Wright that Got Away, page 7
I swallowed hard before stepping out of my room to find Campbell had added lyrics to the tune he was messing with. I didn’t catch them before he came to an abrupt halt, his eyes fixed on me.
He didn’t say a word. Just devoured me with his eyes.
I turned in place. “You think this works?”
“It looks like what you wore in high school.”
“That’s the idea,” I muttered. I hated the next words that came out of my mouth. Even though I knew they were what I should do. “I thought we could record it a couple of times in a few different outfits, and then I could cut them together. To show I’m always the same girl. In this, in my athleisure kits, in my soccer uniform, that sort of thing.”
“And I’ll just be like this?”
“Isn’t that exactly who you are?”
He could barely drag his eyes away from me long enough to look down at himself. “I’d probably change the guitar.”
I laughed, a soft, melodic thing, and he jerked his gaze back up to me.
“What?” I asked warily.
“I just…haven’t heard you laugh in a while.”
“I laugh,” I said defensively.
“Not around me.”
I bit my lip and hurried toward the camera. Well, if I didn’t laugh around him, I had good reason.
“Let’s do a test run, yeah?” I said, going straight back to business.
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
He adjusted himself on the stool I’d brought over for him so that he was in the shot. I set up right where I had been, and he drew in tight next to me. I swallowed at his nearness. Fuck, he was so close. And I’d signed up for this.
I could back out. I could bail on what was happening. But, damn, it would be good for my career.
So, I gritted my teeth and ignored the yawning, gaping need that had formed in Campbell’s presence. The want that millions of girls worldwide felt around him. And I was only different in that I’d had him before he was famous. I needed to keep reminding myself of that fact. It wasn’t real. This wasn’t real. It was just history. Nothing more.
“Okay. We’re set up. We’ll try this take.”
“Start over from the chorus?” he asked, settling into the stool.
“Sure. Or right before the chorus.”
He nodded as his fingers moved effortlessly across the guitar. I pressed the red circle on my phone to record and then stood next to him. For a moment, I let my eyes drift up from the guitar and to his face. His eyes were fixed on the guitar as he hummed the lyrics to get us into position.
Then, he started to sing, and everything in the entire world fell away as I catapulted back in time.
My body might have been in the present, standing before Campbell as he sang “I See the Real You.” But I was no longer there.
I was sitting on my bed, back at my parents’ house. Campbell waited outside in the cold, frantically texting me to see when my mom would be gone. Then, he tumbled in through the window, laughing as he worried more about his guitar than the gash at his knee.
“Shh,” I whispered even though I had the house to myself.
He sat up and drew me to him, kissing my lips so hot and fierce and needy that I almost forgot what he was doing here. His hands were halfway up my sweater before I giggled and shoved him backward.
“You said you wrote a song.”
His eyes were on my breasts, and then they jerked back up to my face. “I did. But I think I want to kiss you again.”
His hands slid up into my stupid brown bob, and then he was kissing me for real. Slow and languid, as if we had all night to explore this. Rather than the few hours that my mom was away on her girls’ night out. I wanted to live in this moment forever. But I was scared. We hadn’t gone all the way yet. We’d barely done anything, and though I wanted it all with him, could see our entire future, I still hadn’t agreed to it yet.
“Okay. Okay,” he said with a laugh as I scooted back again.
I lay down on my bed and watched as he tuned his acoustic guitar. He shot me one heart-melting grin and began to play. The words falling from his lips.
Tears welled in my eyes as I realized that this wasn’t just a song; this was a song about me. This was about him seeing me. Really seeing me. Not just the weird girl at school, but the girl I was when I was with him. The girl that belonged to him.
His eyes left the guitar and fixed on my face. As we stared at each other across the short distance, I knew with teenage certainty that I would love him forever.
I blinked, and the memory dissolved in my mind. Campbell was still singing, but he was looking at me as if he knew exactly where my mind had gone. The same unshed tears that had come to my eyes at seventeen were there again today.
He ended the chorus and let the rest of the music fade away. He still stared at me. Waited for the moment to break or to see if I would give him exactly what I had given him that first night. My whole heart.
Except that my heart was no longer whole. It was a broken, shredded thing that he’d destroyed all on his own. So, though the music was a spell that lingered between us, it was also a lie. Because no matter how much he had seen me then, he didn’t even know me now. And he couldn’t fix any of that.
“Blaire,” he said with concern, reaching out for me.
I yanked away from him on instinct. I swiped at my eyes and rushed to the camera. I ended the recording and breathed heavily as I tried to get myself back under control.
“Do we need to do it again?”
I watched the video to see what in the hell had even happened. I hadn’t been singing or even lip-syncing. I didn’t even look at the camera. In fact, neither of us looked at the camera. He was playing, and then all of a sudden, he looked up at me, sang to me, existed for me. We had eyes only for each other. And then the moment ended. He’d finished singing, and a look of terror had come into my eyes. A rabbit seeing a fox.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
“That bad?”
I turned off my phone. “No.”
“Can I see?”
I dipped my chin to my chest, and then with a sigh, I handed him my phone to watch it.
After a second, he said, “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“We can do it again.”
I shook my head. There was no point. I couldn’t handle trying one more time. I probably couldn’t even use this. No one could look at that video and not see emotions swirling between us. Even if I were a great actor, which I was not, people would still say there was too much chemistry for us to fake all of it.
“It’s fine.”
“Blaire…”
“What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked to change the subject as I took my phone back.
“I wrote a new song,” he said slowly.
I turned finally to face him. “Okay.”
“It’s based off of what you said to me. About how, to me, you were only ever invisible or everything. That there was no in-between.”
“You wrote another song about me?” I said incomprehensibly.
“Yeah.” He ran a hand back through his hair. “I haven’t been able to write. Critics hated the last album, and I think they got into my head. Everything I’ve written since, I have absolutely hated.”
“They can’t all be bad.”
“My manager thinks they’re good, but what does he know? They all sucked…until this song.” He sat back down on the stool, fiddled with the guitar, and began to play.
It was the melody that he had been playing earlier that I thought was catchy. I’d missed the lyrics then, but I immediately decided the tune was going to be a hit. And then when he started singing, I actually sat down because it was so good.
I tried really hard not to smile as he belted out about the invisible girl who was everything to him. I tried to remind myself that it was just a song. I’d just happened to be the inspiration for it. It had nothing to do with me. But it was hard to differentiate. It was hard to hear him sing words that I’d said to him in hate sang back to me in love.
“That’s what I have so far,” he said, stilling his fingers and looking at me warily. “What do you think?”
“It’s amazing.”
His eyes lit up. “Yeah?”
I nodded slowly. “Better than the last album.”
“That’s what I thought!” He got up and paced around like the excited fool he was. Then, he turned back to face me with fear and uncertainty. “I didn’t give you a choice with the last song, Blaire. And I didn’t think it was fair to just record this, knowing how you felt about the last one.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to make sure you were okay with it.”
“You don’t get to choose when inspiration strikes, Campbell.”
“I know but…”
“It’s okay,” I finally said. I looked down at the phone in my hand. The secret that was hidden in that video. He’d done that for me just because he’d thought I’d asked. For no other reason. Could I really deny him a song that would help his career? I met his eyes again. “You can record it.”
He blew out a relieved breath. “Oh, good. I was going to lay it down with Weston later this week if you were okay with it.”
“Weston? Really?”
“Yeah, we’ve been hanging out. He’s a cool guy. Plus, he works in a local studio. You can swing by to hear it if you want.”
I gulped and drew back. I couldn’t fall further for this man. He’d hurt me once, and he was surely leaving again. No matter what he thought. LA was his home now.
“Maybe.”
He heard my refusal in the word and just nodded. “Well, if you change your mind,” he said, taking my phone out of my hand and typing into it, “here’s my number.”
Then, he smiled down at me, and it took everything in me not to reach up onto my tiptoes and drag his mouth down to mine. He was gone before I could do something stupid, and I flopped back on the couch.
“I am so screwed.”
11
Campbell
“What do you think about this?” Weston asked.
His fingers moved effortlessly across the keys. He pulled sound from the instrument in a way that I’d never encountered. Cosmere’s keyboardist, Michael, was good at keys, but Weston had a completely different ear. He wasn’t playing for mainstream music. He was just a professional who had done a lot of work. Thus, the sound was so much more dynamic.
“Fuck, man. That’s it.”
“Are you sure?” Weston looked back at me. “I could do something like this.”
Then, he tried a slightly modified rhythm that I also liked, but it wasn’t quite right for this song.
“No, the first one. But hang on to the second. I have an idea for that one.”
“Okay. I’ll record it, and we can lay it over what we have so far.”
I nodded at Weston as he set up the recording for the keyboard section. It felt fucking good to be back in the studio. Especially this studio. Even though it made no sense. I’d always wanted that LA studio, where everything was moving fast and my career was on the line. I’d wanted that life.
Now that I had it, being in this small space—at LBK Studios, in downtown Lubbock, where the only thing that mattered was the music—felt revelatory. How had I ever worked out my songs in LA? It was exhausting and hardly the best place to get out of a creative rut.
It’d made sense with the first album when we walked in on a creative high, but now, we were exhausted from tour, and the record label was demanding more and more from us. We were superstars with everything we’d ever wanted, and suddenly, I wished for just a sliver of downtime. An ounce of breathing room to rediscover what I loved about all of this.
Sitting in Weston’s small studio was giving me that feeling again.
Weston finished playing and then headed back into the booth. A few minutes later, his voice came through the speakers. “Hey, dude, your phone has been ringing nonstop. Looks like it might be an emergency.”
I furrowed my brow. What kind of emergency could be happening?
I left my guitar, grabbed my phone, and saw that the missed calls were all from LA. My manager, publicist, a guy at the record label, Santi, and Viv had all called in the last half hour. What the hell was happening?
“Uh, maybe it’s because of this,” Weston said.
“What?”
He passed me his phone. “Someone sent this to me while we were recording.”
I took the phone. On the screen was Blaire’s video of us doing the “I See the Real You” challenge. Already, the views were in the millions.
It had been two days since we’d recorded the video in her house. Two days that I’d been waiting for her to post it. Two days that I’d thought maybe she’d changed her mind.
After all, I’d spent years keeping her out of my spotlight. I’d never confessed who the song was about. I’d hinted that it was about someone, but I respected her privacy. And she never said that she wanted to be known for it. Now, here we were, with this video. It was incriminating, to say the least. It looked like we were half-ready to rip each other’s clothes off. And I’d considered it. If she had looked at me like she was half-interested, I would have. But instead, I had seen fear and hurt, mixed with desire. Those were things I couldn’t…wouldn’t touch.
So, I’d assumed that she’d seen what I saw in the video and decided to just trash it. It would certainly be safer. Blaire was in the public eye, but there was a difference between a social media influencer and…well, me. That wasn’t even bragging. It was just my life.
It appeared that it’d just taken her a few days to work up the nerve.
A quick glance at the comments told me two things: everyone thought Blaire and I were dating and that this was a not-so-subtle hint at a new album.
No wonder everyone and their mother was calling me. I hadn’t prepped anyone that we were doing this. I hadn’t told a soul that it was going live. And now, everyone must be scrambling because of the attention. Because of the apparently not-so-subtle hint that I hadn’t meant to give.
Bobby Rogers flashed on my screen again.
With a sigh, I answered it. “Hey, Bobby.”
“Campbell, Campbell, Campbell. What have you gotten yourself into?”
“I did a video. It’s no big deal.”
“Well, I have been on the phone all morning since it went live. Where have you been?”
“I’m in the studio.”
“You’re in LA?”
“No,” I said warily. “I have a friend in town who works at LBK Studios. I’m just laying down some ideas for new songs.”
Bobby’s skepticism turned to enthusiasm. “You found your muse!”
“Sort of.”
“Look, this is great, Campbell. I wasn’t sure about you staying in bumfuck nowhere, but it’s clearly working. This girl is good for you. She is helping you write, getting you on social media, and—”
“Leave Blaire out of this,” I said, my voice like ice.
Bobby sighed. “She put herself into it, kid.”
“What do you want, Bobby?”
“If you’re writing new music, then absolutely nothing. I talked to Barbara.” That was my publicist who I hadn’t answered because I knew she’d be pissed that I’d done this without her. “And she was mad at first that she’d had no warning, but now, she wants to send a team down to Lubbock to help make more of these videos. It could really ramp up the new album.”
“No. No team, Bobby. I want to be alone to figure this shit out, or there will be no new album,” I told him as I paced away from Weston.
“All right, all right. I thought you might say that. So, I told her to wait on it. But,” he said as if he had plans B, C, and D waiting for my refusals, “I want to send the rest of the band there.”
“Wait, what?”
“The band! You write better music when you have everyone there. You said it yourself. If you’re writing new songs and even inadvertently promoting it, then we’ll set you up in Lubbock until it’s time to record.”
“You’re going to send the entire band to me?”
“Yep. I can even hook you up with recording space. We’d still have to lay down masters here in LA, but you could get some time in to practice.”
“I already have a place.” I glanced over at Weston, who had his headphones on to listen to what we’d recorded. “And a guy that I like. We can use LBK Studios.”
Bobby sighed, as if he was suffering. “Fine. Your call, Campbell. Just get us an album. You’ll have Viv, Santi, Yorke, and Michael there to make it all come true.”
“All right.” I couldn’t deny that having them here would certainly help the process. I just hadn’t thought they’d want to travel to Lubbock to do it. “You sure they want to?”
“They’re on board. Just say the word.”
“Fine. But, Bobby, I’m serious about leaving Blaire out of all of this.”
“I heard you the first time, Campbell.”
“Promise me.”
“You know I never make promises that I can’t keep.”
I exhaled in frustration. Oh, Bobby. “Just do your best to control it all.”
“Fine, fine. Can’t wait to hear the new songs.”
Weston pulled his headphones down after I hung up. “Everything all right?”
I stared at the exposed brick wall. I should be happy about all of this. The rest of Cosmere was coming to Lubbock to help me figure out my shit. That was a good thing. Especially because we’d have Weston Wright recording and not some soulless LA schmuck.
Yet I couldn’t stop worrying about Blaire. I thought she’d known what she was getting into by posting this, and now, I was starting to wonder if I even knew what she’d gotten herself into.
“Yeah,” I finally said. “The rest of Cosmere is coming into town. We’re going to figure out the songs for the album.”
