Paper Parachute | Celebrity Romance

10.

"Okay, okay. We really should get back to working on this song Blake." Blair laughed through the phone. Blake stared back at her as they continued their face-time.

"Sing what we have back to me." He told her. They had been working on the song that he had assisted on for over an hour but they were really making some headway.

The nerves in Blair's stomach bubbled like champagne in her stomach, it made her feel anxious and excited all at once. She wasn't even completely sure why she was nervous. Blake had heard her sing plenty of times before at this point but this time felt different somehow.

She took a sip of her water and sat up straight, tucking a piece of her hair, that had fallen from her bun, behind her ear as she opened her mouth and began to sing.

Regrets collect like old friends
Here to relive your darkest moments
I can see no way, I can see no way
And all of the ghouls come out to play
And every demon wants his pound of flesh
But I like to keep some things to myself
I like to keep my issues drawn
It's always darkest before the dawn.
Shake it out. And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back so shake him off.

"Damn." He said, clearly impressed and doing nothing to hide it. "You're gonna blow up after this tour. I better enjoy all this time I'm getting you to myself because once the world hear's you, you're gonna be far too busy for little old me."

"Haha, stop. You flatter me way too much." She giggled, completely blandished by his compliment.

"I'm serious! You're so good Blair. It's like you don't even know how talented you are, which honestly just makes it better because you're not an arrogant bitch about it." His words were a less eloquent than most but she knew he was paying her another compliment.

Blair tilted her had just a hair to the side. "You're really just a big softy aren't you, Blake Everett." she smiled, leaning back on her bed and holding her phone above her head. She was flirting with him, heavily but he didn't seem to mind.

"Don't tell the press," he chortled. "My bad boy image will be ruined." He feigned concern, pressing his hand against his chest as his mouth dropped open.

"Why does everyone think of you so negatively?" She grew serious suddenly and the playful look fell from Blake's face. "It's like the person they talk about in those articles is someone else, someone I've never met. It's not you."

He was quiet for a minute, staring off into space like she has learned he did when he was looking for the perfect words.

"It didn't used to be." He said finally. His eyebrows rising as he frowned and dropped his head so she could no longer see his expressions on her screen. "After my dad died, that's when everything was really just beginning to take off for the band. I was just so, so, angry. Like, I was angry at God or whoever is out there, the Navy, him for enlisting. Angry that he was going to miss everything. I was just angry at the world and everything in it." He sighed but then kept going. "To top all of that off, I had been given this platform. This very public fucking platform where I was in the spotlight and everyone just got to watch as I went on an unexplained path of self destruction." He paused and raised his head up so that he was looking at her again. "I didn't want my dad's death to be a public thing, it was just too personal and I was too hurt. I didn't want to talk about it so I held it all in. I leaned a lot on my girlfriend at the time and when she let me down...I just lost it."

"Lost what?" Blair asked softly.

He was quiet again for a long time, contemplative. "I lost my ability to believe that the world could be good. That there were things that existed for other reasons apart from hurting me. You have to understand that at that point in my life it was like I couldn't catch a break. One shit thing after another until my whole belief in anything good was just...gone."