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.
At the end of the first three weeks on the road, George heard a quiet knocking on her hotel room door. They were in Chicago and everyone in the city was asleep it was so late.
George got up from her spot on the couch in the hotel living room, leaving her whole spread of necessary equipment there on the coffee table. She had insisted Sydney and Jamie take the beds in every hotel room they got these days as it gave George the freedom to stay up and work as late as she wanted. She didn't sleep great as it was and hotel beds made the situation even worse. Her only option was work.
George cracked open the door and found Leo standing out in the hallway, his hand extended out to her with a notebook and a phone.
"I want this on the album," Leo said, greetings at three in the morning apparently not his thing.
George took the notebook and started looking over the lyrics hastily scrawled across the page. She had to assume the phone had a voice recording of the melody.
"Uh, yeah. Okay. Sure. I'm gonna need-"
"Change whatever you want to make it a better song. I don't care."
Leo's words were sharp and terse and George could hear the vulnerability he was trying to cover up.
"Okay. But, Leo- Leo wait! Stop!"
George's cry echoed down the empty hallway and just barely kept Leo from retreating completely back into his room across the hall. He stopped, thankfully but George knew he was ready to run at a moment's notice.
"You need to be lead vocal on this."
George made it so there was no room for questions in her voice. This was a demand.
"I'll take a look at this in the morning, tighten it up, and then tomorrow evening, meet me back here to record. Promise?"
George waited for Leo to respond, her breath pent up in her chest, afraid she'd lose him forever if she even breathed. Leo finally nodded and George could breathe again.
"I'll see you then, yeah?" She asked.
"Yeah. See you then," he responded. And just as fast as he had appeared, he was gone again.
*
It was a juggling act and George couldn't look down for one second lest she fumble and lose all three members of the band. The only thing holding their album together was her and she felt herself being pulled in three different directions. Somehow they had enough faith in her to trust her executive decisions because none of them seemed interested in offering input or critique. George gave up winning awards for this project. If it got done, that was enough for her.
Her vocals, her arrangements, even her songwriting skills, were the glue holding the whole thing together and George was ready to be done with this project. She had already passed along the responsibility of mixing to someone else. Julien could have the headache of finding someone else to take that mammoth on. She was reaching her limit.
But at least she wasn't in LA.
The end of her fifth week was suddenly upon her and George looked up and found they were in Canada somehow. She had missed the whole of the east coast run.
It's award show night, George couldn't help remembering as she bothered to look at the date for the first time in weeks. That night, she couldn't sleep. No surprise there. Even on the softest pullout couch, in the nicest hotel yet, all the way in Montreal, on the other side of the continent from where George knew so many things were happening, still she could not sleep. Not tonight.
And just like she couldn't sleep, she couldn't work either. Her distract had failed her. The thought made her sick and so George left her room behind to seek distraction elsewhere.
The band and their crew had the run of the hotel. It was part of their agreements with every hotel they stayed at that there was to be leniency with where the band and their crew could wander throughout the hotel late at night.
George found a ballroom on the ground floor, its floors empty, the stage bare. There was nothing to even distinguish it from anything else than a fancy storage room where they kept piles of chairs except for a large black grand piano placed in front of a wall of windows.
The keys were cold, the glass to the left of her freezing as George took a seat on the neat black leather bench. Her hands fell to instinctual chords, her mind started playing a melody she thought might sound nice. But she stopped on the wrong note, with the melody unsolved, the song echoing through the silence as she realized what song she was playing. She tried picking out something else, anything else, anything other than that song.
But it was too late. Flashes of images, scenes she had seen a million times before, the rehearsals, the sound checks, the make-up and hair, everything that went into that oh-so-important night. And Felix. Always Felix. It always came back to Felix.
What song was he going to perform? Was he nervous? Had they found out yet which awards he had the highest chance of winning? Did he know she was nominated too? Did he care? Would he look for her when everyone took their seats?
He was the highest nominated act that year. She was the highest nominated act, too. She had to keep reminding herself of that. That album was as much hers as it was his. She had even scored one more nomination than him. Producer of the Year.
Julien had tried arranging it with Sydney to get George back in town in time for the show. George stopped her brain from digging too deeply into what his persistence implied. She didn't care. At least, that's what she told herself.
In a quick ten-minute conversation where he asked her too many times how she was doing, George designated Julien as her representative if, by some lucky chance, George won. But she wasn't going to win. There was no way.
George wasn't the only one who couldn't sleep that night. Her music had attracted another and Johnny was sitting beside her on the bench when George pulled herself out of her spiral.
"That was pretty," he said. "What you were playing," he clarified in response to her confused look.
"Oh, thanks."
George didn't know what she had been playing and took her hands off the piano. Johnny replaced them with his. His long hands flew easily over the keys, speaking of years of practice. The tune he played was sad and lonely like most of the songs he wrote were.
"That's nice," George said.
Johnny kept playing as a soft hum started to go along with it.
"Do you have lyrics for it yet?" George asked, themes and motifs coming to mind as the melody developed.
Johnny's hands faltered at her question as he hesitated to answer. He kept playing to regain his composure.
"This one's for me," he said. George nodded, understanding exactly what he meant.
He met her eyes and gave her a look that George had no problem reading. She knew what would happen if she leaned even an inch closer. And so she stood up even straighter. Johnny looked away, turning his eyes back to the keys as he started to play his melody again, their moment dead before it could become a moment.
Maybe in another life, George thought. Maybe if my heart ever heals, Johnny. Maybe then. But not now.
The small hint of possible romance was effectively done away with when Nate's voice called across the room.
"You two up as well?" he asked.
Johnny stopped playing when Nate appeared through the swinging kitchen doors that led off of the ballroom. He approached the piano with no trace of hesitancy.
"I thought I heard something."
Leo appeared a second later and approached with the same ease. George had to assume it was the late hour that did away with the deep-rooted tension between the three boys.
"We were just messing around," George said, her hands falling back on the keys to play something that would distract from the scene Nate and Leo had found George and Johnny in.
"I like that," Nate said, in response to the tune George was playing. "Something for the album?"
George switched up her chord progression when she realized she was developing Johnny's melody. She could feel Johnny tense beside her.
"Something for another project," she said.
"Grammy's tonight," Leo said, leaning against the piano next to Nate. "You up for anything this year, Georgie?"
George shrugged. "A few."
"We got a few, as well, but we couldn't make it back. I wonder if we won anything."
Leo checked his phone to answer his own question. A look at the time and the lack of congratulations gave him his answer.
"If they don't make you go, then you didn't win anything," George said.
She looked up and found all three of them staring at her with disbelief written on their faces.
"What?" she asked. "It's true."
"It can't be," Nate protested.
"That's how it works, I'm afraid. The more they fight you on attending, the more likely you are to win something."
"Who told you that?" Johnny asked.
"A friend. Besides," George countered. "you forget, I've been to enough of these things. You pick up a thing or two."
"So you must not have won anything then," Leo said.
"If Felix wins, she wins, you idiot," Nate said. "And there's no way Felix isn't winning something tonight."
George's hands faltered at his name. Johnny's hands started moving along the keys to cover for.
"I said you have a higher chance of winning based on whether or not they make you sure you attend. I said nothing about whether or not you have to go."
"So," Johnny said, "Did you win anything?"
A heavy pause hung between the four of them as all eyes fell on George right as Johnny stopped playing. It was broken by the sound of George's phone ringing. All four sets of eyes snapped to where it sat on the hood of the piano, vibrating against the dark wood. Julien's name lit up the screen and George had to remember to take a deep breath before she grabbed her phone and left the boys behind.
She came to a stop on the other side of the room, standing in front of the windows that looked out onto the snowy city that slept before her.
"Hey," she said. That was all she said.
Julien's voice was excited, she could hear that. He rattled off a list and George's brain worked on processing what she said but it failed when he got to the last one.
Her one. Her only solo nomination.
"You won, Georgie!"
Julien's excitement ebbed when he noticed she wasn't replying.
"Thanks for calling," George managed to stumble out. "I'll call you tomorrow, okay?"
"Okay," Julien said, dragging it out to keep George from hanging up on him. "I'm proud of you, kid."
George felt a trail of blood start to pour through the bandages around her heart and she didn't have anything to stop the bleeding. All she could do was hang up the phone.
"So?" Nate asked.
"Did you win?" Leo added.
George waited for the pain to lessen, for her heart to harden, for something, anything to ease to pain currently ripping through her gut.
They did it. They had done it. They had won. He must be so happy right now, George thought. That was what sent the tears falling.
"Yeah," she said, in a cracked voice. "Yeah, I won."
"Congratulations!"
"Way to go, Georgie!"
Leo and Nate's exclamations covered up the sound of George sniffing. She wiped her eyes before putting on the only smile that fit and turned around.
"Thanks, guys."
She pressed her lips together when her thanks were uttered and moved back to the piano bench. She could cry when they left and they would leave if they thought she wanted to talk about the album.
She was right. As she started playing the opening chords to one of Leo's songs for the album, Leo was suddenly concerned about the time and Nate forced a yawn. They left as suddenly as they had appeared.
But Johnny remained. He wasn't fooled by George's defense tactic as he could see the tears falling to the keys.
"So," she said, anything to break the quiet of the room. "Do you wanna work on that song?"
"George, we don't have to" Johnny started. But he stopped when George looked up.
She didn't have to ask again. She didn't have to say please. It was written on her face how badly she needed to work on his song.
"Sure," he said. "Why not? So, I was thinking the melody could go something like this..."
As he started to play, the part of George's brain that worked on autopilot kicked on. The thing she had been doing for so many years had yet to fail her and it wasn't doing so now.
Producer of the Year, she thought, the four words stamping themselves on her brain. She was Producer of the Year.
A/N:
Oohhh. This one cuts DEEP!!
Who cried? You? Yeah. Me too.
Fun fact: Johnny Stephens was George's ORIGINAL love interest. You'll read in an iteration later on but yeah! Johnny was her ORIGINAL love interest!
George's original plot, the first ever George plot line, was George on tour with a boy and on the verge of breaking up and her task was to producer their last album!
I wrote ALOT for that version. 22 chapters, in fact. That iteration of George, however, I will not be publishing. Trust me on this one. It's long, it's rambling and it is not worth reading.
I mean, if you guys beg me like a lot and never stop begging me, yeah okay maybe one day. I'm kind of pushover.
Anyway. On to the next emotionally devastating chapter!