MUSES AND MELODIES

by Yarros, Rebecca

  “He won’t.” I watched the plate spin round and round inside the microwave, debating what I’d thought was a cute little comment three days ago. “And if he does, then I guess we have our answer, don’t we?” Just the thought of it made my stomach curdle, but I was done feeling responsible for Nixon’s choices.

  “Are you sleeping with other people?”

  “No!” I turned and yelled at my cell phone, like Naomi was actually in the room with me.

  “So, you’re not officially together, but you’re not sleeping with other people.”

  “Exactly. At least that’s what I think is going on.” The heartbreak I’d come back to Seattle sporting eight weeks ago wasn’t as sharp since I’d seen Nixon in Chicago. It wasn’t completely healed, either. I missed him more than I wanted to admit.

  Way more.

  The every heartbeat kind of more.

  But that was to be expected, right? It wasn’t natural to spend every waking moment with someone for six months and then be okay when they cut you off cold turkey. In that way, I guess I was addicted to him too. And as much as I wanted to believe it, I wasn’t sure he’d stick to the three-month plan. There was every chance he’d leave for the tour and not look back.

  Ironic, but I was supposed to be happy. I finally felt like I was making something of myself when it came to my career, but I’d lost something I hadn’t realized I’d even wanted, something that was scarily close to a need.

  “He’ll come back,” she said, way more confident about it than I was.

  “How do you know?” Nixon was anything but predictable.

  “I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He’ll come back. Did you know he deleted Instagram?”

  “So Monica was telling me.” The microwave beeped, and I took out my leftover pasta, stirring it.

  “That’s New Zoe?”

  “Nixon calls her Wannabe Shannon. She’s Ben’s new intern, whose favorite hobbies include texting me every five minutes to ask questions about Nixon and frequenting TMZ to ‘make sure the band doesn’t have negative exposure.’” I snorted.

  “She’s young. Give her a break.”

  “Her father is Donald Berkshire. Trust me, she doesn’t need one.” I opened the refrigerator again and stared at my drink options, then bypassed the lone bottle of orange soda on the door for some lemonade. God, I missed him. “Tell me how Levi’s doing.”

  Naomi filled me in on the happenings around Legacy as I ate and threw in a load of laundry.

  Then the doorbell rang.

  “Hold on a second, someone’s here.” I walked the ten feet to my front door and looked through the peephole. “It’s Monica.”

  “Be nice.”

  “I’ll call you right back.” I hung up with Naomi and opened the door. “Monica, it’s almost nine o’clock. What’s up?”

  “Sorry.” She blew her hair out of her eyes and sighed. “I spent all day getting his royal assholeness packed to leave for Jonas’s in two days, where, spoiler alert, I don’t get to go.” I had to give it to the girl—she looked exhausted.

  “Jonas isn’t a big fan of interns creeping around his kid,” I said as gently as possible. It was good Nixon was headed to Jonas’s, not only for the support but for the distance. Now I wouldn’t be tempted to drive over and climb into bed with him at two a.m.

  She nodded. “I know. I just thought I’d be doing higher-level stuff, not packing Nixon’s guitar straps. Did you know that he has one that says Zoe’s on it?” She lifted her eyebrows.

  “Yeah, I did.” I grinned. “It was supposed to be a joke. Long story.”

  “Well, he made me pack it.” Her shoulders fell. “Is this what it’s really like? Babysitting the creatives?”

  “No. Nixon’s on special handling orders for a few months, that’s all. Then he’ll go on tour, and Ethan will be responsible for his royal assholeness.” I opened my door wider. “Do you want to come in? You look like you need to sit down.”

  “No, but thank you for the offer. I just came by because Nixon wanted me to hand deliver this to you.” She leaned over and hefted a new guitar hardcase from next to the door.

  “He sent me a guitar?” I took it from her.

  “Maybe it’s just a case. Who knows with him.” She shrugged. “Is he always so grumpy in the morning? I show up at nine a.m. as instructed, and he bites my head off for the first few hours.”

  I put the guitar case on the other side of my door. “Is he sleeping?” My brow furrowed.

  “How would I know? I don’t spend the night there.”

  Thank God for that. Guess she really wasn’t New Shannon.

  “Here. Come in for a second.” I motioned her forward, then shut the door and walked around the Formica peninsula and into my kitchen, where I dug out an unopened box of tea. “Put this on the counter when you see him tomorrow.”

  “He drinks tea?” She looked skeptically at the box.

  “He does.” I nodded.

  She glanced from the box to me and back again. “You don’t have to pack his clothes.”

  “Not anymore.” I never packed his clothes, but I wasn’t about to say that to her.

  “How did you get to manage your own band?”

  “Went to law school while being Ben’s assistant for four years…only three of those were while I was in school, though. Keep showing up, Monica. You’ll be fine.”

  “Thanks.” She slipped the tea into her massive shoulder bag.

  “No problem, and if Ben doesn’t run you ragged while Nixon’s gone, pop over to my office and I’ll…show you some contracts or something.”

  “Really?” Her eyes lit up.

  “Really.”

  “Thank you!” She adjusted her bag and headed for the door, then paused with her hand on the handle. “Oh, I’m supposed to tell you something.”

  “Okay?”

  “Nixon said that’s not a gift, just a loaner. He called it collateral.” She pointed to the guitar case. “And you’re supposed to keep an eye on TMZ tomorrow, because he bets a whole year of your property taxes that something is going to pop up.” She gave me a smile, then waved and let herself out.

  TMZ. He had to be kidding me.

  I laid the guitar case flat, then undid the latches and opened the lid. The case may have been new, but the guitar wasn’t. The honey-gold tones were all too familiar. My heart somersaulted, and I called Naomi back.

  “He’ll come back,” I said, a smile lifting my lips.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “No, but he sent me a message.” I smiled and ran my finger over the polished wood of the body he’d called collateral.

  It was Kaylee’s guitar.

  * * *

  “Who knew about this?” Ben shouted down the halls of Berkshire Management the next afternoon.

  I abandoned the contract I’d been reading and rolled my chair to the edge of the broom closet that served as my office. Leaning my head out of the doorway, I blinked at the sight of Ben stomping toward the collective group of cubicles that housed the interns.

  “Berkshire! Did you know?” Monica’s head popped above the cubicle.

  “About?”

  “Seriously, the one day you don’t live on TMZ?” he snapped.

  Nixon.

  I pushed off the doorframe and rolled back to my desk, clicking for a new tab on my internet browser and pulling up TMZ.

  There was a photo of Nixon—in a suit—walking down a set of concrete steps with Jonas and Quinn behind him, dressed similarly. All three had on sunglasses, but it was absolutely them. I clicked on the picture, and the headline blew up on the next screen.

  Confirmed: Hush Note guitarist Nixon Winters leaving a hearing at the Washington State Clemency and Pardons Board with his bandmates, Jonas Smith and Quinn Montgomery, earlier today.

  My stomach pitched.

  I scrolled furiously, but the article was short, because there was nothing to report. Though the hearings were open to the public, Nixon hadn’t been spotted
until leaving the building, and only the results of that hearing—not the transcripts—would be released.

  “The answer is ‘no comment’!” Ben bellowed. “Can someone please get Amy Manson on the phone?” The band’s publicist.

  Nixon had gone to the hearing.

  I scrambled for my phone, not giving a shit if it hadn’t even been a week into this wait-three-months thing.

  Zoe: Are you okay?

  I tapped my fingers on my desk, waiting for a reply.

  “I told Zoe Shannon!” Monica’s voice rose above the noise.

  Awesome.

  Nixon: I miss you

  Zoe: Not what I mean.

  Nixon: I know

  I wanted to reach through the phone and throttle him for not giving me an answer, but if I actually had my hands on him, I knew that wouldn’t be the outcome. My chest tightened, thinking of him taking that step, knowing that while he’d had the support of his friends, I hadn’t been there with the same.

  “Shannon!” Ben was headed this way.

  Zoe: I’m serious.

  The three little repeating dots were going to be the death of me.

  “Did you know?” Ben asked from my doorway.

  “Know what?” I folded my hands over my cell phone screen, and Ben narrowed his eyes.

  “You know what! Did Nixon tell you he was going to a legal hearing today? That picture is everywhere.”

  My phone buzzed with an alert.

  “Nope, he didn’t.”

  “Berkshire said—”

  “That Nixon wanted me to keep an eye on TMZ today?” I shrugged. “If we represented sports stars, they’d want us to watch ESPN.”

  His face tightened.

  “I didn’t know,” I reiterated.

  “Do you know what it was about?”

  “I can’t be a hundred percent sure.” My smile was fake, and we both knew it.

  “Was he involved in something—”

  “No.” Was that really the first conclusion everyone jumped to? “Nixon didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing that happened in there can have any legal ramifications, and it’s not like we have any morality clauses anyway.”

  My phone buzzed again.

  Ben glanced from my hands to my face, then pushed off my doorframe and headed back into the hallway. “Someone get me Amy Manson!”

  I uncovered my phone as soon as he was out of sight.

  Nixon: I read a statement to the board about the abuse

  Nixon: He wasn’t even in the room before I left

  The tension in my chest eased a bit. He hadn’t been forced to see his father.

  He was really doing it—the work to get better. He wasn’t avoiding his past or shutting himself away in his apartment…or our Colorado house…and he was doing it sober, with his friends to back him up.

  The ache from missing him threatened to consume me as I typed out a reply.

  Zoe: I’m proud of you.

  Nixon: I love you

  My fingers hovered over the keys, but I just couldn’t go there. Couldn’t give him that power again. The first time I’d given him those words, he’d destroyed me in less than a day. It didn’t matter that my heart lodged in my throat every time I thought about him, not when it came to the very real need for a little self-preservation.

  My phone vibrated.

  Nixon: 3 months

  I swallowed. That, I could handle.

  Zoe: Three months.

  20

  NIXON

  Damn, my girl was beautiful. I leaned over my guitar and scrolled through her last couple of Instagram posts, and sighed like the lovesick fool I was. Three weeks down…too many to go.

  The only reason I’d opened my account back up—after deleting all the bullshit I hadn’t posted over the last few years—was hearing that Zoe had finally gotten one. It was the closest I got to her.

  Her emerald-green eyes stared back at me through the screen, mid-laugh, with her arm around Naomi at Puget Sound. Guess she’d finally taken some much-needed time off. Missing her wasn’t even an emotion anymore as much as it was a state of being. Add to it the fear that she wouldn’t wait, wouldn’t take me back, wouldn’t want to handle the shit that being with me would inevitably heap on her, and I was hanging on to my sanity by a thread.

  But it was a thread, which was more than I’d had this time last year. I was usually mid-spiral by the first week in May.

  “Zoe post another picture?” Jonas asked, walking onto his porch and handing me an orange soda before taking the chair next to me.

  “What makes you think it’s Zoe?” I asked, giving her one last look before shutting my phone off.

  “You follow three people, and if you’re looking at Quinn or me like that, we’ve got problems.” He picked up his guitar and retuned the E.

  “True.” I glanced at the notebook that sat on the small, wrought iron table between us. “Where were we?”

  “Chorus.” He took a swig of his iced tea and set it back down. He strummed the same progression we’d followed with the first. “How about we split that first line here—” He tapped the paper.

  “You’re the only thing—the only thing that matters,” I sang.

  “Yeah. That’s good.”

  I wrote the new variation down as he strummed it out, then penciled in my next thoughts as I spoke them aloud. “In this parade of mad alibis—a thousand little lies—intentions fall like confetti.”

  Jonas stopped strumming and looked over at me. “Damn.”

  “Or we could flip it—”

  “No, that’s perfect. We should have sobered you up years ago.” He grinned. “Mad alibis. Nice.”

  “Whatever.” I scribbled down the chord progression before strumming it out. Had to admit, my brain was on fire now that it wasn’t constantly weighed down. Did every song I write have a hefty dose of Zoe in it? Yeah, but most of my thoughts did too.

  Jonas read off the paper and nodded as he moved through the melody. “Let’s repeat the hook here.”

  I nodded as he sang it back. “You’re the only thing—the only thing that matters.” His eyebrows raised as he followed up with the next lines. “Holding me steady with little more than a memory—the only thing—the only thing that matters.”

  I had a full-out smile by the time he put his spin on the end. “It’s good.”

  “Yeah. Like…single good. Like ‘call Quinn and get on a plane so we can record it’ good.”

  “The album’s already finished, and besides, we don’t even have a second verse yet.”

  “Screw that. We’ll finish the song and unfinish the album. It’s not due to drop for another six weeks. I’ll call Ben and have him deal with the production side.” Jonas stared down at the spiral notebook. “What are we going to call it?”

  I never went for the obvious titles. It just wasn’t my style. “How about ‘Mad Alibis’?”

  Jonas’s smile spread slowly across his face “Yeah. Yeah, that’s the one.” He lifted his brows at me. “Now, how about sneaking a little ‘Merciful Fire’ onto the album too?”

  “No.” My fingers picked at the lead-in from memory. “Too personal.”

  “Man, I hate to break it to you, but you’re in a long-distance ‘maybe’ relationship with a woman you don’t even talk to. Too personal might ease those waters right now.”

  “I’m not putting a song about Zoe on an album when she hasn’t even heard it.” I shook my head.

  “Yeah, and ‘Mad Alibis’ isn’t about her?”

  My mouth opened and shut a few times.

  “Exactly.” He laughed.

  The back door opened and Vivi raced out, a bundle of pure energy as she zipped up her jacket. “I finished my homework!”

  “What exactly are they giving kindergarteners these days?” I questioned.

  “Don’t get me started on the math.” Jonas groaned, but he was all smiles for his little girl. “Good job, honey.”

  She ran her fingers over his strings. “Did you finish?�
�

  “Almost!”

  “Can I hear it?” She bounced on her toes.

  “Sure,” I answered for Jonas, then took it from the top, working through the harmonies once he hit the chorus.

  Vivi clapped when we ran out of material. “I love it! You play really well, Daddy.”

  “Thanks, honey, but you know, Uncle Nixon plays even better.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Jonas nodded emphatically.

  “You’re better than Dad?” Vivi eyed me skeptically.

  “Singing? No. Playing, yes.” I was shamelessly proud of my hands.

  “Dad bought me a guitar.” Her bright eyes met mine. “Can you teach me too?”

  My entire chest seized. I took a deep breath and let it out, keeping myself in the here—the now. She wasn’t Kaylee. I’d never get that chance back. I’d made my choices, and she’d paid a price neither of us had foreseen. Maybe it wasn’t my fault—I was still working through that—but I’d been a factor all the same.

  “Honey, Uncle Nixon is—” Jonas started, obviously seeing my distress.

  “Sure, I’ll teach you,” I interjected.

  “Thanks!” She rewarded me with a grin, then threw her little arms around my neck.

  “Any time.” I squeezed her back, and she raced off to play.

  Jonas gave me a speculative once-over.

  “What?”

  “Just picturing you as a dad.” He gave me that hopeful look he’d been fond of since I’d come to Boston.

  “Don’t.” I shook my head. Not that a green-eyed baby would be the worst thing in the world, just…not any time soon. I could barely picture the next six months as it was, and that was even knowing we were due to start a moderated tour schedule the first of July. But maybe one day. As long as Zoe was on board.

  “Scared of diapers?” he teased. “Or the whole commitment thing?”

  I scoffed. “I’m just scared I’ll be better at parenting than you are, and I’m trying to give you the upper hand for a while.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay. Let’s get back to that second verse.”

  I fell into the music a little deeper than usual, and before I knew it, we were dropping the single.