Carter clears his throat, his eyes darting over my shoulder.
“What?” I ask.
“I may have told my mom that we’d gone on a few dates. It’s fine, though, I’m sure she won’t remember it.”
I start to chuckle and then realize that may not be the appropriate response to a memory joke about someone with Alzheimer’s. I’m notsure what to do with my face…or my body for that matter. “Did you… Did you just make a memory joke about your mother…the one with dementia?”
He chuckles. “Inappropriate?”
“I mean, I don’t think I can tell you how to cope with your mom’s Alzheimer’s, but…at least warn a girl if you’re going to start going dark humor about it.”
A warm smile stretches across his face as he pulls me into a hug. “It feels good to laugh about it for once.”
“Did you talk to her while you were gone?” I ask, knowing Carter tries to call her every day.
“Yeah.” He sighs, dropping onto the edge of the bed. “I talked to both my mom and Mildred, Bill’s wife.”
I sit down next to him, grabbing his large hand in my own.
“How is she?”
“It’s hard to say because I don’t think they’d tell me unless it was really bad. It might just be talking to her over the phone or the change in routine with me gone, but…it feels like she’s getting worse.”
Chapter twenty-two
Carter
“Whatareyoudoinghere?” Jaxon asks me when I join his team leaving the Dome the next night.
“Filling in for one of the guys,” I respond. “Alan asked for some time off once the concert ended so he could call his daughter for her birthday.”
Jaxon nods his understanding as we make our way quickly toward the SUV waiting to take us back to our hotel a few blocks away.
“Great show tonight,” I say once we’re all situated in the car, Weston at the wheel.
“There are few feelings in this world as great as having fifty thousand people singing your songs back at you.”
“Do you write all your songs?” I ask.
“Every single one. I’ve been experimenting a bit with songs written by others lately, but I just can’t seem to bring the same energy to them. There’s something about knowing the feeling behind everyword, every chord progression, that makes it feel real. Turns out, if I don’t have that, I’m just a guy playing a guitar. Doesn’t have the same impact.”
“How do you have enough to say? You’ve got what? Six albums out with roughly twenty songs on each?”
“Seven albums. One hundred fifty-six songs. But I also write songs for other artists occasionally. I think I’ve written over two hundred and twenty songs that have been produced. There are at least a hundred more that I finished that have never seen the light of day.”
“Why’s that?” I ask, confused why someone would finish a song and not just work on it until it was what they wanted.
“It depends. Most of the time, it’s just that my producers or I don’t think it’ll land right, or that it’s such a ‘quintessential Jaxon Steele’ song—their words, not mine—that we can’t sell it to someone else.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
We drive in silence for a few minutes, the bright lights of Tokyo flashing by in a blur of colorful streaks.
When we pull up in front of the hotel, Jaxon says, as if he’s talking to himself, “There have been a couple I recorded that ended up being too personal, so I convinced my team to pull them from the final album.”
I pause, my hand on the door to the car, and really look at Jaxon. He’s still got on his dark jeans and black shirt he wears at basically every concert, his face still lightly coated in sweat. His black cowboy hat is back in the dressing room, ready to be packed up and shipped with the set to Australia, where the team will see this group of equipment next week. He looks tired, though it’s the middle of the night, but itfeels like more than just lack of sleep. The boy I knew in high school looks…weary now.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s get you up to your room. I’m sure your team has your dinner waiting.”
