Page 30 of Over the Edge

“I am. I’m stuck, okay!” I don’t mean to shout but my frustration, everything I’ve been keeping to myself for over a year now, rushes out of me.

“Do you want to write?” Garrett runs a hand through his hair, ruffling the perfect strands before they fall back into place.

“Well, I wasn’t planning on it. But I guess I need to.”

“That’s the problem.”

“That I need to write this album? I have a contract and a release date and millions of people who need me to. You invited yourself to stay and help, so help.” A simmering feeling starts in my chest.

“Do you want to do it? Do you feel that tug like a chord is pulling you to the piano?” he asks, prompting a phantom sensation to pluck at my heart.

“Not anymore.”

His eyes soften. “We’re going to spend tonight getting on the same page. I’m not going to help you write until you find something you want to write about. I’m not going to help you try and force something you’ll hate. I’m not getting anywherenear that. I don’t need you blaming me,” he says. “Have you ever collaborated with someone before?”

“No.”

Avery has offered, and of course, she’s suggested working with Drew, but I’ve been hesitant to overlap those parts of my life. Bringing someone in on that level opens the door for disagreements that you can’t come back from. There’s something deeply personal about art, where it’s hard to not interpret criticism as an attack. I don’t want to ever push the few people I have close to me away over something I’ve always been good with doing on my own.

Another part of it is keeping my team small. The fewer people who know I’m Lyla West, the better. It’s not like I can go and collaborate with people I don’t trust on a whim, no matter how talented they are.

“I’m not saying we do nothing tonight. I’m saying we lay the foundation. I told you I’d help if you helped me. So let me.” His voice softens with…God, is that pity? “I want to help you, Evelyn.”

“How do I know what you’re saying is going to work? What if it’s a waste of time? It’s not like what you wrote for Fool’s Gambit is the same as what I’m doing now,” I say, scrambling for a justification to stay in motion.

“I’m not promising it will work. But obviously, what you’re getting at now isn’t working so maybe it’s worth trying.”

“As if you’re still an expert. The last time you wrote a song was ten years ago,” I remind him.

“Trust me,” he says, voice lowering to a rumble. “I’ve gotten better with age.”

The words skitter up my spine. Sure, there were moments growing up that I might have had something close to a crush on him, but that makes me no different than millions of other people back then. Being in such consistent proximity with himhas been a reminder of why, despite his icy exterior, he’s hard not to look at. Even now he takes up space like it belongs to him, as if I’m the guest here imposing on his evening.

“Fine,” I agree. “But I want to know something too. Why did you stop playing, why did you become a lawyer and give up?”

I feel exposed talking to him about my music. If I can peel back some of his layers, then maybe I’ll feel like I’m not the only one.

“I didn’t give up.” He all but spits the words.

“Sure. You just walked away.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you why I quit if you tell me how you started,” he bargains.

"You have yourself a deal. I was visiting Avery in the Hamptons for a long weekend a bit over five years ago. She was on deadline and we were mostly just messing around,” I start. It was a good vacation. We’d lived in our swimsuits and cover ups dancing through every moment making us feel like we were in a golden age rom-com. It was the last night of vacation after she’d put off recording until the end of the week. I was at the piano while she was draped across it in her best impression of a jazz lounge singer. “One night we set up recording equipment so we could send demos to her agent. I guess we left the recorder on, and I sat down and played something for her. I was always writing things back then and I only had this cheap keyboard in my apartment and the piano at the house was just so nice I couldn’t resist,” I explain as I glance at my own piano, the one I bought after I signed my contract and got my advance. “She edited my portion and sent it to her connections. She kept my name out of it because she knew I would never want to get something just because of being associated with Fool’s Gambit. I told her no for, like, three months before I sat down and really thought about it.”

“And you decided to be Lyla,” Garrett states more than asks.

“Yeah. Even if I wanted to make music, it felt like if my career was starting while Drew’s was still floundering and he was struggling with everything, it would just be cruel. He’s doing really well, you know. He’s got a therapist and is using his support system. He’s happy,” I remind myself, even though I just talked to him and he was fine. I’m no better than my parents, worrying over something I can’t control. “With my parents…I think they blame themselves and the industry.”

I’d come home and overhear them fighting sometimes when he stopped picking up their calls. My parents fought before that, sure. But it was over stupid things that never made them seem like fights, movie captions or if one of them finished a crossword without the other. I was never worried their love story would end.

With Drew, they were fighting to understand something they were never taught to openly discuss. They rarely volunteer information about the mental costs of their immigration to the United States, but from what they’ve shared, I know it wasn’t easy. They likely experienced their own forms of depression, but thought of it as a natural price for the life they were building.

I did what I could. I stayed nearby for school because that’s what they wanted. I put up with their constant check-ins and questions because I knew they were more out of worry than anything else, like if they didn’t I would slip away. I worked at school for the first time in my life with the help of Quinn and Oliver. I felt good pulling my weight to keep things lighter. I liked knowing that I did that for them. I never had any problems I couldn’t fix on my own, and I was happy, so happy, all the time and made sure they could see it. I made sure they didn’t need to worry about me when there were more important things going on.

Garrett leans back against the couch and crosses one leg over the other. “So you got the best of both?”

“Or as much of both as I could.” It was less about me and more about everyone else. If I juggled both, I could keep everything stable. Though lately it's felt like I've been trying to juggle bowling balls that have also been lit on fire.

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