Worlds Apart

Chapter Fifteen

“It needs something else,” I complained with a frown on my face.

I may have been speaking straight into the board, but my actual words were directed towards my producer on my left.

And my Cash just made a self-righteous sound in the back of his throat that had me throwing the nastiest of glowers in his direction. Instantly he backed off, if only slightly, raising his hands in the air in surrender. “I told you that when we were recording it,” he defended, “But you only wanted the stripped down approach.”

“Stripped down was what we were going for,” I snapped back at him.

So maybe I wasn’t so good at admitting fault.

Sue me.

Well, plenty of people had tried. Unsuccessfully, I might add.

Cash just rolled his eyes at me, probably expecting nothing less. It wasn’t any secret that I had an attitude problem, after all. “It doesn’t have to be glammed up to the nines, it just needs something more to boost it up. It’s rather bland after all.”

“I don’t really have any one to help me with my bland song,” said I, biting at the words sharply. I took everything too personally.

This time it looked like he was practicing so much restraint over himself to stop from sighing it was almost painful. If he had let the noise out, it would have definitely been painful for him, though. I had a wicked right hook when directed at the shoulder.

“I never said the song was bland,” he corrected, “I just meant the recording was. If it wasn’t good, we wouldn’t be recording it.”

Finding no way to bicker back at him after he’d said that, I pressed my fingers against my forehead, enjoying the slight pain. At least I could focus on that. It was a problem I could fix as easily as taking my fingers away.

The recording on the other hand, not so much.

We’d recorded the pieces weeks ago, and the people that had helped with it were long gone. Not to mention that were heading down to the finish line of my stay at this studio, time was almost up and I had asked no other people to join me. The only song I had to finish was my untitled song that I’d finished over the past few days but was yet to get a title.

I hadn’t exactly been betting on this issue coming up, to put it diplomatically. And I loved the song, I could hear the way Fever Mind was supposed to be in my head and I knew it could be nothing short of my regular brilliance. Maybe it could even surpass it. However at the moment there was some blockage going on, and though I could hear the almost whining guitar that sang its own story and the throbbing drums, there was something else that was supposed to be there.

What that was remained a mystery to me though.

Letting my hands fall away, I bit on my finger nail a little too desperately as I stared down at the board.

“I’m going to go get some air,” I announced abruptly, standing up and kicking the chair back.

From beside me Cash’s eyes widened, following my movement. “What do you want me to do without you? We still have one song left to record.”

“Figure it out,” I answered shortly. And with that, I stalked out of the studio, barely taking the time to snatch up the baggy grey cardigan that I’d brought with me this morning.

It had felt like night in that studio. To be more specific, a muggy and confusing night where I’d drank too much and had no one around to help me while my mind couldn’t quite focus and I stood on the side of the street, cursing the fact I can never find a cab in LA. However, as it happened, I was completely sober and as I shoved open the door to the courtyard, making sure to leave my producer behind, it proved to be only mid afternoon. And I wasn’t in LA, and there were most definitely no cabs to be found around here.