December 24th [COMPLETED]

11. Producer of the Year

A/N: This chapter follows the events of Chapter 6 of Dec. 24th. George and Felix have broken up.

George was on the road again. That was what mattered. Was she tired? Yes. Was she so emotionally frail she worried she was going to burst out into tears if someone looked at her wrong? Also yes but she was working on that. Hence the road.

She was moving again. Still working (that never seemed to stop). And she was out of LA. That was what mattered.

It helped that she was contractually obligated to travel with Late Nights as per the agreement she had signed with them in the fall. It gave her an excuse to avoid the warmhearted attempts of her family and friends to comfort her during this time.

If there was one thing George didn't need after getting her heart ripped from her chest and then thrown to the ground over and over again until it shattered, it was comfort. Hence, the road.

George knew there was tension among the three members of the world's largest current boy band. She had picked up on it during their meeting in New York last fall. The three members all stood a little too far away from each other. And each of them worked a little too hard to not meet the other members' eyes. George knew it was going to be a tough job going in. She was even excited for the challenge. She was excited about anything that took her mind off the gaping wound that sat right where her heart should have been.

And yet, somehow, in all her years of experience, George hadn't been able to predict just how bad things were between the members of Late Nights. It became quite obvious within her first week on the road with the band that she was not making an album for a band. That would have required the three of them to be in the same room at the same time at some point. So, instead, she settled on making three solo projects and using the best of her abilities to make it sound like a cohesive piece of art.

A thought that ran through her head over and over during her time with Late Nights was "I better win Producer of the Year after all this."
And she deserved it. George started juggling the three enraged former best friends/soon-to-be former bandmates as soon as she stepped on to her bus.

George didn't know the story behind the break up of the band, other than the fact that things hadn't been good for a while and they were waiting for the perfect time to tell the fans. Her work on the album was a part of that timing. She kept her strict boundary of producer, not therapist, to the best of her ability while on the road but the lines grew thin when it came to songwriting.

Johnny Stephens was the easiest to work with. It helped that he avoided spending any amount of time in the band's bus and spent all his waking hours in George's. George was aware of him getting more lead vocals than the others on the album simply because he was there.

She heard more of Johnny's songs than she did either of the two. But Nate Harper put in a solid effort. He was the easygoing one to Johnny's serious manner. His smile was infectious but his presence always quickly turned George's mood sour if she wasn't careful. Nate was friends with Felix. And he was too eager for George's liking to ask her how his old friend was doing.

Luckily he caught onto the state of George's relationship with Felix by reading the message behind George's terse, single-syllable answers.

Leo was a different story, in terms of songwriting, than the other two. George had a hard time pinning him down most days. He had caught on to the fact that her bus was the one place he was sure to run into either of his bandmates and so stayed as far away as possible.

From what George could tell, if Leo wasn't playing soccer with the crew in the parking lot or talking to his long-term girlfriend back home, he was sleeping. George tried scheduling time with Leo specifically, alone in the bus with no one else. to get some amount of his vocals for the backups at least. But trying to pin Leo down was quickly becoming impossible.