Play Me That Song

28

Beau’s P.O.V.

I watch McKenzie sleep peacefully from across the room. I strum the same melody over and over again. I'm supposed to be writing a new song. I'm on a deadline and it is quickly approaching. And in case I ever get the notion to forget that, Adam is in my ear every day now reminding me that if I can’t get my job done then he would call in some outside help. That definitely is not going to happen. Not now, not for this project. If they want a brand-new song to release after my where they came from episode, a song that they asked to fit that same notion, then it's going to be from me. I might be a lot of things, but I have never been fake. He had listened the first couple of times I insisted I wasn’t going to be a damn puppet just repeating someone else’s words. But now he seems to be deaf. If he makes that same empty threat again, then I'm afraid I'll have no choice but to barge into that fancy office of his and make sure he can hear me.

And yet I am still fucking stuck. Adam swears up and down that McKenzie is clouding my creative vision. “Whatever the fuck that means,” I mumble to myself. I lift the glass of whiskey I've been nursing to my lips. I can concede that I'm a bit distracted lately, but it's worth it. “That other bullshit you do down there,” as Adam had put it, is more important to me. I won’t care if I never release another song if it means righting all of my wrongs with her.

I lower my glass to the table and raise my guitar. I strum that same melody again. But nothing. I have nothing. I sigh heavily. I close my eyes and start to play again. I try to imagine what to put to this tune. Visions flash in my mind, all of them of her. I picture the way I saw her laughing from across the bar that night I wandered in with the production crew. I think of the way she glared at me when she turned around to find that I was the one who had come up behind her and looped an arm around her waist. I see flashes of her dancing with me in the moonlight. I see her wriggling beneath me in black lace. I picture the way she looks when I play her that song she likes so much.

I pause my strumming, pressing my hand over the strings to stop all sound. That song. What is it about that song that she loves so much? That's my ticket to setting some lyrics to this thing. I’ve written plenty of other songs, but none of them have ever caught her interest like that one. She likes them, she dances to them, she sings along with them, but her eyes don’t sparkle when she hears them.

 I watch her roll over in the bed. She is the perfect muse. I have written so much about her before, but I still have so much left to say. If every simple song I write would take her breath away like that old one she loved, then I’d write them all.

I watch her pull the blanket up in her sleep, covering the bite mark below her collarbone that she had yelled at me for earlier when she saw it circled on a picture online. She threw a pillow at me earlier when I told her how cute she looked telling at me like that. She snapped at me when I took her phone away before she could read any of the comments or search for it on Twitter. But she didn’t need to see that shit.

I pick up my guitar to work on that song again, but I find my fingers start picking another song altogether. “Look baby, I’m a rockstar,” I sing quietly, smiling to myself at the memory of McKenzie excitedly singing this to me in the crowd at BG’s show. We've spent a lot of festivals together and made a lot of damn good memories at them over the years, but I'm convinced none of those are as good as the memories we've here this past weekend. From the first moment we stepped into the suite and her eyes shone in awe until carrying her sleeping ass into bed a couple hours ago, the whole weekend has been so good that I don’t even mind the paparazzi being around. I want these memories to last forever. Not that I would need to rely on paparazzi photos since I’m sure McKenzie, Emma, and Luke have taken enough pictures between the three of them to fill an entire damn book.