by KE Payne
“Fair point.” Robyn pursed her lips. “But did you like it?”
“Kissing her?”
“Of course kissing her, you idiot.”
My stomach twinged at the memory. The way Alex’s eyes had darkened. Her breath fluttering against my skin, her soft lips on mine.
“I loved it,” I said, “which makes all this even more messed up.”
“And it’s messed up because…?” Robyn asked.
“Isn’t it obvious?” I lifted my head. “I can’t date her, can I?”
“Of course you can.” Robyn looked at me like I was mad. “You’re free to date whoever you want.”
“And when it all ends?” I asked. “What then? That’ll mean the end of all of this. Everything we’ve worked so hard for all these years.”
“Who says it’ll end?”
“Being on the road twenty-four-seven?” I suggested. “Living in each other’s pockets?”
“Nate and I manage.” Robyn shrugged. “I love having him with me all the time.” She looked at me. “Are you saying me and Nate will end?”
I let out a long breath. “No.”
“Well then.”
“I don’t want to ruin her life like I did Nicole’s either,” I said. “I don’t want her to end up how she has.”
“What? When it all ends?” Robyn air-quoted.
“I saw it happen with Nic.”
“None of that was your fault,” Robyn said. “Nicole was a ticking time bomb, as well you know.” She thought for a moment. “Alex is different from her in so many ways.”
“And that’s why I know I like Alex way more than I ever liked Nic.”
“That’s cute.”
“It’s not cute, it’s agony,” I said.
Robyn was saying all the right things, I knew. But she could keep telling me over and over again that Nicole was okay, that I hadn’t wrecked her life. I knew different. I knew that, even as Robyn and I were talking, sitting comfortably on my plush sofa in my plush apartment, Nicole was still holed up in rehab, still blaming me for putting her there.
I’d already wrecked one girl’s life. I knew I’d do everything I could to make sure I never had the chance to wreck another one’s.
Chapter Twenty-five
For someone who’d probably spent most of her Sunday recovering from her hangover, Alex looked perfect when I saw her again at the studio on Monday morning. I know if it had been me that had downed as many shots as she had on Saturday night, I’d have been in bed for at least three days, but then maybe Robyn had been right. Maybe I was a lightweight.
Recording albums can take forever. All the fans see is the finished, polished version. What they didn’t see were the days spent in the studio recording and mixing. The hours spent hanging around waiting for technicians to do their thing, so we could just get on with our singing. That’s all I wanted to do just lately: sing, record, go home. Think about Alex. Not think about Alex. Think about her anyway. My life, it seemed, was a total train wreck right now.
*
“Have you spoken to her yet?”
Robyn arrived at the studio cranked right up into agony aunt mode. It was irritating, whilst at the same time strangely comforting.
“I know I should,” I said, pulling Robyn away slightly from the mixing desk, “but I don’t know what to say to her.”
“How about, good morning, how are you?”
“She’s not talking to me.” I shot a look over to Alex, sitting in her now-usual spot, on her own. “I can’t say I blame her.”
“Did you think about what I said to you yesterday?”
I nodded. I’d thought about nothing else.
“There’s just always something that stops me,” I said, “but I wish there wasn’t.”
“If it’s Nic that’s stopping you, and we both know it is,” Robyn said, “maybe you should go and see her again.”
“It won’t change what’s going on up here,” I said, tapping the side of my head.
“Or here.” Robyn tapped her finger on my chest, just about where my heart was.
The studio was filling up. I glanced over to Alex again and knew Robyn was right. I needed to speak to her; ignoring her was just childish. Wouldn’t resolve anything. Would make the awkwardness that now sat between us even worse.
I nodded to Robyn and made my way over to Alex, sidestepping the amps and cables as I did so. I stood in front of her and, when she didn’t make any move to look up or speak to me, sat next to her.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
It was just like how our first ever conversation had started, yet so different.
“You feeling okay?” I asked.
Alex looked slowly up at me, and the look on her face sent a large sliver of doubt slicing right through any tiny bit of confidence I might have previously had before I’d spoken to her.
“No,” she finally said, “I’m not okay.”
The conversation was going about as well as I thought it would do, and I didn’t know whether I should stay and weather it out, or get up and leave.
I chose the former.
“I’m sorry if what I said to you on Saturday night made you…do what you did,” I said. “I hate myself for making you do it.”
“Not as much as I hate myself.”
“Or me?”
Alex looked at me again for so long, I wondered if she was ever going to answer me. “I don’t hate you,” she said. “I could never hate you.”
“Everything I’ve done,” I said, “I’ve done for a reason.” I touched her arm. “You do get that, don’t you?”
Alex looked at my hand on her arm, then slowly removed it. Instead of answering my question, she stood, put one hand in her jeans pocket, and stared out at a point behind me.
“I want you to have this,” she said, looking down at her pocket. She fished around and pulled something out, then handed it to me.
It was an iPod shuffle.
“Remember at my parents’ house?” she said. “I said I’d put some stuff together for you?”
I looked at it in my hand.
“I did it last night,” she said quietly. “Somehow it felt right to do it last night.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’ll listen to it, won’t you?” Alex asked. “It’s important you do.”
“I will.” I crammed the shuffle into my jeans pocket and raised my hand as I saw Brooke coming over to us. I don’t know why I’d acted quite so much like I couldn’t have cared less about her music, but when I turned back to Alex and looked up and saw the look on her face, I knew what I’d known for a long time now.
It was official. I was a Class A bitch.
Chapter Twenty-six
In the dead of night, the mind wanders. Tortures. Every time I closed my eyes, the expression of hurt on Alex’s face kept appearing, burned, it seemed, into the backs of my eyelids.
I’d been odious to her, and she’d so not deserved that. I don’t know why I’d felt the need to be so horrible to her when I knew now what I’d been denying for weeks. I loved her. She was everything to me, and I’d acted like I couldn’t have cared less that she’d gone to the effort of putting together some music for me.
I missed her too. I missed just hanging out with her, hearing her laugh. I wanted us to get back what we’d had before; I could love her as a friend, I was sure of it. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was how I could even begin to make that happen right now.
Giving up on sleep, I fumbled for the light switch. I squeezed my eyes tight shut against the pain of the light’s glare and, opening them again just enough to see, snagged up my phone from next to my bed. I sank my head back and found myself trawling back through mine and Alex’s text messages. There seemed to be hundreds of them: some serious, some silly, some with deliberate misspellings to make the other one laugh. Because that’s what we did. We made each other laugh.
My eyes left my phone and fell to my jeans, crumpled in a heap on the chair whe
re I’d flung them the night before. Pulling back my duvet, I scrambled over the bed and reached for them, fishing in the pockets until my fingers made contact with the shuffle. I always had a spare pair of earphones never very far away, and once I found a fluorescent yellow pair stuffed into the back of my bedside cabinet, I scurried back under the duvet and pulled it back over me again.
The music that sounded in my ears was rich and warm. I switched the light back off and nestled back down into my pillow, staring up into the pitch-black of my room. As my eyes grew heavy I allowed the music to wash over me. Everything we’d looked at in Alex’s room was on there: the Stevie Wonder music that Alex had managed to find in America; a Marvin Gaye song which I’d never heard before, but which had the most beautiful lyrics. Alex had added other stuff too, mostly older mellow stuff, but some new music too, from bands which she’d told me in her room that she liked. There were bands I’d never heard of, musicians the whole world knew. It was certainly an eclectic mix and I absolutely loved it.
I closed my eyes and allowed the music to take me away from my thoughts. I felt my muscles relaxing, easing the tension that had been gripping my neck, and I knew sleep wouldn’t be far away now.
One song faded, and after a brief pause, the next one started with an acoustic guitar playing. It sounded warm and soft, like a blanket being wrapped around me, and I immediately loved the soothing sound it made. When the vocals started, my eyes opened. I blinked up into the darkness, hearing the familiarity of the voice.
The simplicity around the sound of the guitar playing told me it wasn’t a studio recording, and I instinctively knew that Alex had written it and was now singing it. Her a cappella singing was raw and echoing, and I immediately recognized the nuances in the voice I was now so familiar with, the slight huskiness that always sent shivers down my spine.
The music was achingly beautiful, the lyrics haunting. I stared upward into the dark and imagined Alex singing, seeing in my mind’s eye the way she always closed her eyes when she sang, how she gripped her headphones, the way she breathed, how she sometimes tapped her leg as she sang.
I absorbed every word she sang. I let them form in my mind, let them speak to me:
One day you’ll wake up and you’ll know. You’ll just know. If you keep me close, right next to your heart, you’ll know.
The chorus made my breathing slow, as I heard the words come from Alex’s mouth: Am I so insignificant? Can’t you see? Without you I can’t live, I can’t breathe.
I blinked.
Just take my hand, let me lead you there. I promise you, I promise you. I can wait, I can live. You’ll tell me when. You’ll tell me when, I know.
The song faded. Before it had even finished, I’d pressed play again.
*
It was six a.m. by the time I decided I didn’t need to listen to it again. By then, though, I knew the song word for word. Nothing else on the playlist mattered other than Alex’s song, and as I finally drifted back off into a deep sleep, I knew that nothing else would ever matter to me quite as much as Alex did.
*
My phone was shrill. Shriller than it ever sounded when I was awake. I flung my arm out of the bed to pick it up, and in doing so, knocked it to the floor.
“Shit.”
I lurched over the side of the bed, knocking Alex’s iPod and my headphones off the bedside cabinet as I did so, and scooped my phone up from the floor.
“What?” I answered it, not caring how I sounded.
“You always take this long to answer your phone?” Robyn.
“It’s…” I pulled the phone from my ear, trying to see the time, but couldn’t. The bright light around the edge of the curtains, though, told me it was late. “What time is it?”
“It’s past eleven.” She sounded grumpy. Like I cared.
“It’s a day off,” I said, rubbing my face awake.
“Have you been on the net yet?” she asked. “Or seen the papers?”
“I’m still in bed.” I rolled onto my back. “Give me a chance.”
“Call me back when you’ve seen it,” Robyn said. “I’ve got to dash.”
“What?” I ran a hand through my hair. “When I’ve seen what?”
“Just get your arse onto the net,” Robyn said. “Google Nicole’s name and then call me back.”
She hung up. I pulled my phone away and stared at it, trying to focus on the screen so I could hang up too. I wiggled myself more upright and, yawning, opened the browser on my phone, then tapped in Nicole’s name. What so-called scoop had the papers come up with this time? Releasing another yawn, I screwed up my eyes and opened them again just in time to see Nicole’s name appear on my screen. Along with it were a whole pile of headlines:
Nicole Kelly talks Be4, rehab, and the future.
Nicole Kelly from Be4 spills the beans on what REALLY happened after she left.
Tempers, tantrums, and a whole heap of backstabbing. Read the real reason Nicole Kelly quit Be4.
My eyes darted over the screen, hardly believing what I was seeing. I scrolled down further, the nausea in my stomach increasing with each new salacious and loathsome headline.
“Yes I’ve been away,” says Be4’s Nicole Kelly, “but now I’m ready to rock again.”
Nicole was out of rehab. I did a quick calculation in my head and figured she had to be out at least two weeks early. And spilling her heart out to the tabloids, by the looks of it. Anything for a fast buck, it seemed.
I rang Robyn.
“What do we do?” I asked her.
“You’ve seen them then.”
“Of course I have.”
“I don’t know what we do.” Robyn sounded scared. “Apart from let Ed sort it out.”
“Has she mentioned me in any of them?” I asked. “I’ve mostly read the headlines and that was enough.”
I heard Robyn let a long breath out.
“No,” she eventually said, “she’s not mentioned anything that happened with you.”
Relief flooded me.
“But she’s talked about rehab?” I asked.
“Rehab,” Robyn said, “how we didn’t support her. Blah, blah, blah.”
The anxiety I’d been feeling instantly shot through into disbelief and eventually arrived at a boiling rage at Robyn’s words.
“But we did support her,” I said. “Well, as much as we could. It wasn’t our fault Ed never told us.”
“Tell that to the papers.”
“I will, if necessary.” I cut the call, too disgusted to speak another word.
A text arrived from Brooke: Have you seen it? I’m in bits :(
I snapped a reply back to her: Are you? I’m fucking furious.
Ignoring Brooke’s reply, I pulled open the first story to appear on my screen. My eyes scanned the article, getting drawn to words that made my anger intensify:
I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. Worse than that, I couldn’t understand why none of my bandmates ever came to see me. Tally and I had been so close once, and yet here I was, alone in rehab, and she couldn’t be bothered to even write to me, let alone come and see me. I was heartbroken. I thought better of her.
The irony made me gasp. Nicole had thrown out her cold, hard-nosed judgement on me to the papers without a second thought—me, who’d defended her time and again and had nearly driven myself mad with guilt over what I thought I’d done to her.
Well, enough.
I threw my phone down on the bed then just as quickly picked it up again. I dialled Ed’s number, unsurprised when it went straight to voicemail.
“Ed,” I said, “I don’t know where Nicole has scuttled off to now she’s out, but you find her. You find her and you tell me where she is the minute you do.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Everything was a mess. I’d ruined my friendship with Alex and now Nicole had done a hatchet job on me to the press. I sat cross-legged on the floor of my lounge and laid out the copy of the lucky newspaper that had grab
bed its scoop on Nicole’s story, seeing her photo looking back at me in the two-page spread. The headline was the same one I’d seen on the Internet earlier that morning, but underneath this one, in bold, black letters was the word exclusive, which I took to mean the paper had paid Nicole a whole mountain of money for her story.
I looked down at Nicole’s face. The main photo showed her leaning against a wall, her arms crossed, looking straight at the camera. She looked perfect: immaculate hair, skin. Slight tan. Expensive clothes. She looked for all the world to see as though she really had been in the Caribbean for the past few months. Another smaller photo showed her sitting with her guitar. Another one sitting at a desk, for some strange reason.
As I stared into her eyes, a fresh wave of loathing washed over me. How could she have done this to us? Words from the article swam in front of my eyes: how we’d rejected her, how I’d failed her. How Be4 had been everything to her, and then she’d had it all taken away. The slow realization that Nicole was playing the game of her life gathered pace the more I read. She claimed she was the one who was weak, and it had been us who had taken advantage of that weakness. We, according to her, were the ones who could have stopped her taking drugs; we were the strong ones and we should have known better.
It was detestable.
As my eyes darted from sentence to sentence, my bewilderment and hurt increased. Nicole had done her best to rubbish us all; as far as she was concerned, she was the strong one now, and we had all been weakened by Alex. Alex didn’t belong, according to Nicole; Alex would cause the downfall of Be4 because Alex wasn’t a founding member, and sooner or later me, Brooke, and Robyn would tire of her and strike out as a trio. I looked away, too furious to read any more. She’d had no right to bring Alex into any of this, sweet Alex who loved being with us, and who’d helped us get more success than Nicole ever had.
My eyes fell back to the paper. The talk of disloyalty was laughable, when it was clear, the more I read, it was Nicole who was now betraying us by trying to tell the fans that everything we’d ever stood for had been a sham. Disgusted, I shoved the paper away, but as I did so a sentence with a name in it, one I didn’t recognize, caught my eye.
