes find mine behind the sunglasses. Even hidden, I feel them.
“Morning, Wills,” he says. “Miss me or are we still pretending you don’t notice when I’m gone?”
“Easy, brother,” Cruz says. “Save the asshole routine for someone who thinks it’s foreplay.”
Damon snaps his fingers once at Phoenix. “Booth. Now.”
Phoenix finally looks away from me.
“Relax, asshole,” he says, swaggering toward the vocal booth. “You’ll get your hit.”
Phoenix opens the booth door and steps inside. He grabs the headphones and puts them on.
His eyes meet mine through the glass and, for one second, the room shrinks.
Nothing about Phoenix is ever soft. It’s the kind of soft that presses against my ribs and reminds me I have spent half my life knowing him, loving him, and pretending neither of those things has fucked me over in different ways. He looks at me as if I were the only person here who matters.
I hate that he can still do that.
I hate that after the women, the drugs, and all the filthy little smiles he throws at women who would crawl over broken glass for five minutes under him, my heart still beats harder at one stupid glance.
He leans toward the mic, one hand cupping the headphones, his mouth close enough to the metal grille to make the whole thing appear filthy.
Phoenix never simply sings into a microphone. He owns it. Dirties it. Turns breath and ego into a felony set to a melody.
Damon moves back into the control room and stops at the soundboard beside the engineer, his polished band manager’s face barely hiding how pissed he is.
Damon wants an album, numbers on a board, and Phoenix sober enough to sing but reckless enough to sell.
The engineer leans into the mic. “Are you good in there?”
Phoenix pulls the headphones down around his neck and looks at him through the glass. “Do I fucking look like I’m standing here ordering a sandwich?”
The engineer blinks.
Phoenix tilts his head, his mouth twisting into something mean enough to cut. “I’m in a recording booth with a mic in front of my face. Use your fucking brain.”
Jax snorts from the couch. “Charming prick.”
Cruz barely looks up. “Careful. Keep complimenting him and he’ll start charging you a meet-and-greet fee.”
I sit down between Jax and Jett.
Damon nods at the engineer.
The track starts low.
Guitar comes first.
Dirty from the first note. Cruz has dragged it out of the amp, rough and bleeding. Then Jett’s bass slides in beneath it. Jax follows with the drums and the whole track shifts.
It gets louder. The rhythm crawls through the room until the song has a pulse.
Phoenix closes his hand around the mic. He leans in, mouth too close to the mic, lashes lowered, that bored, arrogant expression still on his face as if the rest of us should thank him for bleeding into the song.
And then he sings.
“You looked prettier cruel than you ever did kind.
Another warm body you chose over mine.
I’m still on the floor with my hands and my pride.
Choking on someone who will never be mine”
Jax’s drumstick goes still against his knee.
Phoenix leans into the mic and continues singing the next verse.
“You remember me when everyone is gone.
Crawl back to my door when the feeling is done.
I’m still here waiting and holding my breath.
Choking on someone who burns like the sun”
Damon raises his hand so Phoenix can see it through the glass. “Stop.”
The music stops.
Phoenix pulls the headphones down around his neck and stares through the glass with the expression of a man who does not appreciate being interrupted.
“What.”
“That last line.” Damon leans into the console. “Do it again.”
Phoenix stares at him for a long moment. The kind of moment that has a point to make.
Then when the music comes back on, he puts on the headphones and leans back into the mic.
“Choking on someone who burns like the sun”
Jax rubs his jaw. “Fuck.”
Cruz looks down at the floor and mutters, “That’s brutal, Songbird.”
Jett keeps his gaze fixed on me. “Are you okay?”
I smile at him because I’d rather swallow glass than answer his questions. “I’m still standing.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“It is today.”
Phoenix holds the last note of the song until it frays at the edge.
For one beautiful, terrible second, it is a song that sits between us.
My words. His voice. The ugliest thing he did to me, dressed up well enough for everyone else to call it art.
Damon lets out a breath. “That is exactly what this album needs.”
Of course it is. Trust Damon to hear my chest crack open and call it good production.
Inside the booth, Phoenix takes off his headphones. His eyes meet mine through the glass and my fingers curl around the edge of my notebook before I can stop them.
“I need a minute,” I say, standing up from the couch, notebook tucked against my ribs. I walk out into the hallway before anyone can say anything.
The door shuts behind me, sealing off the room.
For half a second, the hallway is quiet. Then the door opens again and Phoenix walks out.
“That song’s fucking incredible,” he says, moving toward me. “You always could do that.”
He stops in front of me and stands too close. Close enough for his heat to get under my skin.
“Do what?” I ask.
His eyes stay locked on mine. “Take the ugly shit and make it sound honest.”
And there he is. Not the cocky fucker with girls hanging off him. Just the boy I grew up with before fame put its hands all over him.
“Don’t do that,” I say.
“Do what?”
“Talk to me like you remember who you were.”
His eyes drop to the notebook pressed against my chest. “I remember enough.”