CHAPTER ONE
SKYLAR
“What is this?!” Janelle demands, waiving a hot pink jump drive in my face just as I’m about to take a bite of the world’s greatest veggie burger.
I briefly consider holding off on my lunch another second to answer her but decide against it when I realize questions will only snowball from here and my food will be cold by the time she stops talking.
So, I take my bite.
I chew it leisurely before I swallow.
And then, I answer.
“It’s my new song.” Obviously . “Didn’t you listen to it?”
She plops herself down onto the sofa across from me in a particularly dramatic fashion, more than is normal even by Janelle’s standards for flair.
“Of course, I listened to it. Why do you think I’m causing such a scene?
To add a show to the lunch you brought? No!
I listened to it. And now I need answers! ”
I made the mistake of taking another bite while she was talking. Kind of expected her to rant on for longer than she did. Now I’m left trying to choke down my food and respond at the same time. “Did you not like it?”
“Like isn’t the issue,” she explains, sitting up straighter, face getting tighter. “It’s more that I didn’t understand it.”
I roll my eyes sideways at Grayson, my producer, who has remained annoyingly silent since Janelle came bursting into her office, jump drive nearly flying from her flailing hands. “What part didn’t you understand? Grayson got it, and he’s a dude.”
“The part where it wasn’t a love song, I guess,” she says, eyes bugging out at me. “ Please save me somehow, keep me from falling, escaping the now ?” She waves the jump drive yet again, this time with less flair and more frustration. “What am I supposed to do with that?”
I shrug. “Play it for the label as a preview for the coming album?”
She shakes her head, lowering herself a little deeper into the cushions behind her with each shake back and forth until she’s nearly folded into them. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Janelle, you’re top boss bitch of the industry. Of course, you can do that.” I smirk, my attention turning back to my lunch as I add, “Plus, I’m your boss bitch and I’m telling you to.”
“I could have when Barry was alive. But if I go to the label with this now, if I play it for Chase, we’ll both go from boss bitch to fired bitch, and I don’t think either of us wants that,” she huffs, leaning forward ever so slightly to examine the open boxes of take-out laid out on the coffee table.
When Grayson and I agree to a lunch meeting, we don’t mess around.
“Is anyone going to finish those falafels?”
“Knock yourself out.” Grayson reaches forward to push the box closer to her. “Maybe a little food in your belly will curb your hanger-anger.”
“That’s not what this is.” Bold claim from someone shoving an entire falafel into her mouth as she’s saying it.
She takes half a second to gulp it down before she starts in on me again.
“Sky, you are the queen of love songs. Your entire career has been built on the epic romances you belt out one note at a time. And now, out of nowhere, you want to sing about some self-discovery shit? What the hell is going on?”
“Did you even chew?”
“Did you even listen?”
“More than you chewed,” I mutter, placing half of my burger back in its box.
I’m starting to lose my appetite. “I’ll tell you what the hell is going on.
” I pause. The sentence I’m about to say deserves to be delivered as a standalone statement, not some run-on response to her question. “I’m done with love songs.”
She stares at me dumbfounded, third falafel stuck in midair halfway between the box and her open mouth, which went from welcoming her food to gaping at me. “What does that even mean?”
“See, I told you it wasn’t as self-explanatory as you thought,” Grayson says, picking the cucumbers out of his wrap and dropping them into the takeout box beside my half-eaten burger.
He hates cucumbers. I love them. Fifteen years of working together day in and day out has left us with very little personal space and no boundaries to speak of.
The fact he married my brother only supports what I’m saying.
“It is self-explanatory. You two are just overthinking it, insisting there’s more to the words than what they are. It’s a simple sentence. It’s complete. And very straightforward in its meaning.”
“You can’t be done with love songs,” she insists. “You love love songs.”
“I do. Or I did.” I close the box on my burger. I’m definitely done with it. “Now I think I hate them.”
“What are you talking about?” Janelle’s confusion only seems to grow the longer this conversation goes on.
“Janelle.” I sigh. “I’m thirty-nine years old. You and I, we’ve been doing this how long now? Seventeen years? In that entire time, how often have you seen me in love?”
She frowns. “You’ve been in love.” She hardly sounds convincing. “Andrew. You were in love with him.”
Grayson clears his throat loudly like he’s trying not to choke on his last bite.
“Really? Andrew is the example you’re going with to represent my love life?
” If Andrew is the extent of her argument, I think we’re done here.
“That wasn’t love. That was a twisted game of control and mental destruction.
And when he was done screwing with my head, he went out and started screwing other women. ”
“I’m not denying he’s a piece of shit of astronomical proportions,” she agrees. “But you wrote ‘Love Me Still’ when you were with him. That album had seven number one hits and went double platinum its first year out.”
“That album is a crock of shit and the number one reason I need to stop writing such detrimental crap,” I scoff. “That wasn’t love. That was the delusional infatuation of a na?ve girl too desperate to find a fairy tale to realize she was living in a nightmare.”
Janelle seems to accept her setback for a moment, but one falafel later and she’s coming at me again. “‘Secret Heart of Hearts’. You and Benson. That was love!”
“That was a game. And Benson and I were never actually together,” I remind her. “He was the guy I loved from a safe distance when Andrew messed me up too much to love someone for real.”
“What about Jackson? What you two had was definitely real.”
“Really? Jackson is the healthy love story you want me to refer to moving forward?” Maybe it was real. I certainly thought it was, but the truth is we were both too broken at the time to know one way or the other. And only one of us ever wanted to heal enough to find out for sure.
Janelle gets silent after that, and I know it’s because she only has one example left and she won’t dare use it.
“Face it, Janelle. I’m a fraud.” I sigh.
“I weave the shit out of some tales depicting troubled men and wounded women destined to find each other even when it seems least likely. I start them broken and mend them as they go, leaving them whole by the end. I sell love, and I do it damn well. But...while I have poured my heart into my music, found love a thousand times over in these songs, I’ve never once found it for real. ”
“But you’re such a believable fraud,” she half-whines, half-pleads. “Can’t we just keep lying to people?”
“They won’t believe me anymore,” I tell her flatly, leaning forward to reach my water bottle sitting at the center of the table.
“Of course, they will. They’ve believed you all this time, why would they stop now?”
I twist the cap off but stop short of having a sip. Instead, I look straight at Janelle. “Because I stopped believing me.”
“You don’t mean that.” But even as she says it, I can hear her conviction fading.
“I do mean it.” It was the most heartbreaking realization I think I’ve ever come to, but it’s true.
And now that I’ve had some time to get comfortable with it, I’m numb to it.
“I’m not saying love isn’t real, and that it isn’t a beautiful thing,” I add.
“I’m just saying, I don’t believe it’s out there for me anymore.
And that’s okay. I’m okay. But I can’t keep throwing myself into these fantasies with every passionate piece of my soul when it only leaves me feeling hollow at the end of it.
Whatever my ideals on love and romance amount to, they’re not based in reality.
And I don’t want to keep setting the rest of the world up for the same disappointment I’ve felt every time I let myself believe the crap I sing about is real, that the fantasy could actually come true. ”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Grayson start to open his mouth, but he thinks better of saying his thoughts out loud this time.
We’ve been going round and round with this for weeks.
He knows better than anyone how hard it was for me to get here, but that doesn’t mean he’s any more willing to accept it. Not yet.
“So that’s it.” Janelle drops into the cushions again, this time the movement screams of surrender. “No more love songs.”
“No more love songs.” I repeat the words I’ve made my mantra.
“What about lust songs?” She makes a half-assed effort to keep me skating on the edge of my genre.
“Please,” I laugh at the suggestion. “Unless you want to see me walk on stage naked, you’re not getting any sexy out of me.
” Sexy’s never been part of my skill set.
Mostly because I don’t believe being sexy qualifies as any sort of skill or talent, it’s a natural way of being we all stumble upon at one point or another, some more frequently than others.
“You laugh, but the label might have more faith in selling your naked body than the feminist power ballad you’re asking me to sell them.” She makes a face, and I can’t help but appreciate the irony of using the words feminist and power in the same statement as selling your naked body.
I opt not to respond and instead meet her gawking with a poignant stare.
She scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, I heard it.”
“Can I say something?” Grayson cuts in and I’m sure he knows I was about to take this way off-topic.