“How’s it going?” Cerys asked.
“It’s great. But Buzz Aldrin is in the front row with a sign saying he wants to take you with him on his next moon voyage.” Jase looked down at her footwear and winked.
“Arsehole” she said. “I was too busy making sure you sound good to change.”
“I always sound good, babe. You should go stand on the front row and listen from there. Get the full effect.”
“I think black bra woman would be pissed about that.”
Jase shrugged and leaned close to her ear. “Maybe. But cut her some slack. She’ll never get to meet Little Jase up close and personal.”
“Stop,” she whispered. Cerys glanced over to her father who was watching the two of them closely. “How’s the performance going?”
“The first two songs felt a bit like walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes. We got through it, but it didn’t quite fit right. Nerves over new arrangements and shit. But it’s getting easier as things settle into place. Matt’s amazing. There’s a flare to his playing, it’s like he becomes one with that instrument in his hand.”
Cerys looked down at the guitar hanging from around his neck. “That guitar looks good on you too.”
Jase looked down at the guitar in his hand. “Picking it up for that last song, performing publicly with it for the first time felt foreign as fuck. But halfway through, I forgot about it, and it felt like I’ve been doing it my whole life.” He pressed his fingers to the strings and travelled over the bump of the frets as he ran his calluses up and down the neck of his guitar.
It was the Fender from her dad’s studio. One he’d given Jase permission to borrow for the gig that night.
“Gotta go.” He pressed a kiss to her lips. “Done in twenty, home in forty. Little Jase is looking forward to being rewarded for behaving well while I’m on stage with you watching me. Kinda hot, sunshine.”
Cerys shook her head as he bounded back onto the stage, then glanced over to her father. He tipped his head away from the stage, urging her to follow him. Jase would look for her, she was certain. But her father’s face was set.
“I know we don’t have a traditional father-daughter relationship, Cerys. Hell, I don’t even know if I honestly have the right to say this to you at all. But I’ve hinted at this, and now I need to come straight out and say it. I don’t want you in a relationship with a musician.”
“Dad,” Cerys said, firmly. There had to be boundaries in their relationship and telling her who she could date was one of them.
“Wait,” he said, holding up his hands. “Let me explain. I was Jase. I’ve been a musician and a record producer. Turns out, I was better at the latter than the former, so I’ve been a producer for longer. I’ve done drugs. Drank too much. And as your mom can painfully attest, I slept around.”
Her father’s words caused her chest to constrict. “Dad. Now isn’t the place to talk about you and Mum. I don’t want—”
“You want to know why musicians are such an unfaithful bunch, Cerys? Opportunity. When you’re just the guy who works at an insurance company or whatever, there’s this natural pecking order of the girls you can get. If you get lucky, you can punch above your weight. But when you are famous . . . famous like those guys are going to be . . . everyone is available to you. Jase could be wearing a wedding ring, and black bra woman, as you just called her, would still go home with him tonight. And it won’t just be her. It’ll be one of the girls hanging around back here. Or a girl waiting in the lobby of their hotel, or a girl who offered a roadie a blow job to get on the tour bus. Opportunity.”
“You think I’m not aware of all that, Dad? I have faith that Jase won’t be like that with me.”
“They have addictive personalities. All of them. Expressed in different ways. But addictive. You’ve seen the videos. We lost a production day because they were so drunk they couldn’t stand. I heard Alex winding Luke up about Jase finding him asleep in the hallway. You think you make good decisions when you are fucked off your head? Luke just met those guys he was doing lines with. It could have been anything he just snorted up his nose. If he’s lucky, it was cut with creatine or laxatives or some other innocuous white powder. If he’s not, he’ll fuck his immune system because it was cut with levamisole, which’ll kill his white blood cells.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do here. Scare me off? Maybe you think I’m not enough to keep Jase’s attention. Heck, I wasn’t enough to keep my own father’s.” The words shot out of her mouth in a staccato rhythm.
“Cerys.” The word from his lips was filled with anguish. “Hell, do you think I wouldn’t go back and change my ways so you and your mom and I could be a family? I was so full of my own shit back then, so filled with ego, that leaving you all behind was easy because I was confident I’d find someone else to replace her. And a kid? Who had time for a kid? I had shit I wanted to conquer. But you know what?”
“What?” she whispered, the words escaping on a breath.
“Nothing filled the gap the two of you left behind. No women. No success. No awards. Not a single thing. You think I never married because I didn’t have an opportunity?” Her dad shook his head and looked over her shoulder into the distance for a moment. “I never remarried because none of them were your mom.”
His words rattled through Cerys like a freight train.
Thoughts of her mum listening to a new release on the radio and sighing. Of her mum looking tearfully through a stack of old photographs of her and Jimmy. Of Cerys feeling the need to fill the gaps and cracks with anything to take away the sadness.
You’re my sunshine, Cerys.
“If you felt that way, why didn’t you come and get us?”
Jimmy ran a hand up his cheek. “Because I’d already done enough damage. To your mom. To you. It took about three years after I’d left to realise all this. By then, you were in school, your mom was settled. And I had no way to prove I was sincere about any of it. And my work was here, your life was there.”
How on earth was she meant to process all this?
“Look, this conversation. It’s got off track. I just . . . think twice about whatever is going on between the two of you. There’s no doubt you’re a good fit musically. You’ve been able to get something out of Jase, out of the band, that even I couldn’t see. It’s easy to confuse the way the two of you work together, the intimacy of that, sharing his deepest feelings with you—that can easily be confused with love. I’ve done it, I’ve been there. I had a relationship with someone I helped write and produce songs with, but as soon as the album was out in the world, I realised that’s all it had been. A way to write great songs. And I don’t want you to get hurt. Okay?”
Cerys looked at her father numbly. His words made sense. Hell, looking down at her boots and back in the general direction of black bra woman, she suddenly doubted herself.
“I’m going to go before I make an even bigger fool of myself than I just did. Maybe after Jase has gone, you could use the time to think about what you really want, yeah?”
“Sure,” she managed to say, the words getting stuck in her throat.