The Debt 7 (Club Alpha) (10 page)

“What do you think, Rory?” she said.

Hec shot her an annoyed glance.
 
“Rory aint paid to think.
 
He’s my water boy, he just does my grunt
work while he learns the ropes.”

The others laughed, except for the
keyboardist, which Raven took note of.

“I’d still be curious to hear his
opinion,” she said.

Rory fidgeted nervously before
answering.
 
“Well…I mean…I really
liked what I heard.
 
It just needed
to be stripped down more, I think.”

“See what I mean?” Hec laughed, as he lit
his joint.
 
“That’s dead wrong.
 
Dead wrong.”

“How so?” Raven pushed.

“Because,” Hec said, as he inhaled
sharply, holding the marijuana smoke in his lungs before finally blowing a
cloud out explosively from his lips.
 
“Nowadays, the trend is towards more production, harder beats, more
instrumentation—not less.
 
The
stripped down sound isn’t happening.
 
Electronic music is the biggest music around right now—the hottest
shit—and that stuff is the opposite of stripped down.”

Jake folded his arms.
 
“So, you think I should scrap the new
songs?”

“Look, man, it’s your call,” Hec told
him, passing the joint to the bassist.
 
“All I can tell you is that I don’t think this new stuff will bail you
out of the hole you dug for yourself.”

Jake’s gaze hardened and Hec seemed to
realize the blunder he’d just made.
 

“You think I’m trying to bail myself
out?” Jake asked him.

“That came out weird.
 
I’m just saying—“

“What are you saying?” Raven asked him.

Hec turned to her.
 
“Look, I don’t even know who you are.”

“My name’s Raven.”

“Yeah?
 
And what do you know about making
music?
 
Do you even play an
instrument?”

“No.”

He rolled his eyes.
 
“But let me guess.
 
You’re a model, so that means you’re Albert
fucking Einstein, Mozart and Jimmy Iovine all rolled into one.”

“I’m not a model, but I’m flattered you
think I could be,” she smiled.

Jake stood up, his shoulders
flexing.
 
“Hec, you better get the
fuck out of here before I see if I can put your head through this glass
window.
 
My bet is that I can, but
we can always find out for sure.”

Hec stood up, his eyes wide, making him
look like a sixteen year old boy as he backed out of the room.
 
“Come on guys.
 
He’s as nuts as they say he is!”

The rest of the group began filing out
after him.

“Wait,” Raven said, touching the
keyboardist on the arm.
 
“Could you
hang out for a second?”

He nodded, completely mellow, as if he
saw this kind of thing every day, and sat back down again.

Rory was also leaving, but Raven stopped
him, too.
 
“Will you get in trouble
if you stay here with us?”

The young guy considered it.
 
“I don’t really give a shit,” he said,
grinning.
 
“Hec is a total asshole.”

“Good,” Raven laughed.

After Jake saw the others out of the
house, he came back to the control room.
 

Raven stood up.
 
“I think that guy Hector was an idiot,”
she said.
 
“I think he’s completely
wrong about your songs.
 
He doesn’t
understand what you’re trying to do.”

Jake sighed.
 
“Listen, it’s so amazing that you
believe in me.
 
But I just don’t
think I can do this right now.
 
My
head’s just not in the right place.”

“Rory,” Raven said.
 
“Tell us your honest opinion.
 
Do you think Jake has good material here
or not?”

“It’s good,” Rory told them.
 
“It could be great.
 
I don’t know, but I think we should try
and figure it out.”

The keyboardist smiled.
 
“This is some far out shit,” he laughed.

Raven looked at Jake again.
 
“The songs you played for me last
night—just you and your guitar—they didn’t sound anything like what
was happening with that entire band in here today.
 
It doesn’t need to have all those bells
and whistles, Jake.
 
It just needs
you.”

He swallowed, his eyes seeming to get
moist.
 
But then Jake cleared his
throat.
 
“Okay,” he said.
 
“This is how it’s going to be.
 
Rory will produce and engineer these tracks,
and Phil’s going to accompany me on some additional instrumentation.
 
Phil, you can play most of those
instruments, right?”

Phil chuckled.
 
“I can do it all, man.”

“Good.
 
Raven, you sit right next to Rory.
 
I want you to listen, because I’m going
to let you have the final say on how this stuff sounds and what we need to
do.
 
I’m going to depend on you to
be my ears in there, okay?”

Raven’s heart leapt, but she just nodded
calmly.
 
“Of course.”
 

“Let’s get to work, then,” Rory said,
clapping his hands.

And they did.

***

It was nighttime, but finally they’d
finished for the day and Rory and Phil, the keyboardist, had left.

Raven was tired but
happy,
because she felt like the session had gone incredibly well once Hec and the
other idiots had been jettisoned.
 
Of course, it occurred to her that she’d never actually even seen a studio
session before, so how did she know what was good and what was bad?

Maybe it was like Hec said, and she was
just some wannabe producer chic who had screwed Jake up yet again.

Jake went upstairs to have a quick shower
and came down wearing just his swim trunks.
 
He looked hot—there was no other
way to put it, and once again, Raven lost her breath for a moment.

I
can’t believe Jake Novak is standing here, in front of me, half-naked.

“You feel like going for a night swim?”
Jake asked.

Raven glanced over to the pool.
 
“Right now?”

“Not here—the beach.
 
We can walk for a bit, maybe take a
dip…”

She felt something stirring excitedly in
her belly.
 
“Yeah, sure.
 
That sounds nice.”

“Good.
 
Go get your little bikini on, I’ll wait
here impatiently.”

She giggled, shaking her head, and as she
ran by he spanked her ass, and she shrieked, but kept running up the
stairs.
 
She was
happy,
giddy really, as she changed quickly into her bikini, marveling at just how
much skin was visible in this outfit.

I
might as well be wearing dental floss.

But she liked that, too.
 
She wanted to be wearing next to
nothing, just like he was.
 
Everything inside was ready to burst, since she hadn’t been close to Jake
in nearly a week’s time.

Raven ran back downstairs and found Jake
waiting by the back entrance with a bottle of wine in his hand.
 
He looked absolutely dashing, as if the
day’s session had given him new life.

They walked out through the back entrance
and then made their way down to the private beach, which was totally dark at
this time of night.
 
The moon and
stars were bright overhead, casting light onto the water, making it glimmer in
the darkness.

“It’s so perfect out here,” Raven said,
shivering not from cold, but from Jake’s nearness as they walked by the water’s
edge.
 
She could feel cool, wet sand
between her toes, and then the warm water lapping at her feet.

Jake took a deep breath and then
exhaled.
 
“This feels fucking
amazing!” he shouted, whooping and spinning in a circle with his arms
outstretched.
 
“Damn, I feel like
I’ve been reborn.”

Raven laughed, as Jake handed her the
wine bottle.
 
“Did you drink this
whole thing already?”

“No, I hardly even had a sip.
 
I’m drunk on life, and drunk on you,” he
told her.

Raven took a long swig from the
bottle.
 
“I’m glad you’re happy.”

“Happy’s not the word for what I am right
now,” he said.
 

They continued walking, looking out at
the bright lights along the outskirts of the beach, where the strip was, and
all the tourists.
 
Distantly, she
could even hear faint music playing from miles away.

“Jake, I think you’re doing something
beautiful with your songs,” she said.
 
“It’s courageous of you, and I just admire you so much.”

Jake stopped and grabbed her around the
waist with both hands.
 
His touch
electrified her instantly.

“The beautiful thing here is you,” he
said softly.

“I love you so much,” she told him.

“Not only do I love you,” he said, “but I
need you.
 
I need you because when I
see you, I want to be something more than what I am.
 
I want to be better.
 
I want to make you happy, Raven.”

“You do make me happy.”
 

“Come on, last one in…you know how it
goes,” Jake said, suddenly darting into the water.
 
The moonlight glinted off his bare skin
as he dove under the waves and reemerged again, further off now.

Raven set the bottle of wine down,
laughing, and went in after him.

The water was fantastic, a little bit
cool at the very first, but then quickly it felt almost like she was in the
bath.
 
She licked the salt from her
lips as Jake swam over to her, grabbing her around the waist and picking her up
so that she wrapped her legs around his lower torso, hooking her feet just
above the ankles.

She was practically floating, while the
upper half of her body was mostly out of the water, pressed against Jake’s
chest, while his hands held her back for support.

He leaned in and kissed her, gently at
first, and then more deeply.

Smaller waves washed over their bodies as
the moonlight glistened across the top of the water, illuminating everything,
especially Jake.

She opened her eyes and felt that she’d
somehow awoken into another dream, another vision of paradise, of perfection.

It was timeless.
 
It was pure love.

After a short time, Jake set her down and
pulled her by the hand, walking back to the shore, and then lay Raven down on
the beach.

The sand was cool, almost cold, against
her back.
 
She shivered, but then
Jake was climbing on top of her, his warm body like an oven, heating her up
again.

His hands ever so slowly peeled off her
bikini top, and then his tongue was flicking her nipples, his mouth sucking
them until she cried out, but her voice was drowned out by the waves that
crashed nearby.

It was so dark and
private,
she knew nobody could see them in this place, with the moon now even hid behind
some clouds.

She could hardly see Jake
herself,
it had gotten so dark outside.

But she could feel him, feel what he was
doing to her, and she wanted more.

He sucked her nipples, switching from one
breast to the other, his hands encircling them, rubbing, massaging, and then
squeezing.
 
His fingers toyed with
her nipples.

And then he was reaching down, pulling
her bikini bottom off with one quick flick of his wrist.
 
She was completely naked now, here on
this beach, the waves crashing, the darkness complete, the night wrapping them
like a blanket.

Jake wasn’t speaking, but she could feel
him, almost as if he was talking to her through ESP.
 
And what he was whispering was love,
over and over again.

His mouth was on hers again, hot and
greedy, his tongue thrusting, just as his cock pressed into her slit, pushing
through, opening her up all at once.

She moaned, moaned louder, not knowing or
caring how loud she was, because the ocean was much louder.