by Hazel Jacobs
“I hope Dash will be okay,” Sersha says.
“He’s been hit worse on purpose… at least you did it by accident,” Mikayla says
Sersha groans and runs her hands through her hair. Mikayla’s hair is perfect as always, and her suit looks like she was dipped in it like an ice-cream dipped in melted chocolate. There’s a light scarf around her neck, but it slipped down while she was laughing and Sersha can see a massive hickey on her neck.
Black Lilith grab their instruments and get ready to play. That is, apparently, how they work. The sound engineer won’t be coming to the studio for another hour—Sersha checks her watch to confirm—but the band had wanted to get into the studio early to play around. As she watches, Tommy pulls his notebook out of his pocket and shows it to Logan while Dash slips a guitar strap around his shoulders and Slate drapes himself over the drum kit.
“Did you get my email?” Mikayla asks.
“Yeah, I did,” Sersha replies.
Voices come through the mics in the room beyond.
“…Like the bridge from ‘Tic Tacs and Other Problems’?” Logan asks, frowning at the notebooks that Tommy is showing him.
Tommy nods along. “Yeah, I think that bridge, and the verses from ‘How Long’… the chorus from ‘Not Fucking Likely.’”
“I loved that song!” Dash says, apparently having recovered from Sersha’s attack on his crotch. “We should release that as an EP, it’s not like the fans haven’t heard worse from P!nk.”
“What are they talking about?” Sersha asks.
Mikayla takes her eyes off of her boyfriend and turns to Sersha. “Oh, there was a problem with one of their songs. Bass Note thought that it might be too obscene.”
“Obscene?” Sersha says.
“Rule of thumb… Americans are stupid about sex,” says Mikayla. “It’s okay in ads, but everywhere else is pure as the driven snow.”
“You’re speaking to an Irish girl, love,” Sersha replies. “I come from a country full of Catholics who still watch American television.”
“Are you Catholic?” Mikayla asks. There’s no judgment in her voice—just curiosity.
“When my mam asks… yes.”
The two women laugh together.
“Hey, Tommy… how’d things go the other night?” Slate asks, swinging his sticks around in his hands. “You left with that girl like… five minutes after we got there.”
“You asshole,” Dash adds.
Tommy tilts his chin up as though he’s above this conversation. “A gentleman never tells.”
Logan retaliates by grabbing Tommy in a headlock and trying to give him a noogie. Mikayla reaches over and presses down the microphone button so that her voice is amplified into the room.
“I’ll remind you all that the equipment you’re wrestling next to is worth more than your house.”
Logan releases Tommy and holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry babe,” he says.
The rest of the band shouts in unison, “Sorry, babe!”
Sersha glances over at Mikayla, who grins at Logan and reaches up to shift her scarf, covering the hickey which had been revealed when Sersha beat Dash into the carpet with the strength of her musical enthusiasm.
Tommy runs a hand through his floppy brown hair. It’s almost as messy as Sersha’s got when she ran through the drizzling snow on the way to the studio. She’d enjoyed a walk through the snow the evening before, but she’d gotten back inside before night fell because she wasn’t an idiot, and a woman walking alone in Manhattan after dark is never going to be entirely safe.
Together, the band stands at their instruments and waits for Slate to clap his drumsticks together. They move into a song without, apparently, conscious thought. They just start playing as though they were made to play together. Of the many things Sersha admires about Black Lilith, the way they look when they’re playing is one of the big ones. In their music videos they can move between sexy, to silly, to heartfelt in the space of a few frames. But what always gets through no matter what’s going on in the video is the connection between the band members. The way they move together as though they’re one man in four bodies. The interviews that she’s read talk about how they have been playing together since they were in high school, and it shows.
Tommy, according to a Vanity Fair article from a few months ago, was shanghaied into the band by Slate because he’d found some poetry that he had written. Tommy hadn’t been able to play an instrument, but Slate had hooked him up with a few YouTube tutorials and an old bass.
Now, Tommy holds the bass like he was born with it, moving through the transitions of the song while Logan sings the lyrics off of the notebook in front of him. It’s a song about fighting through hard times, which he must have written specifically for the charity that they’ll be playing for.
Tommy’s eyes meet hers through the glass. She wants to ask him what he’d thought of the song that she’d been showing to Slate when he came into the room. She didn’t write the lyrics herself, but he might like the way that she’d woven the lyrics together so that the message was ambiguous and still exciting.
She looks away from him, re-opening her laptop and closing the document with her song ideas. If Slate was right about Tommy’s motivations for songwriting, then it’s unlikely that he will be interested in her ideas. If he could get away with it, she thinks that he would probably just write the album and tell Bass Note that she’d helped.
That would be awful. She would need to sit down soon and give some serious thought to how she’s going to get through this job. Because she’s been waiting for a long time to put her name on a song she wrote, and she’ll be damned if the first song her name goes on is one that she didn’t even write.
“Maybe we should start over,” Sersha says, taking a seat across from Tommy and raising her mug to her lips.
They’ve met at Starbucks. It’s so cliché and bland in its sameness that it makes Sersha’s teeth ache, but Tommy had seemed grateful to meet on neutral territory. She’d watched the band practice for hours the day before, and when it came time for her and Tommy to sit down and hash out their plans for the next album, he’d claimed that he was too tired to work. Sersha had barely managed to convince him to meet her for coffee the next day.
It was snowing outside when she’d hailed her cab. The cabbie drove her through the disastrous streets toward the Starbucks next to the Bass Note studio, dodging traffic like a fish evading rocks in a stream. She will never understand how people become so acclimatized to bad weather and murderous driving. She tried to smooth her hair down in the back of the cab before giving it up as a lost cause and jamming a pink beanie on her head instead.
Tommy was sitting inside when she arrived, looking artfully rumpled as always in green plaid. He nodded when he saw her enter and waited patiently as she ordered her chocolate and marshmallow S’mores Frappuccino and joined him. He had a plain black coffee on the table between their chairs with his notebook open beside it.
People mill around the shop. It’s a Starbucks in Manhattan, so naturally, it’s packed to the walls with people. Men in suits arguing over their espressos, a couple of hipsters with their laptops open ignoring everyone else, and a large group of teenage girls giggling over their iPhones. Sersha smiles at them because she likes teenage girls and she thinks they get a bad rap from the media. Besides, one of them has a Minions phone case which is absolutely adorable.
When she has her drink, she pushes her way through the crowd toward the table that Tommy has managed to get for himself in the back corner of the shop. It’s pressed up hard against the wall and it wobbles when she sits down across from him.
Tommy raises his eyebrows when she says that she wants to start over.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“I mean that you act like you’d rather have your wisdom teeth removed than work with me,” she tells him matter-of-factly. “And that’s okay. I think I might feel the same in your shoes.”
Tommy
, who’d looked as though he was about to object, nods slowly and eyes her like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. She sips her drink and lets the moment marinate.
“So what sort of new start are you expecting?” he asks.
She’d spent hours the night before thinking about what Slate had told her. About how Tommy feels about the songs that Black Lilith plays, and why he’s so defensive about someone coming in to help him. Even someone who, by his own admission, is a talented songwriter as well.
She puts her cup down. “I’m not coming on board to ruin your next album,” she tells him. “I like the songs you’ve written so far. I wouldn’t try to wreck them.”
Tommy grimaces. “I’m not saying that you would—”
“But you’re thinking it,” she replies. “You’re worried that I’m going to take everything that makes your songs yours and rip it apart.”
He doesn’t answer, which is really all of the confirmation she needs that she’s on the right track.
“I’m not going to let you brush me off. I’ve worked too hard to get here just to sit back and let these songs get written without me,” Sersha tells him. “So the question becomes… how can we work together in a way that allows you to feel like you own the songs while allowing me to actually contribute something?”
He grimaces again. His blue eyes lock onto hers, and she knows what he’s seeing—he sees a smile with a hard edge to it. An offer to play nice with a threat to dig her heels in warring on her face. She wonders what’s going on in his head and whether she’d been right to attack from this angle, but she doesn’t let her sudden self-consciousness show on her face. She just keeps smiling and staring him down, willing him to concede.
Finally, he sighs. “I’ve never written with anyone before,” he says.
“I have,” Sersha replies. “A few people. I can show you.”
He gives her a long look. His lips are set in a pout and she wills herself not to look at them. No matter how pink or perfectly shaped they are, she will not look at them.
“Okay,” he says after a beat. “So where do we start?”
He takes a sip of his coffee and she winces at what she can guess that it tastes like. Black coffee is the devil’s drink—how can he even drink it? She sips her own drink and sees him eyeing the cup like it’s offended him. So apparently she isn’t the only one who judges people by their Starbucks order.
Around them, the lunch hour rush is starting to ebb away, leaving only the hipsters and the teenagers still occupying the seats. There are tourists as well. Though, what kind of idiot visits Manhattan in February, Sersha can’t begin to imagine. They’re easy to spot by their fanny packs and badly-folded maps, leaning against the seats at the front of the shop and rubbing their feet, leaving their scarves and beanies on their heads rather than taking them off and risk a blast of cold air when the doors open unexpectedly. She’s still wearing her own beanie, but that’s less to do with the cold and more to protect the public from her hair. Which she knows will spring forth like a mad cat from a chimney the minute she takes her beanie off. There’s a beanie draped on the arm rest next to Tommy’s elbow. If he’d been wearing it when she’d come in, they would have been beanie buddies.
That thought makes her want to smack herself. It’s like she’s fourteen again and working through her first crush. She starts speaking before her mind can start writing ‘Mrs. Tommy’ on an imaginary notebook.
“Well… correct me if I’m wrong… but I’ve gotten the impression that most of your songs are based on your life?” she asks. “Or at least, experiences that you can relate to?”
“Most of them,” Tommy replies.
She nods. There are some songs, like ‘Termites in the Toothpaste’ that are clearly inside jokes for the band. She hopes she gets to hear some of the stories, because they sound hilarious. There’s one song, ‘Ripped Apart,’ that Sersha had played over and over again when she’d first learned that she would be working with Black Lilith. The singing is good—Logan Todd has a lot of talent—but what got to her was the sheer, raw fury of the lyrics. Those words seemed to reach out and seize her by the throat, holding her against the wall and commanding her to listen, to acknowledge the pain of the writer. More than anything, she would like to know the story behind that song.
But she doesn’t ask. Of course not. Tommy has only just begun to tentatively accept her help, and asking about something so clearly personal will probably send him retreating back into rudeness and indifference.
“So is there anything going on in your life right now?” she asks.
Tommy fiddles with his pen, tapping it on the edge of his notebook. “Well, Black Lilith brought in a new lyricist to work with me,” he says.
“If you’re asking me to write a song about what a bitch I am, I’m down.”
That startles a laugh out of him. It’s not as careless and unstoppable as the laugh he’d shown her when she accidentally whacked Dash in the groin, but she feels a smack of accomplishment nonetheless.
“You’re serious?” he asks.
“Of course,” she replies. “Though I have to ask that you keep your commentary to phrases like ‘drinks herbal tea and eats quinoa’ and ‘a fucking goatee.’”
He laughs again. There’s a pink flush in his cheeks that makes her want to run her hand over his skin, which is deeply inconvenient. She takes another sip of her Frappuccino so that her traitorous hands have something else to do.
“I thought you’d be a man,” he says.
“Oh! Casual sexism… interesting.”
Tommy stops laughing. There’s still a smile in his eyes, but there’s also a slight downturn to his lips that shows her that he’s thinking over her words.
“You’re right,” he says, nodding thoughtfully. “I’ll try to be better in the future.”
Oh crap, she thinks.
Because there is nothing, in her experience, sexier than a man who can admit that he’s wrong. A man who can take a critique about his behavior, give it some thought, and agree that he can do better. A man who accepts that he isn’t perfect and who seems to genuinely want to improve himself.
Sure enough, she starts feeling warm. She reaches up to take off her beanie before she remembers that her hair is a health hazard and pulls at the edge of her shirt instead.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yes,” she replies as nonchalantly as she can while her mind conjures images of pulling him into her bedroom and throwing him on the bed. “Anyway… is there anything else? Apart from the awful unfairness of you getting an assistant to help you write?”
He chuckles and she feels it in more than just her ears.
Before he can answer, however, one of the teenage girls appears out of nowhere and taps him on the shoulder. She’s got red lipstick smeared on her lips and a shirt with Harley Quinn on it, which instantly puts her in Sersha’s good books. And her friends on the other side of the shop are staring at her and covering their mouths with their phones. She looks nervous but determined as Tommy turns to look at her.
“Sorry… I don’t mean to interrupt, but I was wondering… are you, like… Tommy Jones from Black Lilith?”
“Yes, I am,” Tommy replies with a wry, endearingly modest smile.
“Oh my God, I knew it!” the girl says in a rush. “I love your music. Me and my friends listen to it all the time.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind,” Tommy replies. He looks at the phone she has clutched against her chest. “Would you like to take a selfie?”
It turns out that she does. And so do the rest of the girls in the store. Tommy gamely poses for about half a dozen selfies before Sersha is co-opted to take group photos. She tells the girls to pose in different styles—Charlie’s Angels, them swooning over Tommy, Tommy swooning over them—and they seem to have a blast. When they’re finally through and done thanking him, the hipsters have all left the Starbucks in disgust.
“They were nice,” Tommy says when the girls have gone and he
and Sersha are alone again. His coffee has to have gone cold, but he drinks the last of it anyway, proving once and for all that he has no taste buds.
Sersha nods. “You handle the fans well,” she tells him.
Tommy shrugs. “Without them we wouldn’t be where we are now,” he says. “We literally owe them everything. I think that’s worth a few selfies.”
His self-awareness is making her hot under the collar. She sips the last of her Frappuccino, which didn’t suffer from being neglected for twenty minutes, before setting it back on the table.
“Is it true that you guys were attacked on tour?” she asks.
Tommy nods in affirmation. “Yeah… it was Dash, specifically. Some super fan with a knife.” And for some reason, he smiles. “Mikayla tried to save him, like a champ.”
“I think I read about that,” she replies.
Mikayla Strong, the band’s PA at the time, had stepped between Dash and the knife-wielding fan, cementing her place in the hearts Black Lilith’s fan base. She’d never given an interview about it, but the band had commented on it in a number of magazine articles, and to this day the paparazzi are just as likely to follow her down the street as they are to follow the band.
Thinking of that makes Sersha wonder why there aren’t any paps in Starbucks right now, trying to get pictures of Tommy. Or any of the stone-faced security guards that the band usually travels with.
“Tommy,” Sersha says. “Did you give your security the slip to come and meet me?”
Tommy shuffles in his chair. “I wouldn’t call it ‘giving them the slip,’” he says slowly. “I left. Not my fault they didn’t notice.”
Sersha sighs and leans back in her chair. “If someone tries to stab you, you’re on your own.”
He smiles at her. “I can handle myself.”
“I’m sure you can,” she replies. “But it’s always better with a helper.”
And once again she’s devolved into lame flirting. It’s not her fault it’s Tommy’s altruism making her all flushed and bothered. Tommy purses his lips and meets her eyes. There’s something in his gaze that makes her think that she might have bitten off more than she can chew.
