by Roxy Reid
“Of course, of course. Well,” Shaun clears his throat. “There’s a musician we’re interested in doing an exposé on. He’s on tour, but he hasn’t let press join him, and several former employees of his have contacted me saying there’s something there. We want to send you. You’d be following him for the last leg of his tour. $20,000 for the story, plus expenses. You interested?”
Yes. Fuck yes. “If he won’t let press on the tour, how I will I get access?”
“His marketing team is hiring a new photographer. You’d be undercover.”
I stand up and start pacing, my excitement building, even as I try to stay rational. This sounds way too good to be true. And, I’ve never done anything like it before. On the other hand … $20,000. That’s half a year’s salary. I could get a Daisy-free apartment. Or I could skip an assignment every now and then and focus on the projects I really want to do.
“Well?” Shaun asks.
“Look, if his marketing team let’s me in the door, I’d take it in a heartbeat. But I can’t guarantee they’d hire me. I haven’t done concert photography in years, and I’m sure there will be applicants with more experience.”
“We’re confident you’ll stand out,” Shaun says. “He has a reputation for hiring people he knows.”
I freeze as the other shoe drops, “Shaun. Who’s the musician?”
“I … uh … er … we really need you to sign the paperwork before I can reveal that information. This is a big story, and I can’t have you scooping us.”
“It’s Finn Ryan, isn’t it?” I demand.
Shaun sputters, which might as well be a confirmation.
I walk to the window, my ears roaring. I can’t believe this is happening. I’m getting a financial windfall, paid travel, and a way to break into photojournalism.
And all I have to do is bring down the first guy I ever loved. The first guy I slept with. The first guy who crushed my heart to fucking smithereens.
I press a fist to my forehead, wincing at the memories. I almost dropped out of school to run away with Finn. I was three months from graduating and so naive, I would have left San Francisco with him in a heart-beat. We were going to travel the country together, me photographing everything weird and beautiful, him playing in every grimy bar that would hire an 18-year-old to play.
And then he dumped me—without warning and without explanation.
I press my fist into the glass of the windowpane. It’s the first really cold day of fall, and the cold stings as it sinks into my hand.
“Would that be a problem?” Shaun asks. “If it was Finn Ryan?”
“No,” I say. My grin is fierce as I imagine the karmic justice of winning my big break by taking Finn down a peg. “It would be a bonus.”
2
Finn
“You’re hung over again, aren’t you?” my manager Bridget asks. Her voice rings loudly in the marble-heavy hotel suite.
Bridget is an old Irish name meaning “strength and vigor.” Alternately, “exalted one.” I’d add “pain in the ass” and “morning person,” but other than that, the name fits. Bridget’s been in the business for fifteen years longer than me. She looks eerily ageless, dresses in black, and knows everything about the music business. One time I caught her listening to Miranda Lambert, but that’s the only personal thing I know about her.
Bridget knows everything about me though. Well, almost everything.
Which is why lie I lie and say, “Yep, hung over.”
I don’t tell her the truth. That I was up until two hours ago, desperately trying to write a song. Any song.
I’m due in the studio in a month to start recording my next album, and I don’t have a single song.
I’m worried something is permanently broken in me, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t fucking write. The only person I’ve told is my older brother Jim. He thinks I’m having trouble because I never write alone.
I scoffed when he said it. Sure, my last two albums were co-written with Zane Wright, one of the biggest asshole producers in the music industry—which is why we’re not working together anymore. I finally fired him when I got sick of him making the intern cry. She tried to reassure me by saying it was fine; Zane made her cry every day.
But my first album, the one that got me on the map and that won me all the awards? I wrote that one by myself.
At least that’s how I remembered it. But Jim pointed out that I started most of those songs back when I was still with my high school girlfriend. We were teenagers with nothing better to do but come up with excuses to be near each other. We’d hang out for hours—me playing a hook, her giving me blunt feedback or throwing out a lyric idea while she flipped through the glossy photography magazines I’d buy her, since that was literally the only photography thing I could afford to buy her.
I never thought about it as co-writing because she wasn’t a musician, and she certainly wasn’t putting any effort into it. But there’s enough traces of her ideas on my first album that if I was recording it today, Bridget would insist on a tiny co-writing credit at the bottom so I wouldn’t get sued.
Unfortunately, it’s too late to find a collaborator for this album, unless I want to push the release date back. Or work with Zane again, despite the public falling out we had, and the way he tried to bad-mouth me to every gossip magazine that would listen.
So while everyone else on our tour has been enjoying the four days off after the New York shows, I’ve been holed up in this hotel room trying to write a song completely by myself, for the first time in over ten years.
And it hasn’t fucking worked.
I feel dull and miserable. I’m a fraud. And the only way to keep the fraud going for another album is to call a man I hate, and beg him to come back, where he will be shitty and cruel to people who look up to me.
Maybe I can figure out a way where Zane’s literally only interacting with me. I know from experience that will make him even worse, but I deserve it. I’m the rockstar who can’t write a single fucking song without someone holding my hand.
Bridget hands me a glass of cold water and two aspirin with the efficiency of a nurse. Or someone who spends a lot of time with musicians.
I take my medicine, because I can already feel a headache coming on at the thought of working with Zane again.
“As I was saying,” Bridget says before sitting down on the couch across from me, “we need to hire a photographer for the second half of the tour. I know you trusted Kai, but he has decided to follow his bliss to Iceland, whatever that means.”
“Do we have to?” I say. It comes out like a whine. Probably because it is.
“Do you want a lecture on the importance of marketing and the cost benefit analysis of live shots verses studio shots?” Bridget asks.
“No,” I say, and slouch farther into the couch.
“Do you finally trust me enough to let me do my job and pick a damn photographer without your input?”
“No,” I say.
“Then you pick a photographer,” Bridget leans over the glass coffee table to pass me a tablet.
I make a big show of sitting up, because I know it annoys Bridget, and start swiping through portfolios. They’re all excellent, unsurprisingly. Bridget doesn’t let anything subpar pass her desk.
I’m about to pick a photographer at random, not that I’ll admit that to Bridget, when my eyes snag on one photo. It’s a black and white photo of my favorite corner in San Francisco. A little cafe where I used to sit for hours across from the girl I liked, while she did homework, and I ignored my own homework to write bad lyrics about her midnight black eyes.
I keep swiping through the rest of this photographer’s portfolio. It’s less music focused than the others. There’s some stunning shots of dancers performing, along with gorgeous streetscapes. Mostly of San Francisco and New York, with a side of what looks like small-town New England.
“I know you always want to personally see the applications of people who claim they know yo
u, so I included one wild card,” Bridget says. “But I’d really recommend we go with a tried-and-true music photographer. We’ll need fresh photos to use in the lead up to the album launch.”
I can’t tear my eyes away from the San Francisco photos. The thing is, they’re not tourist photos. They’re photos of my neighborhood, of my favorite places. Hell, there’s one of my parent’s pub.
Wait. I know that photo. I own that photo. I commissioned that photo. Ostensibly as a Christmas photo, but really as an excuse to spend time with her.
I check the watermark.
Charlie De Luca Photography.
I can’t believe it. I literally can’t believe it. I haven’t talked to Charlie in ten years—mostly because she made it very clear she didn’t want to talk to me—but this feels like a sign.
If she applied to shoot my tour, maybe she’s ready to bury the hatchet. And if she’s ready for that, maybe she’d be up for …
I don’t know, sitting in the room while I write?
It sounds stupid as soon as I think it, but I can’t let go of the idea. Obviously, Charlie’s not a good luck charm that will magically fix my writer’s block.
But maybe … Maybe if I hire her to do photography and we spend time together, maybe get to be friends, and she’s telling me what she thinks … maybe that dynamic will unlock something in me that I desperately need unlocked.
It’s worth a shot, right? Even if it doesn’t work, what harm could it do?
You could fall in love with her again, a voice inside me says.
Something old and warm flickers in my chest, but I push it down ruthlessly. I am not going down that hellhole of a road again. I’ve changed. She’s changed. People don’t end up with the girl they fell for in high school. It’s not a thing that happens.
To prove to myself how absolutely immune I am to Charlie De Luca, I click through to her website. It would be a lie to say I haven’t thought about Charlie at all in the past ten years. Half the songs on my first album are about her.
But they’re about Charlie-from-the-past. I don’t think about Charlie-now. I don’t think about if she’s a photography success, although clearly she is. I don’t think about if she moved back to San Francisco after college—she didn’t, according to her website. I don’t think about who she’s fucking now. Probably some responsible guy in a suit who actually graduated high school, if her parents had anything to say about it.
See, I am totally over her, I tell the voice.
I click to her personal bio, not admitting to myself what I’m looking for, until I see she isn’t married and breathe a sigh of relief.
Why am I relieved? I AM NOT INTO HER. I’m just interested in using her proximity to rescue my career. That’s all.
You can’t see her eyes, in the photo she has of herself on her website. It’s a photo of her lifting her camera, aiming the lens right at you. All you can see is her shiny black hair hanging to her collar bone, and her delicate hands peeking out of an oversized sweater to cradle the camera. Her smile is wide and happy.
I wonder who she’s smiling at.
Nope, no you don’t wonder that, I tell myself sternly.
Why did she apply? Is it just the money? Because including that photo of Ryan’s Irish Pub feels like a challenge.
I exit out of her website. It doesn’t matter why she applied. All that matters is she did.
Bridget’s tapping her foot impatiently, “If you aren’t sure, I recommend—”
“I want this one,” I say, passing the tablet to Bridget. This decision may blow up in my face, but if there’s even a chance I can avoid working with Zane, I’ll take it. “I want Charlie De Luca.”
3
Charlie
If you’re flying out of New York on a private jet, you don’t go to JFK like a normal person. No, you go across the river to a private airport filled with finance bros and men in suits worth almost as much as my camera equipment. I’m trying to figure out which direction to go—how do you even enter an airport when there’s no TSA to yell at you? When an amused voice behind me says, “To your left.”
It’s his voice. I know it instantly, even if it’s gotten deeper and bossier since I last heard it.
“Charlie,” he says, and I swear I can feel his voice running through me, making every hair on the back of my neck stand up. And suddenly I remember a really, really crappy fact.
I was never very good at lying to him.
“It’s ok to look at me,” Finn says mockingly.
I turn, nerves jangling in my stomach.
The sunlight slants through the glass walls, highlighting him like some kind of angel.
Well, maybe a fallen angel.
Now it’s a different kind of nerves running through me, because holy crap, Finn is beautiful. More than beautiful. Hot. Handsome. Sexy. For the first time in my life, I understand the urge to throw my underwear at a rockstar.
Even though I know how bad he is at oral.
Well, 18-year-old Finn was bad at oral. It’s possible 28-year-old Finn is a different story.
He’s definitely broader and stronger than I remember, with new tattoos twining up his arms. He still wears jeans and a t-shirt, but now they’re expensive, hanging on his body like a dream. His nut-brown hair is stylishly cut, but it’s messy enough that I know he still runs his fingers through it when he’s thinking.
His green eyes are exactly the same though, as they look me up and down. The guitar case in his left hand is the same too, if a little more beat up, and a little more covered in stickers.
And the tiny smirk, in the corner of his mouth? The smirk that could make a girl think she’s special, that she’s the only one in on the joke? That’s still there too.
Only now I know what that smirk means.
Right. Time to practice lying. I sigh heavily, “Well, that’s a disappointment.”
“How so?” Finn asks, cocky. He knows I’m faking.
“I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings,” I say. “Not before your big concert. I know you get sensitive before a show. Someone says something mean, and it gets in your head and then you can’t … perform,” I finish suggestively.
“I do not have issues performing.”
This time it’s my turn to smirk, “If you say so.” I turn on my heel and run straight into a towering, angry looking man who stumbles backward, spilling coffee on his suit.
“SHIT. FUCK. What the hell?”
“I’m so sorry—”
“Do I look like I care? This is Armani, and I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes. Bitch.”
Suddenly Finn is next to me.
“Back off,” Finn growls, advancing until he’s physically standing between me and the man.
“She just fucked up my meeting, and maybe a major business deal—”
“If your deal depended on a suit, you were already fucked. But here,” Finn holds up a fifty, “for dry cleaning.”
The man reaches for it, and Finn flicks it off to the side, “Oops. Fetch.”
The man glowers, before checking his watch, swearing, and storming past us.
Finn watches to make sure the man leaves, before turning back and realizing I’m staring at him.
“What?” Finn asks, suddenly self-conscious.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say, irritated. “I can take care of myself.”
“Oh, that’s cute,” Finn says. “You think that had something to do with you? Nah. I just hate bullies.”
He walks past me, guitar swinging jauntily.
I hurry after him. Partly because my job is to get dirt on him, and this seems like as good a time as any to start digging, and partly because I’m still not entirely sure where we’re going.
As soon as we round the corner, Finn is swarmed. There’s a guy with spiked hair explaining they have to change the bass solo because he sprained his finger, and a woman in black telling Finn she’s booked press interviews in New Orleans and there will be no arguing. There’s a bald man saying so
mething about projections and another who keeps opening his mouth to speak but can’t get a word in edgewise.
It’s weird to see. Finn was a little bit of a loner in high school. Not a creepy loner, he just didn’t have time for anyone who bored him. Every now and then he’d stand up for a kid being picked on, but other than that he slouched in the back of class and doodled in his notebook. We probably would have stayed strangers, except that his parents’ pub was across the street from my parents’ Italian restaurant, and we both worked at our parents’ places. Sometimes we’d end up walking the same way after school, and after a certain point it seemed less awkward to just talk to him.
And hadn’t that been a mistake. High school me had never met anyone like Finn Ryan. Rude, smart, defiant, passionate. Of course, you had to wade through a heavy layer of sarcasm and defensiveness to get there. But I was young and optimistic, and he smelled good, so wade I did.
I guess in some ways I thought of Finn as my secret good thing. No one else noticed how talented he was. How kind he could be. How magnetic he was, when he was looking into your eyes and telling you something he was passionate about.
Of course, then he broke my heart, and I trained myself not to notice any of those things. Which, ironically, was exactly when the rest of the world started noticing all of those things.
“Who’s she?” a young woman with an asymmetrical haircut and a lot of garment bags asks, looking at me.
Finn throws me an inscrutable look, “This is our new photographer, Charlie De Luca. Don’t be too much of a dick to her.”
“Charlie De Luca?” the guy with the spiked hair asks. “Isn’t she—”
But a pretty Latina woman I’m pretty sure I recognize as Finn’s drummer elbows him, so neither Spiked Hair nor I get the answer to that question.
“I’m Mariana Alers, drummer,” she says, coming forward with her hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too.” We shake hands.
