The next afternoon...
I closed my eyes as I listened to Sadie chatter insistently behind me. She may not have been a large part in the making of the album itself, but she had helped Liam get it sold to the French provinces of Canada and that was enough to get her a free ride to the South Pacific. She was just plain giving me a headache.
"How long can she go for?" Tommy asked miserably from beside me, and I turned toward him in the van Darius had decided to use to get us to the airport in. We were taking off from Toronto to land in Papeete, the Port City where we would catch the ship that would take us on the fourteen-day cruise of the islands. I couldn't help it. I was a little excited.
"She's like the energizer bunny. She just keeps going and going and going." I stated simply as Sadie stopped talking long enough to hit me on the back of the head with her duffel bag.
"Hey!" I cried out suddenly before pushing Tommy gently against the shoulder. It didn't feel right. We didn't touch much these days.
"He started it." I supplied helpfully as Tommy threw me a look. I just felt the general need to sleep—you know the basic energizing mode that the body needed for regeneration. I was at least a good forty-eight hours behind. Tom turned back toward the notebook he had been writing in, and I could tell just by glancing down that it was a song we had been working on that Darius hadn't been happy with. Tommy seemed obsessed with making it perfect almost to the point that he was making it worse. I placed my hand gently over the page.
"Darius did say this was a vacation." I whispered softly as he firmly removed my hand. I shook my head before placing it there again. He looked up at me in irritation.
"We have run ourselves ragged trying to figure out what is wrong with that thing in case you've forgotten the recent two day fast and general lock-in at the studio. Just put it away. Maybe not looking at it for a while will make it seem better when you pick it up again." I told him quietly as he just sighed before slamming the book shut. Nice to see I still had some power of persuasion. I tapped my foot impatiently.
"Are you going to be doing that all the way to the damn islands." Tom asked me suddenly as he placed a hand on my knee to keep me from moving it. I just smiled at him sweetly.
"Would it bother you if I did?" I asked him on a chuckle as he finally smiled at me for the first time in days. My heart melted a little out of the icy chunk it had frozen itself into.
"If I said yes, would you continue to do it?" He asked with a wry shrug of his shoulder as I pretended to think a moment before nodding. Yep, definitely.
"Then no." He answered simply as I continued to tap my foot anyway. He narrowed his eyes at me. I just shrugged.
"I didn't say I wouldn't continue it if you said no either." I remarked wryly as he rolled his eyes before sitting back against the seat and closing his eyelids. He couldn't hide the half smile that crossed his face suddenly though as he tried to sleep. I moved a little closer to him without thinking about it as I smiled too. Maybe Darius was right. I needed to find that connection with Tommy again as artist and producer before everything had gone to hell in one single night. It was what made our music brilliant. And right now, we were lacking that brilliance.