Silent Song

by Ren Benton

  While he fumbled for something comforting to say, she matter-of-factly continued. “If it’s a threat to your sobriety, I’ll get rid of it. If it’s making you worry that I’m worried it’s a threat to your sobriety, I’ll get rid of it. If it’s aesthetically offensive, I’ll get rid of it. Any reason, Lex.”

  He hadn’t lied when he told Olivia Gin would support the hell out of her. The danger was letting her make all the hard work her own. She wanted to save someone so badly, but removing temptation for him would only make the hard part look easy and lead to another crash when he inevitably had to take the wheel and steer himself. “I’m not reckless enough to keep a bottle of vodka in my own freezer to prove a point, but I kind of like giving the finger to other people’s booze.”

  Her lips softened into a smile. “You would, brat.”

  The fact that she sounded fond of him despite his childish obstinance was one of the many wonders of Gin. “Are you worried I’m one unsupervised minute away from a relapse?”

  She hesitated over her words again. “It was always painfully obvious when you were counting the minutes until you could escape and find a drink.”

  He averted his gaze to the flat, gray lake. He hadn’t hidden a damn thing from her.

  She brought his attention back to her with an insistent hand against his jaw. “I see none of that now. The only time you drift off is when you need a pencil to write down whatever idea just shook loose, and I’d respect that creatively even if it wasn’t for my benefit.” Her fingers trailed down his throat and settled over his heart. “I worry about whether you’re overworked and eating enough and safe, not that you’re thinking about throwing away five years of hard-won sobriety.”

  Those were normal worries to have in a normal relationship, unlike the worries of loving an addict that he’d burdened her with in the past.

  He covered her hand with both of his and held it against his heart. “Is it too late to give your next based-on-a-true-story movie a ridiculously happy ending?”

  A man trying to have a romantic moment really didn’t want to see the woman toward whom it was directed looking at a nearby lake like she’d rather fling herself into it.

  She raked her teeth across her lower lip. “Are you open for confessions at this hour?”

  “For you? Twenty-four seven.”

  Her gaze shifted to the wrapping paper and down to their feet and to a point beyond his left shoulder, anywhere but direct eye contact. “I have nothing. And I don’t mean a shortage of written pages. I reach into the place where the next ten stories used to clamor for my attention, and it’s empty.”

  He felt a sympathetic twist from his heart to his gut and right into his creative soul. He remembered what it was like to be unable to do the job that defined him more than anything else. “Do you want platitudes?”

  Her disgusted expression telegraphed her feelings before she spoke them. “Fuck no.”

  She still had fight in her — that was a good sign. Anger made good creative fuel. “Ethan doesn’t seem worried.”

  Her free hand picked at the seam on her leggings. “I kept telling myself I had time to turn it around, but then another week zooms into oblivion and the well is just as dry. I’m going to have to tell them it’s over.”

  Only then did her voice get rough. It wasn’t the prospect of a professional end that tortured her — it was fear of losing Maisie and Ethan. “When I canceled a tour so I could take my vacation in rehab, followed by months of wallowing in emo torpor, the rest of the band voted to replace me.”

  Green eyes snapped to his, sharp as jade daggers. “Replace you? The guy who writes every note, every beat, every lyric of every song. You? Whose voice has held it all together through umpteen lineup changes. You. The guy who started the band, which is named in honor of your talent for losing things. Who did they think could replace you?”

  His reaction then had been much the same, but time and schadenfreude had mellowed his perspective. “Ariana Grande would slay it.”

  She was too agitated to offer an alternative. “I’d hunt the bastards down, but I can’t even remember who else was in your band five years ago.”

  The conflict would have been resolved much more quickly if she’d been there to smite his enemies with righteous fury. “They didn’t get far with their plot. Since I stopped sharing songwriting credit on the third album and my name is all over the first two — and I certainly wouldn’t license to them — I could sue for copyright violation every time they played a song I wrote.”

  “No wonder you’re adamant about writing alone.”

  No, he was just a creative control freak. The legal ramifications were a happy coincidence. “Jim told them they were on their own, and the label made it clear they’re not interested in Gone & Forgotten without Lex Perry, so Luke, Mike, and Shawn” — he emphasized each as a reminder — “decided they’d be better off striking out on their own.”

  She squinted at the names. “Are they the ones with the distinction of being voted the worst Nickelback knockoff?”

  “That would be them.”

  “And those motherfuckers thought — ” She held up her hands to ward off the absurdity. “No. It’s fine. They’re in exactly the hell traitors deserve. May they rot in it. Bastards.”

  As much as he enjoyed having her as a champion, he did have a point to make. “What I was trying to get at, following the amount of exposition you favor with your explanations, is that I work with people who hate me and stab me in the back at the first sign of weakness.” Umpteen lineup changes was an understatement. His two-year turnaround on drummers was the stuff of legend, but bass and guitar didn’t have wildly better longevity. He didn’t inspire the kind of loyalty that kept business partners at his side from the inception of the venture until fifteen years later. He lacked Gin’s gravitational pull. “Maisie and Ethan love you. They will help you figure out what to do. They won’t abandon you because you’re experiencing your first creative fallow period in thirty-five years.”

  Her fire dwindled to cold ash when the focus returned to her and her worst worst-case scenario. “They won’t want to, but they have bills to pay.”

  He’d pay their bills if it came to that, but he kept the idea to himself so she didn’t add Lex bought my friends to her list of anxieties. “I don’t know about Mais, but Ethan’s dying for a vacation. Wrap this movie up, give your people the summer off to get some sun and fresh air and dick on the beach. Give yourself the summer off.”

  Come on tour with me.

  He kept that idea to himself because being trapped on a bus with him for several months was not most people’s idea of a good time, but hey, a guy could dream. He’d settle for a visit when relaxation bored her to tears. She might even come backstage this time.

  Gin didn’t even like the beach idea. “You overestimate the allure of sandy dick.”

  “It’s a metaphor. I’m a poet.”

  That pretentious claim won him a halfhearted smile.

  He knew he couldn’t jolly her out of a creative block, but he wouldn’t let her wallow in it, either. “I’ll spare you the hollow platitudes about a well-deserved break solving your creative crisis. But life flips in an instant.”

  Meeting her. Losing her. Getting that email inviting him back to her. She’d flipped his life onto a completely different course time and time again, so he knew she could change any bad track of her own.

  “It’s not the Gin Greene way to believe things will remain the same forever. Give the change that’s coming time to happen.”

  She inched forward and rested her head against his shoulder but made no promises about optimism.

  He could see her panic and guilt, but he couldn’t imagine her empty. If he could rebound from a block, he refused to believe Gin’s could be permanent. He might be attributing superhuman resilience to her again, but she would be devastated without the work that had been with her all her life, and he wanted that to be one pain she never had to experience.

  11
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  Ethan returned the following morning. Immediately upon entering the house, he pointed at the colorful paper covering the front windows. “Happy Christma-Hanuk-Valent-Birthday?”

  Gin gave him a quick hug and relieved him of the mail in his arms. Lex took his coat, feeling a bit like a parent welcoming a fledgling back to the nest. “You might want to fortify yourself with a pot of coffee and several Twix before you hear that news.”

  Ethan slumped. “Oh, I hope it’s the same as my bad news. I did not want to be the messenger.”

  Gin paused in separating the real mail from the junk. “Did you specify ‘bad’ because there’s also good news?”

  “There’s a crew half a mile down the road stringing phone and power lines.”

  She tossed the envelopes left in her hands up in the air. “Hooray for productivity!”

  When no one joined her workaholic celebration, she stuck out her little pink tongue and crouched to clean up the mess of makeshift confetti.

  Ethan threw Lex a suspicious look. “What did you do yesterday that made her so stoked to get back to work, make her sand your bunions?”

  “She wishes.”

  Gin’s lip curled with disgust. “Have you seen his feet?”

  Ethan’s eyes grew wide and wistful. “No. Are they magical?”

  “On the same scale as his hair. Shame dictates I can’t remove my socks until I get a chance to pumice my hooves.”

  Lex pulled her to standing and brought her hand to his lips. “Darling, if it means keeping the socks on those glaciers forever, you have my blessing to leave ’em rough.”

  She elbowed him in the gut slightly too hard to be considered playful. “Ethan will never get his coffee at this rate. If it relieves the burden of being the bearer of bad news, Chief Raymond informed us yesterday that Garth Houle is in town.”

  Ethan’s lips formed a grim hook. “Then I’m only responsible for an unfortunate update. He saw me at the post office and rode my bumper all the way to the end of the driveway. I couldn’t even try to lose him because there’s nothing else out here.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she said in a tone that didn’t invite argument. “Once somebody pointed him down this road, there are only a half dozen doors to knock on. He couldn’t have missed us.”

  Especially if he used the buddy system. “How many other parasites are with him?”

  “I forgot you’ve been completely out of the loop for a day and a half. Kendall Jenner” — Ethan read the room and dialed down his enthusiasm for gossip — “did something neither of you will be interested in, but you’re alone in your apathy. The eyes of the world are directed elsewhere.”

  Except Houle’s, which were fixed upon Gin far too often for Lex’s comfort. “I’m calling a security company the minute the phone works.”

  Gin managed to look down her nose at him from nearly a foot below. “For one guy?”

  “When that one guy has a history of stalking you and profiting from your near death, hell yes.”

  “That’s a waste of their time and your money. It’s not the media swarm Raymond was worried about. If Houle trespasses, we call the police, and it’s within reason for them to pick up one offender.”

  Ethan said, “You just don’t want to bring in anyone else.”

  She extended her argument to include him, almost as if she thought she had a chance of getting her way this time. “Having a bodyguard in the house is a bigger invasion of privacy than one peeping tom waiting for a photo op to happen.”

  Not by a long shot. “If he gets a photo, fifty million people peep along with him.”

  Unable to counter that logic, she conceded, but not gracefully. “If a stranger lurking in the house around the clock sounds good to you, get one. But you two are feeding it and cleaning up its messes.”

  They didn’t have to wonder when the lines were repaired. They were in the kitchen when the house phone and both office phones rang simultaneously. A few seconds later, the Wi-Fi kicked in and three cell phones followed suit.

  Weariness landed on Gin like she’d already worked a twelve-hour day. “I’ve changed my mind. Can they take the lines back down?”

  Ethan jogged toward the office.

  Lex looked at his phone as if he regretted finding it for flashlight duty, but what he saw on the caller ID restored his good cheer. He grinned when he answered. “Patty, beautiful, I’ve been starved for your sweet, sweet love.”

  Resigned to the end of her mini-vacation, Gin headed to the office to grab the other line.

  Ethan waved her off with his phone pressed to his ear. “Don’t answer anything. Don’t talk to anyone. We need a meeting.”

  If he didn’t trust her to field a question without prep, it must be dire. “What happened?”

  Lex came into the office. Shadowed eyes stared at her. He said nothing.

  Her stomach twisted. “Liv?”

  He shook his head.

  The phone under her hand fell silent, then rang again immediately. She recognized the number on the display.

  “Leave it,” Ethan warned.

  “It’s Jim.” She picked up the receiver. “Do you want to be the one who tells me what’s going on?”

  “Our boy sure knows how to pick winners to stick his dick into.”

  That narrowed the possibilities considerably, but she didn’t appreciate his tone. “Last I heard, you’re paying alimony to six bad decisions, so watch where you’re throwing those stones.”

  “None of my bad decisions blabbed to a tabloid that I knocked her up and dumped her for you right before I had to sell out a stadium tour,” he snapped. “There’s a not-so-fine line between bad boy and mustache-twirling villain. Put him on the goddamn phone.”

  Lex looked ill. The way Jim was bellowing, she had no doubt everyone in the room heard every caustic word. “He just talked to Patty. This is more her domain than yours.”

  “The thing is, Ms. Greene, I want to scream at him.”

  She couldn’t care less what he wanted. Her stone-cold producer voice fell into its slot in her throat. “The thing is, Mr. James, you work for him, not the other way around. If you have no managerial solutions to offer, I suggest you leave his image problem in the care of someone who will handle it with some fucking sensitivity.”

  He snorted in her ear. “Patty was so sure you’d be the levelheaded one.”

  “If you want levelheaded, screaming at me like Lex spawned the antichrist and ushered in the end times isn’t the way to go about it. It’s just a baby.”

  Just Lex’s baby.

  Good thing she’d had a rehearsal for this development a week ago. All she had to do was externalize the internal monologue Piper’s baby had mistakenly inspired. “People have them every day. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  Lex finally spoke. “It’s not a deal at all. There is no baby.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time a man’s faith in condoms or I swear I never miss my birth control pill had been misplaced. Men with money and fame to protect ought to know better, but they thought they were invincible until they were laid low by a determined sperm.

  She told Jim, “Talk to Patty. Get a no-comment comment to feed anyone who asks you for a statement and go about your business as usual. We will strategize an official response that won’t negatively affect your paycheck, and the world will keep on turning.”

  “Well, look whose head just got level.”

  She offered her middle finger to the dead air in lieu of the Go fuck yourself she would have preferred and returned the receiver to the cradle, where it promptly rang again.

  Ethan reached across the desk and silenced the ringer. “It’s a good day for voicemail.”

  She dropped into her chair and kicked the neighboring one toward Lex. “Might as well have a seat, stretch. It’s going to be a long morning.”

  “There is no baby.”

  She twirled her hand. “It will be months before you can get a paternity test to prove it. You need damage control today.
”

  A vicious kick sent the chair flying back toward her. “She’s lying. I had a vasectomy.”

  Ethan collapsed into his seat. “Does she know that?”

  “We dated less than a month. I doubt I mentioned my favorite color, never mind my medical history.”

  Vasectomy was as a big a blow to Gin’s system as baby — perhaps bigger because she hadn’t previously prepared — but once her sluggish thoughts recovered, it seemed to tidily resolve the entire conflict. “She’s easy to discredit, then.”

  Ethan shook his head. “You’re my only client and you’ve never had anyone accuse you of knocking her up, so I may be wrong, but I think this makes it a whole lot uglier.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “She called here two days ago screaming about you and Lex. Two days after we didn’t give her the attention she was seeking, she’s set herself up as the innocent victim in a media shitstorm neither of you can afford to ignore because your tour and your movie can’t wait for this story to fall into obscurity. I don’t want to credit her with being a mastermind, but as far as coincindences go, the timing couldn’t be worse on our side.”

  Okay, that part sounded bad, but he’d neglected the most important part. “But she’s lying.”

  “You know the truth doesn’t matter in the court of public opinion. There’s a young, pretty woman with artistically placed tears sobbing that the bad boy of rock-and-roll filled her belly with his child and then heartlessly abandoned her for a murderess whose heart is so cold, as we were reminded only a few days ago, she hid her brother’s body from his adoring fans and doesn’t even celebrate his birthday. According to chapter one, you two are the villains of this story.”

  Not to mention the whispers that their illicit affair had driven Olivia White-Church to attempt suicide. The timing was theatrical perfection, but there was a fatal flaw in the plot. “Forgive me for repeating myself, but she’s lying. If she is pregnant, it has to be someone else’s. Even if she doesn’t know there’s no chance Lex is the father, she knows someone else could be. She knows there’s a non-zero chance of being spectacularly wrong in a global spotlight.”