F*cked Page 4

  She re-read through it. It sounded good. Which was a surprise. She let a breath out. She needed to call Cara, but she was going to call Roman. She had to tell him that she needed to talk to him. If she could tell 2 million people, with an average of 500,000 reads in a day, then she could talk to him about it. If he was really who he said he was, then he could understand.

  Mary let a breath out and leaned back into her chair. It was a solution. It might not be the right solution. But she had to do it.

  She picked up the cell phone and turned off airplane mode. It buzzed frenetically in her hand as it suddenly realized that there were a thousand things she’d missed while she was gone. She ignored them.

  Mary opened the phone app and started to type. R-O-M. The phone buzzed again. A message showed at the top of the screen. The beginning of the text showed in tiny text. But it was big enough that she could read what she needed to from it.

  Don’t contact me again, it said. And next to it was a photo of an album she’d downloaded when she made the contact in the first place. The name next to it was Roman.

  Ten

  Roman checked his phone again. Two hundred Twitter DMs. Which was unimportant. Someone was very interested in getting in touch with him. Or, more likely, a lot of someones were.

  More importantly, no messages. Which was a little more upsetting. He was supposed to get a call from Mary, at some point. He’d told her to give him a call in the morning. But she apparently hadn’t bothered to do so. Maybe she’d decided that she didn’t like him all that much.

  It was understandable. She had a lot going on. There was a lot of baggage involved with getting friendly with a musician. Never mind when he wanted to be a little more than friends, and he wasn’t that subtle about it. There was no reason to hide it, at this point.

  She was allowed to walk away from him. But it didn’t make a whole lot of sense that she would do it without even saying anything. He let out another long breath. No need to get all upset about it, though. He was smarter than that, at least. He hoped he was.

  His eyes scanned the lyric sheet. It was okay. He wasn’t going to win any awards for this stuff. But then again, he was past the part of his career where he thought about getting tons of awards. He had adoring fans, some of whom thought that it would be very interesting for him to see their breasts.

  Which, for a while, it had been. But at this point he was old enough that some of those girls could very realistically have been his own daughters if he’d settled down and gotten a real job. Which really put a damper on the whole thing.

  Now it was a bunch of songs he didn’t care a whole lot about and a lifestyle that he had grown used to more than grown fond of. A manager who he could almost stomach, and a record contract that paid out enough money to touch God. Enough that he couldn’t really justify walking away from it in spite of himself.

  The session guitarist finally got in. Everyone else, apparently, had the time to go in and take a break. After all—the band wasn’t called The Greeks or something. The band wasn’t the draw. Roman Townsend was the draw, and as long as he was around, the rest of the band was transient.

  “You ready, kid?”

  The guy nodded. “You got a sheet?”

  Roman sucked in a breath and dropped the phone on a table. No, he didn’t have a sheet. That would be professional. That would be proper. And it would take time. For example, the month that he’d been promised before they even started working on the damn album.

  “Bit of short notice, I’m afraid. Your part is pretty simple, though, so I guess there’s that.”

  The guy nodded. His long hair fell into his eyes, making him look like the very picture of Kris Kristofferson as a young man. But the guitar in his lap wasn’t an acoustic, and they weren’t about to play country music, so there were at least a few differences. If it was, then they’d have to go grab something from the shelf, or worse, he’d have to let the kid play his, which there was probably some kind of law against.

  “Okay, so we start in C.”

  He moved quickly. These session guys tended to be quick on their feet. Had to be. If he was anything like any of the session guys anywhere else in the country, he’d have taken a quick look at the sheet if they had one and more or less gotten it right.

  The riff wasn’t complicated, and it played without much trouble on the fourth and fifth strings. The only thing that made it any more difficult than what a beginner could play was the chord changes that waited for no man, and that was something that any guitarist got used to quickly.

  He played through it once, real quick. A twenty-four bar progression only takes thirty seconds or so to go through. Then the kid played it back. It wasn’t a perfect recreation. It never is. But Tommy didn’t pay these guys for perfect recreations. If that was what they wanted, then they could just have Roman record every guitar part on a loop.

  It was good enough that Roman was happy with it. And if the kid found something magical in it, then they would probably hire him on. If he didn’t, well, it was enough for a demo recording.

  Then they went through the chorus. It was the same process. The chords, the riff, then play it all out. Altogether, the whole conversation took about ten minutes away from Roman Townsend’s life and added very little to it on the balance.

  But when they started to play together, it must have been pleasant for the kid because he had a halfway sort of smile on his face, and then they added the drum track on loop and Roman started to count them into the demo recording proper.

  Drums are important to a band. Rock and roll practically lives off of them, and that’s not even getting into really rhythm-led genres like R&B. But for a demo, you could get away with a pre-recorded track, and he’d already sat through the conversation with the session drummer that he was having right now with the guitarist.

  It took five takes to cut the whole thing to Roman’s liking. They took a sixth just in case, at Tommy’s request, and then it was all handshakes and goodbyes and thank yous. When he got into the control room, it would be all here’s your checks and then the kid would walk back into obscurity just like most session guys did.

  What didn’t happen in the hour they spent talking, recording, listening, talking, and re-recording was his phone ringing. And he knew, because he was sitting on a stool holding a guitar he’d played for fifteen years and considered more a part of his body than some actual parts of his body, but his mind was entirely focused on the phone not ringing.

  Eleven

  Mary pursed her lips. She’d not called all day. It wasn’t like she had expected. There was part of her that had expected the whole thing to play out as simple as can be. She just wouldn’t call him and it wouldn’t be a big deal.

  Calling had been a verb, in that case. She just didn’t do it, and it was as simple as that. As it turned out, Not Calling was a verb, too. It was something that she did actively, and it drained her as much as thinking about calling had drained her all morning before the call.

  So instead, she did what she always did when she was stressed about something. She checked her engagement numbers.

  The newest blog post had gone up at 11 am, just like it did every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Which meant that it had been almost six hours since she put it up, and that she had spent most of those six hours not calling. Which, by the way, when you end with the exhortation for people to come at their problems head-on, felt a little bit hypocritical.

  But she wasn’t ignoring her own advice, either. After all, she’d been very careful to acknowledge that there were times when someone shouldn’t approach their problems, head-on or otherwise.

  For example, when things will get worse because you approached it. It’s best to let sleeping dogs lie when you’re just going to make things worse. And in her case, she would definitely make things worse by calling when she’d been explicitly told not to.

  Mary stood up. She could hear, distantly, Pete upstairs. He had a guitar that she’d bought for him. It wasn’t the sort of
thing that she wanted him to get into as a profession. Then again, he didn’t seem to have his father’s talent. Not quite, anyways. It would take hours and hours of polish to achieve that, and he had other hobbies and other interests. Thank God for that, it might keep him out of trouble.

  She walked up the stairs. The music got louder. She had to admit that she was giving him a slightly hard time. Few people could compare to Roman Townsend. He was one in a million, as guitarists go. A gem.

  Pete was barely eight, had been playing the thing for two years now, and sounded like he’d been playing the guitar for two years and practicing hard in that time. There wasn’t much more that a person could expect. And of course, that was without lessons. Certainly without lessons from the best guitarist that classic rock had on offer.

  She leaned against the doorway. The boy’s fingers stopped where they were, his fingers frozen. He looked up.

  “Something wrong?”

  “No,” Mary answered. Her head hurt. “Nothing’s wrong. I just thought I would listen to you.”

  “It’s not too loud or anything?”

  “Not at all. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Oh.”

  She smiled. He tentatively adjusted the guitar in his lap. She could see Pete watching her nervously as he moved his hands up and down the neck without playing.

  “You want me to go?”

  “It’s fine,” he told her. He was nervous. But if he was ever going to leave his bedroom, then he’d have to get used to playing in front of people at some point. And she didn’t want that to be a major problem.

  Mary’s smile faded as she thought about the problems that she’d left when she left her phone downstairs. Her son started to play again. The sound rang out through the amplifier. It wasn’t loud enough to bother anyone, she thought. But then, if he was this self-conscious about it, then he probably thought that having it on at all was a bother.

  His fingers seemed to trip over themselves. The difference in sound was immediate and obvious. But he settled into it eventually. And eventually, Mary decided that she’d freaked him out enough and blew a kiss, and left him to his own devices again.

  The sound of music faded as she walked away, and eventually it became a muffled noise in the background that meant nothing at all. Like so many other things in her life, it was just another fact.

  She let out a long breath and picked the phone back up. It was just a piece of electronics. Glass and aluminum and a battery that, if the fiasco of last year had shown anything, could apparently burst into flames at the slightest provocation.

  But it hadn’t burst into flames. It only weighed a few ounces. Given her nerves about it, she thought that it should have weighed more. But it didn’t. Not even when she turned the screen on and saw that there was a text.

  Not even when she saw who the text was from.

  Not even when she read the message in it, and her heart started to thump again as adrenaline shot through every part of her body.

  If the man wanted her, then he ought to figure out how to stop sending such strongly mixed signals. When you tell someone not to contact you again, you shouldn’t send them a text six hours later, asking why you didn’t call.

  The reasons should be pretty obvious. But apparently, when you’re Roman Townsend, rock god, the rules are a little bit different. And given that she pressed the button to call him a second later, apparently he was right.

  Twelve

  Roman Townsend had almost forgotten he sent the text by the time he got an answer. It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing. He had been so clear about his leaving her alone that he almost felt guilty typing it out. Which meant that when he went back to business and back to work, it had worked itself out of his mind almost immediately.

  Three listens through the first track and plenty of serious consideration about how he was going to adjust it for a second attempt was fifteen minutes of hard focus, and thankfully for him, none of it was about Mary. If she wanted him to leave him alone, he’d do it. Just as long as he was able to keep focused, at least. And he could keep focused. It would just take a little bit of effort on his part, and a little bit of time.

  His phone ringing in his pocket almost surprised him. It took him a long minute to realize who it might be. When he took the phone out of his pocket and managed to confirm it for himself, his head was already hurting again.

  So now he’d guilted her into calling him. And probably, she was going to give him a whole thing about how he’d told her that he would leave her alone if she didn’t want to see him. A promise which he had, originally, had every intention of keeping.

  But last night had gone so well. He’d never really expected her not to call. He’d expected to text her when she didn’t call even less. First, because she would call, without prompting, and second, because it meant breaking his word.

  His thumb hovered over the button to hang up the call. She didn’t need him sitting there trying to guilt her into something she didn’t want to do. And as much as she had every right to be upset, he didn’t need to get a lecture about how he needed to learn a lesson that he’d already learned.

  “I’ve got to take this,” he said. Then his thumb moved over, tapped the green button, and he moved the phone to his ear. “What’s up?”

  The door closed loudly behind him, and he kept walking without looking back.

  “What do you mean, what’s up? You texted me.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I know I said I wasn’t going to, but…”

  “Is that what you said? Oh, excuse me. Maybe I’m having some kind of aneurysm or something, and that explains the day I’ve been having.”

  “What happened? You sound upset.”

  “Oh, nothing. I’m just crazy, I guess, because I’ve been going in my head over what the hell I did to piss you off!”

  “You didn’t do anything. Why would you even think that?”

  “Why? Why would you send a text like that?”

  “Like what? I was worried about you. You didn’t call or anything.”

  “Well, I almost called this morning. I was all ready. It was a big thing. You should see it. I wrote this long post on my web site vagueing about you. It was beautiful. People are going to love it, I hope.”

  “And then what?”

  “What, you want me to give you a play-by-play?” She let out an annoyed breath that was loud enough to hear it through the phone. One that came from something that he’d evidently done to make her angry, and something that he couldn’t begin to explain.

  “I guess so. I’ve been waiting all morning. So… I don’t really know what it is that I’m supposed to know about.”

  “Really. Here, let me click over. You’re telling me you didn’t send…” She paused. He could hear the sound of tapping right by the mouthpiece, which he assumed was her fingernail on the phone screen as she navigated to something he’d evidently sent her. “‘Don’t contact me again.’ Sent at… 8:32am.”

  “I don’t mean to sound contradictory here, I really don’t. But… Mary, I didn’t send that.”

  “It’s right here, with your name on it. Same phone number that sent me a message twenty minutes ago, asking why I hadn’t called him.”

  “You know what? I’ll solve this. I’ll just take a look at my message history. Maybe there’s some kind of mistake, or something. I don’t remember texting anyone, of any description, but maybe there was some kind of mix-up.”

  Roman pulled the phone away from his ear and tapped around until he, too, got a chance to look at his messages. There was only the one. A message sent at 3:48 in the afternoon. What’s up, why haven’t you called? And then a winking face in an apparently futile attempt to seem cute and playful.

  He put the phone back to his ear. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve got nothing. I didn’t send it.”

  “Well, I’ve got it. You think I’m lying?”

  “No,” he said. A woman who dressed and acted like a secretary studiously didn�
�t listen in on his conversation. He kept on moving down the hall. “I don’t think you’re lying. I’m just telling you, there’s some kind of mistake, because I didn’t text you. I had just gotten to work at eight-thirty.”

  “So maybe someone else sent it.”

  Roman’s jaw set off to one side. “Maybe someone else did.”

  And he had a very good idea who it might have been. That little twerp was going to get his nose pushed in if he wasn’t careful. He’d worked with Tommy long enough to know that the guy ought to know better than to mess with his personal life.

  And he’d known him long enough to know that Tommy didn’t know anything that didn’t make him money.

  Thirteen

  Mary felt as if head hadn’t stopped pounding in hours. She considered taking painkillers again. There was no good reason not to take them. Except that she had simply decided not to. It was stubborn of her, but stubbornness and perhaps just a little bit of stupidity was what had gotten her where she was so far in her life. The bad places, and the good ones. There was no reason to change horses in the middle of a race.

  She looked at her phone. It was almost nine. Which meant that in San Jose, it would be almost six, which meant that Cara would be finishing dinner. She still hadn’t called. Probably didn’t need to call. But she’d been thinking that she should for the past three days, and even if she had everything under control, thinking it twice meant that she shouldn’t blow it off.

  The phone rang. It rang again. It rang a third time. And a fourth. She ticked the rings off on her fingers as they went by. Five. On six she ticked her little finger down again. And then it went to voicemail.

  “You have reached the voicemail box of—” the metallic voice was replaced for only a moment by Cara’s low, rich voice, when she said “Cara Washington” before it was replaced again. “This Verizon customer is currently unavailable. Please leave a message after the tone.”