Page 60 of Crimson Desires

“Can you give me a second? I’m a grower,” Zephyr said.

“None of you are showing your dicks while I’m in the room,” Ava snapped. She plugged my microphone into her audio processor. Then, she put on her headphones.

Axel leaned over. “So, dude. How’d it go last night? Kane said he saw you and Aster go back to your hotel room.”

My lips curled into a grin. “We had a good night.”

Axel rolled his eyes. “Fuck out of here with that PG13 fade-to-black shit. What did you two do? I want all the details.”

“I gave her head,” I said.

“And?”

“And that’s it.” Realizing that the guys would probably razz me to hell and back if I told them my real reason for abstaining from having sex with Aster, I quickly added. “We got interrupted by a phone call before we could really do anything. And that phone call kind of killed the mood.”

“Who was it?” Axel asked.

“A friend of her dad’s, I think. He went to the hospital last night for a minor blood clot, and apparently, he might need surgery soon.”

“Oh. Dude.”

Zephyr snapped his fingers. “Hey, assholes. Are we going to work on music or what? Our next album is due like, one month after we’re done with our tour, and we only have half of the songs for it written.”

“Sorry, yeah,” I said.

Microphone in hand, I took a seat next to Axel. I always preferred to be next to Axel when we were writing songs. Unlike Zephyr, he’d happily hand me his guitar if I needed it to work out a new chord progression or melody.

Ava began recording the session. She leaned back in her chair, pen and paper at the ready to take notes.

Damien passed me his notebook. It was flipped open to a song that we’d written earlier in the year. Some of the words had been crossed out and replaced with new ones.

Never satisfied, Damien often revised and edited his lyrics until the last possible moment. According to him, lyrics were never finished. They were just recorded.

After running through a few more songs, we started working on a new one.

Unfortunately, none of us could get into the flow of it. Zephyr and Axel kept arguing about scales and keys. Kane couldn’t seem to come up with a bassline that hadn’t been used in a previous song. Damien kept pausing in the middle of writing his lyrics to look up rhymes. And for the life of me, I couldn’t get the melody for the bridge straight in my head.

“Alright, you guys need to stop,” Ava said after a few more minutes of struggling. “You’re clearly not in the headspace for this one. We’ll try again another time.”

Zephyr groaned. “I don’t want to stop the session yet. We can’t leave empty-handed.”

“Jack,” Damien said. “What if we played your song?”

Ava and the guys looked at me. Kane raised a brow. “Jack’s got a song?”

“We were working on it together while you guys were interviewing with Kaleidoscope Radio,” Damien explained. “How’d it go? Something like...” Damien began humming out the melody to the song. Damien was by far the worst singer in our group—but he could still hold a tune decently.

And the tune that he was humming was undoubtedly mine.

I blinked. “Dude. You remembered that?”

“It was a good song. You were writing from your heart, man,” Damien said.

Ava nodded, slipping her headphones back over her ears. “I like it. Jack, how much of it have you written? Can you play it?”

I grinned, almost bashfully. I took out my phone and opened my notes app. I found the temp lyrics that I had written with Damien’s help. Without even having to ask him for it, Axel handed me his guitar. Since we didn’t have a mic stand, he held my microphone for me.

I began strumming, keeping things slow—almost melancholic. I kept my phone balanced on my knee as I sang.

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