Shay thought back to the sacred few days he’d spent with Ollie away from the tour—sleeping in his bed, eating his wonderful Polish food, fooling around on his bed, making him—
“Yeah, Dad. I’m looking after myself. Don’t worry about that.”
Frank grunted again, clearly unconvinced, but he let it go; he always did. Giving Shay grief wasn’t his style.
They said their goodbyes. Shay ended the call and stared unseeing at the screen as a sudden wave of homesickness washed over him. Life at his childhood home was as simple as the food, and he yearned for it as much as he did the complexities of being with Ollie.
I want to go home.
But he couldn’t. He had a show to play—a big one—and zero idea of how he was going to open it.
Shay dropped his phone on a bench and opened his flute case. He picked the flute up and pieced it together, blowing dust from the lip plate and mechanisms. It seemed like a year since he’d last played it, but in reality, it had only been a few weeks. A month, perhaps. How much could change in that time.
He brought the flute to his lips and sucked in a breath.
His phone rang.
It was Ollie.
* * *
Shay’s heartjumped at lightning speed, but his arm seemed to move in slow motion as he grabbed the phone, and his tongue felt thick and heavy. “Um, hey.”
“What’s wrong?”
Shay blinked. Of everything he’d imagined Ollie might say first, it wasn’t that. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”
“Your voice. You sound like you’re choking.”
Shay blew out a breath and set his flute on the bench. “I’m okay, I’m just… fuck, I don’t know. The show tonight has to be massive—all the record-company execs and media wankers are coming—but I literally have no idea what to play.”
In the grand scheme of things, it sounded ridiculous, but as Shay laid a hand over his tight chest, he realised Ollie was right; he was choking.
Ollie hummed thoughtfully. “That wasn’t what I expected you to say.”
“No?”
“No. But that’s probably a good thing. You know what you need to play. You just haven’t figured out how to get there.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Ollie chuckled, dark and throaty. “What does? Okay, think about it like this: what makes this gig so important? Apart from the obvious business stuff I know you’re not that interested in.”
Ollie knew him so well. The band was Shay’s life, but as long as he earned a living, the commercial details rarely crossed his mind. If Corina was happy, he was happy. So what was it about this gig that mattered so much?
He sat on the bench and ran a finger over his flute. “I guess it’s because we never thought we’d get here. The first gig we ever played in London was to twenty-six people, and half of them went home before we were done. We laughed about it—we had to—but we never dreamed we’d be playing a sold-out show to six-thousand people three years later.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re a pirate band from Derby. Shit like that doesn’t happen to bands like us.”
“Or so you thought.”
“Yeah. I suppose.” Shay could hear Ollie’s slow, even breathing. It was nothing like the tense, snatched breaths he’d seen Ollie struggle for in darker conversations. “I think I need to unpick the journey, musically. We have so much material to choose from, it overwhelms me sometimes.”
Ollie said nothing for a long moment. Then he sighed. “I overshot the first film I was ever commissioned for. It was a three-minute movie, but I wound up with six hours of footage to break down.”
“What did you do?”
