Love Song (LGBTQ+) (COMPLETED)

67. Better

After releasing Asphyxiate, it rocketed its way up to number one on the charts seemingly overnight and brought more of the usual attention to Jay. Of course, being the featured vocalist, I was included with that attention. The question that came along with most of those people were "who is Love Song?", but little did either of us know that Jay already set up a number of social media accounts for us the night after we finished recording. Everything from an Instagram account to a YouTube account was created with a logo neither of us knew existed, a logo in which he pulled some strings to get done quickly from a friend.

Even Jay admitted to me that he never expected things to move so quickly for both us and himself, for his label and his own music. Before he knew what was happening, there were stacks of demos and bands emails sent to The Narrative Records. It was almost kind of funny seeing Jay frantically running around and talking to others about something that wasn't even slightly related to music. It wasn't really a sight I expected to ever see.

The following days seemed short as Grace and I both were surrounded with professional photographers and videographers, photos and videos that were seemingly being used to tease people on our social media accounts about our future content. Everything seemed to be moving so much quicker than it had before, so much quicker than anything I ever experienced in Ely. The best part was that these horribly busy days were being spent with the one person I loved more than anything.

Without even having one song to our name, our Instagram follower count shot up to three and a half million and over five million likes all began to stack up on Facebook in just the span of a week, all because I was featured on a song with Jay. Given that it was only my name, I was thrown into the limelight alone without Grace as I was forced into interview after interview and a few live performances of it with Jay. Meanwhile, Grace sat in the shadows with a smile on her face the entire time.

Jay wanted to keep her as much of a secret as possible until our debut single was released, to surprise the fans we retained with another great vocalist. Jay was trying to expose us as much as possible, teasing and hyping did exactly both of those things, but it annoyed me when Grace should've been in the limelight with me. If anything, she should've been the one in the limelight and I should've been the one waiting, but that wasn't how it worked out. What annoyed me even more was the fact that Grace was okay with it.

"Ryan's almost done mixing the first single, right?" Grace floated inside of the pool of our backyard. "What do you want to call it? I like 'Pas Désolé'."

Sitting at the ledge of the pool, I watched as the small waves softly collided with walls. After all of those meetings with Rebecca, I was finally able to get inside of a pool again, but I still couldn't stop the unconscious trembling that decided to reappear whenever I did. It was just one of those things that I had to work on one step a time, in her words. Much to my surprise, therapy was effective for me in a number of ways. The panic attacks all but vanished with the exception of the rare random cases, and if it wasn't for that therapy, I probably wouldn't have even been near the pool Grace was in.

Even if therapy helped me, there were still a lot of things I was working on. It wasn't just the trembling in the pool or the night terrors I still awoke me some nights. I was still working on opening up to both people I knew and strangers about how I really felt on something instead of thinking my opinion wasn't worth anything. I was still working on comfortably being around any man that wasn't Jay or Nathan without having my body freak out on it's own. The fact that all my problems were in my head only made it that much harder, because nobody other than myself knew they existed.

"It's your choice, you wrote it."

"I guess." Grace laughed. "I think I'll go with that, then."

Lyrically, to anyone who knew her well, could tell the song Grace wrote was clearly something of a goodbye and middle finger to her parents on why she would never change who she was. If it was just any random listener or fan, the song probably came off as a jab towards an ex who tried to make her change who she was, so she left them and thus still gave credence to the songs title. While I hadn't asked her, I was almost certain that was what the song was about.