“Thank you,” Matt said quickly. His eyes flitted down the corridor, then returned to her. “For bringing Jase back to us.”
There was such sincerity to his words that she viscerally felt them. “Jase is the one who is doing all the work.”
Matt looked down at his coffee mug. “No. Cerys. It’s generous of you to say it’s all him, but the thing is, we’ve tried. We’ve tried to reach him. And I think that somewhere along the way, we all gave up. Perhaps not Nan. But I think we all began to write him off. I figured we’d be split by the end of the year. And by split, I mean Jase would be gone and we’d have a new lead singer, or I’d be singing. Whatever the record label would allow.” He placed his mug on the counter and walked closer to her. “How much did he tell you? About me and him?”
“If you are talking your childhood and about Izabel, he told me everything.”
Matt’s shoulders sagged. She wasn’t sure what to read into it. Relief. Sorrow. “I felt guilty for loving her, you know. When she told me that for Jase it was more than . . . shit, I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Do you feel the need to make sure I know your side of the story? Because at the end of the day, it’s not really my business.”
“No. It’s not that. It’s just . . . fuck. I’ve always come out on top by any normal scale people judge this shit on. Smarter because I passed more exams with better grades. More successful, because I write songs and play and own our catalogue. And I had Iz. And I felt guilty as fuck because of it.”
Matt’s eyes met hers, and while he was an attractive man, they didn’t cause her stomach to flip. “Do you think you’re better than him because of all that?”
“No.” Matt shook his head. “Of course not. I’ve thought many things about him, but none of them were about being better than him in some way. But I’ll be honest and say I did think he was going to ruin something I’d spent most of my adult life trying to build, and I hated him for that.”
“This feels like a conversation you should be having with him, Matt.”
“We’re trying to move on as a band. And honestly, this,” he said, pointing in the direction of the studio, “is more than I could have wished for. I don’t want to say anything else that might disturb the fragile peace we have in place now.”
Cerys smiled softly. “You and your brother are very much alike. Did you know that?”
“We are?”
“Confident, yet not. Filled with internal conflict, yet conflict averse.”
Matt scoffed. “We fight all the time.”
“Yeah, but about the wrong stuff. You fight about set lists, and pacing, and bookings, and tour dates, and whatever else the million fights that have appeared online are about. Fighting about that stuff was easy. It gave you an outlet for the anger. You could yell and pound on each other and then fix the set list or change the bookings. Whatever it was. And that anger you both felt was temporarily dissipated. But it never went away. You couldn’t escape it because you hadn’t dealt with the real reasons you were angry. For Jase, it was feeling alone and separate from you and your cousins for all those years. Processing all those things that happened to only him. And your anger is what you just said. It’s Izabel, and how he treated something you were tenderly, and with dedication, trying to build. He stomped all over the sandcastles you’d built. You need to get angry with each other about that and let all the hurt out now, or it’s just going to fester.”
Matt sighed. “Are you like this with him?”
“Yeah, she is.” Jase came to stand next to her and threw his arm over Cerys’s shoulder. “Did she talk to you about waves yet?”
Matt stared at Jase warily, but she could feel Jase’s body was relaxed against hers. “Waves?”
“I’m thinking Matt is more like a volcano. Less frequent than waves, more deeply buried, but the eruption . . .” Jase pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Can you give us a minute? I need to talk to Matt.” He tapped her on the end of her nose. “I’ll come find you when we’re done.”
Jase watched Cerys walk away, wondering what the fuck in the world he’d done to deserve her.
“How much did you hear?” Matt asked.
“From Cerys saying how much alike we are.”
Silence settled over the room for a moment. He wasn’t sure what to say next. Cerys was the one who was so good with words. She’d been able to see what the two of them hadn’t. That their behaviour was never about what they were actually fighting about. It was an outlet, a vent to release the pressure of the real issues bubbling beneath. And Cerys was right. His vent was too loose, opening often, with such high frequency—it was like waves. And Matt’s was too constricted, keeping emotions so tightly buried and under control that he erupted periodically.
Matt ran his hands over his face. “I guess this is where I tell you I’m angry with you.”
“I probably deserve it. So, yeah.”
“I don’t want to fight with you. Not least because I don’t feel like getting injured today, but I’ve liked this. I’ve liked being in the studio with you, making music with you. I feel like if the past gets dredged up anymore, we’ll go back to how we were.”
Jase leaned his hip on the counter. “I think the point Cerys was trying to make is that it’s going to happen one way or another. If we don’t address it, it will continue to fester until we end up fighting about something trivial, like song order. If we address it, at least it’s out in the open, and we can begin to fix it.”
Matt looked at him. “When did you get so fucking smart?”
“The day I met Cerys. I like to think our IQs got added together and averaged. Sucks for her.”
Matt laughed, his shoulders eased. “It pisses me off that we lost a decade, Jase. I’m pissed off about every single day you made me feel like shit about my songwriting because you felt like shit about yourself. I’m mad that I’ll be thirty soon and this is the first time that I’ve felt like we’re actually going to make it. You stole a lot from us, and I understand you have really fucking good reasons as to why you did what you did. But most of all, I’m really fucking mad you slept with Izabel. You knew. You fucking knew how much she meant to me. You knew I found it impossible to stick to Luke’s rules, but I did it for the band. I’m mad you broke Luke’s rules. I’m mad you put the band second. But most of all, I’m furious because you knew it would kill me and you did it anyway.”
The wave came.
And it hurt.
It brought with it the detritus of guilt and shame and embarrassment. He breathed through it like Cerys had shown him. Not saying a word until he felt as though he was responding from that place deep in his gut that he found it hard to tap into.
Cerys had called it his truth, but he wasn’t sure what the fuck it was. It certainly wasn’t his brain.
He placed a hand on Matt’s shoulder and squeezed it tightly. “Nothing you said is untrue. I did cost us. I have no idea how many gigs we haven’t got or been invited to perform at because of my erratic behaviour on stage. I’ve no idea how many record labels have glossed over us, even though they liked our sound, because I’ve been unreliable. I’m sorry for all of it. But I promise you this, Matt. It stops. It stopped in Bexter’s cottage. All I can do each day is prove that it’s over by showing up for the band.”