Chapter Two
Neil wasn’t exactly nervous for the fundraising event on Friday, but he still felt the need to go to Laila’s before heading over to the venue. He’d sent her about ten different text messages asking what he should wear and what time he should come over and whether he should eat. He hated it when his anxiety manifested like this. He’d survived literally mob wars, he shouldn’t be freaked out by social stuff like this. But his mother had done a good job of impressing the importance of not sticking out, so he was always looking to do the “right” thing. Thankfully, Laila was aware of this particular brand of trauma and was willing to respond at pretty much all hours to his frantic texts.
He’d chosen an outfit Laila had bought him a few months ago, despite his teasing Cat about going with something Jeremy got him. She had a better handle on his more understated taste, and the clothes she chose were actually some of his favorites. He had dark gray, pleated pants belted high on his waist with a dark blue turtleneck tucked in. He didn’t bother throwing any product in his hair on his way out the door; he’d be staying out of sight and out of mind tonight, plus if Laila thought he needed anything, she’d get it for him at her place. She’d been the one to listen to his three am, drunken rant about his real hair color and how much he hated having to dye it. She’d also been the one to go with him when he got it cut down to his growing-in natural roots. The next time he saw her, she had her usually shiny black curls dyed the exact same color. He’d almost burst into tears on the spot. When he’d asked her why she’d done it, she’d just shrugged, telling him she’d always wanted to go auburn. Plus, she’d added, it was the same color as her best friend’s. That did make Neil cry a bit. He still had issues to work out with how he looked, with his scars and his eyes and everything that came along with them, but now his hair didn’t remind him of his father; it reminded him of his best friend.
When he pulled up to her apartment, he felt himself visibly relax. Even Neil, who didn’t really have an eye for real estate or interior design (most of his household items had been chosen from a catalogue, and not by him), Laila had the most gorgeous apartment he’d ever seen. After making it through art school, she’d bought herself an apartment on the top floor of a brand new apartment building. She, unlike Cat, wasn’t a trust fund baby, something Neil had been shocked to find out after seeing her space for the first time. Turns out, despite being a lovely, modern place with spacious apartments, Laila’s building was right next to a massive highway. They had cheaped out on the noise cancellation for the windows, and therefore the whole building was way too loud for most people to deal with for any extended period of time. Laila, however, being almost entirely deaf without her hearing aids in, had no problem with this. During the day, it didn’t make much of a difference for her work, and she slept without her hearing aids in anyway. Cat complained constantly about how she couldn’t move in or sleep over, but Laila usually stayed the night at her place anyway. She’d confessed to Neil that she was planning on moving in with Cat and converting her apartment into a full time workspace one day, not that Cat was aware of these plans. Neil knew she’d be happy to have the extra work room. She had a corner apartment with two sides of it covered in windows with just enough room for a cushy bedroom and an art studio for her work. The studio had floor to ceiling windows for natural light, cabinets full of paint and canvases, and massive stereos on the cool tile floor. Laila worked in oils, and created gorgeous, expressive portraiture paintings that had been selling well from their places in a number of significant galleries in town. Neil even had one. She’d done quite a few pieces featuring him, all of which she’d offered him first dibs on, but the only one he’d accepted was a painting of his hands sitting on his keyboard. It hung in his living room in a prized position as the only thing in his whole apartment that he’d chosen for himself.
On the whole, her apartment was a safe space for Neil. He banged on the door when he got up to the fifth floor, but since there was no answer, he let himself in. Laila had given him a key for emergencies and when she wasn’t answering, since she sometimes turned her phone off and took her hearing aids out at the same time and was thus nearly unreachable. Neil took his shoes off when he entered and saw Laila standing in the kitchen looking through the fridge. He flickered the lights and she turned around giving him a huge grin.
“One second! Let me get my hearing aids,” she called over her shoulder as she shut the fridge and jogged over to her room down the hall.
She’d been teaching him ASL for months now, and Neil, as an avid linguist, was getting pretty good, but when she was trying to do something else with her hands, such as digging through the fridge or getting ready, she’d make sure her hearing aids were in so that she didn’t have to worry about her hands being occupied.
She burst back into the room, and ran over to give Neil a tight hug. She’d been helping him get better at the whole “casual touch” thing, and Neil had to admit she gave pretty fantastic hugs. She’d traded in her usual paint covered overalls for a long, flowy yellow dress with a slit up the side. Her dark hair was pulled back with a surprisingly elegant red headband and she was wearing wedge heels, something Neil was grateful for. When she wore regular heels he sometimes ended up carrying her back from wherever they were out that night, and as much as he loved her, she was taller than him, making it somewhat of an arduous task. Not that he’d ever admit it. One time, he’d been struggling to hoist her up on his back and Jeremy had offered to carry her instead, which Neil had immediately and vehemently refused. He liked Jeremy, but Neil had a feeling this qualified as sacred best friend duties.
Letting him go, Laila dashed back to the fridge, grabbing her giant refillable water bottle and one of the bottles of pomegranate juice she kept in the fridge for Neil, both of which she shoved in the massive brown faux-leather purse slung over her shoulder. She’d used it for ages to smuggle food in and out of bars and movie theaters, and its presence tonight only served to make Neil more and more sure that this whole event was going to be a long endeavor.
“Alright, ready to go?” She grinned. “Let’s be social for a few hours and then crash on the couch watching Inkmaster until we pass out.”
Neil huffed a laugh. They’d started watching Inkmaster together before she’d gone with him to get his first tattoo. Laila had a number of traditional tattoos up her arms, and she was covered in swooping birds and bright flowers and falling leaves. Neil had gotten a simple set of black piano keys in the crook of his elbow, and he hadn’t flinched once, something which Laila complimented him on before taking him out for iced coffee. Reality TV was an unusual choice of bonding for them, but given how anxious Neil had been before going to the shop, she’d thought she should prepare him a bit for what was to come. She’d told him in advance that it wasn’t exactly the most accurate depiction of tattoo culture, but at least he’d get a crash course in the art styles and learn how to spot a bad tattoo pretty fast. Her usual shop, of course, was much more laid back, run entirely by women, and fantastic for first tattoos, therefore making it nothing at all like Inkmaster, but the show was fun to watch regardless. Plus, they both had a sick sense of humor and enjoyed laughing when some poor canvas ended up with a truly atrocious tattoo that the judges ripped to shreds.
“Okay. Let’s do it.” He shook out his arms, anxiety buzzing all the way down to his fingertips.
Neil knew as soon as they walked in the door that the bar Cat had booked for this event was clearly a recommendation from Allison; the whole place looked like something from a vintage style catalog. The stage had shiny black floorboards and took up about half of the far wall, directly in the center. Along the sides of the room were circular booths, made for larger parties, and the floor space was littered with bronze tables surrounded by vaguely uncomfortable looking velvet seats. The bar on the far left wall had a mirrored back, and the black-stained wood bar was topped with gray marble.
As they walked in together, Cat practically pounced on them, giving her girlfriend a quick peck on the cheek and Neil a customary enormous hug. When they broke apart she flashed him a grin.
“Glad you could make it. Anyone ever tell you you clean up nice?”
“Yup. Your girlfriend, about ten minutes ago.”
Laila gave a small grin behind him, watching while Cat practically collapsed, howling in front of them.
“Goddamn Neil, the day we introduced you to those jokes was the day we signed our own death warrants. Jesus Christ, I have to tell Jeremy about this.” She gave him a quick pat on the shoulder. “See you around, ladykiller. Socialize! Or don’t, but pay the entrance fee.” She waved over her shoulder as she walked off at the hostess station where there was a woman standing in an all black uniform.
They walked over to be allowed entry to the main area, both pulling out ten bucks for the fee. The bar didn’t usually charge on normal nights, but when they had performers they would put up a cover charge for customers to get in. Cat had been telling him all about how she had worked out a deal where they got a portion of the earnings from the entire bar tonight. Judging by the fairly packed room, Neil imagined they were doing pretty well.
Just as he was about to ask Cat where she wanted to camp out for the evening, he saw a raised hand waving desperately in his direction. He looked over at the back wall to see Allison, half out of the round booth she was sitting at with a giant group of people Neil couldn’t quite make out, a huge smile on her face. Her gold bracelets were jangling wildly around her wrists and the low-cut purple velvet jumpsuit she was wearing was clearly turning some heads from across the room. Neil returned the wave, pointing her out to Cat who returned the gesture as well, even though she clearly hadn’t been the intended target.
When Neil first met Allison, she was an entirely different person. Or, rather, she was in an entirely different place. It was a few months after the highly publicized end of her tempestuous relationship with fellow musician Seth Gordon, and she was feeling his absence sorely. The few photos taken of her after his death showed a completely empty shell of the confident, fierce performer she had been before.
In fact, when she turned up on Neil’s doorstep, she was wearing a wrinkled t-shirt dress, oversized sunglasses, and a ratty baseball cap. She told him much later that the hat had been Seth’s and that she had been wearing it whenever she left the house immediately after his death.
It had taken her a lot to come to Neil. It had been at Thea’s insistence that she’d even gotten in contact with him. In the wake of Seth’s overdose, Allison began spiraling. They had been on a break during that time and Allison, along with a few less scrupulous members of the media, blamed herself for his death. She’d been given time off work, and her agency wasn’t expecting any new music from her any time soon, but once she shrugged off the heaviness of the funeral, she found herself drifting in and out of apathy, simultaneously unable to move on and unwilling to truly grieve. Renee had suggested that she consider doing some writing to help cope; it was something she did as part of her therapy, and she passed the advice onto Allison, with the clear message that it didn’t have to be anything commercial, or even songwriting for that matter, and that it could just be for her to process her emotions and try to come to terms with things.
Allison took this rather to heart, and rather than wallowing in her despair, she turned to obsessively trying to create some “perfect” song out of her sorrow. It seemed like she thought that if she could just write some kind of incredible music, then she’d be simultaneously able to fully process Seth’s death and make her comeback in one fell swoop. Once she started, she tuned out anyone’s advice or suggestions, even the urgings of her agency and her closest friends, and locked herself in her apartment for almost a month. It took Thea practically bursting into her apartment and pulling back her curtains to bring her back to reality. Thea took one look at her and made her get up and go out to lunch, somewhere small and quiet enough that neither of them would get recognized. Once she got a better sense of exactly how deep Allison had gotten into writing this song, Thea realized that the best thing for her might be finishing it and getting some kind of closure on this whole period of her life.
So that’s where Neil came in. Thea had worked with Jean before, and had thus spent some time at Cat’s, where she and Neil became vaguely familiar with each other. They’d never worked together themselves, but between Jeremy and Cat, she had a fairly good grip on the type of music Neil made and his writing process, so she decided to give Allison his email to see if she’d be willing to reach out.
After about a week, she sent Neil a terse email asking if he’d be willing to collaborate on a song together. They emailed back and forth for a few days before finally scheduling a meeting.
Neil, knowing who it was coming to his doorstep, had actually dressed up for this particular meeting, but soon relaxed once he saw that Allison was wearing flip flops that were falling apart at the seams and carrying a hoodie draped over her arm.
Over the next few weeks, Neil slowly, and almost completely by accident, got her to open up. He wasn’t entirely sure how he managed it, but after a few days they moved into his writing room and ended up spending more than a few long nights scrawling in notebooks together and eating crappy pizza. That somehow brought them fairly close as people, as they spent hours trading stories of shitty parents, although Neil filtered his somewhat, and the struggles of the industry, finding that against all odds, they actually had quite a bit in common. Once they reached that point, Allison started really talking to Neil. He’d always been better at transcribing the feelings of others than expressing his own, and once she started spilling the stories of how she and Seth met, their bad patches, their really good patches, and how she watched him start to decline but felt like she couldn’t keep him together, Neil started really writing.
At the end of the next month, he could say he probably knew more true things about her than probably most other people in her life, and that, in the end, they’d created a pretty killer song together. When they parted, Allison gave him a firm hug before leaning back to place one hand on his cheek. Smiling softly, she said “Thanks, kid. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
Neil just looked back at her. “Yes, you could’ve. But it wouldn’t have been the same.”
At that, her smile grew. “See you around Josten.”
So he wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with Allison popping in at random times, either with Thea to take Cat out to lunch, or swinging by to pay him a visit with some truly spectacular smoothies in hand. But she seldom came to official functions like this.
Although she and Cat were friends, Allison tended to stick to attending performances arranged by her agency. It wasn’t that she wasn’t allowed to perform elsewhere, but she seemed close with the musicians back at her home studio, and wanted to stick close by. But Cat must’ve finally persuaded her to give them a hand, since she was hastily pushing the friends she was sitting with aside and hurrying over to him, throwing her arms around Neil’s neck casually.
“Neil! Good to see you. You too Laila, how’s that piece I commissioned coming along?”
Those two chatted for a little while, Neil standing idly next to them. Laila and Allison weren’t the closest friends, but she knew her through Cat, and Allison had always been a huge supporter of Laila’s career. She’d bought tons of her works that were strewn across Allison’s mansion in the hills. At first, Laila had accused her of charity. Allison had just shrugged, saying she got fantastic art out of it and that she could one day say she got a real Dermott for a fraction of its worth. Laila didn’t bring it up again.
After a minute, Allison turned her razor sharp gaze over to Neil. “So, Neil. Cat said there’s an open performance spot.”
Neil tensed. “I already told her I wasn’t going to be doing anything.”
She waved a hand. “Yeah, but you didn’t tell me. I was going to sing something as a favor. Want to be my backup?”
Neil frowned. “You’re actually performing?”
She shrugged. “Thought I might. It’s for a good cause, right? Go ahead and tell her we’re in, would you?”
Neil sighed. That was how Allison was. A bit of a bulldozer, but with good intentions. He shrugged. “Yeah, sure.” What could playing the piano track hurt. Not that he saw even a keyboard on stage. God help him, he’d probably end up having to play guitar at this rate. He was better on the keys, and they were his favorite, but he’d been branching out lately, and his few years on the guitar were nothing to scoff at either.
He walked over to Cat, currently schmoozing with someone by the stage between songs. He tapped her shoulder and she turned, giving him her full attention.
“What’s up babe? Laila boring you already?”
He smirked. “Of course not. Allison wants to sing something and I’m her backup. Is there room for us?”
Her gasp was answer enough. “Oh my god, yes! Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I think I can fit you in towards the end, the second to last spot is still open.” She was beaming, now completely ignoring the tattooed man she’d been chatting with a second ago. “Go hang out until then. I’ll check with one of the guys performing and see if you can borrow his guitar, okay? I assume you didn’t bring yours.”
Neil rolled his eyes playfully. “It’s a party, Cat. No, I didn’t bring an instrument.”
“No worries. I’ve got it. Go on, have some fun before then. Gah, I’m so excited!”
She gave him a light shove back towards Laila who had taken up residence by the bar. Neil gave Allison a quick thumbs up from across the room, which she quickly returned with a grin.
Maybe this would be fun after all.