A/N: Dedicated to sellerofpurplecloth for her absolutely amazing and inspiring comments the last two chapters. Gave me a smidgen of motivation, so thanks.
Again, college suck so.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
First Meetings: Part 1
The thing about William Edwards was that the members of his band were all nearly as “famous” as he was. In fact, if you weren’t an avid fan, you might think that the group was a group act, rather than singer William Edwards and his band and, in all honesty, they had into of evolved into that.
James had started out when he was twelve and James had been serious. He’d known that he had talent the moment he’d first fit his hands across the smooth, lacquered wood of his then-new drumsticks, the moment he’d sat in front of his first set. It hadn’t been cheap, but his mother had gotten some sort of bonus that Christmas and somehow she’d just known. James spent the next two years scraping together every penny he could on lessons, using every extra moment to perfect any and every skill he learned.
When his teacher at the time had bluntly told him that she had nothing left to teach him, his mother had splurged again and paid for him to have his very own demo made, all professional and everything.
It wasn’t immediate; James must have sent the demo to over a hundred different companies. But, after a year of pushing, James was picked up by the managers of some small time Japanese boy band.
Even now James’ll say that the day that he was able to pay off all his mother’s debts was one of the best days of his life. He’d done it anonymously, but that hadn’t fooled anyone. Especially when the ‘anonymous’ car was parked in her drive way three days later, keys in the ignition and the title folded on the front seat. Mrs. Phillips finally stopped him when a real estate agent contacted her about her ‘preferred living arrangements,’ insisting that James needed a girlfriend.
James had thought he’d ‘made it.’ He might not absolutely love the music he played, might wish that he at least understood the language, but he was a drummer. It was his actual career and James thought he’d made it.
Then the internet caught his sob and serve story, going widespread in America, and he realized that the success he’d been so proud of was small. Within a couple of days, it seemed everyone knew his contract was up in a month.
James still didn’t know for sure why he’d gone with the up and coming indie artist, when Jason Aldean himself had told James that he’d be “happy to have James on tour,” but it’d turned out to be the best decision James had ever made.
A month after William’s second single released, James had signed a two-year contract, and William had already been booked for a world tour.
* * *
When he first saw Matthew Byrn, James Phillips was in a bar in West Meath after a rousing concert, hair still stuck to his forehead, and the Irish boy was thoroughly pissed. Not angry, but drunk. Rip roaringly so. In fact, five minutes into it, the bottle-dye blond was all but hanging off James’ arms and all James could thin was: he was too tired to deal with this. James’d been sorely tempted to just shove him off, be he was stopped by a few things. One, the boy was only about fifteen or sixteen, obviously underage. Two, no matter how hard James had tried to coax an address from the boy, he couldn’t for the life of him understand anything the boy said. The words sounded English, but the Irish accent was so overpowering as to mangle the language beyond recognition. Three, the fact that the boy STILL hadn’t recognized James was shockingly refreshing. It had been that long. And lastly, unlike most celebrities, James had an annoyingly loud conscious.
