Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
LOU
J ay sniffs and walks off, and Patty doesn’t even watch him go. He just starts walking, moving across the stage like their conversation was nothing. Like I’m nothing.
I follow, my boots landing hard on the stage, but I don’t care. My heartbeat rushes in my ears, drowning out the background noise of the crew. Patty reaches the soundboard, picks up a notepad, flips a page, then adjusts a knob, all without acknowledging me.
I fold my arms and lean on his equipment, forcing him to notice me.
“Was it as painful as you expected?”
His hand stills for a fraction of a second. “What?”
“Listening to my album.”
He lifts his head, his amber eyes unreadable. “I didn’t listen to your album. Just the songs on the setlist.”
“That’s practically the whole album. Plus a couple of B-sides.”
His jaw shifts. His fingers move over another control, deliberate and precise.
Something inside me flares, an emotion I can’t name but can’t ignore. He doesn’t like my music? Fine. I don’t need him to like it.
So why am I here, staring him down?
Why do I need proof that he can feel something?
I watch him. And wait. And watch.
“I’m gettin’ paid to know your setlist,” he finally says. “When it changes, I’ll listen to the rest.”
“Gee, that’s flattering.”
“Did you need me to flatter you?”
His eyes meet mine, and something electric pulses between us. I don’t know how I actually feel about his question, but I know how I should feel. “No.”
“Good. Because that ain’t me.”
“That’s right. You only say what you mean.” He nods. “In that case, I couldn’t help but notice you nodding along to one of the songs earlier. Which one?”
Patty’s eyes catch on something behind me, and he leaves his setup to go adjust a speaker.
I follow him.
“I told you I only say what I mean. That doesn’t mean I offer up every thought that runs through my head.”
Ha! A ripple of triumph runs through me. “You loved it, didn’t you?”
“Your band is watching.”
I whip around like a cat caught with her paw in the fish tank. “Hey, y’all. Ready?”
Abby, Bailey, Celia, and Delilah all smile.
Yes, those are their real names. And yes, we quickly decided my backup band should be called The Alphabet. They love it. Or they say they do, at any rate. I don’t know. We’re not really close.
We grab our instruments while the production crew stands in the wings. We’ll have a sound check tomorrow, but otherwise, this is it.
We start playing the first notes of Double or Nothing , and Patty moves in to adjust the monitors—the wedge and side-fill speakers that face us so we can hear over the acoustics and crowd noise. The front-of-house engineer monitors the sound for the audience, but Patty? He’s the one making sure we hear ourselves right.
I face the empty rows stretching into the dim auditorium, and behind me, I hear Patty checking in with the rest of the crew. Politely, even. But after a minute, he’s next to me, his brow furrowed. He shifts a monitor, listens, then shakes his head and disappears.
Everything sounds fine to me, so I don’t know what he’s listening for. A minute later, he’s down in the audience, talking to the front-of-house engineer, Rick. He waves his hands, and Manny says, “Stop.”
Patty plants a hand on the stage and jumps onto it easily. He strides toward me, holding something small in his hand.
IEMs. In-ear monitors.
“Something rotten in Denmark?” I ask, not hiding my annoyance. “I don’t like in-ears.”
“Do you prefer hearing loss?” he asks.
I glower. “I can hear just fine.”
“You were a bit pitchy.”
I feel the flames before the smoke billows out of my ears. “Excuse me?”
Patty stands close enough for me to count the whiskers in his permanent five o’clock shadow. Or to stomp on his steel-toe boots. “It was subtle.”
“Musta been, considering no one else noticed.”
I keep my gaze locked on his wide jaw—anywhere but his eyes—as he sweeps my hair back and tucks the first IEM into my ear. His hands are careful, his touch surprisingly gentle as he tugs the top of my ear, then my lobe, to secure it.
“I have perfect pitch,” he says. And as annoyed as I am to admit it, that’s all he needs to say. “But it ain’t your fault. It’s hard to hear yourself on stage. Now open your mouth.”
My breath catches. “What? Why?”
“The earpieces shift when you sing. We need to make a seal.”
Oh.
I open my mouth, and he adjusts the first earpiece. I don’t move while he inserts the second.
“Open and close a few times,” he orders.
I do, and his fingers sweep over my monitors, checking for movement. Then, for the first time, his brow creases in frustration. “Why don’t you have custom IEMs? These are gonna fall out.”
“I told you—I don’t like wearing ‘em.”
He exhales through his nose, slow and controlled, like he’s deciding how much energy he wants to waste on me.
“I’ll take you to a specialist tomorrow to get molds made. You can’t perform without ‘em.”
“Of course I can.” I say it purely to contradict him, but then sigh. “Fine. I won’t. Because I don’t want to go deaf.” I let the corner of my mouth twitch up so he knows I’m just being salty.
“And because it makes you pitchy,” he adds, his own mouth twitching in response.
Patty distributes IEMs to the rest of the band and shows us the “talk-to-me” switch on the microphones so we can flag him if needed.
“I’ll use a laser pointer if I need to get your attention,” he says.
And then we start from the top.
By the second song, everything sounds like chaos. The drums thud in my chest, the bass pounds through my ribs, and my voice?—
Where is my voice?
I grab the mic, my grip tight on the cool metal, and belt my heart out.
Your lyrics have teeth, your every word bites
They sink in sharp, and the pain ignites
When I finish the chorus, I gesture to Patty to turn my volume up. He does, but it doesn’t help. The music is a wall of noise. The more I push, the more lost I feel.
I’m about to rip the IEMs out when Patty’s laser pointer hits my wedge monitor. I flash him a look hot enough to melt steel.
“You gotta stop hollerin’ like that,” he says through my in-ear.
I flip my mic switch to the “talk-to-me” line. “It’s too quiet! I can barely hear myself over the band!”
“And the band can barely hear themselves over you,” he replies evenly. “I keep adjusting the mix because you won’t sing at a consistent level.”
I grit my teeth. “Then turn up my volume.”
Patty tilts his head like he’s studying a science experiment that’s about to explode.
“What do you hear?” he asks.
I want to scream, but I’m painfully aware that every eye is on me. The crew. My band. I must look like such a diva. “Everything but me.”
He pauses. Then, his voice drops, steady as ever. “It’s the in-ears. They’re new. I get it. But you gotta trust the mix. You don’t need more noise, you need to hear clearly. Trust me; the difference matters.”
I hate this. Hate that he’s asking me to trust him. But I hired him to do a job, and right now, at least, he’s trying to help me.
I close my eyes and focus on the drums pulsing through my head, picking out the fills and cymbals. The bass comes through clearly too. But when I strum along, I can’t tell what I’m playing from the?—
“Fiddle. I can’t tell them apart.”
“Okay. That I can work with.” He adjusts something, and suddenly, the fiddle is louder in my left earpiece, my own playing in the right. “Better?”
“A little. But it still sounds jumbled.”
We hit the next verse, and I sing along while my sound shifts in my ears, making me almost dizzy. I nod or shake my head with each tweak, signaling what helps and what doesn’t. As the song nears its end, anxiety swells in me like a storm cloud. What if this is the best it gets? I won’t just be a watered-down Winona Williams, like critics are already saying. I’ll be a washout before my first tour is over. I can’t go night after night not knowing what I sound like.
Bringing Patty in was a mistake. What was I thinking, giving him such an important job without so much as an audition? This tour could make or break?—
My spiraling stops cold. I gasp as something shifts in my ears. I can hear my guitar perfectly! I’m not fighting the fiddle; we complement each other, just as I intended when I wrote the song. Our instruments rise like birds circling each other, soaring up, up, up into the sky.
My eyes fly to Patty’s, and I feel like the tour bus just rolled off my chest.
I switch my mic to the Patty-only channel. “That’s good. Now let’s do my vocals.”
We go through the same rigamarole, and halfway through my next song, my voice comes through my IEM, clear as crystal. When he nails the mix, I grin.
And—do my eyes deceive me?—he grins back.
Well, he smirks, at least.
Good enough.