Chapter 6
Chapter Six
B lake belted out the last note of “We Can Do This Together” with his arms spread wide and his head thrown back, completely immersed in his character. He projected all the bravado and confidence Jesse felt as he tried to convince the woman next to him that he was the right man for the job.
When he finished, he looked around for the approval he felt sure would be on Piper’s face this time. Jeanette, the studio engineer with black-rimmed glasses that reminded him of Harry Potter, waved at him from the other side of the glass. She gave him a sunny smile and a thumbs-up. She’d been with them all day, every day, for five days straight, no matter how late they stayed, and now she was stuck here on a Saturday. Despite all that, her attitude never dimmed.
Jeanette deserved a raise.
Piper rubbed the back of her neck. “Okay, let’s start over from the top.”
He stared across the ten feet of space between them with a hint of you’ve-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-me. “What do you mean, start over?”
His nemesis gave him a don’t-bullshit-me glare. “You have two perfectly healthy ears. You know when it’s pitchy or weak or over the top.”
After doing the same song over and over and over, he really thought they’d finally nailed it. “It was damn near perfect. Jeanette gave it two thumbs up.”
“Your idea of perfect and mine aren’t even on the same planet.” Piper waved at the girl behind the glass. “Let’s take a break. Ten minutes?”
Jeanette clicked a button, so her voice could be heard inside the recording booth. “Sure thing. Want me to order dinner?”
“No,” Blake said at the same time Piper said, “Yes.”
They glared at each other.
“Ohh-kay, then. You two, um, chill, and I’ll check back in a bit.” Jeanette clicked off and hurried out the door.
He stalked over to the mini-fridge and fished out a soda.
He was done.
Done with this song, done with constant rehearsals that never amounted to a finished product, and most especially, done with Piper Vocal Dictator Bellamy.
“We’ve been at this for five days. It’s time to stop obsessing and move on,” Blake said through gritted teeth. “Done is better than perfect.”
Piper snatched the bottle out of his hand. “I told you, no soda while we’re rehearsing. It clutters your throat.”
“Oh, we’re done rehearsing.” He tried to grab the soda from her, but she put it behind her back.
Blake seriously considered making a lunge for it. His throat was on fire, and he really needed a drink. Maybe one with a little more kick.
“We’re not done.” She arched an eyebrow at him .
“Come on, give it back.” He held out a hand. “I need it. My throat is dry.”
She stuffed the bottle back in the fridge and handed him a water instead. “If your throat’s dry we should send out for hot herbal tea. And, no, it’s not time to move on. It’s nowhere near time to move on, and it won’t ever be time to move on until you start taking this seriously.”
He forced himself to unclench his jaw and sound reasonable. “I’ve been here every single day since the table read like you insisted. I’m Mr. Serious.”
He felt like he was talking with a throat full of gravel. He reluctantly opened the bottle of water.
“That’s just showing up.” Piper looked at him like he was the one being unreasonable. “You have to actually put in the work once you get here.”
His irritation was starting to build despite all of his effort to keep his cool. Her impossible standards on top of his rapidly compounding workload were wearing him thin.
“What do you think I’ve been doing?” His voice cracked.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “What was that?”
He took a long gulp of water that burned going down. He really wanted this day to be over, but she’d been singing just as much as he had, and her throat didn’t sound like it wanted to sue for divorce. He damn sure didn’t want to show weakness in front of this woman.
“What was what?”
His voice betrayed him on the last what.
“Dammit, your throat isn’t just dry. Your vocal cords are raw.” She huffed out a sigh of exasperation, and he had to control a guilty flinch. “Why didn’t you say something? We should have stopped earlier, or taken the weekend off. You need to rest them.”
“I don’t need rest.” He hadn’t said anything because the last thing he wanted was for this process to take any longer than it already was. “We need to finish this track so we can move on.”
Piper walked over to the pit of chairs in the corner and rummaged around in her purse. “If we keep pushing your vocal cords, you’ll be down for at least a month.”
He almost choked.
He had a tentative start date for filming Conned based on when Scorched was supposed to wrap, but at the rate they were going, they’d never leave this studio. “I can’t be out for a month. I have another project that can’t wait.”
“What project?” She gave him a curious look.
“My next movie,” he said. It came out more clipped and annoyed than he’d intended.
“Your next movie,” she repeated and sat very still. “So because you have something waiting in the wings, this project we’re working on now isn’t important.”
“I didn’t say that.” He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to rein in his frustration. “Every project is important, but you have a serious case of beginner’s overkill.”
“I’ll tell you what else is beginner’s overkill. What you’re doing to your vocal cords.” She raised her hands to the heavens like she thought he was a trial sent to plague her. “God, it’s as if you don’t know how to sing at all.”
“I know how to sing.” His resentment spiked.
He clamped his lips shut before he admitted to this tyrant that she’d just hit on a painful truth. He’d been eight years old when he stopped singing anywhere but the shower and karaoke nights because that was when his dad ran out on his mom.
“Then act like it.” She paced back and forth. “If you keep pushing like an amateur, you won’t be able to finish this movie or the next one. The last time I hurt my voice, I had to stay completely silent for three months. ”
“Is there any chance you could go back to that?” Blake said semi-jokingly.
She flashed him a look of annoyance. “Even if you don’t care about this project, a lot of other people do. They’re depending on us, and they can’t do their work if we don’t do ours.”
“I’m aware of how many people are waiting for us to finish.” She had no idea how many people were waiting on him to move on from this. “We’ve had a lot of good takes.”
“When we have a good take, I’ll let you know. There’s a reason Tamar put me in charge of our sessions. She trusts my judgment. She knows I won’t stop until we get it right.” She pulled a package of throat lozenges out of her bag and slapped it against his chest.
He shoved it into his pocket without looking at it. “Fantastic, because we’ve already done that. We did it three days ago.”
She let out a derisive little laugh. “No. We didn’t. We haven’t been anywhere near the neighborhood of ‘right.’”
“Dammit, it’s good enough.” His voice broke again on the word good like a traitor.
Anger and challenge flashed through her eyes. “Good enough isn’t good . Good enough isn’t right or finished. Good enough is something you say when you don’t care about the outcome. I would never, ever put out a song that was just good enough. I wouldn’t treat the fans that way.”
“You’re not the only one who cares about fans,” he snapped back. “But I want them to actually have a movie to watch. Sticking to my deadlines is how I show I care. But I guess divas have a problem with deadlines.”
She stared at him for a long moment, seemingly nonplussed with that retort.
He stared back.
Silence stretched for a few long seconds.
“That’s it.” She threw her phone into her purse. “You know, if you put a quarter of the heart into singing as you do into acting, we’d have a quality track finished by now. Unless you’re telling me this was the best you can do.”
He was tired and hungry, and his throat hurt, and her words stung.
Is that the best you can do?
It was his mother’s mantra. Something he’d heard since he was old enough to know the meaning of words.
Why did that sentence always make him feel guilty?
He’d spent his entire career striving to be the best he could be, throwing everything he had into his craft. Maybe his voice would never be a match for Piper’s, but dammit, he wasn’t a horrible singer, and these sessions had been more than fine.
She slung her bag over her shoulder. When he didn’t answer, she raised an eyebrow and said, “Well? Was it?”
The words “Yes, it was the best I could do” died in his throat.
He couldn’t say them.
Today, it was true. But if he’d had enough time to get a vocal coach, or if he’d spent as many years learning as she had, or if they’d had a year to get it right, then his best would have been a lot different.
But that wasn’t the timeline they were operating on, and he hated that she was making him feel guilty about something he couldn’t fix.
“I’ve been working just as hard as you.” He had a hell of a lot more on his plate than she did. As far as he could tell, she had no other commitments at the moment. “Are you sure this isn’t just resentment that I pointed out you needed acting help after you were late on the first day? Because that’s what it sounds like to me.”
She flinched like he’d struck her. “I was thirty minutes late. One time. I haven’t asked you to do anything that I don’t do myself. When we get out of here, I go home and work. I’ve been figuring out the emotions of every character for every damn scene. I’ve been practicing every line over and over and over to make sure I get it right. Because I don’t want to let anyone down.”
Nobody had ever made him feel like a slacker as much as she had the past five days.
“I’ve been going over endless screenplay edits for Conned , scouting out shooting locations in California and Nevada, trying to figure out how to make a big-budget movie with less than half the money one would normally get, while trying to convince half my friends to work for free, so, no, I haven’t been singing when I get home. Twelve hours a day for five days on one song is more than enough.”
She looked at him like he was the thing she hated most in the world. “Maybe if you were giving this project your full attention, we would be done by now. You’ve been selling this song short because you’re only half here.”
He returned her glare with interest. He had never, in his entire career, half-assed a project. “We can’t—” His throat stuck. He tried to clear it, but the gravel dug in and refused to budge. He resorted to a semi-whisper instead of the firm retort he wanted. “We can’t keep doing this. We have to move forward.”
She closed her eyes and appeared to be counting under her breath. When she spoke, she sounded tired for the first time since he’d met her. “Go home, Blake. Stop talking. I’ll see you Monday.”
“I’m not coming in on Monday,” he said with absolute conviction. “I don’t care if you send your flying monkeys to get me, I’m not setting foot in this studio.”
“My flying…” She flushed. “I thought you wanted to be done with this.”
“I do.” He leaned in. “Believe me. But I’m busy Monday.”
Her hands curled into claws like she was thinking about strangling him. “Fine. Tuesday. ”
Piper crossed to the door, then paused.
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “You know, when you told me how horrible my read was, I didn’t argue with you. I listened to what you said. I took your advice, and I worked on it until I did it better. You’d think you could do me the same courtesy. I can’t sing this duet by myself.”
She pushed open the door and walked out without another look back.
His anger collapsed in her wake. The sudden silence in the room drove home her point more effectively than anything she’d said or done, and he was left feeling about two inches tall.
He thought about going after her, but it wouldn’t do any good.
What would he say? He was trying to hold the character in his head, but she kept knocking him out of it every time she said “start over.”
He might be good, but she created vocal magic, and he knew the difference.
If his performance wasn’t up to her standards, well, her standards were just…dammit.
He was making excuses. Reasonable, easy-to-understand, justifiable excuses.
Deep down, he knew he could do better. He just didn’t know how.
The fact that she was right poked a nerve. So did the fact that she had listened to his advice. She’d done short read-throughs every day with him, and she’d improved so much he almost couldn’t believe she’d been that stilted on her first day.
“Blake?” Jeanette said over the intercom. “Are you two going to dinner? Should I come back later?”
Jeanette was in her early twenties and had the stamina and bright-eyed enthusiasm of someone who was new to the business.
He gave her a tired smile. “No. We’re calling it quits for the day, and we’re taking tomorrow and Monday off. We’ll see you Tuesday, okay?”
“Sounds good.” Jeanette clicked off, paused, then clicked back on. “Just so you know, I thought you were great today.”
Her hopeful smile lifted his mood a little. “Thanks, J. You’ve been awesome hanging out here with us this whole time.”
“It’s what I’m here for.” Jeanette gave him a quizzical look. “Hey, are you okay? You don’t sound so good.”
He pointed at his throat. “A little overworked, I think.” It came out barely above a whisper.
“Oh. Yeah, you should rest your voice. That’s the money maker.” Jeanette gave him a thumbs-up. “See you Tuesday.”
He gave her a wave, then pulled his phone out of his back pocket and tapped out a quick text to Marshall. Where R U
On set. Never leaving. May die here, Marshall sent back.
Today was the last day of shooting for Marshall’s current project, The Other Man . The rom-com featured his friend as the lead, alongside Ciara Rodriquez and Zach Martin. Blake had worked with both before, and he’d wanted to stop by and say hi, but that idea had slipped to the back burner when Scorched and Piper had taken over his life.
He could go home, put his feet up, sit in silence, and rest his voice like Piper told him to do, or he could go check in with Marshall and follow up on the latest script changes and maybe sort out a few scheduling details.
It wasn’t a tough call.
Forty-five minutes later he pounded on Marshall’s trailer door twice, then let himself in.
The place was cozy and comfortable, with light wood floors, white walls, and two red sofas facing each other with a walkway down the middle. A large TV with a game system attached mounted above one, a picture window above the other. There was a kitchenette with a fridge, microwave, sink, and bar, and a large bathroom/closet/dressing room at the back.
“About time.” Marshall paused the basketball game he was playing and glanced up. “Why are you wearing your psychopath smile?”
Blake worked his jaw to ease the muscles. “I have a psychopath smile?”
“Yeah. The bottom half of your face looks happy but your eyes say you want to murder someone. What’s up?”
Blake collapsed onto the sofa next to Marshall with a sigh of relief. He hadn’t realized just how tense he’d been until right this second. “Piper. Bellamy.”
“What did she do now?” Marshall peered at him suspiciously. “Why do you sound like you’ve been gargling shards of glass?”
“Because that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing.” He fished another lozenge out of his pocket. “I’m trapped in musical boot camp and she’s the drill sergeant. The woman just doesn’t know when to quit.”
“Oh really. Sounds familiar. Pretty sure I’ve heard this song before.” Marshall unpaused the game and guided his player down the court. “At least she’s a sexy drill sergeant.”
“She comes across all nice with her soft little Southern drawl and those puppy dog eyes, until she gets you behind a microphone and turns into Mussolini. She’s a dictator with a nice…voice.”
Marshall took a shot and missed. “Sure you weren’t going to say ass?”
“We don’t have time to beat these songs to death. I’m trying to keep my cool but it’s not easy.” Just thinking about the last conversation with Piper brought all the irritation he’d felt bubbling back to the surface. “I swear she’s doing this on purpose. It’s sadistic.”
Marshall kicked his feet up on the coffee table and leaned back. “You think you have it bad. Try having to do a love scene with a woman you slept with once and then never called.”
“Wasn’t that over two years ago?” Blake remembered Marshall and Ciara working on It Takes Two . It was a rom-com with several up-close-and-personal scenes, which often led to a little side action. It was hard to separate the on-screen from the off sometimes, but he could have told her it wouldn’t last. His friend wasn’t the settling-down type. “Surely she’s over it by now.”
Marshall grimaced. “She’s got a long memory, man. A long, long, long memory.”
“Did you apologize? Girls like that.”
“Yeah, of course. Didn’t help. Get this.” His friend shifted on the couch so they were semi-facing each other. “The first love scene, I go in for the kiss and she turns her head to the side and bites my ear. I yelp in surprise, then she grabs my face and kind of does one of those kiss-bite combo deals. The director loved it, but look at this. She drew blood and everything.”
Marshall pointed to his ear lobe, where Blake could see a small, fresh scab. “The director keeps saying how great our chemistry is, but I’m telling you it’s not sexual. It’s homicidal.”
“Told you it’s a bad idea to get mixed up with a co-lead. It always ends badly. Just look at my parents. Besides, my situation is a lot worse. We’ve been in that studio for five days straight. Five. Days. And after making us sing the song for the thousandth time, Piper accused me of not working hard enough. Me.”
“I can see how you would find that as painful as losing a piece of flesh off your ear.” Marshall looked unimpressed. “Did I mention that Ciara is sleeping with Zach? He’s playing my best friend, so she sees him as my competition or something. She’s across the way doing him right now for spite.”
“Piper said I didn’t put any heart into the song.” That comment had been out of line. He picked up the game controller to distract himself. “I’m all heart. I know my character inside and out. I am Jesse.”
“Every time I’m close enough to Ciara, she whispers critiques about my lovemaking skills. We only did it once, but according to her I’m the worst lay she’s ever had.” Marshall snorted. “No chance of that.”
Blake unpaused the game, ran the digital player down the court, and scored. Fake crowd noise cheered him on.
“It’s not right that you play pretend basketball as good as you do the real thing,” Marshall said.
“Practice, man. That’s all it is.” Blake went up and down the court twice before he said what was really on his mind. “She asked me if it was the best I could do.”
Marshall whistled. “Damn. She sure found your button.”
“Yeah.” His throat tickled. He handed the controller back to Marshall and dug out another lozenge. At this rate, he’d go through the entire box in an hour. “These things taste like being punched in the face.”
Marshall peered at them. “They aren’t drugs, are they?”
“Piper gave them to me for my throat. Probably part of her plan to torture me.” He passed the box to Marshall.
“Throat lozenges for the serious singer.” He snorted a laugh and looked up. “Sure you should be eating these?”
“Yes.” He took the box back and glared at it. These things were a metaphor for the past five days. They took forever to dissolve and left a bad taste in his mouth. “Piper the Sadist gave them to me. I hate to admit it, but they do help.”
Marshall smirked. “Does she know you’re not a serious singer?”
“She’s made her thoughts on that pretty clear, yes.”
“So what did you say?”
“I told her I was working my ass off.”
“That didn’t exactly answer the question.” Marshall tossed the game controller onto the couch and crossed to the fridge. He pulled out two bottles of a locally brewed, limited-edition ale and held one out to Blake.
Blake imagined how beer would mix with his sore throat and menthol-coated tongue and shivered. “No, thanks. Got any herbal tea in there?”
“Uh, that would be a hell no. I have this, water, energy drinks, and Diet Coke.” Marshall put one bottle back in the fridge, opened his, and took a long pull. “So why do you need these magical drops? What happened to your throat?”
“I might have been a little enthusiastic on the final verse.” He sucked on the lozenge like the penance it was.
Marshall waited with the patience of a friend who knew more was coming.
“I belted that sucker out the way Jesse would, loud and proud. But it was all the repetition that did me in.”
“Which happened because…”
“She’s insane?” He checked inside the box of tiny torture devices. There were only three left. “Any idea where I can buy more of these?”
“I don’t know. A vitamin store?” Concern crept onto Marshall’s face. “What happens if your voice is stuck like that? You sound like an eighty-year-old chain-smoker. That won’t work for Conned . You’re the hot, young lead. Emphasis on young.”
“I know.” He tried to ignore the stab of worry that thought caused, but it festered a little. It wasn’t just Scorched riding on his ability to get this song nailed down. “Don’t worry, her vocal majesty has commanded voice rest and herbal tea, which she thinks will fix everything by Tuesday because that’s when we agreed to be back.”
“Herbal tea?” Marshall wrinkled his nose. “Can’t you take a pill or something?”
“Apparently not. ”
“Voice rest. So you’re not supposed to be talking right now.” Marshall grinned. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you go more than ten minutes without talking.”
Blake stared at Marshall for a long, thoughtful moment and then gave him the only answer that seemed reasonable. “Bite me.”
A text alert sounded on Marshall’s phone. His friend picked it up and grunted. “Back on set in fifteen.”
“Okay. I’ll clear out.” Blake stood up.
“No need to rush. Trust me. Nothing moves that fast around here.” Marshall leaned against the kitchenette counter. “I’m just curious. What’s taking so long to nail down these tracks?”
“Piper,” he said with a little too much emphasis. “She refuses to accept any of the takes we’ve done. There was one yesterday that was more than good enough but she refused to send it through to Tamar.”
Marshall gave him a funny look. “Good enough?”
“Yes, as in sufficient quality to promote to the general public.” He cleared his throat.
“Sufficient,” Marshall repeated in a flat, even tone.
“Stop that.”
“What?”
“The playback was pretty good. I nailed the character, and she sang the hell out of the chorus. Add in the animation and it’s fine. Anything rough would get ironed out in post. But she doesn’t know anything about the production process. All she knows is the music stuff.”
“Fine.” Marshall said it like the concept was foreign. “You think it’s good enough, sufficient, and fine.”
Hearing those words said like that, one after the other, set guilty heat prickling up the back of his neck. “Yes.”
Marshall stared at him.
“What?” But he knew what, and Marshall knew he knew.
Marshall held his gaze. “Let me ask you this. When we finally start shooting Conned and we’re deep in one of the pivotal scenes, and we’ve been at it all day, and we’ve done the scene oh, five or six times, and one of the guys tells you it’s good enough, but you know it isn’t. What are you going to say?”
“You know what I’d say.” Blake sucked in a deep breath and tried to let go of the irritation that had joined the guilt bubbling under his skin. “It’s not a fair comparison. Our high-budget, mainstream blockbuster movie is a hell of a lot more involved than her animated fairy tale.”
“Oh really?” Marshall nodded to himself. “Because last I saw the budget on an animated feature was three times higher than ours. More people involved, more tech, more money.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours. Always,” Marshall said instantly.
Blake glared at the TV, but he was really seeing Piper’s face when she’d said start over. “Piper’s version of good is everyone else’s version of outstanding. Her standards are way too high.”
Marshall’s phone dinged again. “Ten minutes. Which means another hour because we have to do makeup and hair all over.”
Blake paced to the back of the trailer and turned around. “Nobody’s expecting Broadway or solid gold. If they were, they wouldn’t have cast me as the lead. It’s not like I’m known for singing. That’s Dad, not me.”
Marshall frowned. “You know I’m just kidding about your singing, right?”
Blake shrugged. He knew Marshall was joking, but a secret part of him had always wondered if he was right. “Sure.”
“Come on. You know you’re better than good. You’re frustratingly talented. You’re a better singer than a lot of so-called professionals and you don’t have to sweat for it, while the rest of us poor slobs have to work our asses off to sound even half as good as you do in the damn shower.”
Marshall’s compliment felt like an unintentional echo of Piper’s disappointed “is this the best you can do.” It made him shift uncomfortably. “That’s not the point.”
“So what is?”
He couldn’t quite explain the difference between his singing and Piper’s, but he knew that there was one. “I can hear the difference between where she is and where she wants me to be, but I don’t know how to get there. So we just keep doing it over and over, and I get louder and louder. Then she gets that look on her face.”
“What look?”
Blake tilted his head, raised his eyebrows, and pressed his lips together to mimic Piper’s why-are-you-breathing-my-oxygen-you-painful-disappointment expression. “This look.”
“Oh. Yeah I’ve seen that look before.” Marshall’s lips twitched. “You make a version of that face a lot.”
“I do not.” He stopped pacing to glare at his friend. “I’m nothing like her. She’s an uptight, impossible-to-please perfectionist.”
“And you aren’t?” Marshall supplied. “Please. Remember how you made all five of us on Back to Work take real office jobs for a month so we could experience what it feels like to be one of those nine-to-five slugs?”
“Hey, we had a great time in that office. We ended up with some good dialogue too, and the box on that was over two hundred million.”
“I’m not saying it didn’t work. I’m just saying it might be considered—” Marshall paused as if hunting for the right word.
“Professional?” Blake offered.
“Obsessive.” Marshall snapped his fingers. “That’s the word. Obsessive. Oh, or like in Get Hairy , when you had the wolf gang stay in full makeup and hang out with a bunch of dogs for hours so they could experience what it felt like to be part of a pack. ”
“We spent thirty minutes, not hours, with two dogs. Not a bunch.” He held up two fingers. “Two.”
“Whatever.” Marshall’s phone dinged again. “Five minutes.”
“I’ll walk you out.”
They left the trailer and head down the lot toward the soundstage.
“Hey, I have another one for you,” Marshall said. “How about the time you stayed up for a week straight so you could be ready to play that insomniac who had, like, what, three lines? I had to come pick you up because you were so tired you couldn’t drive, and you passed out before we got home.”
“It was good practice.” People were emerging from the row of trailers and the backlot. He lowered his voice. “It’s not like you’re any different. Look at all the research you did to get ready for this little rom-com fiesta you’re in now.”
Marshal snorted. “You think my recent dating life is research? Dude.”
“Can we drop it, please?” He waved to a couple of the crew he recognized.
“Hey, Blake!” A short guy with wild hair and glasses held up his phone. “I heard about the new project. Give me a call.”
Blake gave him a thumbs-up as he ran through his memory trick for names.
Glasses…Granny…Gerry.
“What do you think of Gerry?”
Marshall shrugged. “He’s cool. You know him better than I do.”
“I like him. He’s not afraid to speak up if he thinks it’s going wrong. But he can be stubborn.”
“Like we aren’t.”
“True.” More true for him than Marshall, but he didn’t mind arguing a point if he believed in it.
Kind of like Piper had done today .
Damn.
They were a lot alike.
“So, what are you going to do about your little situation?” Marshall pointed at his throat.
“Grab some herbal tea and more of these throat things. Then I guess stop talking.”
“Right.” Marshall hit him on the shoulder. “Good luck with that.”