my life as a pop album

by LJ Evans

  “I like you like this,” he said huskily.

  I looked down at myself, in my sundress with bare feet curled under me. “Like what?”

  “Relaxed. Happy.”

  I flushed. He put down the guitar and eased a finger over my flushed cheeks. “I like you here. As my girlfriend.”

  I tried not to panic. And I knew that this was the time to say something. To speak up about the label he’d given me and the few days we had left together. But just like he didn’t want to talk about his childhood, I didn’t want to talk about the future. For once I just wanted to continue to live in the moment. It was why I’d come with him on this journey to begin with, to escape my reality.

  It would come back to bite us. I knew it would, but as he continued to touch me, my brain shut off and my body took over. And then we were gone for a while again. Lost in each other and our skin in a way that I never knew I could be lost. Lost in a way that I couldn’t have imagined even two weeks ago when I thought I was missing Hayden and was full of guilt over my dead brother.

  * * *

  Family dinner at the Waters household was nothing like my family dinners in Tennessee. First of all, it didn’t even start until nearly eight o’clock. In Tennessee, we ate with the senior citizens at five or at the latest, six. And this wasn’t really a family dinner to me at all because Maggie had dinner on her own and was in bed with the nanny watching over her. Our family dinners would never have happened without all the kids scattered around the table. To me, that’s what made it a family.

  I was nervous as I met Bianca for the first time because I hadn’t changed out of my simple sundress while she looked like she’d just stepped out of a fashion magazine. And she wasn’t nice and self-deprecating like Trista the model had been. No, Bianca was a Hollywood wife. She was one hundred percent blonde and perfect and entitled.

  As we gathered into one of the richly furnished rooms that she called a family room, she made a slight attempt to visit with me before realizing that we had nothing in common. I ran a car dealership in the backwoods. She kept her husband’s entire life running while he made A-list movies.

  The doorbell rang and we were soon joined by George and a man that looked like a run-down version of Dylan. He had gray hair that you could tell used to be blonde, and a cleft chin like the boys, so it was obvious this was dad. But that’s where the similarity to either of the brothers really ended.

  “Derek!” he boomed in a voice that was scratchy from too many years of smoking.

  Derek didn’t hug him like he had Dylan. In fact, he barely acknowledged him from across the room. “Dad.”

  Derek’s father made his way to us. “George here has been telling me how your songs are finally taking off. Took long enough,” he growled.

  When he got close, I could smell the alcohol on him. It was so strong it was almost as if it had embedded itself into his skin permanently. A cologne that didn’t need to be reapplied.

  I held a finger to my nose so I wouldn’t gag. Derek frowned at my movement while Derek’s dad eyed me. It was not unlike the way Dylan had eyed me, but you could tell that the older man came up with a different assessment. “Hey, honey, I’m Doug. Who might you be?”

  The sordidness in his tone took me back. I couldn’t believe that there was any way that this man could actually be Derek’s father, and I wasn’t sure how to respond to him. Derek tugged at my hand, interlacing our fingers, and when I looked up at him, I saw Derek in a way that I’d never seen him before. Barely veiled contempt and anger clouded his face that was normally so happy. Even the seriousness I’d seen had nothing on this look.

  My heart broke in a whole new way because I could tell that the forgiveness Derek had had tattooed on his wrists was tied to this man and his childhood. The childhood without pictures. The childhood he didn’t want to talk about.

  “Dad, this is my girlfriend, Mia.” His voice was cold as he said it, and I didn’t take it personally because his whole body was coiled tight as he addressed this man. I inwardly cringed at allowing him to continue to use the girlfriend term. But, like before, now wasn’t the time to stop him.

  “Mia, huh? That’s a good name.” Doug eyed me up and down again, taking in my size E’s in a way that no father should. Definitely not the way a father should look at his son’s proclaimed girlfriend. I stepped closer to Derek.

  I felt Derek lean forward to say something that wouldn’t have been good at all, but we were interrupted by a southern accent attached to a dark-haired man. “Mia Phillips! As I live and breathe!”

  And then I was being enveloped in a hug from Keith. Long forgotten Keith that Cam had just mentioned seeing at this very mansion. He seemed tall and happy. Derek pulled at my hand again as Keith let me go.

  “Keith!” I said with a smile.

  “I swear I can’t leave you for two seconds without you running in to someone else you know,” a deep voice said next to him. The man who came up to Keith had graying hair that belied his age. He was handsome and self-assured with an expensive suit that clung to his body. A suit that was mirrored by the one that Keith had on even though they were different shades. They both spoke of money and success in a that way that only custom suits could. I knew that for a fact after having seen all of Hayden’s tailored suits in his closet.

  “Mia, this is my boyfriend, Locke,” Keith said, his smile full of so much love that it made me forget all about Derek’s slimy dad.

  “Nice to meet you,” I smiled. Derek seemed to relax just a touch and my stomach couldn’t help but do a little flip of relief.

  “How do you know Mia?” Derek asked.

  “We grew up in the same town,” Keith responded with a smile.

  “You grew up in Tennessee?” Derek was surprised.

  “Yep! Sure did. I think I was the one that kept Mia here supplied in ice cream after she’d had her surgery,” Keith said before regretting it just like anyone from our town ever did when they talked about Jake and that time. It was like they couldn’t help themselves because they forgot he was gone and then hated themselves when they remembered it all over again.

  “Keith was really more of Cam’s friend than mine,” I told Derek with a smile.

  “That hurts.” Keith pretended to pout.

  I laughed. “It’s true though. Who ordered you to bring me my ice cream?”

  Keith smiled knowingly. “Well… that would be Cam. But who can ever say no to that woman. How is she? How’s the baby?”

  “They put her on bedrest,” I said.

  Keith chuckled. “Oh my God. I feel sorry for Blake and everyone else that comes into her eyesight.”

  “I know, right? Blake’s grandma tried to get her to start cross-stitching.”

  Keith laughed so hard that he had to lean into his boyfriend. It was good to see him so happy.

  “So you work for Dylan?” I asked.

  Keith nodded, leaned in and whispered, “I’m only here tonight because Bianca wanted someone to make sure Dad got here safely. Sometimes it feels like I work for Bianca more than Dylan.”

  Derek overheard and laughed the first real laugh since his dad had walked in, and that made me like Keith more than I ever had.

  Bianca announced that dinner was ready, and we made our way into a huge dining room that looked like it should be in Buckingham Palace instead of a Hollywood mansion. We were spread out around the long table like polka-a-dots on a dress.

  I was near Keith, his boyfriend Locke, and Derek’s dad. Derek was down with Bianca, George, and Dylan. It seemed like it was a statement that Bianca had made on purpose separating real family from the “others.”

  Derek frowned as we sat down but didn’t say anything. He seemed somehow out of his normal element in this place with these people. He would never have let any of the band keep us apart at a table. But, I wasn’t going to cause a scene when he was obviously already feeling uncomfortable.

  Bianca asked casually if Keith was picking up the new art piece for Dylan’s offices tomo
rrow, and Keith nodded. “Thank God. I don’t have to make up an excuse to check on Seth then,” Locke said, brushing a hand through his graying hair.

  “Is this Seth Carmen you’re talking about?” I asked.

  “Yep, you should see the work he does now, Mia. It’s really incredible,” Keith told me.

  “Last I remember of Seth Carmen was Jake punching him in the face,” I said.

  Keith turned somber. “Yeah. He was pretty screwed up back then. But we all have our demons we have to confront and bury before we find the path to real life.”

  And his words hit me hard in the chest because weren’t they true. We all had demons. Every last one of us. Mine were giving my brother a kidney and then having him die from it and chasing a boy who did nothing but break my heart. But, that didn’t mean that I couldn’t find a path to a real life. Whatever that would be. And for the second time since Derek and I had gotten together, another tiny piece of hope niggled into my heart.

  “Do you want to go with me tomorrow and check out his work?” Keith asked.

  Derek was going to be at the recording studio for most of the day as they tried to finish up a couple extra songs for the bonus album and I had planned on hanging by the pool with my Kindle. I shrugged. “Sure. Text me the details,” and we exchanged numbers.

  “Dylan’s offices are okay,” Doug commented as he finished yet another scotch. His words were slurred, but you could tell he wanted to be the focus of everyone’s attention. “But they’re nothing like Hugo’s.”

  None of us knew how to respond to his comment.

  “In fact, this whole spread that Dylan has set up,” Doug waved a drunken hand around the room, “it’s okay, but when you’re back at the mansion, that’s where the glamour is really at.”

  Derek had turned toward our end of the table as soon as his dad had started talking. He was listening carefully. I cringed as Doug, who was sitting on my other side, took me in again. “I can see why Derek picked you. You’d fit right in at the mansion. Why don’t you come by and I’ll introduce you to folks who could make you over into a real somebody.”

  Derek threw down his napkin, rose, and made his way over to us. “Mia already is a somebody, Dad.” The scorn in his voice was clear.

  “What? Do you model?” Doug asked surprised, taking in my no make-up face and my wavy hair that I’d brushed into a simple braid.

  “No,” I breathed out.

  “But you want to, right?”

  I shook my head in the negative, but he guffawed in disbelief. “Hugo would love you. Eat you up like sugar cubes. You really picked a good one, Derek-my-boy,”

  “Mia isn’t going anywhere near the mansion,” Derek’s voice was firm.

  “Aw, ain’t that cute, son. But you really should let the girl decide. I bet she’d love to have a piece of the ol’ Brantly pie.”

  I shivered in disgust not only at the thought of being a Brantly Babe but at the tone in Doug’s voice.

  “You should come with me. You’ll see just how fuckin’ amazing it is,” Doug slurred, and he leaned towards me as if he might kiss me.

  I backed up in my chair at the same time that Derek jerked me out of it.

  “That place is nothing more than a legitimized whorehouse. And as I said, Mia isn’t going anywhere near it.”

  Derek was pulling me forcibly towards the door. I didn’t resist. I was shocked not only by the whole scene Doug had made but also by the angry hulk that had taken over the gentle man that I adored. He was seriously snarling with the anger coming off him in waves.

  “Derek, don’t go,” Bianca cried out from the other side just as Dylan rose from his seat to protest as well.

  “Derek!”

  “I told you family dinner was a bad idea, Dylan. Next time listen to me.” The sarcasm in his voice was eating at me. I wanted to cry. Cry for my happy, sexy BB. That this was his family. That this was his life.

  Derek slammed the French door behind us. I looked back to make sure it hadn’t shattered with the force he’d used and then tried to keep up with his long strides as he pulled me along with him.

  Once we made it to the guesthouse, he let me go, and stormed into the kitchen where he grabbed his own highball glass and filled it with amber liquid. He swallowed it in one gulp before pouring himself a second which he drank slower. He hadn’t turned on a light besides the kitchen stove we’d left on earlier so his face was shadowed, and he wouldn’t look at me as he inhaled the alcohol and breathed heavily. I just stared. I knew that he knew I was watching him. Just like my echolocation always knew when he was watching me.

  “Spit it out, Phillips,” he said. And that broke me a little more because it was so cold and impersonal. I was back to Phillips, Little Bird nowhere in sight. Not even a Miss Mia.

  “I don’t know what to say.” I spoke quietly, not teasing at all this time. Instead there was nothing but sorrow in my voice.

  I guess I probably should have been angry that he was acting this way. That he was shutting me out and calling me Phillips instead of opening up to me, but I couldn’t be. Because this wasn’t Derek. This wasn’t the man I knew. Instead, I just wanted to wipe it all away.

  He downed his drink, poured a third, and then made his way to the couch, where he sank down, head resting on the back, legs spread out in front of him. I made my way to him slowly unsure of how to approach this Derek I had never seen before.

  I sat down, freeing myself of my shoes, and pulling my knees up to my chest. My bare toes barely cleared his thighs. I wrapped my arms around my legs and put my head on my knees so that I could watch him. It was not unlike how we had sat a few hours ago when he’d ignored talking about his past and I’d ignored talking about our future, before we lost ourselves in each other. But now the emotion wafting through the air couldn’t be overlooked.

  His eyes were closed as a full range of expressions poured over his face, from anger to disgust and unhappiness before settling into the worst of them all, sadness.

  “I want to say I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ll be tossed in the pool instead of a lake,” I tried to lighten the mood as he was so good at lightening my mood when I went down the dark paths inside my brain.

  “Apologizing for things you can’t control is no way to live,” he said, but he didn’t open his eyes and it wasn’t accompanied with his cleft tugging smile. It was said from some pit inside him.

  I reached down to where his wrist lay on his leg, the hand not wrapped around the glass of whiskey. I pulled it to me and rubbed my finger gently over the tattoo that said, “To err is human; to forgive, sanity,” because I thought I had a glimpse of what he was trying to find it in himself to forgive and to forget.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked quietly.

  This got him to open his eyes. He turned his head on the back of the couch, eyes meeting mine in the dim light from the kitchen stove.

  “No.”

  “It would probably help,” I told him.

  He pulled one of the strands of my hair loose from my braid and twirled it up to my lip, caressing the corner. “I don’t want to give that dipshit or my past any more energy or time or space.”

  Johnny Cash coming back to us. I nodded, and I removed the glass from his other hand, and brought that wrist to my lips and kissed the double wrapped tattoo there. I was a chicken because I didn’t want him to give that past any energy either. I was afraid that if I knew his story, it might make me feel more for him than I was already feeling. And I didn’t know if I could handle being broken by his words about the past that was haunting him.

  It wasn’t the right thing. It was going to come back and implode on us both eventually, but that wouldn’t be tonight.

  So instead, I did what I could so that he would give us all of his energy and time and space. I slowly unwound my feet from my hands and eased myself onto his lap, a move, that even five days ago, would have been impossible for me. I pushed my hands under his t-shirt, grazing his sculpted abs and tugging until
he had to move, so that the t-shirt could disappear somewhere behind the couch. And I started kissing him, his neck with the eagle spread out and down to his shoulders and his chest.

  When I looked back up at his face, he wasn’t scowling anymore. Instead, the storm in his eyes were for the reasons I loved. And that made my breath hitch because I had wanted so much for him to look at me just like that, and I was happy that I could bring him back to this moment.

  “You are so damn beautiful, Little Bird.”

  I smiled back at him because he’d said Little Bird again and not Phillips. And then we were both adrift once more in the energy and space that belonged to just the two of us. Like Ed shared with his own “Cold Coffee,” a place where we could stay forever or even just for now. Where I could give a loving hand and help him fall asleep.

  ONE

  Studios

  “Take my hand and my heart and soul, I will only have these eyes for you.”

  -Ed Sheeran

  THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN I woke with my alarm, it was again to an empty bed. I was just getting to the point where I only resented mornings a little instead of outright hating them, but waking to an empty bed made me hate them all over again.

  It wasn’t like I hadn’t known that Derek was leaving early. He’d told me that Rob was picking him up at the crack of dawn so they could finish off those last few tracks, but actually waking up without him tucked up against me was like having someone throw a bucket of ice on me.

  I growled at the light but got up to feed Jane the Kitten who was happily adjusting to life in the guesthouse. She’d found a place at the foot of our bed that was hers. And during the day she found the sunshine and whole boat load of things to play with that gave me a heart attack.

  After taking care of Jane, I buried myself under the water and scented soaps in the bathroom before dressing in jeans and one of the blousy tanks I had bought in Oklahoma City that seemed an entire lifetime ago now.

  I had just emerged from the bathroom when I got a text from Keith who said he’d be at the house in fifteen minutes. I texted Cam and told her I was going with Keith to see Seth’s studio, and she told me to hold onto my panties and make sure that I didn’t tell Derek that I was going to see a hot Cuban guy.