by Zoe Lee
With an impatient kick of her legs, recrossing them, she leveled a sturdy, warning look at him and pointedly started recording before she asked, “What was Xavier like when you first met him?”
Seth scrubbed a hand over his mouth, hiding a boyish grin. “A great big nerd,” he replied, “with a voice that could carry across an auditorium like it was a closet. We met in the showers, technically. I was there getting ready to go to a class performance, when all of a sudden someone starts belting out ‘Send the Pain Below’ by Chevelle, not that I’d ever heard it before then.” He snorted with a shake of his head, then gave in and laughed a little. “That wasn’t… exactly what most kids at Juilliard were listening to in their spare time, you know? I didn’t know the song, because it wasn’t what was on the radio at home either. But when he was done, I lobbied with ‘Wildflowers’ by Dolly Parton. His laugh almost knocked me out in there with the bad acoustics, ricocheting off all the tile on the walls and floor.”
“I love Dolly Parton,” Astrid murmured. “I don’t think I heard her before I came here.”
“It’s good you know her now. She wouldn’t like to be missed.”
Her eyes swept away from him abruptly as her fingers interlaced tightly over her knees. When she looked back at him, she had an almost rigid, blank look on her face as if she were trying to be a total professional without opinions of her own. He got the sense that she hadn’t meant to insert herself into the interview at all, to offer up anything of herself.
It was an understandable trait in a music journalist, but made him even more guarded.
“And then, the next time you met Xavier, what was that like then?”
“It was about four years after I left Juilliard when I saw him again,” he said, measuring the words out carefully so that nothing about those fours years had the chance to sneak into his tone and give anything away. “I was deejaying in Rio de Janeiro during Pride and Xavier saw me, so he and the band hung around until I was done. It was a total coincidence. He was pretty much the same guy, and I liked the others in the band right away.”
“Were they performing?”
With a toss of his head, Seth laughed heartily. “Oh, no. This was before Kayla, before she was their publicist or dating Gin. Gin’s girlfriend at the time worked for a LGBTQ tour company. Somehow she’d convinced all of them to take a tour to Rio for Pride.”
“Did they enjoy it? Did you?”
It might have been years ago, but Seth still got a sense memory of the combination of Polo cologne and sweat of the lover he’d had for the month he was in Brazil. “They had a fabulous time, and I’ve never been to a Pride celebration I didn’t enjoy,” he replied, his words lollygagging so that his drawl was at its thickest, the way it got when he was restraining himself. “And I love Rio. It was very good to me while I was living there.”
“So then, why did you leave the band after only two years?”
Seth had known the question was coming. She couldn’t have interviewed him without asking how it was that he’d come to join Downbeat, and why he left too. And this music journalist, no matter how spirited, strong and yet fragile she might be, wasn’t going to hear a single breath about Hedda or what she’d meant to Seth and his life. But he hadn’t known, until that moment, how he was going to explain anything without speaking about Hedda.
So he dropped his head into one hand and sucked more iced mocha into his mouth, letting it slosh over his tongue before melting straight down his throat. “Some things are just meant to be, Ms. Sinclair. Running into Xavier again, at that time and place, well, it was fate. I wasn’t moving, but then once I joined them, I was moving again, with an old friend and a bunch of new friends. I loved the two years I was with them, and they gave me a lot.”
“What did you give to them, other than all of the songs you wrote single-handedly?”
“Well, now, I always write single-handedly, I’m not ambidextrous,” he retorted mildly.
“Funny,” Astrid said with a little roll of her eyes. “But I was being serious.”
“So was I,” he murmured. But he could tell by the hardening look on her face that she wasn’t going to let this go, not just yet anyhow. “It was a really good time for the band. Everyone was figuring out who was responsible for which things, settling into a good dynamic, playing to everyone’s strengths. Kayla found us, and she and Gin got together. We were all at the hospital when Jorge’s first kid was born, and we sent a million videos and pictures to Anita when we had to travel. The band wasn’t very well known, so we could mess with the sound, tweak bass lines and solos at every show. We got lucky, opening for great bands because they love Hank so much and were willing to give us a shot just for that.”
Seth figured that was about as much as he’d said at once in a long time, and he felt almost breathless by the time he was done. He’d barely skimmed the surface, sounding like it was rote lip service hiding a multitude of sins or scintillating stories. While they had had a lot of great adventures too, in actuality his time with Downbeat had been a lot of hard work and self-doubt. In his opinion, they would have always been hanging a foot back from the edge of the cliff, paralyzed there by Xavier’s secrets, Gin’s stubbornness that they shouldn’t suck up to fans, and Trentham’s overall distrust of strangers and users. Until Kayla, that was.
“What were some of your favorite bands, of those?” Astrid asked.
His thumb and first finger touched his chin and spread to stroke along his jaw while he contemplated Astrid Sinclair, known as Ms. A. while she was with Barley Finn, rock star of rock stars under fifty, frontman for Barnyard. They’d been divorced since before Seth went back to Maybelle, he thought, and new bands might have emerged and made it big since then, but most of the top rock bands had outstanding longevity. Everyone there was to know, Astrid must have at least met once at parties or awards shows.
Once he’d processed that for a minute, he put it aside. She was asking about his experiences; she wasn’t there to compare stories, to compete in some tedious game of one-upmanship of name dropping. Some press probably would be, but he imagined that she’d already had enough of a tough time getting taken seriously as a journalist; she wouldn’t want to have a reputation as someone who constantly referenced her old life.
“Candied Hearts was my favorite, actually,” he threw out there.
“Downbeat opened for them,” she repeated almost dumbly. “The girl group.”
He couldn’t help a little bit of a smirk flitting across the placid pond of his expression. “Yes ma’am. They… well, those four women know their fans and they love them.”
After a second, he lazily ran one hand through his hair, leaning back a little with the movement to emphasize his lean torso. “So they like to have their opening act be… candy too,” he murmured, indulging the slowly building urge to test the chemistry between them.
There, he thought, when Astrid’s cool, professional gaze evaporated under a flash of heat. She swallowed and crossed her legs again, shoulders rigid as if she wanted to lean in.
“We were Rachel’s wedding band,” he almost sighed, easing back, not sure if this proof of their chemistry meant that they’d passed the test or that they’d failed the test. “She and her now-husband gave us a very specific set list to play,” he went on, laughing and shaking his head, remembering how much fucking fun they’d had playing all covers of songs done by women—The Supremes, Christina Aguilera, The Spice Girls, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Streisand. But he didn’t tell Astrid that, since it had been a private function and he’d never spoil that.
“Who else?” Astrid said, and he hoped it wasn’t his imagination that her voice sounded a little scratchy, as if her throat were dry because she was heating up, because of him.
“I don’t think I’ve played more pranks than I did while we were opening for Paul Crow in Europe,” he said. “Trentham started it in Madrid, putting orange food dye into Gin’s sunscreen. Gin pranked him back by bursting into tears and Crow didn’t know it was an act, b
ut when he figured it out, he yelled at her to come onstage in Paris and made her stand there while he serenaded her with some song that used the word ‘orange’ like fifty times.”
A tiny, catlike curl of amusement reshaped her mouth for a few precious seconds, then it smoothed out again. “Those are lovely stories. So, I must ask again, why did you leave?”
Seth stopped himself from drawing a big breath. “It wasn’t because we were fighting or because we wanted different things, nothing like that. I just needed to go home.”
Astrid studied him, and he met her look with equanimity, calm and sure as always.
While his life in Maybelle had been completely different than his life since he was eighteen, he knew the decision had been right for him. It had been painful, the grief over Hedda that he’d never properly dealt with cutting him off from vital pieces of his music for a long time. It had been a slow crawl upwards to be happy playing and writing, to reach out to friends or respond to their invitations to play or help them record, to sell his words again. But, even aside from all of that, he would never have traded that for being with Downbeat. He had been able to support his siblings in a way he hadn’t when they were kids, since he’d spent his childhood in youth orchestras, school music programs, music camps, and competitions. He’d gotten to work at Wild Harts, giving his siblings a little bit more time and less responsibility so that they had the freedom and opportunity to grow their relationships with their significant others. There was nothing to be sorry about, nothing to regret.
“That’s all you’re going to say about it?” Astrid finally interrupted his musings.
“If you want to ask about how I write songs, or if we have superstitious rituals before we go onstage, I’ll tell you,” he told her evenly, “but I didn’t agree to discuss my heart.”
My heart.
The words landed heavily between them, and her eyes fluttered in something like shock and curiosity, and he cursed himself for letting those words slip out. His stomach twisted because he’d given her a tantalizing hint of the real explanation without meaning to, and no matter how intrigued by her he was, no matter their chemistry, this was her job.
Her throat convulsed silently as she swallowed hard.
“With all of the artists you’ve opened for and written for and met, I’m surprised that you still have such a low opinion of rock stars,” she declared at last.
It came from such a different direction that it took Seth a second to figure out what she was referring to. No. That’s not me. I don’t fuck everyone who tosses themselves at me and drink all night and get onstage at stadiums in front of thousands of people like a god demanding adoration.
Seth felt his emotions very deeply and let them run rampant when he wrote and sang, so his temper was a sluggish, lazy beast. But he came by it rightly; his parents were charmers but they were fearsome when they felt it, Aden’s temper took over good sense so that he blurted things out without thinking first, and Leda’s had been explosive until love and motherhood had gifted her with some small amount of restraint.
But unlike his parents and siblings, Seth had total control over whether or how he expressed his temper. He never exploded. So his hands curled over the ends of the armrests, his fingertips digging into the corduroy upholstery, and he leaned forward slowly. “I haven’t given any opinions on rock stars during this interview,” he stated quietly.
Astrid flinched.
“If you meant to ask me what my opinion of rock stars is,” he continued, relentlessly quiet and calm, angry at her for using words he’d spoken just to her, just for her, “then I’ll answer that I don’t judge entire groups of people, and I’m not gossiping about individuals who I’ve met, whether I love them or don’t particularly like them.”
There was an awkward, stiff silence. “Do you consider Downbeat rock stars?”
“I think that they’re poised to break through to the top of their field. I think they’re hard-working, talented, good people who make great music,” he answered, peeling his fingers off the armrest and crossing them over his ribs, eyebrow arching. “I’m proud to have been in the band and proud to write songs for them. It was really good to come here to play with them at the festival, and to get to catch up with all of them. As for whether they’re rock stars, I think that judgment is left up to journalists like you, right?”
He stared at her fiercely, his anger finally starting to ebb, leaving him trembling.
“Oh,” she gasped, suddenly fumbling for her cell to end the recording.
Seth shoved to his feet and moved to brace his hands on her armchair, one planted behind her head and one on the armrest next to her hip. His hair hung around his face, his eyes intently on hers as her head tilted up to keep eye contact with him. His eyes dropped to the base of her throat, watched it hollow out and then relax quickly with her rapid, uneven breaths. His body had ached to be this close to her, and it made his cock more than half-hard to be able to smell her again, but in his mind and heart, all he felt was the echo of his anger.
“I’m not some romanticized rock star, some tortured artist with a tragic backstory that left me with some awful hole in my heart that I need to fill with fame or sex or drugs. God knows I’ve met those people and I feel for them and I hope they will all heal and be happy someday. But I am just a small-town boy who got called a prodigy and didn’t give a shit about that, as long as it meant I got to do what I love and it made my parents proud.”
Shocked to find his breathing out of control when he was finished, he shoved away from her, nearly tripping over the coffee table, and shook his head down at her. “Whatever you’re looking for from me, Astrid, you’re not going to find it,” he said with finality, knowing she’d been fishing, and then he got the hell out of there, pulling out his cell.
“Hey, Seth,” Jesse, Leda’s best friend and the friend he was staying with, drawled.
“You free right now?” he asked, words coming more quickly than they usually did.
“Shit, I know that tone,” she groaned. “Seth, you know how much I hate… feelings!”
“Damn it, Jesse,” he growled.
“Yeah, okay,” she sighed. “My shift just ended, just come back to my place. Hell.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Astrid
The soles of Astrid’s shoes stomped across the parking lot at the Metra station in the northern suburb where she lived, echoing as if it were hollow beneath her, the vibrations satisfying in their power. Her purse jerked against her hips as she went, weaving efficiently through the cars towards hers. Her hips ached a little from the train ride because she was leggy enough for the seating to bother her even after only an hour.
As soon as she was in her car, suitcase on the front seat, Irish punk rock blasted out of her speakers and its shameless rage conversely helped her unwind as she drove home.
Her stone house was small, but with a private beach on Lake Michigan, an outlandish purchase made with her divorce settlement. It was less than ten miles from Barley’s mansion, which they’d chosen together when they moved here after her TV show was canceled. She knew it seemed crazy that the members of Barnyard would choose to live here in the suburbs, but they loved Chicago yet still wanted to live in a quiet place once they’d started having kids. This suburb was chosen in part because the people tended to be a bit too snobby to allow themselves make a big deal out of Barnyard or Astrid.
She went inside, put her suitcase down, and climbed into her bed, groaning in relief. She dug her hands through her thick hair, searching until she found the hair tie so that she could untangle it, groaning as the tension of her messy bun eased, eyes falling shut.
A nap was all she wanted, but instead, guilt crept through her like a thief in the night.
Because at that adorable hipster coffee shop in Chicago, she had thrown away the trust Seth had given her, whether she deserved it or not, when he agreed to the interview. He’d shown up, only to have her toss words he’d spoken to her most definitely off the record
back in his face. She couldn’t justify it on a professional level at all; it had come purely from some primal place of hurt, attacking him because she could tell that he was holding back, that he was keeping the truth from her...
Ludicrous—she was being ludicrous.
She’d simply made a professional misstep. Again, her mind whispered.
When she was working on longer pieces, she was with a band for a longer, more close quarters stretch of time, and she always explained clearly that there was no such thing as off the record. That was why she always provided them with the draft ahead of publication, to let them review things and dispute this or that if they really wanted to. But it was also why she recorded more formal conversations, where the bulk of her direct quotes came from, so that they could only hem and haw and debate with her, but couldn’t outright call her a liar.
But Seth wasn’t quite… covered by that informal agreement, was he? He’d come as a courtesy, without any notion that she was interviewing him to two stories, really.
If he’d withheld the truth from her, well… she’d withheld it from him first. It hardly mattered what she had—or hadn’t—been thinking; she’d fucked it up.
A huff of annoyance blew out between her clenched teeth.
Her cell beeped and she lunged for it, grateful for the interruption to her maudlin mood. But when she opened the calendar notification, she gave into melodrama and whined. She had a friend’s fortieth birthday party tonight and she’d totally forgotten about it.
Then she rolled her eyes at herself and got up. She wasn’t going to skip the party just because she was in a whiny mood about a work mistake she was going to find a way to fix.
There wasn’t enough time to take a nap now, if she wanted to get to the party on time, so she unpacked instead. It was a ritual for her and took her mind off Seth too. She loved being in new places, but she didn’t enjoy traveling from place to place, the planes and taxis and hotel rooms, the suitcases and the rarity of home cooked meals. So every time she got home, even if the hotel had only been twenty miles from her house, she took her time unpacking, reminiscing about where she’d just been, parsing through the emotions and events so that they stuck in her mind. Otherwise, an hour or two after she’d gotten home, it seemed like the trip already felt like it had happened years ago, instead of hours ago.
