CHAPTER 11

JARED

We were due to step into another recording session soon, but we had to get through this meeting first. Gerry and Alicia had come down to the studio to meet with us on the progress of the new album and to check-in on the hype we were meant to be creating for it. We’d followed Alicia’s advice and posted some stuff from time to time after our first meeting a couple of weeks ago, and the fans were eating it up.

I was riding high off the buzz, and I thought it was time to take things up a notch, but Alicia didn’t agree with me. I didn’t know whether it was because she still thought I’d egged her car yesterday or if she really didn’t think that it was a good idea. Either way, we were sure going toe to toe on this one.

We were all piled into a cramped lounge at the back of the studio, and the lines that were being drawn in the sand were all the clearer because of the positions we’d inadvertently taken up. I was seated on an uncomfortable couch on one side of the room and had to actively keep my butt from sliding off the white slippery material. Caleb was sprawled out beside me, and his leg kept knocking into mine from his own efforts to get comfortable.

Alicia and Gerry were on the couch directly opposite from us, with Dom leaning on the wall behind them. Matt and Nick were in the single seaters on either side of the small coffee table between us, which seemed fitting since they weren’t saying much.

Alicia glowered at me, and her blue eyes, bright and shining like sapphires in the sun, lit up in irritation. Her toned arms were folded under her breasts, pushing them up in a way that was making it hard not to stare, but this wasn’t the time to get distracted by tits. Even if the creamy globes were covered only by sheer floral material and what looked like a very thin shirt underneath.

“We talked about this only a couple of weeks ago, Jared,” Alicia told me, the exasperation in her voice making it clear that she thought I was an idiot for not remembering the conversation we had. I did; I just thought that things had changed since then.

“I know. I didn’t forget, but then we were talking about releasing teasers for the singles, not about dropping our first single. The hype is huge right now. We can use that momentum to catapult us to space if we drop a single immediately. We already have a couple of songs recorded. I really think we should do this.”

“I agree that the hype is building, but I don’t think that it’s there yet,” Alicia argued. “The only reason it’s building so much is because of what we are doing. I really think we should just keep doing that. It’s obviously working.” Her expression was fierce. It was cute if she thought her ferocity would intimidate me.

“If we keep doing what we’re doing, people are going to get bored with the wait. I’m telling you, if we drop our single now, it’ll leave them salivating and wanting more.”

“And everyone knows that leaving them wanting more is always a good thing.” Caleb smirked beside me, on my side of an argument for once in our fucking lives.

Alicia’s eyes cut to him before locking back on mine. She waved her hand between Caleb and me. “You two are the worst. Can we please stay on point here?”

“We are staying on point. Because Caleb is right. Leaving them wanting more will always have them desperate for it by the time you give it.”

Alicia’s tiny fist slammed down on the arm of her couch. “I don’t care about your antics with the women you have sex with, or what state you leave them in, or what state you like to work them up to. Be serious for once in your lives. This isn’t a joke, and it isn’t about your sex life.”

Direct. Fucking. Hit. It felt like she’d punched me in the nuts, but I schooled my features, and outwardly, I knew my expression remained the same. “I am being serious. Trust me, this is the furthest thing from a joke to me. I was scrolling through my social media accounts last night, and the time is right.”

Alicia cocked her head and raised a brow. “You mean last night after you were drinking all afternoon? Newsflash, Larsen, I scroll through all of your social media accounts every single day. I keep track of the trending hashtags, and I have my finger on the pulse of the media.”

“Then you should know as well as I do that we should strike while the fans are practically panting for something.”

“They’re not panting yet. Trust me. Think about this Jared, what if we drop the single and it lands as a dud because we haven’t got things built up all the way yet? That would hurt your reputation and destroy all the work that we’ve already done.”

“You haven’t even heard the new stuff we’ve got. We could drop any one of those songs, and they would explode. There’s no way any of them would be a dud.”

Caleb backed me up on that by adding, “The songs that we have recorded are dynamite. Jared’s right. That shit would light up brighter than Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”

Dom shook his head, the tattoos on his arms flexing as he uncrossed and crossed them again. “We’ve got good stuff, but what we’re working on is even better. Besides, I agree with Alicia that if we drop and fail, we’re fucked.”

“The operative word there being if,” I said. “If we fail. We haven’t failed once since we took off, and we won’t fail now.” I stared at one of my oldest friends. I knew the look that was in Dom’s eyes as well as I knew the one in mine. We really were on opposite sides of the fence with this argument.

At thirty, Dom was the oldest of our merry band of lost boys, and he never let us forget it. I’d met him when I was six and Caleb was only three. He lived on our block and was the one who’d introduced me to rock music. He was raised by a single father who blasted the classics while he got blasted every night.

I looked over to Matt, then Nick. Both were sitting stoically, uncharacteristically quiet. “What do you guys think?”

Matt shrugged, his fingers tapping out a steady beat on his knee. “I don’t know, man. I’m dying to drop, too. The sooner we do, the sooner we get back up on stage, and you know how much I love playing live. We read the audience though, brother. And as fucking amazing as you are at that, it’s Alicia’s job to read the public as a whole. If she doesn’t think that they’re ready, what’s the rush?”

Well, that didn’t help at all. Nick cracked his neck and threw his palms up. “Don’t look at me. I’m just here to jam. Let’s just go do our fucking jobs, and let Alicia and Gerry do theirs.”

I couldn’t fucking believe them. “This is a part of our jobs, asshole. Don’t you remember back in the day, when we were still handling all of this ourselves? We know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before. We used to go with our guts, and look how far that’s taken us. We don’t need PR people to tell us what to do.”

“Jared, be reasonable,” Gerry said. “No one’s saying that you don’t know what you’re doing, and no one’s denying that you did a good job before you had people handling all of this for you. But you’ve also never been this big before, and you have people to handle it for you. Why don’t you head off into the studio and let us deal with the business end of things?”

Condescending prick. If he thought for one second that his patronizing tone or his bullshit soothing of my ego was at all going to get me to back down, he had another thing coming. “I’m not going fucking anywhere until this is settled.”

Alicia sat up a bit straighter and looked me right in the eye. “Look, Jared. This isn’t about you. I don’t care who did what, where, and when in the past. This is now, and while I accept that you’ve had a look through your social media, I can assure you that now is not the time. This is my job, and I’m damn good at my job, so believe me when I say that if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we will get to the point where the time is right, but it’s not now.”

“It might be your job, sweetheart, but I’ve been in this industry a lot longer than you. They don’t call me the Emperor of Rock for nothing. In fact—”

“For fuck’s sake,” she said. “Enough with the Emperor of Rock stuff. Everyone gets it. You’re good. Great, even. There’s no doubt that you’re one of the best singers and songwriters out there at the moment, but has it ever occurred to you that even Emperors had advisers that they listened to? They had advisers because they accepted that they didn’t know everything about everything. As your adviser, I won’t be ignored, and I won’t be steamrolled. I am strenuously advising against dropping a single right now.”

Gerry leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I agree with Alicia.”

My leg started jumping. The annoyance building up inside needed some kind of outlet before I fucking punched someone. Caleb had his arms crossed, glaring at a Dom, while Matt and Nick’s eyes were darting between the two camps like they were watching a tennis match, but they kept quiet.

Alicia’s eyes were still locked on me, passion for her job and her belief radiating from them and making them look like the Caribbean churning before a storm rolled in. I actually liked that. I hadn’t seen this side of her before, but I could now see that she was truly passionate about what she did.

And it was kind of awesome that she was doing it for us, pouring all of that passion and belief into our music.

My music.

With a heavy sigh, I nudged Caleb’s shoulder with mine to tell him to stand down, and I grumbled, “Fine.”

For the first time in my life, I was walking away from the battle, but I was more determined than ever to win the war. Even if I couldn’t quite figure out what I was fighting for yet.