Spencer laughed and wandered over to my car, which was parked three spaces away.
Glaring, I slid my finger across my throat before throwing myself into my car.
He popped open the door still laughing.
“You can walk, you know.” My fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
“Ms. He-Has-Nothing-To-Do-With-The-Guys-I-Like.”
I slammed my foot on the accelerator and he shot forward, banging his head on the dashboard.
“Asshole.” He buckled his seatbelt and rubbed his forehead.
“Takes one to know one.”
“All I’m saying is that your ex, the professional football player, is going to be in your building for the next month.”
My skipped heartbeats were getting to the point that maybe I needed to swing by the medical center.
“Do you think he could get a ball signed for me?”
I punched his shoulder. “Are you serious right now? I’m in the middle of a heart attack and you’re talking about autographs?”
He smiled and winked. “Gotcha.” He threw double finger guns at me, which made me want to break both. “Why don’t you tell me about it? It’ll make you feel better.”
“I doubt it, but fine.” On our drive, I gave him the CliffsNotes version. “We had a senior year fling. I sang. He played football. We banged. He broke my dad’s guitar. We graduated. The end.”
His hand tightened on my arm after I put the car into park. “You sang?”
I threw my hands up. “That’s what you got out of that?”
He nodded with his mouth open. “I knew you could play guitar, but you actually sang?”
I closed my eyes and the air blowing from the AC vents reminded me of the cold breeze on my back steps the first day I took the guitar out and decided to sing. The energy had flowed through my fingers, and those first rusty notes felt like opening a creaky trunk filled with old memories. “He was the first person I sang in front of other than my dad.”
“And then he broke your heart.”
“Shattered was more like it, but yeah. He did. Textbook bad-boy-meets-good-girl explosion.”
Sadness and pity swirled in his blue eyes. “The guitar couldn’t be fixed?”
I shook my head. Tears welled in my eyes. “It was in pieces. Staring at it and holding those pieces in my arms, I couldn’t keep it. Even tucking it away into the case and pretending it hadn’t been shattered—” I shook my head. “I threw it away.” All but one piece. The only intact piece. The mother-of-pearl inlay around the sound hole I’d scribbled on with a permanent marker when I was six. It had always seemed like the most delicate piece of the guitar, but somehow it had survived. My dad hadn’t cared about the scribbling; he’d just laughed and said it gave it more character. I blinked the tears back and gripped the wheel tighter.
“That’s fucked up.” He shook his head, and his blond hair went from tousled to wild.
“You don’t say. We’re late. Let’s go.” I hopped out of the car. Inside, we flashed our badges at the front desk. The receptionist handed Spencer the clipboard with our assignments for the night. He lapped up her batted eyelashes and flirty smile. His ripped jeans with dropped suspenders looked borderline dorky to me, but he was never without a woman ready to swoop in and play with her hair whenever he came near.
I continued to be invisible. It was a wonder she didn’t double-check my badge again, although I’d been coming here for nearly three years.
I rolled my eyes and we walked down to the basement level. The temperature dropped as the air changed from balmy California summer to recycled and slightly musty.
We used our badges on the lock for door thirteen at the end of the long hallway lined with other numbered doors. Our studio was barely bigger than a closet. There was just enough space for a love seat, two wheely chairs, and the computer monitors and the nearly room-length mixing board. And an overflowing ashtray.
He grabbed it and dumped it out into the trashcan. “The least they could do is clean this place up before they leave.” Dusting off his hands, he flipped over the top paper on the clipboard. “Did you hear back from any of the jobs you applied for? You leave at the end of the month, right?”
“Trying to get rid of me already?” I laughed, but my chest tightened. I’d found issues with the last two offers, but there was still one pending. The one I’d put in knowing they’d never take me and asked for concessions no recent grad would even think of requesting.
Self-sabotage to table one. Self-sabotage to table one.
I’d put in the applications after the mom inquisition over what I planned to do after graduation. Apparently, couch surf, watch House Hunters, and pretend I didn’t have to join the real world wasn’t a good answer. But I wasn’t gone yet.
“What do we have today?” I logged into the computer and fidgeted with the knobs and sliders on the virtual sound board.
“Basketball player’s wife. Basketball player’s girlfriend. Football player’s mom?” He squinted. “Or girlfriend. I can’t tell.”
“They’ve got to find something to fill their days.”
“It’s a ploy to get a reality TV show some day.”
“The dream life.” I took the clipboard from him, scanning the names and notes. The thought of millions of eyes on me made my head swim. “How long until our ears bleed?”
“I’d give it to the first chorus of the evening. Aren’t you going to miss this when you start at a job that pays you enough money to actually survive?”
“This glamorous life?” I spun my chair and banged my knee on the desk. Pain reverberated down my leg. Wincing, I rubbed my knee. I would miss it. The smell of the studio, a mix of circuitry, steel and wood, the sound dampeners on the wall. The late nights. Watching people create music, even if I couldn’t. Mixing the levels and getting them just right. “How could I not?”
Our client turned up forty-five minutes late into the two-hour session with an entourage of at least five people. I directed them to the waiting area, since any more than the two of us would turn the closet into a coffin.
By the time I’d come back, Spencer had already set her up with everything she needed in the booth. With headphones on and the mic hot, we kicked on the backing track and gave her the thumbs up to sing.
I shot out of my chair, fingers flying to the knob to turn down the volume on our side of the glass.
Spencer and I exchanged looks and I bit my lips to keep from laughing. If a peacock was being murdered by a chainsaw-wielding owl, it couldn’t have sounded worse. And the music…. If she’d paid someone to create the backing tracks for her, she needed to demand a refund and damages.
Working with what we had, I tweaked, auto-tuned and leveled out as much as possible. I went into the booth and walked her through a few basic tips to keep the screeching to a minimum.
Thankfully, she took so many rest breaks that there was only fifteen minutes or so of actual recording to work with and listen to.
“I’m sure you guys haven’t heard anything like that before.” She slipped the headphones off her head, grinning like we’d been listening to a challenger to Mariah Carey.
Spencer spoke out of the side of his mouth while keeping the smile on his face. “It will haunt my dreams.”