Page 33 of Next Time I Fall (Excess All Areas 2)

“Can you expand on that?”

“Do I fucking have to?”

“No. You don’t. But it might be helpful to.”

“The songs are Matt’s songs. The lyrics are his experiences. I’m just the way he shares his emotions with the world. He thinks I don’t understand him, but I do. I sing his truth, his pain, the stuff that happened to him every fucking time I stand on that stage.”

He made a move to leave the studio, but Cerys grabbed him by the arm. “No, don’t march off. Stand with it. Stand in it. Let the emotions you are feeling right now come out. What’s your truth of this?”

“Cerys, don’t. Stop ... this ...”

“This what, Jase? It’s okay to have strong emotions. It’s human to be angry, to hurt. But emotions are like waves. You have to let them pass through you or they’ll knock you over every single time, like they are now. And every time they knock you over, it’s with a promise that next time they’ll be stronger, taller if you don’t face them.”

“Don’t play psychology queen, Cerys. That’s not what happens to me.”

Cerys put her hand on his arm. “Isn’t it? Where does the anger come from? What makes you throw an instrument on stage at your brother? What makes you storm offstage when you don’t feel like singing? What makes you charge out of a recording studio that the record label is throwing money at to get an album out of you quickly? That’s you allowing those big emotions to knock you over.”

“Fuck off, Cerys.” Jase shook her hand off his arm.

“It’s what you’re doing now. I’m prodding at something raw. Something you don’t want to expose.”

Jase spun around on his heel. “Watch where you are treading, Cerys.”

“No. You could stop for two seconds. You could take a breath, right now when the wave is about to take you down, and breathe into those feelings. Ask yourself why you are having them? Where are they coming from? What are they rooted in? Just, please ... Do that for me right now.”

The air in the recording studio hummed around her as if it still carried the energy of their words. The large vibrations of anger and hurt.

Jase shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at the floor. She could see his chest heave as if he were sucking in large gulps of air.

Like a drowning man managing to get his head back above water.

Her own breathing was coming fast, but energy flowed through her body. From the tingling in her fingers, to the way her head spun with clarity.

Like any good outro after the crescendo of the rousing last chorus, the energy began to settle. The noise lessened. The roar quieted.

When Jase looked up at her, his face was stricken. “It’s a lot. Too much.”

She hurried over to him and gripped his forearms. “I know. But stay in it, Jase. I’m here.”

“What do I do with all this, Cerys?”

“We work through them all. One at a time. We make sense of them. What’s causing them ... and not just what caused them today, but what the repeating habits are.”

Jase took his hands out of his pockets and reached for hers. His skin was cool and damp to the touch, such was his discomfort. “Cerys. I’m as thick as sandwich bread. I have a handful of GCSEs from school and not a lot else to go on. It’s amazing you have so much faith in me, but then, I think you have faith in just about everybody. But even your dad thinks my singing sucks.”

“Why on earth would you think that?”

* * *

With her mouth open and shock reaching the corners of her eyes, Jase wasn’t sure how she couldn’t see it.

“Why else do you think I have to have singing lessons with you?”

“They aren’t singing lessons, Jase. They arevocallessons. We don’t need to teach you how to sing, as in how to perform. The lessons are to help you with longevity. Is that why you’ve refused to take them? You thought they were because you weren’t any good?”

Jase pursed his lips. His gut reaction was to argue, to deflect, to get the hell out of the recording studio that was starting to feel a lot more like a church confessional than an oversized cottage on the edge of a lake.

“I want to shout at you right now,” he admitted honestly. “Can we just go make breakfast?”

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