Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Okay, and one more just after the middle eight,” came the voice through his earphones. Dax looked back at the words, nodded, and the music came in again. He closed his eyes and sang into the microphone, giving it everything he had. The mixer in the booth gave him the thumbs-up, and the final chords played out to the close.

“Great job,” said Mixer Mike. His real name was Adnan, but for as long as Dax had been signed to TerrorCorp Records, he’d called him by the same nickname as the others had.

Dax pulled off his earphones and smiled at the woman next to him. She was tiny and waif-like, with long brown hair and huge brown eyes. She stared at him nervously and nodded. She looked like the slightest puff of wind would blow her over. But only a few minutes earlier, she’d belted out the song with the lungs of an opera singer. Dax had been the one to have been nearly blown over.

“Great job, Renee,” he said. “I’m stunned.”

Another voice came over the headphones. “She’s a cracker, isn’t she?”

Dax looked over to the booth and saw her manager, Terry. He nodded at him. “Never heard anything like it.”

“Well, this track looks to be the big hit of the winter. I’m thinking we can get it on the lineup for Ledbrooke?”

“I’ll run it by Grant, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out,” Dax replied, and he took off his earphones. He reached for his bottle of water and took a swig, then he and Renee left the recording room. Outside Terry was beaming at his protégée.

“Tell him when your birthday is, kid,” he said to Renee. She gave a nervous smile, and looked up at Dax.

“December twenty-second,” she said.

“See? Ah?” Terry held out his hands to Dax. “Come on. She’s going to be eighteen. Don’t break her heart on her eighteenth birthday. You wouldn’t do that, surely?”

Dax was used to being emotionally blackmailed in a lot of ways. Stopping to pose for photographs with kids who were in wheelchairs. Stopping to chat with a girl who told him her dog just died and could he give her a hug to cheer her up? Stopping to grin into the lenses of a million different smartphones simply because if he said no, fans burst into tears as though he’d just spit in their faces.

“Like I said, I’ll speak to Grant,” he said to Terry, who shook his head.

“That guy’s got you by the gonads, hasn’t he?” he asked. “What ever persuaded you to get in bed with that snake is beyond me.”

It was a term used only in the business sense, but it pricked at Dax and he bristled. “Well, he’s been good to me for the last fifteen years. I mean, look where I am.”

Terry nodded, and held up his hands. “Hey, no offense meant. I think he’s an asshole, but no offense meant. If anything, I’d say you deserved better. It’s a compliment to you.”

He put his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a card. He held it out to Dax. “Look. I’m pretty sure you know where I am, and how to get hold of me. If you ever change your mind and want to move on from being a teenager’s crush forever.”

Dax didn’t reply. He took the card. Terry and Renee left and Dax looked at Mixer Mike. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to call him.”

But Mixer Mike simply shrugged. “It’s nothing to do with me. Everyone knows Grant’s an asshole. I just wish that Terry guy would hand me his card and ask me to call him.”

Dax put the card into the rear pocket of his jeans. He could never give the real reason that he stuck with Grant. That Grant had too much dirt on him to ever walk away. He knew that as soon as he went with another manager, Grant would make sure that every shot of him kissing a guy, every check he’d written to men Dax had spent the night with, just to keep them quiet, would be suddenly and anonymously leaked to the press.

There was nothing he wanted more than to rid himself of the scourge of Grant Beaumont. But he was trapped.

The studio was quiet, and Dax jerked his head to the recording room. “Reckon I could lay out a couple of tracks of my own?” he asked. “I’ve been working on some new material.”

“Sure,” said Mike.

“And if you could keep this between you me…”

“What, Terry? You don’t have anything to worry about—”

“Not just Terry. The music, too.”

Mixer Mike grinned. “Discretion’s my middle name, dude. Just remember me when you’re collecting your next award.” And he winked.

Dax picked up his guitar from the recording room and sat up on the stool in front of the microphone. He tuned the guitar. “Let me just go through it a couple of times and tell me what you think,” he said into the mic. “Let me know if you’re getting the strings or not.”

“Knock yourself out,” said Mixer Mike.

Dax took a deep breath and began to strum the song that had been whirling around his head for weeks now. The words were there, the chords were ready, and he’d strummed the melody so many times that it was now imprinted in his brain.

 

“You said you’d catch me if I fell, but it was a lie I fell so damn hard and well, you just watched from the side.

Thought I’d recover, but then I discovered

I was watching myself from your eyes.

You couldn’t fix me

No, you couldn’t heal me

Broken bones mean nothin’ if my heart’s still sufferin’

No you couldn’t fix me

You couldn’t heal me…”

 

As he sang, he felt tears pricking his eyes. When he finished the song, he held onto the silence for a few more seconds until he heard Mixer Mike’s voice in his ear. “Dude. Where the hell did that come from?”

Dax composed himself with a brief cough. “Is the sound okay?”

“Are you kidding me? That has to be on the next album!”

“It’s not the kind of thing Grant wants.”

Mixer Mike laughed. “Bet it’s the kind of thing Terry would love.”

They went through the song again, and Mike tweaked a few things here and there. Between the two of them, they had the track completed within the hour. Mike liked it without anything but Dax’s voice and the guitar, and they both decided that it was better to have it clean and simple, without any extra instruments or effects.

Dax left the recording studio feeling strangely calm and rested. While singing the song he’d written for Cameron, he’d imagined he was singing it to him live, and it sent a shiver up his spine. He got in the car and Rocky drove him home. When he was there, he called Kelly.

“Are you busy?” he asked.

“Never too busy for you, boss, you know that,” she quipped.

“Can you get hold of a VIP ticket for the show for me?”

“Sure. How many?”

“Just the one.”

“And who am I making it out to?”

“If you can get it over to me in an envelope, that’d be great.”

“When?”

“As soon as you can. And then if you could run to the post office and send it for me, I’ll take you out for sushi later.”

“You’re paying me extra to do my job? Hell, I’m not complaining.”

“See you in a bit.”

He hung up and found that he was humming the song as he walked into his study. It was a room he rarely came into. When he bought the house he’d fitted the whole room out with the latest tech and expensive designer furniture but he barely turned the computer on these days. The tablet he bought hadn’t even come out of the box, and as he turned on the lamp and found it didn’t work, he peered over the shade and saw he’d never even taken the bulb out of the packet and put it in.

Opening one of the drawers of the desk, he pulled out a pad of paper and found a pen. He wasn’t even sure what to write. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even written with a pen, save for the scrawl of an autograph he worked out he’d signed around a million times in his career.

He leaned over the paper for a while, and then he took a deep breath, and wrote a short note. He read over it several times, making sure that it didn’t sound too dumb, and then he folded the paper up and put it in his pocket. When Kelly arrived a little later, he took the paper out, put it in the envelope with the VIP ticket, and sealed it. Then he carefully wrote the address on the front and gave it back to Kelly.

She looked at the address, raised an eyebrow, and smiled slowly. She looked up at him. “Really?” she asked. “For him?”

“I don’t know if he’s going to come or not,” Dax said. “But I’ve got to try one more time.”

She grinned. “I’ll go and post it now. I don’t even know how much it costs to send something to Scotland.”