Page 8 of Heartbreak Honey
Before
HE ACTUALLY FUCKING MADE IT. He was going to be in the band. Apparently, that assistant was right about him.
Both Trevor and Skyler, along with three other guys, Oliver McKinley, Noah Winters, and Jermaine Jordan, were now officially the members of the band Boys Will Be Boys.
Trevor couldn’t believe he’d signed a contract for a record deal. His mom had asked if they needed to get a lawyer to read it over, but he’d waved her off, saying, “Mom, it’s a fucking record deal. I’m signing it!”
It had been a whirlwind since then.
Getting styled for a photoshoot, learning to harmonize with the other guys, listening to demos of the songs for their album. He’d been a little taken aback that all the songs were already written for them, but it made sense. This band was entirely manufactured by the record label. Of course they wouldn’t be asking the guys’ input on anything.
They didn’t even get to have input on their own appearances. The stylists had pretty much left Trevor alone, but they’d dyed Oli’s light brown hair platinum blond and made Jermaine cut his afro into a high and tight fade. Jermaine didn”t fight them on it, though it was obvious he wasn”t happy with the decision.
Some of the stuff like that was starting to make Trevor a tad uncomfortable, honestly. At some point while he was being shuffled from place to place and told what to do, he’d stopped feeling like a person and began feeling like a piece of property owned by a man named Charlie Carmichael.
Between the label head, the other executives, and the band’s new AR management team, there had been a lot of people talking at them, rather than to them.
But two things kept Trevor from thinking this whole thing was a mistake. Number one: the money. His eyes had practically fallen out of his head when he read that line in the contract. And number two: Skyler James.
He’d thought he was totally gone for Skyler when the guy sat down next to him and told him his pants fit him good. But then he’d finally heard Skyler sing, and that was it. Totally. Fucking. Gone.
He was so screwed. He couldn’t sit here lusting after his new bandmate. Once he’d found out they’d both been selected for the band, he’d tried to rein in his hormones. Because seriously, he’d never even been with a guy before. What was he doing?
The problem was, he wasn’t simply attracted to the guy. No. He liked him. There was something about Skyler that seemed to pull everyone around him into his orbit. He gave Trevor so much of his attention, and yet Trevor found himself getting jealous whenever Skyler talked to someone else for more than two minutes.
Skyler was different from anyone else he’d ever met. He didn’t understand the concept of playing it cool. He got excited over everything, he shared whatever he was thinking, and his laugh…
Skyler’s laugh was loud and obnoxious, but he let it out so unabashedly that Trevor found it the most endearing thing ever. Ugh. He was hopeless. He kept saying dumb shit he wouldn’t normally say just to get a laugh out of him. He”d never considered himself particularly funny before. But Skyler made him feel like he was Jimmy Fallon.
Skyler made him feel a lot of things. Most of them confusing.
Like now, as they sat beside each other in two deceptively uncomfortable armchairs waiting for a meeting to start, and Skyler reached over to squeeze Trevor’s thigh and whine, “I’m boooored. Entertain me.”
Trevor’s first thought was to drag him out into the hallway, shove him up against the wall, and jam his tongue down his throat. That would keep him entertained, right?
Fuck.
“The meeting’s about to start,” he told him instead. “Be good and I’ll buy you a milkshake after.”
They’d already discovered this diner right across the street from the studio lot that made the best milkshakes and pies, and Trevor had learned Skyler had the biggest sweet tooth.
Skyler laughed, not his full-bellied one, but still a nice sound. “Okay, fine,” he agreed, before turning sideways in his seat, legs swinging wildly across the arm of the chair so they dangled over Trevor’s lap. They shared each other’s space so naturally.
Trevor wrapped one hand around Skyler’s ankle to prevent himself from being kicked in the face when Skyler inevitably started flailing around. He didn’t think he’d been such a tactile person before, but Skyler was always touching him, which he really didn’t mind, so he found himself always touching Skyler too.
When the door to the conference room opened, he nudged Skyler’s legs off the chair and urged him to sit up properly. A stuffy looking man in a suit—one of the label guys—sat down across from them and introduced himself as Adrien, even though Trevor was pretty sure they’d already met him before. But truthfully, they’d met so many people in the last couple weeks that he couldn’t keep anyone straight anymore. A woman on their management team sat next to him.
“So here we are,” Adrien said, adjusting the knot on his tie. “Boys Will Be Boys. Now we obviously expect all of you to recognize this as a job, and to take it very seriously. But we don’t want you to look like you’re taking things too seriously. We want you to look like you’re having fun. The time of your lives. Boys being boys.”
“We don’t want fans to just fall in love with your music,” the woman from management said. Trevor couldn’t remember if her name was Molly or Maggie. “We want them to fall in love with you. Each of you individually, and all of you together as a group of close friends. That’s the image we’re trying to project.”
“You each have a personality to fill,” Adrien told them.
“A personality to fill?” Skyler muttered disbelievingly under his breath, only loud enough for Trevor to hear him.
“Yo, we’re not the freaking Spice Girls,” Trevor interjected loudly. Partly to make Skyler laugh, and partly because fuck that.
“If we are, then I get to be Baby,” Oliver chimed in good-naturedly from his right. At sixteen, he was the youngest of the five of them.
“What if I want to be Baby?” Jermaine asked.
“Come on, you know I’m the baby,” Oliver insisted. “You can be Sporty.”
“Fine,” Jermaine relented. “But you have to put your hair in the pigtails.”
“I’d like to see him try that,” Noah jumped in.
Molly or Maggie cleared her throat as Adrien scowled, clearly annoyed by the derailment of the conversation. Trevor leaned back in his seat and gave Skyler a satisfied smirk. He was rewarded with Skyler’s dimples in return.
“Now as I was saying,” Adrien continued. “Oliver is going to be seen as everyone’s little brother and the jokester of the group.”
At that, Oliver preened and shot them all a pleased grin.
“Noah will be the leader, the responsible one.”
Trevor frowned. Since he was the oldest, shouldn’t that be his role? Then again, Noah did seem to be taking all this more seriously than him, considering Trevor’s interruption just now, so whatever.
“Jermaine is the mysterious bad boy.”
He frowned again and glanced at Jermaine. He was the quietest out of all of them, so he could understand the mysterious part. But putting the “bad boy” label on him didn’t sit right, especially after the way they”d changed his hair. Trevor wanted to question it, call it out for the bullshit it was.
A quick glance at the other guys” faces seemed to confirm they were thinking the same things, maybe looking for someone to speak up. But Jermaine”s face remained impassive, giving Trevor the impression that he didn”t want to make a big deal out of this. And even though he”d already made one snide comment, Trevor was admittedly a little intimidated, sitting here in a room with the people who”d offered him a music career and could likely take it away if they wanted. So he kept his mouth shut, feeling powerless.
Ignoring the tension in the room, Adrien went on. “Skyler is, of course, the heartthrob.”
“Of course,” Oliver mocked, leaning all the way over Trevor to ruffle Skyler’s hair. Trevor had to fight the urge to slap his arm away.
When Oliver sat back in his seat, Trevor caught Skyler blushing, and asked him with his eyes if he was okay with this. Skyler shrugged.
“And Trevor will be the soulful one.”
The soulful one? What the fuck was that? It sounded like they didn’t see anything interesting in his personality, so they picked a random word to tack onto him.
Adrien went on to explain how the next few months would work as they recorded their album and then started doing promotion for it. They already knew the five of them would be put up in a house together so they could bond as a group, and to make it easier as far as getting all of them to where they needed to be each day. Trevor would have preferred to stay at home with his mom, but Skyler wanted him to live in the shared house, so he hadn’t bothered asking if him staying in Culver City was an option.
He”d only known the guy a couple weeks, but he was already realizing he’d do pretty much anything Skyler wanted him to.