Bo & Ember (14 page)

I nodded quickly, encouraging him to get on with it. Ember watched our interaction with a bit of tension on her face. I hadn’t given her reason to think I’d be anything but a pain in the ass about Beckett. That was about to change.

“Well,” he continued, “demand for you two has been crazy. Ever since the vineyard show.”

“Right,” I agreed. “The traffic on The Six’s website went crazy the night after we performed.”

“Yardley’s web design team has your page ready to launch. She wants to check a few details with you, but even the second they announced they’d signed you,
their
traffic has increased almost threefold.” Beckett eyed Ember with a proud peacock grin.

Ember stood and stretched. The bottom hem of the long sleeved brown shirt she was wearing rode up, exposing a few inches of skin on her stomach. Beckett’s eyes stayed on hers, which made me hate him a little less.

“How the hell have I missed this explosion in popularity?” Ember said, somewhat sarcastically, as she rolled her neck back and forth. Every movement of hers seemed uncomfortably sexy in the presence of other men. I knew that was all in my head, but I didn’t want them eyeing her the way I did.

That was the blessing and curse of marrying the most gorgeous woman in the universe, I guess.

Beckett sat on a nearby stool, arching a mischievous eyebrow. “Because you’ve been up here playing house.”

“Shit,” Ember sighed, “isn’t that bad? Shouldn’t we be out, like, connecting?”

“No. It’s fucking brilliant.” Beckett leaned forward, taking his hands from his pockets and leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “The counterculture lovers signed to a big record label, living all Salinger-like in New Hampshire while recording their debut album in their love nest? Do you not see the romance of it all?

Ember hung her head, shaking it back and forth. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Nope,” Beckett asserted. “Brill-i-ant.”

“We’re not really even the counterculture ones.” While Ember had surrendered a bit more to her upbringing over the last year, it was still a hard pill to swallow at times.

Beckett snapped his fingers and pointed an inch from Ember’s nose. “Don’t. Don’t even say that. Ever. Your music, your look, your
name
… it’s counterculture. It’s going to sell. Big. Look at the Top 40 artists this week. Christ, look at the top
ten
. You’ll see it dominated with real singers who can actually play an instrument. Auto-tune is as foreign to them as genetically modified chicken. These are your people.
You
are
their
people.”

Jesus.
Beckett knew his shit.

Ember turned to get my opinion. “Are you hearing this?”

I grinned. “Quick, let’s go upstairs and compost something.”

Beckett laughed, but spoke seriously. “That’s the right idea.”

“I don’t want to be dishonest…” Ember wrung her hands, looking at me pleadingly.

“Babe,” I stood and walked over to her, “it’s not dishonest. We had fruit and seaweed for lunch. You grew up on a commune and went to an Ivy League school as an act of rebellion. It’s a gorgeous story how you emotionally reconciled with your parents and fell in love again with the lifestyle you’ve always known.”

Ember twitched her lips and arched her eyebrow suspiciously. “How do we explain you, then?”

I shrugged impishly. “Plot twist?”

As Beckett chuckled, a familiar voice trailed down the stairs and into the studio.

“What? The broody millionaire jock-turned-philanthropist? Ah the possibilities of how to
explain
him.” By the end of his sentence, Tyler was smirking in the studio doorway.

“Oh, who the fuck asked you?” I teased.

Ember’s face lit up. “Hey, you! I was wondering when I’d hear from you again. I thought you were blowing me off. Oh. Tyler, this is our sound engineer, Beckett. Beckett, this is Tyler.”

Beckett turned his back to me to shake Tyler’s hand. After the introductions, Beckett headed back to the control room to grab the files he needed. Tyler gave a minute nod in Beckett’s direction, raising his eyebrows hopefully.

I shrugged, highlighting my ignorance about Beckett’s sexual orientation. All I knew about his sex life was he’d slept with my wife when they were seventeen. Ember seemed to think Beckett had slept with Yardley, but I tried not to think about Beckett sleeping with
anyone
.

Tyler nodded approvingly, then turned his attention to Ember.

“I’d never blow you off. Not my style.” He winked, causing me to roll my eyes, then continued. “Anyway, I figured since I hadn’t actually
seen
Bo since you’ve been back, I’d bring some of my plans here and we could go over them together. I thought you were only recording in the evenings, though. Is this a bad time?”

Ember nodded to the control room. “We’re actually done for the day. Beckett’s got a conference call for work so he’s heading back to his hotel. We’ve actually got friends coming up for dinner tonight, but I
need
you to meet Monica. She’ll freak.”

Honestly, I’d forgotten about our dinner plans. Time and space seemed to shift imperceptibly when I was in the studio. We hadn’t seen Josh and Monica since we’d been back, and I was really looking forward to seeing them.

Tyler looked slightly unsure as he addressed me. “Are you sure? I don’t want to crash your plans.”

I moved over to where he and Ember were standing and put my hand on his shoulder. “The more the merrier. What’s the point of a house this size if we don’t fill it with people from time to time?”

“Well then,” he smiled, “let’s go upstairs and I can show you what I’ve come up with.”

“You guys go ahead,” Ember said. “I’ll be up in a sec. Just gotta talk to Beckett about something.” She turned on her heels and bounded into the control room as Tyler and I left the studio and headed for the stairs.

Tyler and I sat at the corner of the dining room table, and he pulled out his laptop. “That’s an insane studio you’ve got down there, Bo. Really impressive.”

“Thanks. I had it built a couple of years ago. Three, I think? I can’t remember anymore.”

I used to reference time by things that happened before my parents died, and things after. Once Rae died and Ember and I got married, though, benchmarks got fuzzier and I no longer knew if I should anchor the hourglass in the tragedies or the happy moments. I knew my therapist would tell me it wasn’t healthy to dwell on anything negative if I wanted to train my brain to focus on the positive, but that was textbook advice that didn’t seem to translate into real life functioning for me. I hadn’t connected with her since I’d moved back to Concord, though I realized I should schedule an appointment soon.

“Yeah,” Tyler sighed, “guess it’s been a long time since I’ve been here, huh?” He ran his thumb against the corner of his mouth and looked down. I don’t know if the movement was conscious, but I consciously chose to
not
respond to it.

By not responding to it, though, Tyler and I were thrust into this short burst of incredible silence that made both of us shift in our seats.

I cleared my throat, not wanting to dwell. “So, want to show me what you’ve got?”

“Wait!” Ember shouted from the top of the stairs. “Don’t start yet!”

Tyler laughed and his signature bright smile returned to his face. “She’s awesome, man.”

I smiled as all the tension left my shoulders. “Yeah. She is.”

Ember stormed into the room and sat next to Tyler so she could better see his laptop. “I leave you two alone for three seconds and you’re going to try to design the house without me?”

“What’d you have to talk to Beckett about?” I asked, leaning forward so I could see what Tyler was pulling up.

“Oh, some marketing stuff for us. I’ve been chatting with Monica and she gave me some ideas I wanted to run by him. Live podcast interviews, sample tracks, live recording feed … he left out the basement door. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

Her face was pink with excitement. I knew it was going to be a tough transition with all the life changes we had going on at once, so it was a relief to see her smiling like that.

“Excellent ideas. What’d Beckett think?” I was impressed with Ember’s initiative on the business side of things. She seemed hesitant when it came to anything outside the studio.

“He thinks they’re all great ideas. I told him we’d talk to Yardley tomorrow. I just wanted his impression.”

Tyler whistled. “Wanna switch gears here?” He pushed his laptop away from him to give us a clear view of the screen.

“Sorry,” Ember whispered with a giggle.

“It’s okay, you’re safe from detention,” Tyler teased back.

Once Ember focused her attention on the screen, she gasped. “Wow.”

I squinted my eyes, tilted my head, and looked around the room. “That's … that’s this room?”

Tyler nodded, eyeing me cautiously.

“Wow is right!” I smiled at the possibilities that lay before us.

With his interior design program, Tyler had a full mockup of the dining room. When he pushed a button, we got to see a “live” transformation of the room as he saw it. The table we were sitting at disappeared and a wider, more country-looking table took its place. The wallpaper was replaced with a pale yellow that made it look like the sun was shining through the windows. The wall behind us slid out of the way and made way for a sunroom addition. I was floored.

Tyler took a deep breath and spoke in the most professional voice I’d ever heard from him in real life. “I know it’s a lot. So just take a minute and look. We’re able to consider the small sunroom because when your parents remodeled the kitchen and made it wider, it created this short alcove of unused space outside. If we put a sunroom there, it won’t really be a loss of yard because you can use it year round. We’ll insulate the hell out of it and put a small wood stove in the corner, here.” He tapped the trackpad and a wood stove appeared.

Ember sat back in her seat. “This is beyond anything I could have imagined. I was excited for a new table and fresh paint.”

“Well, this is kind of what I do.” Tyler smiled almost bashfully as he continued staring at the screen.

“We have a couple of choices for the kitchen,” he continued. “We can leave it as is, or we can move some things around so you can have two entry points to the sunroom since they’ll share a wall…”

For the next hour, the three of us discussed the bottom floor renovations of my childhood home. The living room would receive cosmetic treatment and some built in shelves carved into the wall. My office would be rearranged to fit two new desks, allowing Ember and I to have a shared professional space. Ember protested, saying she didn’t have anything that she needed a desk for, but Tyler told her she’d regret it if she didn’t have it. He said at the basic level it would be a place to leave her computer at night, since he wanted to keep all electronics out of the bedroom.

“Shoot,” Ember hissed as she checked the time on her cell phone. “I’ve got to get into the kitchen and start dinner. Monica and Josh will be here any minute. Tyler, can you come back tomorrow or the next day to talk about the upstairs?” Ember stood and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Sure. I’ve got one or two things I want to talk to Bo about, but I’ll come back and we can finalize ideas. I can start pricing things for you.”

Ember stopped as she crossed the threshold into the kitchen, turning around slowly and looking a bit embarrassed. “Shit. We haven’t really discussed a budget.”

Tyler looked to me for direction. I took the lead.

“We’ll discuss it later. I’ve given Tyler figures already. Sorry, it slipped my mind.” I stood, and Tyler followed suit.

Ember’s eyes settled on me for a few seconds. Her lips pulled into a straight line before she came up with a smile and said, “Okay. Well, thanks for everything, Tyler.” She gave him a quick hug and returned to the kitchen, burying her head in the refrigerator as she dug around.

Tyler nodded toward the stairwell. Once at the top of the stairs, he rapped a knuckle against the wall. “I want to leave the widow’s watch as is. It’s brilliant and the light it lets in here is something I could never recreate. I want to talk to you about stripping the hallway, too. Getting rid of all this dark wood. I never remember it being this dark in here when we were kids. Was it?”

I managed a half grin as I prepared my canned response. “Shit happens, and you kind of see things differently, I guess, huh?” I wandered over to Rae’s bedroom door and ran my hand down the doorframe. It
was
a little too dark.

“I … I don’t know if you’re saying that to me or yourself…” Tyler tucked his laptop under his arm and leaned against the opposite side of Rae’s door.

I sighed and set my head against the wood. “I guess I don’t either.”

“Look, Bo.” Tyler spoke quietly, no doubt so Ember wouldn’t hear. “If it’s going to be too weird for you to have me working here—”

I straightened myself and looked him right in his eyes. “Stop. It’s not going to be weird. Sorry that I went rogue there for a second. Look, it’s fine. It’s all over now, right?”

Tyler’s face fell right along with his eyes as they swept to the floor. “Yeah,” he swallowed hard, “but you know I never meant to—”

“Hey,” I interrupted. “We were all just kids. None of us knew a damn thing. But, yeah … do whatever you want to the hallway, okay? You worked a miracle in that bedroom. She’s in love.”

Tyler’s smile was infectious as he met my eyes. “So are you. And, Christ, it’s a beautiful thing.”

Just then, there was a knock on the door.

“That must be Josh and Monica.” I smiled and slapped Tyler’s shoulder. “Come down and meet them before you take off.”

“This is Ember’s best friend, right?” Tyler trailed me, trying to organize himself socially.

“Yep. They went to Princeton together and worked at the Hope Foundation until Ember and I left for California.”

“That’s domestic violence, right?”

I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned, confused, to Tyler. “Huh?”

“The Hope Foundation. They deal with domestic violence.”