Page 27 of Before You Fell

“You look tired, Songbird,” Cruz says.

“And you look like a fire hazard. We all have our thing, right?”

Jax lifts two fingers in greeting from the couch. High effort for a man like him at ten a.m.

Jett looks up, smiling.

“Hey,” he says quietly.

“Hey.”

The coffee cups are multiplying. Someone’s jacket is on the floor. I can tell it’s been a stressful morning.

Damon glances up from the console. “Tell me you brought the other two songs.”

He sets his coffee down and steps into the live room like a man who’s already decided the answer is yes.

I drop my bag on the couch—in the space between Jett and Jax—and unzip it.

“Yeah, good morning to you, too, Damon,” I mutter.

Jax makes a sound that’s close to a laugh.

I’ve barely pulled out the lyric sheets when Damon snatches them from my hands.

Cruz is watching me from the wall. “So where the fuck have you been hiding?”

“My apartment.”

“What were you doing? You completely disappeared on us.”

“I was just writing,” I say.

Jett looks up. “You good?”

“I’ll live,” I say.

Damon looks up from the pages. “These are exactly what we need. Have you already given them to Phoenix so he can start on the music?”

I give him a smile. It’s restrained and professional, though what I really want to say is, “no, Damon, because every song I have written for this band has gone through you first. I write the lyrics, hand them to you, you decide if anything needs changing, and then you pass them to Phoenix for the music. It was the same three days ago when I gave you the first song sheet, and now we’re all here to record it.”

Instead, I smile and go with: “No. I thought I’d stick with the wildly uncomplicated system where I hand them to you and then you ask me whether I handed them to Phoenix.”

Jax coughs into his fist.

Cruz looks down at his guitar, grinning.

Jett’s mouth twitches.

“Fine,” Damon says. “I’ll give them to him.”

“Great,” I say.

The door opens and Phoenix walks in looking as if the night chewed him up, fucked him twice, and spat him out near sunrise.

His black jeans sit low on his hips. His shirt is half untucked, wrinkled to hell, with the top buttons open enough to reveal the chain at his throat and the edge of ink disappearing beneath the cotton. His hair is a messy disaster and he wears sunglasses inside the studio because apparently shame needs UV protection.

The smell of cigarettes, stale whiskey, expensive cologne, and sex he’s not even decent enough to hide emanates from him.