38. Hawk
Charlie had been right; Tori had called to ream me out about the two songs her father wanted from us.
She’d yammered on about how time was of the essence, which was funny as fuck to me because Castor Records had been sitting on the first ten songs for over five years, but whatever. Now that I was thinking about branching out on my own, I was finding that Castor and his demon spawn of a daughter weren’t nearly as irritating to me as they had been.
No, now, I just let her talk, her words rolling off my back like a fuckin’ duck. The power she’d once had over me was gone, and I had never been more grateful that Lewis had fucked my wife than I was in that moment.
Sitting downstairs in my home studio, I leaned back on the deep leather couch, taking a long hit of the joint I’d rolled earlier and letting the bitter burn of the smoke steal my focus and drown out all the shit.
The guys would be joining me any minute now; Harry was upstairs, bustling around the kitchen making all kinds of snacks, having never lost her desire to spoil us boys with food. To be honest, it was a wonder any of us could fit into our pants some days.
Thank fuck the skinny jeans craze was behind us.
Blowing out the cloud of smoke, I set the joint back between my lips and pulled my Martin into my lap, the familiar feel of the wood and strings like coming home after a long time away. I had held this guitar in my arms more times than I could count, and every single time I still felt the rush. She made the sweetest sounds when I touched her, each note calling to me like a lover, and I caressed her curves with my fingers for a second before I started playing.
I didn’t have a plan, my fingers simply landing on the strings in the right places, muscle memory and a million identical moments that had come before meaning that I didn’t even have to think. The notes just bloomed under my touch.
Closing my eyes, I tilted my head back against the cushions and let my thoughts drift away, aimless and loose. I played, the notes quiet and soft as I picked out a melody that hovered on the edges of my mind, thin and insubstantial, vanishing like smoke the moment I tried to focus on it.
It had been that way for a while; the melody had been teasing me for years, reminding me of that one night.
Reminding me of my Bird.
It was always that way, the music that I associated with her drifting through my mind during the quiet moments of my life. A weird case of deja vu that I couldn’t seem to exorcise from my head. I’d hear it, ghosting around in my memories, reminding me of something I wanted desperately to remember, but could never quite grasp, and then it was gone again, like the wind.
The song floated through my brain again now, more substantial than I could ever remember it being, and I found myself repeating the same four bars over and over, feeling calm and peaceful as I played and smoked and drifted.
“You write that?” came Alex’s voice, startling me out of my Zen. “That’s sweet, bro.”
“Hey.” Placing the Martin back in its rack, I stood, taking one last hit of my joint before setting it in the ash tray and greeting the guys. “When did you get here?”
“Almost half an hour ago,” Gavin said, rolling his eyes. “Alex was sucking up to Harriette so she’d make him that cake he likes.
“Listen, no one makes a better Devil’s food cake than my girl Harry,” Alex protested. “It deserves to be revered and worshiped and devoured.”
“You gonna eat it or fuck it?” I asked, chuckling.
“Is fucking it an option?” he retorted.
“Not in my goddamn house, it isn’t.”
“Seriously, though, dude. What were you playing?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered honestly. “I was just dicking around and it sort of appeared. I’ve been playing it on and off for years now, I think.”
“You think?” Gavin asked.
“I mean,” I swallowed, shifting on the couch. “I have been, but it’s never become more than those four bars, so...” I finished with a lame shrug.
“Well, what if we made something out of it?” Alex pressed, and I paused, looking at him.
In a weird way, I didn’t want to make anything out of those notes. I couldn’t explain it, but there was something personal about them, and I was wary of sharing them with the world. It might have been stupid or whatever, but somehow, they felt special. Important.
Mine.
But now that the guys had heard them, the proverbial cat was out of the bag, and I didn’t see a way to stuff them back in.
“Alright,” I agreed, picking up the guitar and getting ready. “Let’s see what we can do.”
We played for hours. Harry came and went with snacks and beverages, keeping us hydrated and just generally fussing the way she liked to do. We hardly paused—except for when the cake was done, at which point Alex disappeared back upstairs for nearly an hour, doing whatever the fuck it was he did when he was mooching off Harry—and as the clock ticked over to midnight, I was surprised as shit to realize we had the makings of a pretty fucking great song.
All built around my Bird’s melody.
“You know,” Alex mused, scraping his fork against the plate, trying to lap up every last crumb of his fourth piece of cake. “When I suggested we write a ballad, I had no idea it was going to be so fucking dope.”
“Is that your official opinion?” Gavin asked dryly, nursing a cup of tea. We’d finally abandoned the basement studio and returned to the main floor, gathering around the kitchen island. Harriette had gone to her room hours ago, so it was just the three of us in the dark, quiet house.
“Sure as fuck is.” Alex set the plate on the counter before removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “And once we polish it up a bit, we’ll take it to Castor and tell him to shove it right up his tight—likely bleached—asshole.”
“That was...oddly specific,” Gavin said while I chuckled lightly. Alex only shrugged.
“There is one thing we haven’t talked about,” I said, hating to drag down the good vibes of a successful night of song writing. The guys looked at me, nodding, because they knew.
Of course, they knew.
“Lewis.” Gavin’s tone said that he was as unhappy about the direction of the conversation as I was.
“Do you think he’s actually going to want to record with us?” Alex asked. “The guy essentially lit our band on fire and walked away without looking back.”
“Tori said that he would, but only if I apologized first.”
Alex snorted.
“What the fuck for? It’s not like you were the one who slept with his wife.”
I nodded absently, but couldn’t bring myself to actually agree with him.
Because Lewis publicly admitting that he had been sleeping with my wife may have been the last straw in our farce of a marriage, but it certainly wasn’t the only thing that led to the demise of Black Kite. And while the public infidelity was the thing that eventually led to me being able to divorce Tori, I wasn’t blameless in the fucking dumpster fire that our situation had turned into.
“Lewis and I were on the rocks long before I ever put a ring on Tori’s finger,” I replied eventually, and Gavin nodded, his too-sharp gaze letting me know that he had seen more than he’d let on all those years ago. “I knew he was into her, and I still fucked her anyway.”
Before we’d been married. Not after.
Never after.
“Well, it’s a good thing it’s you that has to apologize and not me,” Alex grumped, reaching for his coat, picking up his phone and pocketing it before he headed for the door. “Because if it was me, I’d be more likely to feed him my fist than anything else.”
“You heading home?” I asked, as he spun his keys around on his finger.
“Nah.” Alex tried for casual, but failed miserably. “I think I might head down to The Sour Patch, see if there’s anything going on worth looking at.”
I narrowed my eyes at him before I turned to Gavin. He and I shared a knowing look, but neither of us said anything.
Whatever Alex was up to, he wasn’t ready to share just yet. I just hoped he clued us in before he ended up in the news.
Or in Dubai. That had actually happened once.
“I’ll see you boys tomorrow,” he called, then he was out the door.
“Do you think we want to know?” Gavin asked warily.
“Probably not,” I admitted. “But we should probably be ready for anything, just in case.”
“Agreed.” Gavin was quiet for a bit, not saying anything, but not making any move to leave either. He always was the type to really roll an idea around in his brain before letting it come out of his mouth. Kept his ass out of trouble over the years.
I should have probably been taking notes.
“You know, Hawk,” he said eventually. “It really is a great song.”
“It is.” He meant the ballad. The way the music had come together with some of the lyrics I had been tossing around for weeks had surprised me. It was as though the two separate entities had been waiting, patiently, for the other to appear.
“It’s a song that deserves to be heard. If apologizing to Lewis is what makes that possible, then maybe it would be worth it.”
“Lewis deserves an apology from me, regardless of whether it gets him to agree to play on the song or not,” I confessed, and I stared as a slow smile crept across Gavin’s face.
“Well, look at you. All mature and shit.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I groaned, shoving him in the shoulder. “Shut the fuck up about it, you douchebag.”
“If you want us to be there, you know we will be.”
“Thanks, but I think this is something I need to do on my own.”
Gavin nodded, and then, with a slap to my back, he was gone, and I was alone.
After locking the door—just for Charlie—I wandered around the house, nothing but the sound of my own footsteps there to greet me, hating how the loneliness started to descend on me like a cold fog. It was times like these when I wondered what the fuck I was even doing with my life. I gazed out across the property, seeing the lights off Harry’s wing and almost regretting the fact that she was asleep. I would have totally crashed in her room, showing up with a bottle of whiskey so she could slip it into her tea when she thought I wasn’t looking. We would throw on some crappy old action movie, then spend the entire time calling out how unrealistic the script was while simultaneously reciting every damn word.
But her lights were out, and I’d be the biggest asshole in the world if I woke her up just so that I didn’t feel like such a goddamn loser.
When I’d roamed through all the rooms, finding each one as depressing as the last, I headed back downstairs and picked up my Martin. Cradling it close, I looked at the sheet music we’d worked on, seeing all the words and notes spread out before me.
We’d written some awesome stuff tonight, stuff that would probably be nominated for some award or another, but when I stroked the strings and started to play, it was those same four bars that came to me.
Over and over and over again.