Chapter Three
Almost two hours later Neil found himself being waved over by Cat and instantly regretted every decision that had brought him here. Reluctantly, he made his way over from his spot in the corner with Laila, who graciously grabbed his drink while he walked towards the stage. She knew he was uncomfortable getting open drinks in public, a rule his mother had enforced strongly, and so she always kept unopened bottles of various non-alcoholic things in her fridge, or in the case, her purse, for him when they went out. She took back the juice he’d been working on and shoved it back in her bag, giving him a quick shooing gesture as he went.
And just like that, Neil found himself on a stage for the first time in about two years. The only thing that kept his legs steady as he walked up the small set of stairs to the left was Allison grinning at him as she adjusted her mic stand. Neil grabbed the guitar Cat held out for him, probably from one of the shitty country artists that worked down the hall. Neil just avoided wrinkling his nose in distaste. He didn’t have anything against the genre, but those guys were just crap, no matter what type of music they were making.
He took a seat on the metal stool on stage nonetheless, fiddling hesitantly with the strings, the mic luckily already placed pretty well to pick up the chords from the guitar. After a few seconds, Neil nodded in Allison’s direction, and she turned to face the room, amping up her usual stage presence with a smile.
“Hi guys. My name is Allison Reynolds, and I thought I’d sing something for you tonight. A friend of mine wrote this song with me a little while ago, you might know it. Neil here is going to be playing guitar for me, and he’s actually the representative for tonight’s organization. Say hi Neil.” He gave her a look, begrudgingly waving before turning back to his guitar strings. “Anyways, there’s a box at the front and one by the bar in case you want to throw some more money towards Third Floor Studios, so if you like this one, maybe pay them a visit.”
WIth that, she turned away from her mic a smile. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
He struck the first few chords, and was enthralled by Allison right along with the rest of the audience. He never got tired of her voice, and he was lucky that he knew the chords by heart, because he might have just forgotten to play otherwise.
He remembered that night when he and Allison first ended up on the floor of his studio, talking quietly back and forth with each other. After a while, she’d begun telling him about Seth, about how they started together as a casual hookup, but ended up becoming something more. She told him about the the time Seth beat up some guys who slipped something in her drink, and about the time he took her to the cheapest, dirtiest diner in the city and tossed fries in her mouth while she laughed so hard she cried. And then she told him about the drugs, and how angry they made him. About how, no matter how much she begged or threatened or offered to help, he was always fighting something so much bigger than her. How she felt them start to fall apart, and how she eventually had to break things off because of how low he was dragging her down. It wasn’t fair to either of them, but she still loved him. How she watched him break further, how she paid for rehab and made sure he went to meetings and how it still wasn’t enough. How she just kept telling him to last a little longer, and then a little longer than that. And then, she told him, tears slipping down her face unnoticed, he died. She found out through TMZ along with the rest of the world and she’d screamed so loudly she was surprised no one had called the police.
And then the news coverage came. The blame from angry fans who said she’d killed him, that it was her fault. Her own breakdown and the grief she’d been living in. And by the time she’d finished, Neil hadn’t said a word, just reached out a hand. She’d looked over, staring at him for a moment before grabbing it.
The first time she sang it, she couldn’t get through it without crying. Even the final recording that eventually got released to the public was choked with emotion. Now though, sometime afterwards, it sounded stronger. Less of a tragedy and more of a memory.
It still enchanted audiences after all this time though, Neil included. As he played the last note, the room burst into applause, and Neil looked up to see Allison’s eyes shining slightly. It was quickly lost though as she looked over towards a point Neil couldn’t see to her right.
He thought maybe he had an idea who she was looking at, but he wasn’t going to push it yet.
Allison gave him a quick hug, and then they both headed off the stage. As he took the final step, he saw Cat grab his arm frantically.
“Neil! My last performer bailed on me. Took one too many shots at the bar and is passed out in a cab on the way home by now. I would just call it, but we still have another fifteen minutes before the event ends. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you please, please play something? Just anything, I don’t care if it’s a cover or a ballad or whatever, just fill some time for me? Please?”
Neil tensed like a deer in headlights. Playing the backtrack for someone was one thing. He got the feeling though that he couldn’t keep the audience’s attention by himself with some casual guitar covers though. But Cat looked close to tears in front of him, and he felt a crawling sensation at the back of his neck.
It had been years. The chances of a Moriyama representative being here and shutting him down were next to none. And he hadn’t been the mobster’s son in ages. He took a deep breath.
“Fine. Just this once. And you owe me big time.”
Now Cat was actually crying slightly. “Thank you so much, I love you.” She pressed a quick kiss to his cheek before running up on stage to grab the mic, wiping her face haphazardly as she went.
“Alrighty then, ladies and gentlemen, we have our final performer of the evening. He rarely performs for the public, so give it up for my friend Neil!”
The applause was light, by design. Neil kept his rare in-person performances under his first name to avoid any further pursuance by Moriyama reps, and his song writing, despite the acclaim some of his work had earned, was entirely under his alias, so there was no way for anyone here except his friends to be familiar with him.
He didn’t usually bother with an introduction, but he felt the eyes on him from the crowd. He looked up to see Laila at the bar, giving him the sign for “go.” He gave her a wry smile before adjusting his mic, caving slightly under her watchful gaze.
“Hi, my name is Neil. I’ve been working with Cat’s company for a while now, and she’s finally worn me down to do something like this, so here I am.”
He paused. He didn’t know what he was going to perform. He could always do a cover, but the music he knew best was his own. His fingers seemed to find their place on the strings themselves, and before he knew it they were in place for a song he hadn’t expected. He looked up.
“I wrote this song a few years ago, and I haven’t ever sung it in public before. So, go easy on me, I guess.”
He took a deep breath in, keeping his head bowed towards the guitar in his hands. As Neil started singing, he felt himself taken back to when he’d first written the lyrics. He’d been sitting in his Uncle’s house, listening to him and his mother argue through the walls and had put in his headphones to block them out. He listened to hours and hours of music on his cheap iPod, scrolling through song after song. So many of them were about places in the artist's lives that Neil couldn’t possibly imagine. Love and adventure and even grief that Neil couldn’t possibly recognize. It was then, in his head, that he started toying around with the lyrics. He thought about who he was, where he was, where he wanted to be. More than anything in that moment, he’d wanted to be a real person, with a real life. Far away from the shadow that he was, hiding in this strange room in this strange house in this strange country. Not that he was homesick. Except, he almost was. But for where he might end up, not for where he had come from.
In the present, his voice shook slightly as he sang the words to one of his first songs.
He felt the words pour out of him. He remembered now, why he’d chosen this path, out of all the options available to him. The world had opened up to him, the crossroads he’d reached stretching out before him, and he’d chosen this. It wasn’t a mistake.
He finished singing the last lyrics, and the room fell into silence again. It was broken by a loud wolf whistle from the side of the room, coming from vaguely where Allison’s table had been. It didn’t sound much like her though, so Neil brushed the thought aside. Heavy applause broke out, and he gave a humble acknowledgement, placing the guitar carefully on the floor by the stool and brushing his hair out of his eyes, making a beeline towards Laila at the bar.
He needed a drink, even if it was just juice. And more importantly, he wanted to feel his friends around him. That was another reason he avoided performing like that. The stuff he’d written for himself was all much older, and it brought him back to places he’d rather forget. Not that he would prefer to sing the vapid excuses for music he wrote now. With a few notable exceptions, such as his work with Allison.
Speaking of, she grabbed him before he could reach Laila and dragged him over to her corner booth.
“Neil, I have some people for you to meet. You know Renee.”
He did. He gave her a friendly nod, which she returned with a warm smile.
Neil didn’t exactly trust people like Renee. The reason he was comfortable with Allison, Laila, and Cat was that they never failed to say exactly what they meant. They were unapologetically themselves. People were seldom as nice as Renee claimed to be, and with his other friends, he knew right away who they really were because they just told him outright. Renee just wasn’t like that.
But Allison cared about her, and he cared about Allison, so he didn’t make a fuss about it.
There were some other faces he didn’t really know, and whose names he quickly forgot. They were more likely associates of Allison than her real friends. She had a secondary circle of “society” friends that came and went as she pleased, and Neil never really bothered to learn their names.
“And this,” she said, tossing a thumb over her shoulder at the man Neil had seen Cat chatting with earlier, “is my producer, David Wymack. Coach, meet Neil Josten.”
Neil knew the name, of course. He felt stupid for not recognizing him earlier. Wymack, called Coach by his rowdy group of talent for looking more “gym coach” than Hollywood bigwig, was in charge of Foxhole Records, home to a mismatched group of singers and artists who collaborated on songs together and produced albums that, while hardly top twenty material, had a fairly intense group of fans. Neil had known Allison was part of them, but she’d always kept that part of her life fairly separate from her time with Neil and his friends. She’d gone to Neil for outside help with her music, something allowed by her contract, but Neil imagined that introducing her semi-coworkers to the man she’d gone to for help instead of them would have been a bit uncomfortable.
He shook hands with Wymack nonetheless, keeping eye contact despite the impressive height difference between them and Wymack’s fairly intimidating appearance.
“Nice to meet you.”
“You too. Can’t say I’ve heard much about you.”
“I could say the same about you.”
Allison rolled her eyes. “Coach, Neil is the guy who helped me get out of my writing slump. He’s done some pretty impressive work under a pseudonym.” She casually dropped his recording name in the conversation.
Wymack’s eyebrow raised slightly at that, as Neil turned a betrayed look towards Allison.
“Really Ally?”
“All for good reasons,” she said, throwing her hands up, “Just tell him Coach, or he’s gonna kill me for that.”
Wymack rubbed at his brow. “We’ve been looking to make some additions to our lineup at Foxhole Records, and Allison suggested you. After watching your performance, I’m willing to offer you a contract.”
Neil’s eyes widened, his breath catching slightly. “I’m sorry, I don’t usually do that kind of thing. I made some enemies early on in my career and they tend to make any shot I have at success end fairly poorly, and soon. The only reason I can imagine that you’d even make it this far into offering me something is that they don’t know you’re doing it.”
“Listen kid, I’m no stranger to making enemies of the Moriyamas. And yeah, they know, they’ve already been in contact. I’m not particularly inclined to listen to them. I’ve gotten into way worse with Kevin, and the offer stands.”
Neil just stood there, silently.
“I get it, they’ve probably been putting the pressure on you for a while to sign with them, I’ve seen it before. They have a lot of power in this town. But we’re already pissing them off, so we have literally nothing to lose with you. I’ll send you the contract, look it over and let us know by Monday. It’s a one time offer, kid. But we’d be happy to have you. Think about it.”
He watched Wymack walk off. Allison turned to face him fully.
“I get that this might not be your style. That’s fine. But don’t turn him down over those stupid pricks, alright? We’re tougher than we look, and there’s some people there who would really like to work with you, myself included.”
Neil tried to give her a hard look, but eventually broke down with a sigh. “I’ll think about it. But seriously, let me make my own decision, okay?”
Her face broke into a massive grin. “Okay, absolutely, whatever you want. Just give us a fair shot.”
His shoulders dropped. “Fine. Nice as this has been, I’m going home to crash on the couch. See you later Allison.”
He stalked off towards the bar, still fuming slightly. He’d trusted Allison with a lot of himself, and despite her good intentions, this felt like somewhat of a betrayal. Or at least a severe manipulation. He wondered bitterly if she’d been responsible for the last performer bailing last minute too, and if she had Cat in on it. If so, the crocodile tears had certainly been something. Sighing, he finally made it to the corner, planting his forehead firmly on Laila’s shoulder, who reached a hand up to smooth down his hair.
“You alright?”
He groaned. “Let’s go home.”
She hummed. “Sounds good to me. I’ll text Cat, and then we’re out of here.”
For the first time in a while, Neil was the one getting practically carried to the car. He wasn’t drunk, just exhausted. He was asleep almost before they left the parking lot, and stayed that way until Laila shook his shoulder once they pulled into his apartment complex.
He rubbed at his eyes. “My place?”
She smiled slightly. “Yeah, I figured you’d want to get some sleep. We can catch up on shitty TV later. Go to bed, dumbass.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but was interrupted by a yawn. “Fine. Text me when you get home.”
She looked up at him from the driver’s seat. “Will do. Sleep, now.”
He gave a tired wave over his shoulder, and made for the elevator. He waited until he got a text from Laila and then headed straight for his room. He didn’t even bother changing before he collapsed in bed, and he was asleep before he had time to process what the hell just happened.