Chapter Four                     

Tim

HE PULLED A T-SHIRT over his head and grabbed a shirt off a hanger.

"Why do you have to go to the studio in the middle of the night?" Isabella asked.

He buttoned up the shirt, desperately trying to find a way out of that situation before spun out of control. She wasn't accusing him of not going to the studio. He counted that as an improvement.

"She's coming over again, isn't she?"

He slipped into a pair of running shoes, willing himself not to get drawn into the argument.

"Say something, damn it!"

He wouldn't lie to her. Not even to avoid an argument.

"I'll work with Vy on her album."

"I knew it! You don't have time to come with me to the doctor but you make time for her whenever she wants."

He had gone with her to every appointment, but he hadn't hidden his annoyance when they had been inconvenient.

"You know my schedule and you keep making appointments when I have commitments."

"Commitments more important than your son," she said resentfully.

"They're routine checks. You don't need me there to hold your hand while the doctor tells you everything is ok and you have to eat vegetables or something."

"Hold my hand? Hold my hand?! You haven't touched me in weeks, I wouldn't expect you to hold my hand."

She had noticed. He tried his best, but he couldn't bring himself to want to touch her any more. She looked every bit as beautiful as the first time he saw her, but beauty alone only worked for one night. Whatever else had drawn him to her seemed to have vanished.

"She abandoned you. When will you get the hint? She doesn't want you!"

"For the thousandth time, Isabella, drop it."

"You're not even denying it anymore," she said.

"You don't seem to hear it anyway."

He bit his tongue. It was true, but it didn't help calm her down.

His soul was full of wasps and dust. He couldn't think straight. All his life, he'd done things his way, without bending his will to anyone's expectations, emotional blackmail or even to the public opinion. The more he wanted to make this relationship work, the worse it got out of his control.

"Are you having an affair with Vy?"

"To have an affair I'd have to be married, and we are not."

The words had come out of their own will. She had never mentioned marriage but at some level she must have wanted or expected it. Even in modern Illyria, marriage gave a seal of approval and respectability. He wasn't opposed to marriage as a concept. He just couldn't see himself married to Isabella.

All blood drained from her cheeks. He cursed himself. That was exactly what he had tried to avoid. He hadn't meant to hurt her. Neither of them wanted to be in this situation. He should fix this somehow. Without lying to her. Without making things worse. He had to find a way to stay in her life. But how? He hung his head and his shoulders slumped. 

"I'll be back in a few hours. Go back to sleep," he said walking out.

He heard something smash against the door just as he closed it. He sincerely hoped that helped her blow off some steam because he couldn't find anything he could do to help her.

The moment he invited Isabella back in his life he decided to do everything he could for her and the child. Everything short of marrying her. All his good intentions didn't matter when he couldn't order his heart to love her back.

Even the first time, he hadn't promised her anything other than sex, although at the time he believed he was in love with her. That didn't lessen his guilt of stepping all over her feelings now.

Something was deeply wrong with him if he couldn't love a woman like Isabella. That came as a painful confirmation of the very thing he denied when he had pushed away Alba.

#

Isabella was asleep when he got back, late into the night. He snuck into his own home like a thief. A quick shower, a couple of hours of sleep on the couch, a change of clothes and he was driving at high speed toward the Sing House before she was up.

That place had been the source of his frustrations and the cause of his exhaustion since he took the job, but this year, he found it the most relaxing place in Illyria.

One of the reasons why he'd been stressed out the previous years made a comeback in the form of production assistant Kate Redding.

"Good morning, Mr. Carter," Kate said when he checked in to enter the House.

She handed him a large manila envelope. He could guess what was inside. A bunch of meaningless forms he had to fill. They went through this song and dance every year. They gave him a bunch of papers, he pretended he lost them, they hunted him down and gave him another set.

IBC's bureaucracy got on his nerves but he was too tired to make a scene. He considered not taking the envelope or throwing the papers up in the air and walking away. It would set a bad example for the already tenuous self-discipline of his contestants.

He needed a way to get out of actually reading them. Over the years, he cultivated the habit of reading before signing. His lawyers insisted on it quite forcefully.

Maybe he could bully some intern from the production team to get them off his hands unsigned. He put the envelope on windowsill from where they could fall out into the hedge on the side of the building without him actually throwing them.

He sat down at the piano and ran his fingers over the keys while he waited for his contestants to show up for the morning practice. Vy's album was coming along nicely. Her songs crystallized in his mind better than anything he tried to write for the Waves. With every new Waves song, he fought against himself. They all stunk of frustration and failure.

The thoughts fell to the back of his mind when the door opened. Vy was important to him, and so was his work with the Waves, but as long as he was in the House, his energy was focused entirely on his contestants.

"Come on in, guys," he said and started playing the song Wade and Antonio were supposed to be rehearsing.

Three hours later, pain threatened to split his head. Staying in the studio with Vy until 2 in the morning served as a contrast between her obsessive perfectionism, her dogged determination to work as hard as he pushed her, and the behavior of his current contestants.

These boys seemed to waste their talent. Wade lacked the tools necessary to improve as fast as Tim wanted him to, as well as the habit of hard work. He seemed content that he made it to round three. Antonio was aware he was objectively better than his direct competitor and he just didn't put in the effort Tim expected of any true artist.

"It's enough for today," he said. "You have stage practice with Lisa this afternoon. I'll try to come by around six."

"Ok, TC," Antonio said.

"We'll meet here again tomorrow afternoon," he said.

"At 2, yes," Wade confirmed. "Are you coming with us at lunch?"

"No, you go ahead. I have some papers to do," he said, looking toward the window, without any intention to touch the documents.

He didn't need a lunch break, but his plan to work with them until Ellen and Tamara showed up had gone up in flames. Their attitude irritated him and he decided that at least at lunch he could get away from them. He took off his shirt and threw it on the back of a chair in the corner remaining in the black t-shirt he had put on before running out of his own home.

Before he left the room, he opened the window wide. 

"Mr. Carter, did you get a chance to fill in the forms we gave you this morning?" Kate Redding ambushed him as entered the dining hall.

"I'm working on them, Kate," he said.

He grabbed a tray and piled up food on it haphazardly. He scanned the room, hoping to see Ryann or Lauren, but the only people in the room who were not contestants were King and his little helper.

The guy seemed to be humming while writing industriously on the papers Alice fed him. When he got close enough, he heard Alice whispering in a sing-song voice the answers King wrote down in the documents.

"Three more and we're done," Alice said, taking the page and arranging it neatly in the folder.

King beamed at her. In the twenty years they had known each other, Carter could count on his fingers the number of times he had seen King genuinely amused and relaxed.

They stopped when he approached and looked up at him.

"Hey, Carter," King said. "Have you done yours?" he asked, pointing down at the form he was filling.

"Not yet. I don't know why they even bother to give them to me. They must know by now that I don't do paperwork."

He hoped that his stack of papers was somewhere in the hedge surrounding the west wing.

"Come on, sit down," King said. "They're not that bad."

King and Alice sat on the opposite sides of the long table, and he had to choose on which side to sit. He sat down across from King, setting down his tray careful not to interfere with their papers. His thigh pressed against Alice's for a moment. He breathed in her scent. Same unique mixture of smoke, and traces of wood and flowers. She moved a few inches, and he missed the warmth of her body.

"I remember distinctly that you suggested we should burn them last year," he said accusingly to Andrew.

King waved a hand dismissively. "You just need to find a good system and you get through them in no time."

"I very much doubt that," he said, taking a sip of coffee.

"I find your lack of faith disturbing."

He snorted coffee through the nose when he heard the low mutter from Alice, delivering badly the famous Star Wars line. He patted a napkin over his Darth Vader t-shirt while King looked confused from him to Alice.

"What is this amazing system pray tell?" he said, without bothering to enlighten King.

"Alice should explain," Andrew said. "She came up with it."

He turned his head expectantly toward her. A blush crept up her yellowish cheeks. Did this girl ever see sunlight? Her eyes fluttered and she avoided his gaze. 

"System is a big word," Alice said.

"There you go, dashing my hopes," he said.

"I can sh-show you, if you want," Alice offered. "They're not confidential or anything."

He might have to forgo the opportunity to torture some staff guy whose job it was to get him to sign them. It was worth trading in building up his reputation of nastiness if it meant he didn't lose his temper on something trivial. He had enough of that at home.

"I'd appreciate that," he said. "They're in my room. If Andy can spare you for half an hour."

"I can't really, but I know you desperately need help," King said.

"You are magnanimous indeed," he told King who tried not to seem annoyed he used the nickname he hated.

He turned his head to Alice who was playing with her toast.

"Whenever you can, Miss Lewis, I'm at your mercy."

The knife clinked when she rested it against the edge of her plate. She took another sip of coffee and dabbed her mouth with a napkin before turning to him with exaggerated formality. Maybe he was getting used to her, because the tiny smirk didn't annoy him.

"At your service, Mister Carter," she said.

King looked at them with raised eyebrows. He had to know that she was Vy's friend and they must have met before. Maybe he assumed they had a friendly private banter about being overly formal to each other. It wouldn't hurt to sow some mistrust in Team King. Too bad he couldn't stand being called Mister Carter.

"Please, call me Tim. I'll soon be in your debt, after all."

"I quite like Miss Lewis," she said. "My friends end up calling me that when I'm helping them with stuff."

"Miss Lewis is perfectly correct about that," King said.

He heard an unexpected strain in Andrew's tight voice, but there was warmth in King's black eyes. What was going on between these two? Young Alice Lewis was an unexpected choice for a vocal coach. Tim knew her vaguely from recordings of Vy's former band, but that didn't make her qualified for the job.

"Well, then Miss Lewis shall be."

"Alice is fine," she said looking in his general direction, as if she tried to make it seem she's looking at him without actually meeting his eyes.

They were close enough for the first time that he could glimpse her eyes under the long fringe. Almond shaped, brown flecked with green. And sad. Weary.

She pushed away her plate, which told him she finished lunch.

"All right, Alice," he said. "Do you want to come over now?"