Chapter Text
Daisy can’t sleep. It’s not unusual, but it is inconvenient. And, yes, habitual cocaine use isn’t helping (fucking duh), but she has a near-infinite supply of down pills and plenty of liquor and that’s typically enough to carry her into unconsciousness regardless of how much goes up her nose. If she strikes the right balance—just enough wine, just enough pills—she might steal a few solid hours, but more often than not, the equation fails her. Nothing takes the edge off the high of a good session, and lately, nearly all of them feel good. Electric, addictive, the kind of delight that lingers long after they’ve packed up and headed home.
She’s more than proud of what the record is becoming. It wouldn’t be exaggeration, wouldn’t even be vanity, to say her mark on it is indelible. Every note, every lyric, every breath of it bears her imprint, pressed in deep and impossible to scrub out, like blood under fingernails. There’s a savage kind of relief in knowing her voice will outlive her, carved into vinyl, rattling around in strangers’ heads long after she’s gone. As long as people keep pressing play. The ache is in guessing how she and Billy will be etched into memory, tangled up in each other whether they like it or not. Bandmates. Rivals. Maybe even something both worse and slightly more accurate, if she’s lucky and legend twists their fights into something cinematic, something sharp-edged and fabled. She doesn’t mind, not really. But it won’t be the full truth. And it sure as hell won’t be kind.
Famous or faded to dust, it hardly matters. Either way, she can already see the shape of it, the way history will set her in stone as Billy Dunne’s co-writer, his co-vocalist. Maybe even, insult to injury, as The Six’s occasional tambourine player. Fantastic. She doesn’t have to be dead to feel herself rolling over in the grave.
Unsettled, Daisy rolls over, topsheet twisting around her calves like a winding sheet as she turns. Sleep is a slippery, elusive bitch, and she is nowhere to be found tonight. The antique grandfather clock she brought home in a missguided (drunk) attempt at sophistication ticks so loudly that she can’t help but try to imagine how easy it would be to tactfully detach (rip out) its clicky-clapper-whatever-you-call-it without damaging the essential timekeeping mechanism; it does make for lovely decor despite its volume.
Sixteen breaths in, deep and measured, and sleep is further out of reach than when she started. Daisy gives up. Rolls out of bed, swings her feet to the floor, and finds her slippers missing, which is both very typical and very annoying. She crosses the room fast, cold feet slapping sharp against tile, snatches the first book her hands find, and makes a break for bed before the cold can settle into her bones.
Very late at night, or on the thinnest cusp of morning, depending on your perspective, when she’s too wired to sleep but too spent to justify wasting a whole pill, Daisy turns to the small horde of books she manages like a tiny library. A little classic philosophy. A stack of esoteric nonsense promising ancient wisdom. New-age spiritualism, flimsy as tissue paper. Self-help books with titles so moronic they almost feel like an insult.
If she can’t sleep, she might as well learn. Might as well read until she can swallow down whatever collective wisdom these pages promise, metabolizing it all like medicine. It remains unclear, even to her, exactly what she's chasing.
In theory, it’s steadiness. Something solid, something she can press her palms against and know it’s real. Something to tether her to her own skin when all she wants is to slip loose and drift through the hallways of her own shallow existence.
It’s also practical, a last-ditch defense for when the wine starts whispering for Billy’s blood. A lifeline for when his name feels heavy at the bottom of her pitted heart.
Unfortunately for Daisy, she’s inexorably trapped in his orbit, dragged under by some unseen force that refuses to let go. It’s uncanny, brutal in its intensity, an unwanted siren’s call that has her running full tilt in the other direction, chasing down anything that might make her feel untouchable, immune. Anything that might dull the sharp edge of every reckless thought that burns through her skull whenever they breathe the same air.
It does nothing for her cause that she and Billy spend nearly every waking hour tangled up in each other, two sloppy, stupid animals burrowed into the same mess of a warren. Writing and fighting, slipping too easily into something that shouldn’t fit but does. Trying impropriety on for size seven times over and back. Testing waters that have already been proven.
All those swizzy daylight hours in the studio bleed into midnight phone calls, voices low, cigarettes burning down to their filters, the moon an indifferent witness. It isn’t romantic. It can’t be. But their conversations hum with something warm and effortless, something she can’t find anywhere else. And when the line finally clicks dead, Daisy is left staring into the dark, settling back into the ceaseless rhythm of pretending solitude still suits her.
There are all the long lunches, just the two of them, stealing ‘focus time’ like they’re getting away with something. Fingers brushing as they drag fries through the same mess of ketchup, neither of them moving fast enough to pretend it doesn’t register. Billy never says a word about the way her hands shake, but she knows he sees it. None of it makes her feel any less undone.
There’s no clean math to define what Billy is to her, and that might be the worst of it. Most days, she can convince herself she hates him. It’s easy enough to make a mantra out of his faults: his unbearable stubbornness, his relentless need for control, the way his voice scrapes against hers in the studio, turning everything electric. But in the dim, uncharted corners of her mind, where intuition drowns out reason, she knows the truth is more dangerous. It isn’t hate. Not entirely. Not even close. It’s something worse, something tangled and unspeakable, and it terrifies her more than she’ll ever admit, even to herself.
It’s fractured and familiar. A borrowed ache, a bruised instinct. Whatever it is, it’s stitched together with threadbare intention and a nameless, heavy itch that refuses to soften. Daisy smells it clinging to her hair like smoke at the end of each day, feels it staking claim at the summit of her spine, a needling pain that keeps her alert. Keeps her coming back for more. Perversely, she’d miss it if it were gone. Call it madness, call it masochism, she can’t explain it either way.
Sometimes, for briefest blips, her mind slips loose, and she grants herself the hollow luxury of reckoning, taking inventory of everything he leaves vacant in his wake. But with every smile, every minute touch, every look, she finds it increasingly difficult to call herself back. Douses the ache with white wine before the clock reads noon, chases it with pills and champagne when the lights tilts low. Trades emptiness for the hollow warmth and meaningless weight of other men in her bed, a revolving door of mediocre not-Billys. It’s more than she wants, but somehow less, too.
In rare moments of honesty, which almost never overlap with sobriety, which in turn almost never coincides with her waking hours, she feels brave enough to name it. Against her will, against every last scrap of reason left in the goddamn solar system, Billy sees her. And she lets him. So of course she wants him with a hunger that makes her unsteady, with clarity sharp enough to split her skull.
It’s been a quick, rapturous fall. On better days, Daisy tells herself it’s nothing but a trick of proximity, the natural consequence of too many hours tangled up in the same air. Heat distorts things. Warps reality into something sticky, claustrophobic. No room for reason, no room for escape. No room for anyone else.
Other days, it feels different, and there’s no escaping the truth that blazes in her chest like the slow collapse of a dying star. She loves him. The realization sits there, still and suffocating, a secret she’s spent so long pretending to forget. It’s not the kind of love that sings or sweeps you off your feet; it’s the kind that drips and drags, and grows painfully rotten roots in places you didn’t know could hurt. And knowing it—really knowing it—makes her want to fold in on herself, makes her want to forget. But it’s happening. It’s happening, and that, more than anything, ruins her.
It’s nothing. It can’t be anything. It’s fine. Stop asking.
Daisy wonders if there’s a word for the way memory distorts under the weight of hindsight, how reality softens, colors leach out like fabric left too long in the sun. She remembers teenage heartbreak she swore would kill her, the white-hot despair that felt like drowning, like the end of the world. It was real, she knows, but real the way a candle is real. Bright and consuming in its moment, but laughable now in the face of the bonfire she carries.
Is there a way to hold space for that truth, to honor the burn of those small flames without diminishing the infernos that came after? Or does every tragedy collapse the ones before it, reducing them to something foolish, something childish? Maybe that’s the cruelest trick of time: everything that once felt urgent and unbearable, shrinking into a footnote the second something larger eclipses it.
Most wounds dull with time, edges smoothed by distance, pain reshaped into something small, something harmless. Not this one. Some memories sharpen instead of fading, carving their shape deeper the more she tries to bury them. Like the way she can still feel the ghost of his hand at her back, heat searing through fabric like it belonged there. The thought curdles, sweet and unbearable.
She’s not in the habit of wrecking homes, no matter what people say. God knows, she doesn’t want to be that person. It doesn’t change the way her breath stills when he catches her eye across a crowded room, the way her whole body settles at the sound of his laugh. She wants him, plain and unvarnished, a want that hums low in her bones. Wanting and taking aren’t the same thing, though, and Daisy has enough ruin of her own without borrowing someone else’s. She knows what it means that he has a wife, a child. She respects that.
But the hunger she carries for him isn’t some quiet, gentle thing. And respect is a poor muzzle for longing.
It doesn’t stop the shiver in her hands when his shoulder brushes hers, doesn’t stop the thousand impossible lives unfurling in her mind, versions where they belong to each other. It didn’t stop her that night, either, when she leaned on sheer nerve to say, I’m not tired, with all the certainty of someone stepping off a cliff and pretending it was flight.
The beach was a mistake. She should have known better. Every girl knows that you don’t go to a second location unless you’re willing to pay the price.
The shoreline was empty, nothing but ghosted bonfires and the restless murmur of waves. Nowhere to look but at him. Nowhere to run from the way Billy watched her, like he meant to consume her. You can’t lie to yourself about that kind of intensity when it’s staring you down under a sky wide open with stars.
"You make everything better." Just like that. No armor, no irony, no clever misdirection. Nothing to translate. Sweeter than any high she’d ever chased, and ten times more lethal.
It’d finally hit her, then, more late than helpful, the kind of understanding that crawls out of hindsight only when it’s ready to bare its teeth. That wasn’t a misstep, or some one-sided fantasy spinning its wheels in the dark. Still isn’t. For all his restraint, something in Billy leans toward her, something irrepressible, and it clearly scares him as much as sets them both alight.
She doesn’t remember making the decision to go to her place. Doesn’t think there was a decision at all, so much as a silent, psychic understanding.
What she does remember cuts jagged, more sensation than sequence. The glint of his ring catching under a carousel of streetlights. The rest of the world dissolving into static as they hurtled toward tragic inevitability. Billy’s hands clamped around the wheel like he needed the anchor, her fingers pressing into the crease where thigh met leather. The air, her underwear, everything damp as August and perilously close to too much. That degree of tension doesn’t snap. It condenses, collapses inward, grows unbearable under its own weight.
And then—nothing.
Well, some things happened. Just not The Thing. Billy eased the car into park. The engine silenced, ticking as it cooled down. They walked the narrow path in step. Her hand found the doorframe as she crossed the threshold and stood there waiting. Close. So close to five steps that would change everything. Maybe for the worse, but maybe not.
Sadly, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Billy gathered up all that ragged nobility, packed it tight into his chest, and walked away. Left her standing in the doorway with nothing but the crisp night air and the hollow, ringing absence of his retreating steps. She’s grateful, in hindsight, that she didn’t call after him. Asking him to stay would’ve been humiliating. But that kind of gratitude is paper-thin, and nowhere near enough to dull the way she wants him even now, which is a horror movie unto itself.
She’s tried every bland platitude she can remember. It is what it is, let the chips fall where they may, you can’t help what you can’t help. They crumble to dust in her mouth. Resistance is fucking futile.
She supposes it served some grim purpose, in the end. A brutal wake-up call, a warning wrapped in thorns and carved deep against the folly of craving anything tied to Billy. His name, his touch, the weight of his shadow.
It taught her, in the cruelest way, the necessity of fortification, each fragile crack in her swollen heart sealed with steel and silence. A harsh reminder to pull back from the edge, to stop the fall before gravity claims its prize. And the hardest lesson of all, hammering home the truth she’s tried so hard to ignore: nothing worth keeping waits for her on moonlit beaches or in stolen moments. Not with Billy.
So, in a last-ditch attempt to make sense of the mess, she reads most nights. Researches, even. Takes notes about half the time, which is honestly more than anyone would expect of her. She fills margins with scribbled questions and fragments of thought, a map she’s carving out in the dark. If she can annotate her way out of this ache, she will.
Some of those notes – snatches of particularly beautiful language; noble, arching metaphors; places she’ll never see and people she’ll never meet– worm their way into songs. Other pages are repurposed as kindling for the fires she’s not supposed to light per edict from the Chateau’s wimpy overlords. (Pushovers, all of them. She’s never paid a single fine, despite the number of violation notices slipped under the door and, less tactfully, plastered to damp bottles of room service champagne.)
The thing is, every story loops back to him. To them. She reads about heartbreak as if it's some universal affliction, a shared sorrow that’s meant to soothe. All it does is remind her how painfully specific hers is. And it might as well be a fool’s errand, trying to tuck away her feelings for Billy, like folding a wildfire into a matchbox and willing it not to burn.
For all of her effort, all of the books she’s devoured, the diligent soul-searching, Daisy is as close to indifference as she is to speaking fluent Russian. And she doesn’t know a single word of Russian, not one.
It’s both a tragedy and a strange kind of comfort, this wanting what she can’t have. It would be wiser to hang it on a branch, leave it swaying in the wind, an ornament just out of reach. Lovely to look at through a window. But Daisy isn’t a person who finds solace in admiring from afar, and no matter how she spins it, no part of her wants to simply look. She wants to reach out, hold it in her hands, feel its weight settle into her palms. She wants him to belong to her, even though he never, ever will. She wants to belong to him, too.
In steadier moments, drunker ones, she has to believe she’ll move past it. Past him. Repeats it to herself each night, a promise tied to the passing days. A prayer that time and distance and sheer willpower can untangle her from this misery.
The studio is supposed to be her sanctuary, a place where music swallows what words and prayers and books cannot. Lately, it feels less like a refuge and more like a minefield.
As has become their routine, today Billy walks into the studio with a song in hand. If he’s surprised to find her there first, he masks it well. Without a word, without explanation, he presses a torn sheet of paper into her palm, ink-heavy with his unmistakable scrawl. His other hand lands, firm and unrelenting, against the small of her back. Without fanfare, he steers her into the sound booth with a purpose that brooks no resistance, and with little regard for anything but the motion of it.
It’s hard to feign indifference when she’s fighting to remember how to breathe. Harder still to make sense of his scribbles when everything in her line of vision is eclipsed by the literal fucking hearts in her eyes popping up whenever Billy’s face drifts into view.
He settles the headphones over her ears with uncomfortably intimate precision, fingers brushing her hair like it means nothing. Daisy’s still, utterly still, and she wonders if he’s noticed. Whether she looks more like she’s been struck or scared is anyone’s guess, but Billy’s expression offers nothing but that same unreadable stoicism.
“You good?” he shouts, too loud. An awkward attempt to cut through the mess of headgear. “It’s called—well, I think you’ll figure it out.”
Daisy nods, eyes pinned to the paper. The words are clear enough, but they still don’t make sense. Each line reads like it’s been plumbed straight from the depths of her darkest, most privately self-loathing thoughts, even as she tells herself it’s not possible. It can't be possible, yet here it is, written in his hand and settling like a lead weight in hers. More fun to miss than to…
He can go fuck himself. Daisy tears the paper in half with a satisfying rip, watches it fall, the muffled clap of it echoing through the room. She fixes him with a steady, unwavering gaze, lets the silence hang before leaning into the most venomous tone she can muster. "I'm not singing this."
“You are,” Billy rejoins, not unkindly. Stares at her mouth as he says it, too. Doesn’t make the slightest effort to pretend otherwise, even as he snatches the paper back, smoothes out the crease and settles it onto a music stand in front of her. “And you’ll be amazing.” His index finger skims her arm from shoulder to elbow, so light she might’ve hallucinated. Real or imagined, the touch leaves her shivering and damp.
Capitulation comes quicker than she’s willing to admit, surrender wrapped in the thinnest of veils. She’ll sing his fucking song, but she won’t look him in the eye while she does it. That would be more than he deserves, and less than she wants to give.
Without a word, Billy’s fingers find the strings, opening chords cutting through the air. Daisy’s left scrambling and breathless, desperate to meet him in the melody. It’s maddening, how effortlessly he robs her of composure without even trying.
She looks down at her feet, wishing the ground would pull apart and swallow her whole, make a maw out of the basement she’s never visited but of which she has always heard dark, sweaty rumors. Maddeningly, the floor board remains firmly in place. It’s probably better this way, Daisy supposes, but she won’t force herself to act thrilled.
With no other choice in sight, she’s left with two viable options: sing or vomit. Because it’s the one thing in life that’s yet to let her down, because she’ll do pretty much anything to avoid spilling her insides all over the equipment, and because she genuinely doesn’t want to let Billy down, Daisy chooses to sing.
_____
Despite the initial friction, the two of them manage to carve the path to a vocal take that feels right in a way neither of them could’ve anticipated. It’s far from their usual rhythm—the band’s nowhere in sight, and the idea of writing on separate circuits feels sacrilegious—but somehow, it lands. Whatever the reason behind it, their fourth attempt serves up something luminous, a blade that looks pretty as it slips between the ribs to find its deadly mark.
It’s clean, bright, excruciating. It’s perfect. Billy stops the tape one minute into playback, leans over without a word and clamps his hand on top of hers. Before Daisy can think or react, he pulls it back. At least he has the decency to look vaguely apologetic as he drags that same palm across the worn fabric of his jeans. Daisy knows, with certainty that feels like resignation, this exact version of the song will make it onto the record whether she’s ready for it or not.
More fun to miss. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Frankly, Billy would be more fun to miss, himself. The issue is that he patently refuses to give her the space needed to miss him in the first place, and Daisy’s starting to believe it’s not entirely accidental. Worse, she doesn’t think she minds one bit.
Everything starts to fall apart the moment they call in the rest of the band to lay down instrumentals. There’s a brief flicker of focus, enough to carry them through the morning, but by the time they return from the afternoon break, something's broken. The others start fumbling through takes like they’ve never played instruments before, their sudden ineptitude collectively veering the session completely off-course, and before long the day’s gone entirely off the rails.
Billy’s posture gradually wilts as they circle the drain until the irritation wraps around his body like his tightest (and, in Daisy’s opinion, best) pair of jeans. He scowls, looking every inch the controlling frontman when he yells, “Are you even hearing the beat, guys? ‘Cause you’re sure not playing like you can hear the fucking beat.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, irritation simmering beneath the words. “It’s one and two and three and four, not one-two-three-four. Let it breathe a little bit, you know? It’s not hard!” Standing there exasperated and impossibly bossy, he’s somehow even more unbearable than usual.
Daisy flat-out refuses to indulge him when he gets this worked up, so she lets his lecture blur into common background noise. Instead, she focuses on the tendon straining against Billy’s neck, a taut, pulsing thing displaced by the tension in his clenched jaw. It reminds her, oddly, of a blanket bunched up beneath the sheets, though she can’t say why.
Honestly, sometimes she thinks they might as well rebrand as Daisy Jones & the Seven given how much space Billy’s attitude takes up, like a whole other bandmate, so constant it’s practically ambient. Yes, fine, he’s gotten better at sharing, more comfortable with the idea of a quasi-democratic process, but she wouldn’t say he’s anywhere near good at it. And she can’t entirely blame him for that; she isn’t exactly a model of grace under pressure herself. They both struggle with the fine art of letting go, and that unspoken clash, thick and unwieldy, sits between them like a wall, even when it’s just the two of them leaning on each other.
They’re still trying to figure out how to make it all flow nicely. It’s not perfect, but at least Billy isn’t pulling away as much, and she’s working on softening her critique of his lyrics, even if half of them still read like half-baked confessions wrapped in clumsy metaphors for guilt. Progress is progress, even if it’s the kind you have to squint in order to make out every half-formed idea floating in the dark.
Though it sparks wicked satisfaction, Daisy tamps down the urge to push more of Billy’s buttons. God knows it’s a particular talent of hers, but trying to be semi-professional, at least for the next few hours. The high road is tedious, as she’s quickly learning, all littered with potholes and good intentions, and nowhere near as thrilling as the alternative.
Even without the added prodding, Billy’s posture is that of a rubber band pulled too tight, one snap away from unspooling entirely, ready to lash out at the first person who dares to breathe in his direction. To be fair, the others aren’t exactly helping—they’re acting more like children in music class than musicians. It doesn’t bother Daisy all that much, but then, she’s usually the one driving the most disruptive antics, so it’s hard to take it seriously when it’s not her at the wheel.
Billy’s sharpness comes close to slicing through the hum of her carefully curated buzz, courtesy of a private wine stash in Teddy’s office. You can’t pour from an empty cup, or whatever the saying is, so Daisy makes sure hers stays full to the fucking brim. When her mind’s loose, unmoored and drifting just far enough from her body, his rejection doesn’t hit as hard.
She rocks back on her heels, watching, waiting for the next thing to unfold. Flicks her eyes from Billy to the band and back. There’s Warren, swaying on his stool and pedaling the high-hats when he’s meant to hit the snare. Bleary-eyed Karen’s tucked behind her keyboard, hitting most of the right notes yet looking deeply unsure of herself. Distant and dopey, Graham stares at Karen like she’s the only light in the room, mostly oblivious to the guitar slung across his chest.
Eddie’s acting distinctly off-kilter too, smiling at nothing and no one in particular, looser and more amiable than she’s ever seen him. Quiet contentment radiates from his person and that, coming from Eddie of all people, is alarming. Sure, they can all be weird, but they’re rarely this weird, and never as a whole collective. Daisy scrutinizes the situation at large, trying to catch on, when the revelation slams her train of thought like a battering ram gone rogue.
They’re all high. Sky fucking high. Stoned out of their goddamn minds.
Good for them.
It’s a little strange, the way they’ve excluded her from what’s clearly supposed to be a group thing. A little hurtful, too. If there’s one thing those four have always known, it’s that Daisy doesn’t miss a party. Any party. No questions asked, practically no exceptions made. It’s the one unwritten rule she’s always been happy to follow. Certainly the only one that’s ever made much sense.
Really, Daisy’s never quite thought of this crew as her friends, not in the way people usually mean it. Bandmates, sure. Co-conspirators in the grand experiment that is trying to make something real and loud and unforgettable together? Absolutely. Evidently, affection blossomed somewhere along the way beneath the noise and the ego and the endless, beautiful mess of all of them crashing into one another.
She finds this particular brand of self-awareness unsettling. She didn’t sign up to win friends or to babysit those friends when they’re too high to work (she shows up high as a kite plenty, and no one has to babysit her, despite what Billy might think or say or do); she’s here to make a fucking record. Luckily, the feeling doesn’t stick around for very long. It slips away into the ether, and in its place settles a particular shade of amused certainty.
Billy’s going to lose his goddamn mind when he figures it out, and of course he will. Eventually. And, honestly? She can’t wait to watch it happen. Briefly, she considers calling Teddy. Suspects he’d find this whole farce just as amusing as she does. If only she had his number memorized; it’s not like she could ask Billy, handy human rolodex, for it without piquing suspicion.
Daisy lets the quiet thrill of it settle, anticipation curling low in her stomach. Billy paces like a zoo-fatigued panther, still coiled so tightly she swears she can see the tension vibrating under his skin. He’ll either see what’s happening and understand, or he won't. If he stumbles, it's his own blindness, not her responsibility.
They weren’t high when they got here, that much is certain. Possibly it happened when she stepped out, gone a few minutes longer than intended, slipping off for her own kind of escape? Warm white wine in the ladies’ room isn’t exactly a picture of decadence, but some days, it’s the only way to make it through.
She’s knee-deep in weighing the potential virtues of establishing a secondary liquor cache across the building—cultivating a well-rounded portfolio, if you will—when the sound of Billy clearing his throat slices through the air, clean and unforgiving, and jolts her out of her own thoughts.
Daisy suspects, with a seeping kind of dread, that his voice alone could wake her from the deepest sleep or call her back from the grave. It’s a bone-deep truth she’d much prefer to hold at arm’s length, an unwelcome train of thought she has no business riding.
She stands there, teeth working at the inside of her cheek, and wonders if Billy ever spends this much time thinking his way around her specter. Now isn’t the time, and this sure as hell isn’t the place, but she likes to imagine she’ll ask someday, though it’s all but impossible to imagine him responding honestly, especially with the present version of Billy glowering across the room.
She recognizes this Billy all too well; it’s not the first time he’s shown up to a session like this, waspish and impossible to impress. "Run it again," he snaps, hands flung up in frustration. Lets his guitar swing low by its strap and sharpens his voice, cold and sure. "I’m dead serious—if you can’t get it right, I’ll keep everyone here ‘til you can play it all the way through without screwing up."
Billy can marshal all the discipline he wants, but chaos is the natural order here, as much a fixture as the battered guitars and the ash-laden air. Smoke curls to the ceiling in slow, lazy ribbons. Bottles clink against wood. Someone carves out a line with the edge of a guitar pick, sniffs it like a benediction. They move in restless loops, pacing grooves into the carpet, their steps layering over the ghosts of every artist who’s done the same before them, a silent choreography pressed into the bones of the room. Most days, they hover just shy of losing control, the whole thing teetering, blurred at the edges but somehow still holding, still humming forward on the raw, volatile thrill of making something that didn’t exist before.
Except for Billy, of course. He stays clean, sharp, iron-willed. Organized. Principled. Daisy assumes all that resolve is fueled by strong coffee and warm breakfasts, courtesy of his wife’s careful hands. A wholesome luxury the rest of them can’t afford. Lucky him.
The progress they’ve made today could hardly be smaller, in the sense that it’s nearly nonexistent. No surprise there, not with Warren slouched over his kit, eyelids heavy, barely open. His shoulders list lazily, not in time with the beat but with something deeper, slower, moving with the telltale drift of someone floating away from this plane of existence. Daisy watches with the faintest flicker of envy, wishing she could follow.
Billy’s watching too, taking stock, face carved from stone. No amusement, no patience. “Hello?” Arms crossed, gaze cutting a line through the room, threading each of them like beads on a string. Daisy feels his eyes catch on hers for a fraction too little, a flicker too brief. An evasion disguised as appraisal. Maybe even a backhanded compliment, sparing her the full brunt of his ire just this once. “Earth to everyone—what the fuck is wrong with you guys?”
Graham blinks in his brother’s direction with some visibly faint recognition that somebody ought to actually say something. “Nothing’s up, Billy. We’re just vibing,” he ventures. And it’s nice of him to respond and engage, very thoughtful, but it’s also exactly the wrong thing to say.
“Vibing?” Billy repeats through clenched teeth. “You think we’re going to finish an album by vibing?”
Sensing none of the crystal clear and present danger, Warren leans back casually. Flashes a bright grin, toothy to the point of looking cartoonish. “Nah, man, we’re fine. Don’t sweat it. Juuuust channelin’ a little Tommy James and the, uh, the Shar– the Shun– the Shondells, over here. Totally sweet, totally under control.” His words trip over themselves, slurred and stretched, chasing their own tails.
Billy’s never been the patron saint of patience, at least not in Daisy’s rich and varied experience, and it’s written all over him now, in the hard line of his shoulders, the steely edge in his voice. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I’m being serious. Did you guys take the hard stuff?” If he’s jumping straight to that conclusion, sobriety has completely sanitized his sense of proportion.
Karen, ever the wisest of them, presses her lips together before popping them apart, punctuating a sentence she doesn’t bother to say. The sound lands somewhere between amusement and dismissal, a noise that doesn’t invite a response but makes itself known all the same.
“No hard stuff, no,” she says at last. Then, after a beat, “Right, okay—there were these brownies. Special brownies.”
Billy blinks at her, exasperation rolling off him in thick, shimmering waves, like heat rising from sun-scorched asphalt. He looks every bit the fed-up father. Which, Daisy supposes, is precisely what he is. “Special how?” he sighs, all weary resignation.
Karen exhales, a little cautious, a little sheepish. “Laced with pot,” she admits. “We think.”
Billy’s jaw tightens. “What do you mean, you think?”
Karen’s eyes flick around the room, looking for backup. Finding none, she shrugs, rocking back on her heels. “Fair question, I guess. Someone dropped them off at reception, but we have no idea who. Didn’t realize they were… enhanced until after we ate them. It started making sense about an hour ago, I’d say?”
“They were delicious. I had three,” Eddie volunteers, sounding shockingly lucid.
Billy’s eyes tip skyward, rolling so hard Daisy half expects them to get stuck there. Ever the diplomat, Warren senses an opening and lumbers toward it. “Everything’s groovy, man. We’re fine. I’ll, uh—I’ll count us back in.”
With the grave determination of a man embarking on a noble quest, he plunges both hands into his pockets, rummaging deep. Seconds later, he resurfaces victorious, lifting his spoils high like relics of some forgotten age.
He’s beaming, utterly convinced he’s found his drumsticks.
They are, unmistakably, not his drumsticks.
Daisy casts a long look at Warren with reluctant affection. She’s kept quiet this long, letting Billy wear himself down against the sheer, unrelenting force of their collective absurdity, but there’s only so much secondhand embarrassment a person can stomach.
If she doesn’t say something, Billy will, and it won’t come with any kindness to cushion the blow. “Warren, sweets,” she adopts her most patient, honeyed tone, “those are straws.”
Warren frowns, glances down at his hands, turning the evidence over like it might change under closer inspection. A beat passes. Then another. “Ah,” he says at last, nodding once, twice. “So they are.”
“Fantastic. Really. Just stellar work, guys,” Billy deadpans, slow-clapping like he’s gunning for an Oscar in sarcasm. Daisy thinks, not for the first time, that maybe music was the wrong line of work for him. Hollywood would’ve killed for a leading man like this: glowering, self-righteous, absolutely convinced of his own tragic burden. “A whole day down the drain because not a single one of you thought—”
“Alright,” she cuts in, stepping clean through his unraveling patience. It’s a rare moment of responsibility, sort of feels like she’s slipped into someone else’s skin. “Let’s take a break, Billy. Call it a day. They’re useless.”
He rounds on her, skeptical, eyes narrowed. “You’re not—are you seeing this?”
She lifts a shoulder, lazy, detached. “I mean, I’m here and I have eyes, so yes, I’m seeing it.” A pause. “Nothing to do about it now, other than letting them sleep it off.” What she doesn’t say, but thinks, is: You remember, don’t you? Do you remember how it feels?
“But you,” he presses, scoffing like she’s the one who doesn’t understand. “You’re holding it together.”
“And what do you mean by that, Billy?”
“You’re not all over the place. You’re standing. You’re still singing on key, you’re right on the beat. And, look at that, you’re capable of having a real fucking conversation.”
It’s fully unclear to Daisy when this conversation stopped being about the band and turned into an audit of her personal faculties. She plants one critical hand on her hip, head tilted, all slow-burning incredulity. “Wow. Thanks. Might be the first compliment you’ve ever given me. If it even is a compliment, because I honestly have no idea what the fuck you’re trying to say.”
Billy rolls his eyes, a grand, sweeping thing, like he’s making a point of letting the whole room know just how exhausted he is by her. As if he’s ever held less than absolute conviction in his own rightness. It grates. It’s unbearable. “All I’m saying,” he drawls, “is that if you’re still okay, maybe the brownies aren’t much of an excuse.”
And there it is. The thing he wasn’t saying, dragged into daylight. Like it’s obvious. Like it’s never been in question. And she can’t even blame him for thinking it; if she’d known about the brownies, she would’ve had her share. Maybe that’s what cuts deepest—not just his certainty, but the way he keeps her pinned in place as the wildest card in the deck, the one he’s always got an eye on, as if the rest of them aren’t just as capable of slipping through his fingers.
“Right, because me being coherent is some kind of miracle?” She spits it through her teeth, sharp enough to wound if he’s really paying attention. “Good to know where I stand. Really appreciate all your honesty.”
"Daisy, that’s not what I meant–"
“Oh, okay. Sure.” She stands a little taller, the tension in her bones aligning. Squares her hips for battle. “Except it is, Billy. You’re always waiting for me to go off the rails, acting like I’m gonna be the one to fuck it all up, because you’ve already decided I will.”
He opens his mouth to argue—naturally—but she’s already working to cut him off. The words spill from her wine-stained tongue, clawing their way free as she continues. “I get it. It’s easier for you if I’m the screw-up. Means you don’t have to deal with what happens if I can actually keep it together.” Her voice lowers, a whip of quiet rage designed to shred through his poise. “That scares you, doesn’t it?”
There’s a shift in him, subtle but unmistakable, as his muscles flex beneath a porcelain veneer of calm. It’s addictive, this deadly dance of push and pull, this game they’ve mastered. Daisy assumes he both hates and thrives on it, same as her.
As if on cue, Graham’s belch echoes across the room, shattering the moment on impact. It’s a crude reminder that they aren’t alone, that there are four other people here, waiting and watching them like a film. Daisy feels it break her first; today has been fucking absurd. Sometimes you laugh to keep from screaming, and this is one such occasion.
Warren and Eddie follow suit, their laughter booming and guttural, rattling the walls with a crude, infectious warmth. Karen looks momentarily affronted, expression hovering somewhere between shock and disapproval, though Daisy knows she’s seen worse, endured louder, and probably burped harder.
But Billy? Billy’s still there, all fire and fury and clenched fists, bristling like he’s about to keep pushing, until, slowly, he eases back. Mutters a jumble of spirited nonsense and drops his arms to his sides. “Maybe we can take a break. Just for the night.”
Daisy shrugs like his surrender was all part of some master plan, even as it surprises them both. She turns on her heel, a slow, deliberate pivot, and walks toward the back of the studio. Billy’s eyes track her, heavy like the pressure before a storm, bracing for whatever she might unleash next.
"Good call, captain," she throws over her shoulder, dry as bone. Then, offhand, like it barely matters—"Oh, and I hid a plate of brownies in Teddy’s office earlier. Figured these scavengers would wipe out the snacks before I got one. Reeked of weed, no clue how they missed it. Had one a few minutes ago. Hasn’t hit yet, but any second now... liftoff."
The lie slips out easy, smooth as glass, no hesitation. One day—another day, not today—she might actually take a beat to figure out why she does that.
Billy squares his shoulders, stands taller, like that might give him the upper hand. “You’re kidding.” Not a question. An accusation.
Daisy doesn’t blink. Just tilts her head, lets the silence stretch before throwing it right back at him with her teeth. “Why would I lie?” And it is a real question—she hasn’t bothered lying about pot since she was fifteen. Besides, he’s seen her do worse, heard her say worse, watched her be worse.
He opens his mouth, then shuts it, chewing on nothing. “It’s... well. Yeah. Fair enough.” A beat. Then, quieter—“Shit.”
“See? We’ve established I’m not exactly the problem here—” Daisy motions toward the others, slack-jawed and sinking fast. “But they’re done. Let’s pack up, get out of here, try again tomorrow.”
Billy rolls one shoulder back, casual in the way only control freaks can be when they’re pretending they don’t care. “That’s not it,” he says, dangerously unhurried. “I found your stash. Didn’t know what they were. Ate one.” Another beat. “So that’s just perfect.”
Daisy swallows down the instinct to call his bluff, retort sticking to the back of her teeth. He’s lying. She knows, because she’s lying too. This is a move, not a mistake. For once, she can’t tell if it’s meant to protect her, protect him, or if it’s just another way he doles out punishment, penance dressed up as principle.
He’s holding eye contact longer than he usually allows, which historically means either something promising, or something’s about to go down in flames. Daisy tips her head, waiting for the punchline. “Oh, is that right?” Her voice dips just enough to turn the question into something closer to a dare.
Billy exhales, slow, measured. Too smooth to be honest. “Unfortunately, yeah.”
“Well, that’s what you get for stealing.”
“Right. Thank you, it does looks like I’m learning that lesson the hard way.”
They’re fencing now, lies meeting in the middle, waiting to see who lands the first real hit. But there are more immediate concerns before Daisy decides how deep she wants to cut.
“Alright, I’m calling a cab for the four stooges,” she announces, mostly to reset the room. “They’ve had their fun.”
Her heels sink into the carpet as she moves, footsteps swallowed whole, like even the floor is in on whatever this is. She doesn’t need to look back to know that Billy’s eyes are on her, weighty, pulling like a tide. It’s always like this. It’s gravity. It’s ruin. It’s magic.
Her hand hesitates for half a breath before she grips the phone. The weight of it feels familiar, grounding. She loops its cord around her wrist, a quiet tether, curling tight as she dials from memory and arranges the cab.
Waiting silence follows the sound of the receiver clicking back into place. Daisy presses a hand to her temple, fingertips skimming the spot where some goggle-eyed mystic might say her third eye should be. Not that she buys into any of that shit, no matter how many books she’s torn through on borrowed faith. Easier to scoff than to admit she’s always grasping for some kind of clarity that too-often falls through wide open fingers in fetid chunks. Now, with Billy’s lie still swimming through the air between them, she feels it again. That sense of bobbing on the ocean, the room pitching from left to right.
Hands smushed into fists at either side, Daisy pivots. Faces him fully, keeping her stance deliberate. “What about you?” The words come out light, almost lazy, but she feels the effort of it. “Need me to call a cab for you? Or do you have another plan?” Flop sweat starts to gather in her armpits.
Restless energy swirls like static, crunches like gravel underfoot. “I’ll sleep it off somewhere,” Billy says. “Maybe here. Camila would kill me if I showed up at home like this.”
Like what? Daisy wonders. Sober as a judge? Isn’t that exactly what she wants? Feeling like glass braced against a storm, she maintains eye contact. Stands steady and strong on the precipice of decision, unsure if she can speak her next thought into existence. For a moment, she hangs in mute suspense, words parked on the tip of her tongue.
It’s that terrifying, weightless last second before the plunge. The feeling of standing on the edge of a diving board, your toes curled over the platform, world narrowing to a faint tremor beneath your feet. The moment when your brain and body align in a shared betrayal: the decision to jump made half a heartbeat before you can stop yourself.
Before she can talk herself out of it, Daisy hears herself offering, “You could come back to my place,” innocent as she can muster. Tells herself it’s practical, harmless, just a gesture. Nothing to analyze, nothing to ruin. “I’ve got a couch. Nothing fancy, but it’d probably be better than sleeping on whatever’s in reception.” Her words build the kind of bridge you only cross when you’re looking to tear something else down. She hopes Billy recognizes this.
Billy looks down at his feet, back up to her face, and says, “You’re probably right. That’s really nice of you, thanks.”
She’s wretched, she’s hopeful, she’s burning up. After fifteen interminable seconds, he opens his mouth again, but she’ll never know if it was to change his mind or to tell her off, because it’s Eddie’s voice that sticks in all their ears. “Uhhh, hey, guys. Hey? Guys?”
And that could be the end of everything, a chance for him to pull back and erase whatever fragile acceptance he’d let slip. Enough to turn the whole thing into a bitter aftertaste. But it won’t be.
Billy’s smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “I swear to god– what, Eddie? What do you want?”
Eddie jerks his thumb toward the others, their heads bobbing around in blissful oblivion, barely aware of the air they’re breathing, let alone anything else. “Well, we talked over here,” he says, like there's any question about who constitutes the ‘we’ in question, “the gang and I, y’know. And, uh, we’re starving. Like, I’m knocking on heaven’s door here. You think the cab’ll make a pit stop for burgers on the way back?”
Billy and Daisy answer in unison, a resounding, emphatic “No.”
_____
“Sure you’re good to drive?”
“Sure, Billy. It’s pot, not heroin.” Even though, as it turns out, it’s neither.
“Alright. Whatever you say.”
“What, you don’t trust me?”
“I didn’t say that–”
“I’m a good fucking driver, Billy. No one made you get into this car with me. Want me to drop you off somewhere? Home, bottom of a ravine? Plenty of gas in the tank, so you tell me.”
Actually, the car is running on fumes, but Billy doesn’t need to know that.
“No, it’s fine, I trust you, I trust your driving. Besides, I want to see where you live. Didn’t make it inside last time.” He seems sincere, but that doesn’t mean much of anything.
This drive is a ghost of that other night. Daisy feels it in the cadence of the wheels against the road, in the charged stillness that hums louder than the engine. She forces herself to look it squarely in the eye, tears away the gauze wrapped around the memory to cushion it from herself. What it really was, was a dance cut short. A half-step toward something that never did find its footing.
And now? Now she wonders if Billy’s walking the same paths in his mind, retracing them to rewrite what happens next. She doesn’t dare hope, not outright, but the thought hangs there, fragile as glass. “It’s a little messy. My place, I mean. Haven’t had much time to tidy up with the way you’ve got us working.”
“That’s okay, I don’t mind mess. I have a toddler, pretty used to it.”
Daisy’s stomach flips on itself. She hasn’t forgotten—how could she?—but hearing him name it feels intentional. “Right,” she says blankly. Doesn’t know what else to do, so she forces a laugh. “Bet you’ll feel right at home, then.”
Except his toddler probably doesn’t leave a fine layer of cocaine sprinkled over every surface like a trail of fucked up fairy dust. Surely Billy’s house doesn’t have a heaping tower of moldy-smelling old books, or rows of empty champagne bottles lined up like fallen soldiers by the bathtub.
Billy doesn’t laugh, just huffs out a breath that sounds almost tired. Resigned. Then he says it, just says it out loud, like it’s nothing at all. “Maybe I will. It’s easy to feel at home when I’m with you.”
It’s easy to feel at home when I’m with you. It’s easy to feel at home when I’m with you. It’s easy to–
Daisy freezes. Blinks like she’s been struck, because what the fuck is she supposed to do with that? Explanations present themselves for consideration: he’s joking, he’s lying, he’s out of his goddamn mind, a perfect roulette of possibilities.
Maybe she’s grossly misjudged the situation and he really did eat one of those brownies. She wants to laugh but it would be the wrong type of laugh, the kind that comes out high and thin and makes you feel worse after, so she makes no noise at all.
And Billy, apparently realizing the gravity of what he’s done, backpedals. Like clockwork.
“Not like that.” He adjusts his hands on his lap, keeps his eyes pinned on the road beyond the windshield. “I just mean—God, I don’t know—sometimes you remind me of…” Softly, he trails off, frowning like he’s got another foot to stick in his own mouth. “Forget it.”
“Nope.” Daisy finds her voice again. “No way, you don’t get to just drop a line like that and then take it back. ‘It’s easy to feel at home when I’m with you.’ What’s that supposed to mean, huh?”
“Daisy, it doesn’t mean anything.” Too fast, too loud. Too insistent to be honest. “It was nothing.” So blatantly poisonous it chokes them both.
Her mouth falls open, a thousand curses written on her tongue. It’s a relief when they pull into the gravel parking lot with a crunchy echo. Daisy’s not ashamed to admit that she swerves the car a little harder than necessary, sending Billy’s knees crashing into the metal doorframe.
She cuts the engine and silence folds itself around them like a second skin. The air feels thin, under-oxygenated, the kind that isn’t rich enough to really fill your lungs. Daisy stares straight ahead, the words Billy said and then unsaid rattling between her ears.
Eventually, she announces, “We’re here,” as if it isn’t tremendously fucking obvious. An olive branch disguised as banality.
Billy exhales, long and weighty, like he’s been holding his breath for centuries. She feels his gaze settle on her, like the brush of a hand she’s been craving and dreading in equal measure. And beneath it, a sick, sinking certainty that he’s about to say something ruinous, some excuse, some neatly packaged reason why he can’t stay after all.
History doesn’t just repeat itself—it circles like a vulture, patient and merciless, waiting for her to stumble. And stumble she does, over and over, mistaking red flags for tricks of the light, shadows cast on a windless night. She could blame the wine, the dim glow of the dashboard, even Billy himself, but none of that would be true. She’s always known better.
The leather creaks as Billy shifts beside her, the sound cutting through the fog in her head. “Look,” he says, edging forward like he’s afraid she’ll bolt. Careful, like he’s handling something fragile. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just… I think it’s the brownie talking.”
Daisy turns, fixing him with a flat stare. “The brownie,” she repeats, voice scraped clean of anything but exhaustion. She barely has the patience for this.
“Yeah.” His mouth twitches—an involuntary flicker, just shy of a smirk—and that’s all it takes. She knows. The mask is thin, useless against the telltale betrayals of body language, the fault lines in his expression. And he knows she knows, just as surely as he sees through her. Still, they hold their positions, move their pieces across the board, neither willing to forfeit.
“You know—” He gestures vaguely, a loose wave of his hand, like that might stand in for the thing neither of them will say. We both lied about the same thing tonight. “The weed. I think it hit me harder than I expected.”
Daisy leans back, stretching into the warmth curling around her like a cat in a sunbeam. Lets the moment stretch, lets him hang there. Then: “Pretty sure you’re full of shit, Billy.”
He laughs, quiet, almost sheepish, and then he looks at her, really looks at her, like she’s just a person, not someone who could turn him into stone. It’s disarming, the way his eyes soften, the way uncertainty settles over him like an unfamiliar coat. For the hundredth time, Daisy wonders if she and Billy are two sides of the same coin or minted in entirely different currencies, never meant to pass through the same hands.
She doesn’t say another word. Just pushes open the driver’s side door and steps out into the night, cool air curling around her like a second skin. Her heels crack against the gravel. A moment later, she hears him follow.
They’ve walked this road before, but their footsteps sound different now. She’s too aware of him beside her. The brush of his shoulder, the way his arm hangs close enough that her fingers ache with the thought of reaching. Close enough that the heat of him bleeds into the space between them.
Her cottage rises out of the dark like a beacon, porch light spilling gold over thorny bushes and marble pavers. Most nights, it looks like something plucked from an ordinary life—small, solitary, an island, a refuge. But tonight, it looms, waiting to devour her whole. A witch’s hut from some cautionary fairy tale.
At the threshold, she hesitates. One hand ghosts over the railing, the other tightens around the strap of her bag. She doesn’t turn. Won’t. She fears the myth of looking back.
But he’s there. Behind her. The faint, steady sound of his breathing catches in the hollow of her chest, sharpens the ache sitting there. She can feel him in the scrape of his boots on the uneven brick, in the way the air itself seems to bend around him. Gravity, pulling closer.
She pushes the door open. Warm light gilds the edges of her hair, turning her into something luminous. Slowly, deliberately, like stepping into deep water, she crosses the threshold.
And he follows.
No hesitation. No pause. Just the quiet click of the door latching behind him. Its sound settles her soul.