Truth

“What? You’ve never seen a guy in boxers?”

OF COURSE I HAVE, BUT NONE OF THEM WERE REID KING! JESUS! He was trying to kill me. That’s why he all of a sudden wanted to “work.” He wasn’t really trying to work; he was murdering me. And it would be a slow, painful death—I knew that for certain.

“Just tell me when you’re done,” I mumbled, still covering my eyes.

I felt the bed dip and then heard his sultry voice. “I’m done.”

Slowly, I removed my hand and peeked one eye open. Reid was lounging back now, fully dressed, his lean body lying on the bed with the pillow and an open notebook beside him. He had a pencil in his hand, twirling it around and around with those talented fingers as he stared down at the paper.

“I can’t do this with you staring at me.”

I laughed, throwing my head back. “You can get up and perform in front of thousands and thousands of people, but you can’t tell me what a pillow makes you feel?”

Reid grunted but didn’t say anything. Instead, he just stared at the pillow.

“Okay, how about this…” I started. “Scratch the pillow idea.”

“And do what? Because I can’t just shit out words, Brooklyn. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Duly noted.”

I had an idea. An idea that came out of nowhere. And considering I had no clue how to get Reid back to what he was before, I was blindly pulling a rabbit out of a magician’s hat, hoping it would work in my favor.

“Why don’t we get to know each other first, and then we can dig a little deeper? It’s hard to open yourself up to people regardless, let alone someone you don’t even know.” Reid remained motionless on the bed, still staring down at the pillow with his face unmoving. I started to get nervous. I started to remember that he wasn’t just a normal guy who just happened to be excessively attractive. I remembered that he was Reid King—someone most people aspired to be like, someone who sang like the heavens had opened up, someone who was so successful it made Steve Jobs curious. He doesn’t care to get to know you, Brooklyn. God. “Or… okay. Maybe we shouldn’t do that. I just thought—”

“That seems better than this bogus ‘describe a pillow’ shit.”

I grumbled, “You wouldn’t be describing it. It was an exercise for you to get your creativeness rolling.”

Silence.

Uncomfortable, awkward silence.

“Have you ever played twenty questions?”

Reid’s amber eyes drove into me, and I wished so badly that I could decipher what was going through his head. I couldn’t, though. Reid was closed up tight like a clam at the bottom of the ocean floor. His well-defined Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he angled his head upward. I gulped, now sweating, and then he said, “Have you ever breathed oxygen? Of course I’ve played twenty questions.”

I chuckled. “Well, you are Reid King. You act like most things are below you. How would I know if you had ever played such a normal game?”

“You know, I was actually a normal kid at one time. I did normal teenager stuff.”

“Now that’s a great start. I’ll go first to piggyback off that statement. What was the most normal thing you did as a teenager?”

Reid eyed me suspiciously. “How is this going to help me write a song? How is this going to help me get my shit together?”

I cocked my head to the side. “I already told you. In order for us to collaborate together, we need to be comfortable with each other.”

I had no idea if this idea would even come remotely close to working. I just figured that Reid needed to be comfortable. He needed to know that I wasn’t out to get him, that I wasn’t just sent here to breathe down his neck to write a song. How could you truly open up to someone if you had no idea who they really were? It was a start, right?

Maybe, maybe not. But I knew that I needed to go with my gut, and my gut was telling me to show Reid what it was like to be normal, to be comfortable, to laugh again.

Reid King had yet to smile a true smile since I’d met him over a week ago. If he was onstage, he was smiling, but it never quite reached his eyes. I could still see the drawn look that he tried so desperately to hide.

He just needed to get back to where he was before—using his emotions to create the most explicitly beautiful music I’d ever heard. He was hiding from them. He was hiding and burying things deep. I could tell. That was what my gut was saying, and my gut was never wrong. I knew it for certain.

“Why are you nodding?” Reid asked, now staring at me.

“Huh? Who? What?” My face felt hot. I was rambling, doing that nervous thing that Jane always made fun of me for and nodding my head in agreement with my thoughts. God, I am a dweeb.