by L. Philips
Cameron loses himself in thought, and I move on to the next glass-encased award. It’s a Grammy, and although I don’t recognize the name of the recipient, I am floored by the category.
“Best Jazz Album? Paradise signs jazz musicians?”
Cameron joins me by the case. “Only a few in our history. This particular group was a favorite of my grandfather’s.” Cameron slips into a horrible Brando accent. “He made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.”
I shake my head but chuckle in spite of myself. “That was just terrible.”
Cameron grins. “You should hear my Irish brogue. Truly a wonder of mimicry.”
“I bet.” I glance pointedly around the room. “It’s impressive, Cameron.”
“Is it?” he asks. A loaded question if I’ve ever heard one.
“Yes, it is. Taylor Huffman aside, you can’t get all these without doing something right.”
Cameron crosses his arms over his broad chest. “I wish I could believe you meant that. Or, at least, that you believe that about me. I got the impression the other day that you . . . well, that you sort of hated me, my whole family, Paradise Entertainment, pop music in general, and basically anyone who makes a lot of money or is related to someone who makes a lot of money.”
I feel my skin flush, from my chest all the way up to my hairline. “I said a lot of things I didn’t mean the other day.”
“Which things did you mean?”
I reach back and brace myself on the glass case holding the jazz award. “Look, I shouldn’t have said that stuff. I was caught by surprise and overwhelmed. You have to understand that this whole thing has been truly awful for me.”
“Me trying to find a guy I thought I had a connection with, you mean? Or are you talking about me offering you a job?”
Embarrassment turns into anger in a hot second, and I hear my voice gaining volume as I speak. “Is that really how you look at it, Richard?”
“Cameron. My name is Cameron.”
“Your sister mentions in one tweet that you want to find me, and then suddenly the whole world is looking for me. People tracked down my house. I couldn’t even get inside. I had to leave the city for weeks! But pardon me, you’re Prince Charming, right? I was just supposed to thank you for your attention and fall at your feet with praise?”
Cameron opens his mouth to speak, but I charge on.
“And the job? A job accompanying the son of the guy who drove my dad to suicide, for the company that ate at his soul for months before he jumped? Are you freaking kidding me with this? Of course I’m the crazy one, right? How could I not drop everything for that offer?”
“Then why did you? What are you after? Because you have to be after something, and I deserve to know what.” I look at Cameron and I can see it in his eyes: he’s hurt. “Seriously, Nate. I have to know why. Because you’re here in the middle of the night, and you wrote my song like you all but pulled it out of my head, but you obviously hate me, or at the very least, have a burning, intense contempt and disgust that will make it impossible for us to really work together. So why are you here?”
I rub the calluses on my fingertips together, trying to make sense of every thought and feeling inside me so I can give him an answer. Because he’s right. He at least deserves that.
“I’m here because I can’t get your voice out of my head.”
Cameron goes still. “What do you mean? You mean the things I said the other day?”
“No,” I say. I can’t look at him. Not yet. “Not anything you said. The song. Your singing. You say I wrote the song like I pulled it out of your head?” He nods. “You have the voice that’s in my head. The one I wish was mine. The one that goes with every single song I write. Your voice is all I’m after. That’s the truth.”
Finally, I work up the nerve to raise my eyes to Cameron’s. His have gone soft, sympathetic. Hopeful.
“So you hate me, but I’m your muse?”
I scrunch my nose up. “Muse? That sounds a bit too . . . intimate. And overimportant. You don’t inspire me, exactly. I just need your voice.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And hate’s a strong word too.” I shrug. “I don’t hate you. At least I don’t think I do. Which is more confusing than anything, because I should. I shouldn’t even give you the time of day.”
Cameron winces. “Okay, so not exactly hate, but you don’t like me. You don’t like Paradise. You don’t like my father—”
“No, I actually do hate your father.”
“And no one could blame you for that, Nate. I don’t. I can understand why you don’t want to work with me. I guess all I can do is try to prove to you that it will be worth your time.”
“It’s not the time I’m worried about,” I say.
That hangs between us for a moment, and the air in the room starts to feel dense. Stuffy.
“Can I show you something else?” he says finally, and I nod. He walks a short distance to the back of the room, to a glass cabinet perfectly tucked into a corner. “I told you about how some of our artists get so many awards they start giving them away? These are Taylor’s. He’s only kept one Grammy, that I know of, and one of the Moon Men he got for his crazy—and superexpensive, I might add—music videos. He gave the rest to us, because we signed him when he was only fourteen. As big as he’s become, he’s still very grateful for the chance to make his music heard. And we gave him that chance.”
The number of awards in the case is staggering. They’re crammed in like baubles in an antique mall.
“Believe it or not,” Cameron continues, “Paradise looks for quality. Taylor might be overproduced, he might be trendy and look like the new, improved version of David Cassidy, but he can sing the hell out of a song without all that. And he can certainly write his own stuff. There’s a reason why he’s trendy: he sets the trends. He’s always pushing the boundaries of what pop is, mixing in new sounds or borrowing from the old to create something different. Even if he didn’t have the perfect face for the cover of Teen Vogue, we probably still would have signed him. Sure, we would have given him a total makeover, but we enhance; we don’t create illusions. As my grandmother would say, we don’t put lipstick on a pig. That’s my father’s philosophy; that was my grandfather’s, and his father’s. And even though I don’t run the company yet, I’ve already adopted it myself. If you doubt me, look at the other labels. Look up their artists and see if they’re doing acoustic sets, or if they’re getting in trouble for singing along with tracks at concerts. We sign talent, Nate. Period. That’s why I want you to work for me.”
I turn back to the shrine of Taylor Huffman’s awards, mulling over his words. “I like how that was said with so much conviction.”
“So believe it.”
“I’m willing to try,” I say, and meet Cameron’s gaze. “That’s the best I can do right now. I hope you can understand that.”
“Then we’ll try to work together, try to write for the demo, and maybe, somewhere along the line, you’ll see that it’s not just faith, it’s fact.”
I want to ask him what happens if I can’t believe him. What happens if, instead, he proves the opposite is true. What happens if every time I look at him, or his family, or Paradise’s sleek logo, I feel like I’m betraying my dad?
But I don’t ask him any of those things. It’s all far too complex to answer with words, anyway. And more than that, deeper than that, I am desperate to hear him sing again. I’m desperate to make music with him, like it is in my head, like it is in his head.
So I offer my hand for a shake, and he takes it, and that seals our cautious agreement. Then I give him the brightest smile I can muster.
“I left my guitar in the foyer, and I’m going to need help getting back there. Seriously, you realize that one day the peasants are going to rise up and storm the palace gates, right?”
With a genu
ine, full-bodied laugh, Cameron leads the way.
Chapter Fifteen
Cameron
“Holy shit.” Nate’s guitar case hits the floor with a soft thud, the strings within vibrating a tuneless chord. “This is your bedroom?”
I look around the place, taking in with new eyes the room I’ve had since I was moved from the nursery as a toddler. It’s really more than one room. A suite, to be precise. There’s a small sitting room off to the left of my bed, with a couch and a few armchairs. Beyond that, the outside wall is made of floor-to-ceiling windows with French doors that lead to a balcony overlooking the pool. The shape of the whole house makes a squared-off U, wrapping itself around the pool, and so even though my balcony is opposite the one we were on before, I can also see down below into the city. Naturally, I have my own bathroom and a walk-in closet that is just as full, although not as spacious, as my sister’s. The suite is all done in shades of sand, cream, and slate. Masculine, but not hard or cold.
I am usually ecstatic about this room. Proud, even. But looking at Nate, who is looking around it in what seems like shock, I feel a little silly for its size and opulence. Plus, now that I think about it, maybe working in my bedroom seems a little forward. Or desperate. Or both.
“It is. I hope you don’t mind working in here. We could go to the pool house if you’d prefer.”
Nate shakes his head, though the pale skin along his neckline goes all blotchy. “This is fine. Besides, this is where you keep everything, right?”
I laugh. “If by everything, you mean my notebooks, then yes. The piano is in the living room, but I’m not sure we need it?”
Nate shrugs. “Maybe not just yet. Let’s just try to write a little, and if that’s the kind of sound we want, we can move.” He picks up his case and looks expectantly at me. “So, um, where should I . . . ?”
“Oh. Um, here. I’ll grab my notebooks. The couch over there . . . ?”
“Yeah, I’ll tune up.”
He crosses through my bedroom and I turn around so that I can rummage through my nightstand. I can hear him lift out the guitar, the subtle scratch of callused fingers teasing the strings, then the case getting pushed aside. As he starts tuning, I make myself take a deep breath, hold it for five seconds, and breathe out for ten. It doesn’t help. When I reach for the knob on the drawer, my fingers are shaking visibly.
“Pull it together; you’re a Pierce,” I scold myself, and dig into the drawer. I pull out my most recent notebooks, which probably contain the least embarrassing attempts at songwriting that I possess. On some level it helps knowing that it’s not just nervousness about an impossibly cute boy currently playing his guitar in my bedroom (seriously, dream come true), it’s also that, for the first time, I’ll be sharing my intimate, mortifying, and probably hopeless lyrics with someone else.
I mean, it’s not a comforting thought, exactly. But at least the burden of responsibility isn’t all on my seriously intense crush.
I step into the sitting room, ignoring the jelly-like feeling in my legs. Nate is sitting on the carpeted floor, perfect with his dark eyes and full lips and hands poised over the strings of a beat-up old acoustic. He looks at me and smiles, more welcoming than he has been all night. It’s a step, however baby-size.
I hold out my notebooks, unsure of what comes next. “So, uh . . . what should we do? Do you just want to look through and see what catches you?”
Nate considers that for a moment, then shakes his head. “No. I want to see what catches you. Show me something you really love, something that is so vivid in your head, it’s already complete.”
He’s right. He’s exactly right. So I sit down, cross-legged, and lean against the cream-colored armchair at my back. The black Moleskine, the thickest and newest of my notebooks, is where I start. Thumbing through the pages, I stop on a few lines that I wrote months ago. When the world had exploded around me with the news of me leaving Harry for Xavier. I hold out the open notebook to Nate, but he shakes his head.
“I don’t want to read them. Sing them.”
I hesitate.
Nate smiles at me, and this time it’s downright warm. “You’ve heard me sing. Trust me, I’m nowhere near as good as you.”
“You really think I’m good?”
Nate rolls his eyes exaggeratedly. “Don’t tell me that the guy with old-Hollywood looks, a bedroom bigger than my whole house, and an entire company at his disposal needs ego stroking.”
I laugh, and try not to let his words sting. “I know. I’m sorry. I just haven’t really done this before. The only one who really hears me is my sister.”
“And we have to change that,” Nate says. “Because unless that video I saw was fake, you have, honest to God, one of the best voices I’ve ever heard, Cameron. It needs to be recorded.”
The sincerity in his tone, more than even the words, dulls the edges of my nervousness. I take a breath. “Okay, just keep in mind that I don’t really . . . I mean, I have this idea of a melody, but sometimes it’s not like a complete thought, you know?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Nate says. “Only I do that with lyrics. I hear a melody inside my head and think, This could be great if I could find the right words.”
I can only hope that I’ll give him the right words, so without any more excuses, I start to sing. It’s been a while since I’ve even thought about this song, but the tune comes back like an old friend. My voice wavers a bit, wobbles when it’s unsure how a phrase should end, where the emphasis should go, but I don’t dwell on it. I sing to Nate about wanting to hide, wanting to just be with someone without the world watching, to be alone and unbothered, to be a secret.
When I’m done with the lines I have, I stop, set my notebook on my knee, and raise my eyes to Nate. He looks half-drunk.
“Well?”
“Well,” Nate begins, “I have to say I’m really curious who you wrote that about. It’s pretty personal. And pretty specific.”
I shrug. “Xavier, actually. The press was all over us for a while, saying he’d stolen me away from Harry. It wasn’t quite like that.”
Nate’s lips tighten. “What was it like, then?”
“Harry was the unfaithful one. I think he got bored with me or something. Maybe the long-distance thing while they were touring got to be too much.” I shrug. “But Xavier and I became friends. I’d fly to meet Harry in whatever city they were in and he’d barely make time for me. Xavier would. He and I would talk for hours. And one thing led to another. Harry just kind of laughed when we told him.”
“But everyone said they got into a fistfight in that club in Paris over you.”
“You’ve been reading up on me, huh?” I say with a smirk. Nate starts to give me an excuse, but I let him off the hook. “That wasn’t over me. But it made a much better story, didn’t it? Saying that Harry lost interest and started sleeping with groupies instead isn’t quite as hot a story.”
“No, I don’t suppose that’s juicy enough.” Nate worries his bottom lip between his teeth.
“What?”
“I just have so many questions.”
“Okay,” I say, nervous but curious all the same. “Shoot.”
The questions tumble out in an avalanche of words. “How often is that stuff true and how often is it made-up? What happened with Xavier? Why the hell didn’t you ever sing for—or with, for that matter—the London Five? And Vic’s little sisters would be so angry if I didn’t ask . . . Who was a better kisser, Harry or Xavier?”
“Well, you did say you had a lot of questions.” I laugh, then shrug. “I’ll try to give you answers: I don’t know. Most is lies, but there’s a grain of truth in just about everything. Xavier and I fizzled out, another boring end to an only so-so relationship. I didn’t sing with those guys because, trust me, with five egos that size in one room, I didn’t want to add mine to the mix. Why do you think
Xavier punched Harry, if not because of me? Because he didn’t like him hogging the mic earlier that night at a show. And who was better? I guess it depends on what kind of kissing you like.”
I can tell Nate’s mulling over each of my words. Then he wrinkles his nose, which is, by the way, the cutest thing ever, and says, “Soft kissing. Building the intensity as it goes.”
Duly noted.
I grin. “Xavier, then. Harry was more of a grab-you-and-pin-you-against-the-wall type.”
“Oh, well, that’s not bad either.”
I laugh so loudly, I probably wake Tess and all the staff. “I’ll remember that the next time you try to kiss me in a dark alley.”
Nate’s mouth flops open in objection. “I didn’t try to kiss you; you tried to kiss me! As I remember it, you were leaning toward me before we were so rudely interrupted.”
“Rudely? So if my bodyguard hadn’t come out when he did, you would have let me kiss you?”
“See, you just admitted it. You tried to kiss me.”
“Touché. Okay, I admit. I made the move. But I’m happy that I would have been successful, if not for Theo having the worst timing in the world. Also, I guess, if my last name wasn’t Pierce.”
With that final remark, the mood in the room shifts entirely, and I instantly regret mentioning it. I could swear even the few lamps we have lit get dimmer and the air is thick, buzzing with emotions and memories and thoughts. I get up and open the French doors wide, letting in the summer night air. When I turn back, Nate has my notebook in his hands, his big eyes moving over the words I’d written about Xavier a year ago. For a moment, I just watch him mouth the words, wondering what he’s thinking, wondering if a kiss would have changed anything, wondering if my last name will keep him distant forever.
“I remember how that felt,” he says softly, drawing me from my thoughts, speaking through the heaviness in the room. “Trying to escape all the attention. People not leaving me alone. Prying into things I didn’t want them to know. It was just for a few weeks, but it was awful. Suffocating.” He looks up at me, focusing his gaze right into mine. “Is it like that all the time for you?”
