Page 43 of Revive
“Shite. I mean, in better circumstances the attention of four attractive men might have been nice, but my mind was kinda preoccupied.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled again, and offered up a chagrined grin.
“My brother called.”
“Oh!” he said, heart already sinking into his stomach.
“Ewan,” she clarified. “He wants me to talk to Flynn. Can you believe that? After all that wanker’s done, I’m the one who should reach out and be all forgiving? The fuck I will.”
“Maybe you should?”
The words left his mouth before he’d adequately considered them. Too many years of playing the peacemaker in a band full of hard heads. Although, honestly, he didn’t want her holding onto a grudge on his behalf.
She sat up, making the headboard clank against the wall as she thrust her back against it, then folded her arms across her chest.
Spook eased himself up on one elbow. “Your choice, obviously. I’m just… I don’t want you not to do it because of me.”
“Spook, he—”
His arm shot out, way ahead of his brain, so that he raised one finger before her lips. “I don’t need a refresher.” It tended to send him spiralling if he thought about that period in time, so he avoided it. “But it’s like you said. We can’t change what’s done, but the future’s how we choose to shape it. At some point we have to make our peace with the past. And sure, I’m still working on that. Maybe you need to work on it too.”
“You think I should call?”
“I think you should think about whether or not you want to call. It’s your family, Alle. They’re your brothers, regardless of what they’ve done.” He didn’t want to be responsible for her permanently snipping familial bonds. He’d never asked her to do so, and frankly, he didn’t need that sort of guilt weighing him down. Whatever decisions she made, they had to be hers, uninfluenced by him. The whys of what the Hutton brothers had done and how and if that could be forgiven was for her to figure out.
And maybe, just maybe, some tiny corner of his soul really wanted to believe that family meant something.
-14-
Allegra
22ndFebruary, Cornwall
“Guys, come listen to this with me. There’s something missing. This bit here, right before the bridge. Can you hear that?” Alle played it over three times for Spook and Xane to listen to. They’d managed to get the rest of the recording done, so things had now moved on to mixing and refining. This particular song though, it’d been bugging the hell out of her. She’d had it on repeat through headphones most of the previous evening and all of this morning. Something about it wasn’t hitting right. It was like there was an absence, and that, once she’d pinpointed it, felt like a black hole the rest of the tune kept falling into.
“It could use a fill of some sort,” Xane agreed, having given a thumbs up to the rest of what she’d done.
In the studio they were working surprisingly well together. Outside, Alle struggled not to be irritated by him. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t being an ass, she just couldn’t help being annoyed by how chill Spook was around him, and how goddamned attuned to one another the pair of them were. Not that things weren’t good between her and Spook. They were, but as hard as she tried, and as hard as he tried, they still had to actually speak to make themselves understood.
And they still hadn’t talked about what had happened.
“Alle, what have you tried?” Xane prompted her. She suspected he’d asked her once already.
“That’s the problem. You name it. I’ve tried it. Nothing fits.” Or at least nothing she’d tried tickled the portion of her brain that told her she’d nailed it.
“Move on, come back to it,” Spook suggested from his horizontal position along the couch behind where she and Xane were sitting at the mixing deck.
The two of them groaned. Her, because jumping focus wasn’t going to stop the problem with this track niggling away in her head, and Xane, because he was a perfectionist, and he didn’t like leaving things undone. Spook was much better able to hop from one thing to another, while still retaining all the details of the other things in his head, whereas Xane liked to go deep with one thing at a time.
Curious what you learned about people recording an album.
She’d also learned that Ash was a people pleaser, Paul despaired of ever finding a soul mate, Luthor had the body of a Greek god hidden beneath his baggy clothes, and her once wide-eyed bushy tailed wannabe, Ronnie had grown into a force to be reckoned with. He’d stood his ground against Xane the previous day over a particular keyboard section, and then over a line in the chorus of another song.
“Wait. Groans,” Spook remarked. “That’s it. Seriously. Low, so it’s barely there, but the thread of it weaves around the words. In fact, they could stretch through the whole thing, but just come into more focus at the point you’re on about.”
“Groans?” Xane arched his brow sceptically, but Spook’s eyes were ablaze. He swivelled around so that he was sitting facing them, as Alle listened again, trying to imagine what he was suggesting.
“Sexy groans? It could work. Xane?”
