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But Malibu seemed to drag.
She couldn’t say why except that she was pretty sure she missed André.
Which was a stupid and irresponsible feeling to have. Irresponsible to her heart and everything that it had already been through with him.
She’d gotten back from Malibu as the sun was setting. Part of her wanted to walk over to the studio to see if André was working but she knew that would be a bad idea.
She took a shower, put on a tank top and some sleep shorts, and tried to go to bed early.
But she couldn’t sleep.
She tossed and fussed until she’d thrown her pillow across the room and gotten out of bed.
The house was quiet as she crept downstairs. Asa was probably watching TV in his room. Al and Steiny would be at rehearsal for a couple more hours.
Nikki grabbed her acoustic guitar from off its stand and quietly slipped out the back door.
She set her phone to record and put it on the table in front of her and then sat cross-legged on the loveseat.
The small jungle behind her house teemed with life. Crickets’, frogs’, and locusts’ songs hummed in the summer air.
Talking to André was obviously the right decision.
But she couldn’t stress enough how much she didn’t want to do that.
She pulled the guitar into her lap and breathed the night air.
It started with a few small strums and some experimental chords.
She hummed and sung with no words as she tried to find her feelings in there somewhere.
The last time she’d done this was Christmas Eve night.
André had called her, drunk and unintelligible. She couldn’t understand a word he’d said and it had become obvious after a few minutes that he had pocket dialed her.
It had been an accident.
And it had hurt like fuck.
When her phone had lit up with his name, her heart had tripped all over itself trying to get to the phone before her hands did.
But it wasn’t what she’d thought.
Or hoped.
Thus was born the Heartbreak Chronicles. She and Zara had confessed a dizzying amount of secrets that they hadn’t told anyone else. And then they’d started writing songs about them.
That’s what they’d been sending back and forth to each other for the past eight months.
Songs of love and hope and heartache.
Zara wanted her to produce the entire album. She said she didn’t trust anyone else to understand what it needed to sound like.
But Nikki wasn’t a producer.
Sure, she wanted to be; that was the dream.
But she was untested and inexperienced. Her first record shouldn’t be for the biggest pop star in the world.
