“Ben, I literally just got home from moving my whole life back to London again so I could be with you. I’ve left my job, my roommates, things that are important to me. Because you’re more important than all of that.”
“Are we fighting?”
Stan blew out a hard breath. “I’m tired. I’m sorry. We should probably not talk about this for a while. At least until I’ve gotten over the jetlag.”
“Are you going to go home?”
“Can I stay here?”
“Yeah.” Ben swallowed, like he was nervous. “Course you can.”
Stan held his hand out and Ben took it. They didn’t go to the sofa, which was fine for one person to nap on, but not big enough for two. Stan kicked off his shoes and curled up on the bed, on top of the covers. A moment later, Ben shuffled in close behind him, his arm coming tight around Stan’s waist.
Stan took his hand and brought it up so he could kiss across his knuckles.
“Sleep for now,” Ben said, like he could read Stan’s thoughts.
After all this time, maybe he could.
Chapter Eighteen
Someone at Ares’s management company managed to get Ben a recording slot at a studio that had been used by pretty much every major rock band that had ever come out of the UK. Which was awesome. For years, Ares had recorded at the rehearsal space in the house at Belsize Park, or more recently, in LA. The producer who’d worked on their first album had moved out to California, and they wanted to keep working with him, so it made sense to be where he was.
Ben would have just sat down at the house to record, but he really needed professionals to give him some feedback. Having Tone around helped. Even though Tone’s part in the recording process had been tied up ages ago, he knew the songs as well as Ben and could give better direction than the sound techs.
Sitting in a booth with a guitar again was nerve-wracking.
“Need anything?” Tone asked, sticking his head around the door.
“Can you get someone to get me a Coke? A really cold can of proper Coke.”
Tone rolled his eyes. “I’m sure we can manage that, yeah.”
He shut the door and Ben slipped the headphones on.
Jez had arranged for everything they had recorded in LA to be sent to London, so Ben could work with that while laying down his part.
They worked solidly through the morning, getting far more done than Ben had anticipated. As it happened, he was good at getting back into the flow of working when he had to. He thought it probably helped that he’d had a really good session with Dr Greg the day before where they’d discussed professionalism and how to segment his process.
As Jez had promised, the music sounded good. Listening to it again after almost four months was weird. Ben recognised that he was in a different place now than where he’d been when he wrote those songs, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
When Tone reappeared with his Coke, Ben beckoned him in.
“We need another track for the album,” he said without preamble. “Maybe two.”
“You think?”
Ben nodded. “It’s not done. It’s not ready.”
“Ben… they want to see it pretty fucking soon. We don’t have a lot of time to write new material.”
“We can round up the guys,” Ben said. “Have a jam session in the studio like we used to. There’s something missing.”
Tone sighed and scratched his beard. “We need a banger and an eleven o’clock number.”
“You know what a fucking eleven o’clock number is?”
Tone had never struck him as a musical theatre fan.
“I’m not a fucking Muggle, Ben.”
That made Ben laugh. “I know, I know. You’re right, though. This record is going to blow their fucking socks off, but there’s nothing on there for people to scream back to us, you know? I love those songs. That’s why people like our music.”
“Yeah. We need another ‘Forget Me Not.’”
The single that had truly propelled them into the spotlight. Those kinds of songs only came around once in a lifetime, if they were lucky.
“We can try,” Ben said. “You get where I’m coming from, though?”
“Yeah. I’ll set something up.”
Ben nodded. “See you back at the house.”
“Yep.” Tone shut the door behind himself as he left.
While Ben was in the right mood to work, he ploughed through, working on as many of the tracks as he could, until his fingertips started to go numb from the strings of his guitar. He knew it was late, and the sound techs probably wanted to leave. If they were in LA, Ben would have kept going with cocaine and Red Bull, but he was trying to break both of those habits.
“You ready to call it quits?” the tech said through the headset.
Ben nodded. “Yeah. Save that last version for me? I want to listen to it back tomorrow.”
“You have tomorrow off.”
“Fuck.”
That made them laugh.
He carefully packed up his guitars—he’d brought three of them for this session—and filled his backpack with his notes.
One of the techs, Shane, held the door for him. “We’re going to grab a beer, if you want to join us?”
“Nah, I’m good, thanks, man,” Ben said.
“Are you sure? It’s all industry people, and we’re going to James’s house, so you don’t need to worry about anything.”
Ben hesitated for a moment, thinking about the empty bed he had to go home to. Stan was at an industry event, so he couldn’t go back to the flat. And it wasn’t particularly late, only just gone 9:00 p.m.
“Okay,” he said. He probably needed more friends other than his bandmates if he was going to be living in London full-time again. And these guys were cool. “Let’s go.”
He knew as soon as he turned up that there was something off. It wasn’t just a couple of guys hanging out at someone’s house, drinking a few beers and smoking weed. There was a full-blown house party going on, with people already spilling out onto the front garden and the entire street buzzing with activity. Ben got the impression it wouldn’t be long until the police got called, even if this was mostly a student corner of Hackney.
Shane had taken another cab over here, so Ben followed one of the other guys inside and stepped around a girl who was almost passed out in the hallway. These parties were painfully familiar, and Ben decided he’d slip out as soon as he could. Maybe he should text Dr Greg.
“Ben, man, you made it!” Shane slapped him on the back.
How the fuck was he wasted already? And how did he get here before Ben?
Shane pressed a beer into Ben’s hand and steered him through the house to the kitchen. Where there were lines of coke laid out on the marble countertop.
“Help yourself,” he said, waving a hand at it.
“No, thanks,” Ben mumbled. He pretended to take a sip of his beer to cover how much he wanted to say yes. God, he ached for the bittersweet high, the blankness, the opportunity to let everything just fucking go and breathe, for a while.
It was never just one line with Ben, though. One line would turn into two, then six, then he’d find himself waking up at a train station at dawn not knowing how the hell he got there.