Page 29 of He's The Reason Why

He clamped his lips shut before he admitted to this tyrant that she’d just hit on a painful truth. He’d been eight years old when he stopped singing anywhere but the shower and karaoke nights because that was when his dad ran out on his mom.

“Thenactlike it.” She paced back and forth. “If you keep pushing like an amateur, you won’t be able to finish this movieorthe next one. The last time I hurt my voice, I had to stay completely silent for three months.”

“Is there any chance you could go back to that?” Blake said semi-jokingly.

She flashed him a look of annoyance. “Even if you don’t care about this project, a lot of other people do. They’re depending on us, and they can’t do their work if we don’t do ours.”

“I’m aware of how many people are waiting for us to finish.” She had no idea how many people were waiting on him to move on from this. “We’ve had a lot of good takes.”

“When we have a good take, I’ll let you know. There’s a reason Tamar put me in charge of our sessions. She trusts my judgment. She knows I won’t stop until we get it right.” She pulled a package of throat lozenges out of her bag and slapped it against his chest.

He shoved it into his pocket without looking at it. “Fantastic, because we’ve already done that. We did it three days ago.”

She let out a derisive little laugh. “No. We didn’t. We haven’t been anywhere near the neighborhood of ‘right.’”

“Dammit, it’s good enough.” His voice broke again on the word good like a traitor.

Anger and challenge flashed through her eyes. “Good enough isn’tgood. Good enough isn’t right or finished. Good enough is something you say when you don’t care about the outcome. I would never, ever put out a song that was just good enough. I wouldn’t treat the fans that way.”

“You’re not the only one who cares about fans,” he snapped back. “But I want them to actually have a movie to watch. Sticking to my deadlines is how I show I care. But I guess divas have a problem with deadlines.”

She stared at him for a long moment, seemingly nonplussed with that retort.

He stared back.

Silence stretched for a few long seconds.

“That’s it.” She threw her phone into her purse. “You know, ifyou put a quarter of the heart into singing as you do into acting, we’d have a quality track finished by now. Unless you’re telling me this was the best you can do.”

He was tired and hungry, and his throat hurt, and her words stung.

Is that the best you can do?

It was his mother’s mantra. Something he’d heard since he was old enough to know the meaning of words.

Why did that sentence always make him feel guilty?

He’d spent his entire career striving to be the best he could be, throwing everything he had into his craft. Maybe his voice would never be a match for Piper’s, but dammit, he wasn’t a horrible singer, and these sessions had been more than fine.

She slung her bag over her shoulder. When he didn’t answer, she raised an eyebrow and said, “Well? Was it?”

The words “Yes, it was the best I could do” died in his throat.

He couldn’t say them.

Today, it was true. But if he’d had enough time to get a vocal coach, or if he’d spent as many years learning as she had, or if they’d had a year to get it right, then his best would have been a lot different.

But that wasn’t the timeline they were operating on, and he hated that she was making him feel guilty about something he couldn’t fix.

“I’ve been working just as hard as you.” He had a hell of a lot more on his plate than she did. As far as he could tell, she had no other commitments at the moment. “Are you sure this isn’t just resentment that I pointed out you needed acting help after you were late on the first day? Because that’s what it sounds like to me.”

She flinched like he’d struck her. “I was thirty minutes late. One time. I haven’t asked you to do anything that I don’t do myself. When we get out of here, I go home and work. I’ve beenfiguring out the emotions of every character for every damn scene. I’ve been practicing every line over and over and over to make sure I get it right. Because I don’t want to let anyone down.”

Nobody had ever made him feel like a slacker as much as she had the past five days.

“I’ve been going over endless screenplay edits forConned, scouting out shooting locations in California and Nevada, trying to figure out how to make a big-budget movie with less than half the money one would normally get, while trying to convince half my friends to work for free, so, no, I haven’t been singing when I get home. Twelve hours a day for five days on one song is more than enough.”

She looked at him like he was the thing she hated most in the world. “Maybe if you were giving this project your full attention, we would be done by now. You’ve been selling this song short because you’re only half here.”

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