Page 12 of Places I've Never Been

They haunt me.

All the placeswe could have gone but never went

All the ways that I missed you but I never showed

All the memories I cling to that I won’t let go

I need you

I love you

Always

Mattie Bellamy washis high school crush, his teenage dream, and his adult fantasy. He pictured her walking through the front door to the studio. She’d smile, and he’d take her hand, and he’d finally,finally, know what it was like to be next to a living, breathing, priceless work of art.

“Adam?” Lucas tapped his shoulder. “You with me, buddy?”

Adam jumped. He hadn’t heard a word anyone had said since he started picturing himself and Mattie together. From the looks he was getting, everyone in the room knew exactly what was going on.

His brother rolled his eyes. “Sorry, Adam can’t come to the phone right now. He’s lost on an island with that sweet Southern Bellamy Babe.”

“I’m not lost, you giant pain in my ass.” Adam paced over to one of the executive chairs and gripped the back of it. “I’m right here, thinking through this important business decision.”

LT smirked. “Business. Right.”

“Her accent is hot.” Cooper winked.

“Grow up, will you?” Adam looked around for something else to throw, but the pillows were all out of reach now, and Flynn hid his drumsticks. “We’re not in high school anymore.”

“It’s a good thing, because if we were you’d never get within a mile of that girl,” Brandon said. “Especially if she saw your bedroom at home. She’d think you were psycho.”

“Odds are you couldn’t even get in line to see her even now,” Cooper said. “At least, that’s what it looks like on Twitter.”

“That’s who I want,” Adam insisted.

Lucas looked doubtful. “Not sure I can deliver that.”

Adam leveled his best get-it-done stare at the man. “It’s her or nobody.”

“Son, we’re under contract to provide sixty-five minutes of new content, spread over at least thirteen tracks.” Lucas straightened to his full five-foot-five height. “We can’t just leave them off. At last count, you have ten tracks complete, for forty-seven minutes. You’re three tracks and fourteen minutes short of the promised land.”

“We aren’t due to release for another six months,” Adam pointed out.

“Which will go by in a blink if you keep rejecting partners,” Lucas said patiently.

“If we don’t write something new with Mattie, we’ll go to Plan B.” Adam shrugged. “I’ll pull something out of the vault.”

“I don’t think any of those are ready for prime time,” Cooper said. “Maybe we should try the think tank approach first.”

“The last time we tried to write a song as a group the neighbor’s dog actually howled when I played it.” LT picked up wayward pillows and tossed them onto the couch. “They called the cops for noise violation.”

“Songs by committee don’t work,” Adam said. That wasn’texactly true, but now that they’d put the idea of Mattie into his head, he couldn’t get it back out. Hell, he didn’twantto get it back out. For the first time since Johnny J left, he felt a spark of hope that a great new song might be in his grasp, and he wasn’t about to walk away without at least trying to meet her. “We need someone actually good with words. Johnny J was world class, but he’s not an option. That leaves Mattie Bellamy. She’s the best songwriter of our generation. So let’s get her.” He turned to Lucas. “Make it happen.”

Lucas pulled out his phone. “I’ll give it a try, but I can’t promise anything.”

“And Lucas?”

Lucas paused with his fingers over the screen.

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