Verse Eighteen

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She was nothing like Ivy. 

She wasn't kind and patient.  Humble without trying. 

She wasn't overly strong willed or stubborn. 

There was no fire in her at all, really. 

Just a cellphone in her hand and sunglasses perched on the tip of her thousand dollar nose job. 

Just french tip manicured fingernails that nearly blinded me with the jewels that had been pressed on them, their razor sharp tips surely uncomfortable when trying to do everyday tasks. 

Seriously, how did she go to the bathroom with those?  Blow her nose?  Pick up change from the ground? Open a can?

"Kade, this song you're putting out is amazing.  What do you think about doing a Stella Stein feature?"

Oh.  Of course this was what she wanted.

"Sorry, Jackie.  I've already got someone on the feature."

Stella's head jerked up from the phone she'd been so focused on the past thirty minutes of our 'business' lunch and affixed her dark brown eyes on my face before flicking her black and dyed hot pink hair over a shoulder covered in a (hopefully faux) fur mini jacket. 

What was the point of wearing a jacket if it was only sleeves?  Why not wear the whole thing? 

Fashion lately made absolutely no sense which was why I was glad my stylists made sure to keep me in simple pieces and dressing 'boring' according to Jackie for the most part. 

There was that one incident with feathers at the Met Gala...yeah, I didn't use that designer ever again after that one. 

"Oh?  Who is it?"

Stella's interest was slightly piqued, but there was no way I'd be giving Ivy's feature away to her.  It would send the wrong message, for one. 

She was a pop star, and my new album was heavily leaning dark indie and acoustic folk.  Having her on the album would be counterintuitive to what I was trying to do. 

"She's new.  My songwriter."

"Your songwriter?"

Jackie's question was sharper than I'd have liked as she put down her stylus to the iPad in front of her and made sure she knew her distaste was on display as her eyes crinkled.

The sizzling of skillets in the back of the restaurant filtered in throughout the meandering wisps of conversations threaded with shady business deals or illicit affairs. 

Odeon was a place to eat, sure, but it was also the breeding ground for the New York version of Hollywood's elite to flaunt their wealth and be photographed and spotted by the likes of gossipmongers bearing the same name as Deuxmois posers and fakers.

I couldn't count on my hand the amount of blind items I'd been the subject of thanks to them and their rumor mill, and over half of them were false. 

The ones about my sister, though...those were all true. 

And it burned my stomach to ashes just thinking about them getting their hands on anything else in my life that I preferred to keep private. 

Like Ivy.

But that ship had long since sailed after she'd agreed to feature on the single she'd written.

I only hoped it proved to be the right idea.

I would find out at midnight just how much of a hit or a flop it would become.

"Is this the mystery songwriter I've heard so much about, then?"

Jackie's eyes faltered, flicking between Stella and my own eyes, a pinched expression souring her face. 

"Oh?  And how much have you heard about her?"

"Just that she's good enough for you to commission her for the entire album, and no one else.  I'm honestly surprised—I use at least three different teams to help me write."

Her long nails clicked back and forth on the dinner table, and my teeth ground to dust in my mouth. 

"So, Kade," Stella started, her nails reaching along the table to where my arm had been resting beside my plate. 

She ran those claws over my arm before I had the chance to yank it back.  There was a flash of light from outside the apparent tinted windows.  Not tinted enough, seemed like.

"How about that song?"


***


My sweat-slicked palms wouldn't dry on the denim of my jeans. 

"Are you sure we should even be entertaining this, Corbin?"

He shrugged. 

"It couldn't hurt.  I mean, has Ivy signed the contract yet?"

"No, I'm sure she'll want to have her father's lawyers look them over before sending the copies back over virtually."

"Are you sure you don't want to wait?"

"No, the execs at the label are breathing down my neck for some new material, and this will drum up excitement for a new album coming soon.  It'll be the lead single off it.  I just don't want anyone else featuring on it besides Ivy."

"Then tell them that."

I followed Corbin's narrowed eyes to Stella in the booth with the headphones firmly clasped over her ears crushing the lion's mane of hair on her head. 

"Jesus.  Why did I agree to let Jackie's bullshit into the music?  I told her—stick to the managing and I'll stick to the singing.  And look what happened."

Stella hit a stray note off-key and I was ready to call it then and there. 

This wasn't her song. 

This was Ivy's song—our song. 

The notes sounded all wrong coming out of the speakers, but there was a rigid smile on Jackie's face.

"Jackie—I don't want her singing this one.  We can find her another to feature on."

"She wanted this one.  Someone snuck footage of you singing it at your show and she said she fell in love with it.  I can't tell Stella Stein no."

My hair was two seconds away from being ripped out by my fingers. 

"You will if you want to keep your job."

Her face paling, the red lipstick on her mouth looked more like blood than makeup. 

The crow's feet around her eyes crinkled. 

"She is good for business, and what's good for business is good for you.  You should know that.  I'll tell her when she's done that you've decided to go another way."

"Thank you for doing your job.  You know, what I pay you for."

Turning back to Corbin, his eyes were wide. 

"Brutal."

"Hardly."

But that was when the door to the studio opened and Ivy strode in looking nothing short of a dream. 

Pale lilac cotton clung to her body like it was crafted out of her skin, the dress a near-sheer knee length that was kept more casual by the thin white cardigan she'd thrown over it but it fell to her elbows and exposed the creamy skin of her shoulders and long column of her neck that I'd imagined running my mouth over far too many times in her presence. 

Everyone else in the studio became background noise as our eyes held, a slight pink tinge coming to settle across the apples of her cheeks. 

Her deep red hair billowed around her in a soft curtain like the sunset coming to frame the ending of a perfect day, her eyes wide and so bright the green looked as if it was backlit by the leaves of an evergreen forest. 

With her she brought in the scent of the turning fall day and the sugary sweetness of her perfume. 

She curled her black fingernails into her palms before finally coming into herself and realizing there were other people in the room besides the two of us. 

One look away and the spell was broken, but in the span of the ten seconds we'd stared at each other, it had felt like an eternity. 

Until Stella Stein opened her mouth again and butchered our song, and Ivy's face scrunched up into confusion before settling into a mask of understanding contempt. 

"Stella wanted to record this one, but I already told Jackie it was a no-go."

Jackie snorted in the corner. 

"Yeah, sure," Ivy said, her voice small against something I could see slowly crushing her as she retreated into her shell. 

"Hey, Corbin, can I—"

"Yeah.  I'll cover for you with—"

A high note that came out of nowhere and definitely didn't fit in the song punctured the air as the melodic instrumental continued on as if Stella wasn't completely butchering our song. 

"Yeah.  Ivy, can I talk to you for a second?"

She let loose a sigh that sounded like it had come from the deepest part of her, a bone weary sigh that shouldn't have sounded so exhausted from someone so seemingly full of life. 

"Sure.  Lead the way."

Nudging the door to the studio open with my hip, I reached for Ivy's hand instinctually, tugging her forward as her slender fingers gripped my own.

Leading her to the sitting room off the front parlor of Corbin's brownstone, I was more than thankful that his wife had taken their daughter to her piano recital so that we could at least be alone—as alone as we could be with my best friend, manager and a pop star diva in the other room. 

"So, that was a lot, sorry you had to walk in on that.  Stella is...Stella.  Jackie thinks it would help sell more records if she featured on a song, but I already told her that one was off limits.  She only wanted to sing on that track because she knows it front to back."

Ivy's hand dropped out of mine when I tried to pull her toward the couch, but she preferred to stay standing and leaned her hip against the doorframe. 

I grabbed a seat on the couch in the middle of the room and ran a hand through my hair a few times before collecting my thoughts. 

"So did your lawyers have a chance to look over those contracts?  You still want to do the feature, right?  I mean, you don't even have to do anything but sign.  You already did the hard part of recording the vocals, anyway."

She fidgeted in the doorway, wringing her hands until she seemed to make a decision in her mind to come and sit down beside me, her perfume wafting up to me and making me completely forget what the conversation had been about in the first place. 

Because that was Ivy sitting with her thigh touching mine, her exposed legs on full display with her hair falling down her back like a glistening red waterfall. 

And that cardigan had fallen down her arms again, and her neck was so close to me I could practically see her pulse pounding in her veins through her light skin. 

Her green eyes lifted to meet my own, and though I was already a goner, in this moment I hadn't realized just how bad it was. 

Before now, I would've written it off as something simple, like some kind of crush that I could get over with enough time apart from her. 

But in this moment, staring into her eyes and begging her silently in my mind for her to move just the smallest bit closer, I realized. 

I was infatuated with the woman in front of me. 

"I don't know about the song anymore, Kade.  There've been some...things that you don't know about that have come back up and I don't think it will be good for you to be connected to someone like me."

"Someone like you?  What do you mean?"

Her cheeks were the inside of a ripe tomato—bright as the red of her hair, flaming crimson.

"I mean...didn't you do a background check on me?  You have to know about what happened.  We talked about it a little bit, but I figured you were just saving me the embarrassment of bringing it up."

"Bringing what up?  I only know the basics and what you've told me, Ivy, only Jackie and Hollin know everything."

"Oh, great.  That honestly actually makes it worst, I think."

She shook her head as her chest rose rapidly, and a pinprick of anxiety started burning the center of my forehead raw. 

"Ivy, what's this about?  Is it about that guy at your dad's house—Caleb?"

She flinched visibly, and my entire body tightened with a freshly coiled rage.

"So it is about him."

"Yeah.  Just something that happened back in freshman year is coming back to haunt me.  So maybe it's a good thing that Stella Stein is here to record the track, I don't think you should use my vocals on it."

"If you don't want me to use your vocals, then I'm not using anyone else's besides my own.  No one else will feature on it if I can't have you."

She stopped breathing for what felt like minutes but was really only two seconds.  Probably.  It was hard to tell time when I was so damn close to her. 

"I mean—" she broke off in a sigh before craning her neck the other way, refusing to look me in the eye."

"If you think you can hide me behind a pseudonym, then yes.  I want to do it.  But if you can't, and it gets out—"

"Ivy, look at me."

She didn't.  

My hand clasped her jaw and tilted her face toward me, surprise and something else swimming in those deep green eyes of hers as I kept my grip on her and spoke. 

"No one will find out its you.  I will put Hollin and my best guys on it.  I can promise you that.  I actually tried to branch off and write under a different name a few years ago and no one has ever found it even though its on Spotify and everything else—it's doable."

A shaky breath fell past her plump pink lips and it took all my willpower not to lean forward and take that bottom lip in between my teeth. 

"So...this thing that happened in your freshman year?  You don't want to talk about it?"

Like everything else in her life, she kept everything close to the vest.  Considering her home life with her family, it was starting to make sense.  Especially with what seemed like an abusive ex-boyfriend. 

"No, I'm sorry.  I just...can't.  It's just easier to pretend it never happened in the first place.  It hurts less that way."

"I know what you mean."

Which was why no one would ever get an exclusive or a sound bite or the smallest hint of me discussing what had happened with my sister. 

I wasn't going to risk it. 

My hand was still on her jaw, so I let it fall down slightly, resting along the length of her neck. 

The sunlight came slanting through the window in the corner gilding Ivy in a golden light and giving her a halo of light above her head. 

As if I didn't already think she looked like a literal angel. 

"Kade..."

Her voice was a breathless whisper, maybe even a plea. 

She was closer now than she'd ever been before, her peppermint breath coating my mouth. 

And then her pink tongue darted out to lick her lips, and my other hand snaked around her waist until we were impossibly close, breathing in each other's air and trying not to drown on it. 

My hand slid up her neck again until my fingers nestled into the hair by her ear, anchoring myself to her as my fist curled around her red waves which seemed to be her final undoing. 

I tugged her to me in one last desperate moment to have her for myself and she whimpered into my mouth as her lips danced across mine. 

And all I could think was: finally. 


***

Author's Note:

it's only going to get spicier from here ;)

Until next time my lovely readers,
Kristen :)


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