7. Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
Willow
Iwake with a headache pressing behind my eyes and Phoenix Stone’s voice buried somewhere under my ribs.
Yeah. Once.
Two words should not still be alive within me.
They should not have followed me home from that hotel suite, crawled through the dark, and settled into the quietest part of my chest. And for fuck’s sake, they shouldn’t be the first thing I hear when I open my eyes to pale morning light spilling through my curtains.
But it has been two days.
Two whole days of acting normal while my mind keeps dragging me back to that couch. To that lazy sprawl of his body. To the way he looked at me and handed me one small truth before crushing it under that filthy little smirk.
Then you got bossy and ruined it.
I laughed because that’s what I do when Phoenix hands me something sharp and expects me to admire its shine. I laughed because not laughing would have meant sitting there with the cut open for everyone to see.
I tell myself it was just Phoenix talking shit because he was high. The smoke was thick, the music was loud, and his pupils were blown so wide that people say stupid shit all the time. That should make it easier.
It should make the whole thing stupid enough to throw away. Another messy after-party moment. An almost-sentence from a man who has built an entire personality on never being pinned down. A drug-softened slip. A joke with bad timing.
Somehow, it makes it worse. If the drugs made him honest, then he meant it. For one stupid second, he gave me something real before snatching it back before I could even close my fingers around it.
And if he didn’t mean it, he reached into the softest, ugliest part of me by accident and laughed, unaware that he’d drawn blood.
I press the heel of my hand against my forehead and stare at the ceiling.
My room smells of clean laundry I haven’t bothered to put away, and of the faint vanilla candle Mom bought me because she still believes a woman can be rescued by soft lighting and good intentions.
My notebook lies open at the end of the bed. Half a verse bleeds across the page in ugly, uneven handwriting.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I already know it is Damon before I even glance at it. The man has the emotional timing of a debt collector and the patience of a loaded gun.
Damon: Need revisions to the second verse before lunch.
I stare at the message, still half under my covers, still tasting sleep and the ugly aftertaste of Phoenix in my head.
The second verse of the song I gave Damon three days ago.
A second later, another message arrives.
Damon: Label wants the hook sharper, less vague, and more blood.
Then, because apparently hell has Wi-Fi and business hours, a third one appears.
Damon: Studio at ten. Don’t be late.
I stare at the screen until it goes dark in my hand.
For a few seconds, I stay lying under the covers as morning light presses against the curtains. My body is heavy in that strange, hollow way it does when sleep has not done its job.
I close my eyes and try to breathe through the tightness sitting low in my stomach.
I sit up fast and the room tilts, just enough to make my throat pull tight. For one quiet second, crawling back under the covers feels almost reasonable. Let the whole machine run without me.
I get up anyway because I’m not the kind of girl who disappears just because the day has teeth.
By the time I reach the studio, I have sunglasses on, my hair pulled back, and a black coffee in my hand that’s strong enough to strip paint.
My boots hit the polished concrete with more confidence than I feel, which is one of my better talents.
I appear put together while my insides quietly discuss collapse.
Damon finds me before I’m halfway down the hallway.
He steps out of the control room in a charcoal shirt and his phone already in his hand.
“You saw my messages?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Well good morning to you too.”
“I need the revisions.”
“The song is three days old, Damon.”
“The song has to earn its place.”
My fingers tighten around my coffee cup. “It already does.”
“Not yet.” Damon steps closer, lowering his voice as if that makes the pressure seem more professional. “The label likes the chorus and the concept but they don’t think the second verse hits hard enough.”
“They don’t think,” I say, keeping my voice even. “You mean they skimmed it between meetings and decided that pain needs a cleaner structure.”
“They’re paying for an album that sells.”
“And I’m writing the songs that give them one.”
His eyes hold mine without a flicker of guilt. “The first verse has teeth. The hook is close. The second verse loses momentum.”
“It gives the song somewhere to breathe.”
“It softens the hit.”
“No, it stops the song from sounding manufactured.”
“The label is not paying for a diary entry.”
Heat climbs up the back of my neck. I remove my sunglasses and regard him. “No. They’re paying for me.”
A beat passes. Damon’s jaw ticks.
“Willow, they’re paying for the version of you that finishes what they want,” he says. “Not the version that gets precious about a line because it hurts to write.”
I want to tell him to go fuck himself. To fuck this and the goddamn label.
Damon glances at his phone, then lifts his gaze back to mine. “I need a rewrite before lunch. I need you to do your fucking job.”
For one second, the hallway grows too quiet around us.
I lift my chin. “I am doing my job. That is why you’re standing here, asking me to fix the part no one else in this building can touch.”
I walk past him because this conversation is finished.
“Good,” he says behind me, his voice clean and cold. “Touch it. Before lunch.”
I stop outside the kitchenette and turn slowly, just in time to see him moving back toward the control room, phone in hand.
The kitchenette is empty. Thank fuck for that.
I drop my bag on the counter and toss the empty takeout cup into the trash. I reach up to open the cupboard above the sink for a mug, but my hand stalls midway when I see the tiny reflective panel on the door, and in it, my face waits to ambush me.
Pale. Hollow-eyed. Alert in all the wrong ways.
Fantastic. Nothing screams I am fine and thriving like looking like I’m one second from throwing a cup across the room or burying a body under the sound desk. Preferably Damon’s.
I snatch the mug from the cupboard and make the coffee stronger because my hands need something to do. The machine hisses as if it has opinions about my life when the air at my back changes.
It’s not Phoenix. My body clocks it before my brain even gets involved. Phoenix walks into a room and the air grows hotter. My pulse starts acting desperate and stupid. Every nerve in me tightens, ready for a fight or a mistake.
I grab my cup and turn to find Jett.
Jett leans against the doorway with his arms folded and his expression locked down.
Intricate tattoos cut down his forearms. His dirty-blond hair is a little messy.
His jaw is shadowed and his eyes are too observant for anyone’s comfort.
He is beautiful in that rough, dangerous way his twin is, except Jax burns loud and Jett holds still enough to make silence feel armed.
“You look pale,” he says.
I glance at him. “Hello to you, too.”
“I’m checking if you’re all right.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I snap.
The second it leaves my mouth, guilt bites sharp and quick.
Jett doesn’t deserve it. Not today. In fact, he never has. Of all of them, he is the one who looks after me in small, quiet ways. The way an older brother would if he had been raised on tour buses and in rooms full of men who think volume is a personality.
He is the one who notices when I haven’t eaten and leaves food where I’ll find it.
The one who pulls me out of my head before the thoughts turn ugly.
He has stood between me and Phoenix more than once with nothing but a stare, silently saying, “back the fuck off, Phoenix, before I stop being polite.”
His eyes flick over my face, too quick to be obvious and too careful to miss anything.
“Have you eaten, Wills?”
My stomach twists enough to answer before I can. “Don’t start.”
“That answers that.”
“If you’re here to fuss over me, I need you to understand how badly that will go for both of us.”
“I don’t fuss.”
“No, you loom quietly and make people confess to things.”
His mouth shifts into something that’s not quite a smile. “Only works when they have something to confess.”
I take a sip of coffee even though it’s too hot. It burns my tongue, which is almost helpful. Pain is easier to handle than the kind that moves through you and refuses to be named.
Jett observes me from the doorway, his quietness compressing the space.
“What?” I snap.
Being seen by him is worse than being judged by Damon. Damon wants verses, hooks, a clean little wound with radio potential. Jett notices what it costs before I have figured out how to hide the receipt.
His gaze shifts down the hallway before it comes back to me. “Phoenix is an idiot.”
My fingers tighten around the mug. “Groundbreaking. Should we call a press conference?”
“I think you need some distance from him.”
The words land quietly.
I glance down at my coffee. “From Phoenix.”
“Yes.”
“We’re in the same band.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to let him crawl under your skin every time he gets bored.”
The anger flares under my skin. “He doesn’t crawl anywhere I don’t let him.”
Jett’s face barely changes but something shifts in his eyes.
“He’s not good for you, Wills.” Jett’s gaze remains steady on mine. “You need to take care of yourself.”
My throat hurts because the stupid, awful truth is that I don’t know how to put distance between me and Phoenix without cutting out half of who I am.
So I do what I always do when someone gets too close to the truth. I turn mean.
“I am looking after myself,” I say. “I have been doing it for years, actually. Long before you decided to appoint yourself my tragic little guardian angel.”
The second I say it, guilt cuts through me.
“I know, Wills, I’m just saying—”