previously: Vale and Vicky make some big moves together // packing up // and celebrate nephew Abe's 1st birthday.
Music lessons, because:
“I already wrote you a love song,” she said.
“But I want another one,” he said.
—
The process of composing their first song together was raw, private, and inspired. Releasing that song to the world, however, was none of those things. Vale was used to the ups and downs of this by now, but Vicky had just received her very first music review:
“He sounds like a happy robot tripping on LSD on spring break. She sounds like buried sorrow and windsong at dusk over an open prairie. Both are good. But consider peanut butter and pickles—do they really belong together?”
- Drew Bradshaw, Sierra Sun Magazine
—
Vale taught her to play guitar. Vicky was a vocalist, primarily, but if she wanted to be a songwriter, she needed an accompaniment to get the music down. He wasn’t wrong, but she worried that the skin of her fingertips would never harden enough, and her finger joints would never contort in the specific ways they needed to. It was one in the morning. She’d spent all the lyrics she had in her brain, all her inspiration depleted. It was time for bed. But he was still going, going, going. He was the Energizer Bunny, bouncing in neon lights in the dark.
“Babe, give it a name,” he said.
“What kind of name?”
“What’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
“How about, ‘The crushing disappointment of gathering just that tiny sliver of hope, only to see it dashed to pieces like sand in the tides.’”
“Yikes,” he said with a grimace. “Well, we could do, ‘Crushing?’ It’s open to interpretation. Thanks, you’re a genius.”
He wrote down the new title and saved the file.
“You read the review, didn’t you?”
“It didn’t sound like he liked it,” she said. “What an uppity snob. What gives him the right?”
“Well, he’s an arts critic. That’s like, his whole job.”
“Do you think I’m the peanut butter or the pickle?”
He grinned. “The pickle, definitely.”
“You almost done?” she asked.
“I’m just wrapping up. How’d you do?”
“Well, my fingers hurt and now I know C, G, and E-minor.”
“Hey, that’s awesome! You’re halfway to a pop song already!” He paused, looking unsure, but then continued. “So, I was getting a soda and heard some of your song. It sounded sad.”
She shrugged. “Maybe it was sad.”
“I hope that one’s not about me.”
She smirked at him. “This might be hard for your ego to take, but they’re not always going to be about you.”
“I guess can live with that,” he said.
—
Their first release together earned mixed reviews—nothing too scathing, but nothing too adoring, either. But that was okay. They each had some other things in the works. Vale wanted to run some sounds by his producer, Patrick Nova. Pat was a real workhorse in the industry, and Vale really wanted him to hear Vicky sing.
So they performed an acoustic version of the song Vicky wrote, just Vicky’s voice and Vale on piano. Vicky even earned her first raving fan in Pat’s star-eyed nine-year-old daughter, Raine.
Pat loved it, too. In fact, he even offered Vicky her first paid gig. “My sister is getting married in June. There’s a song she has her heart set on for the ceremony, and it needs two female voices.”
Raine chimed in, “I’m one of the voices, just so you know.”
But this offer wasn’t for both of them, just Vicky. “No offense, man,” Pat said to Vale. “But my sister is the folksy barefoot in the woods type. The song has a banjo accompaniment. Not really your style.”
Vale nodded. “No worries. What do you think, babe? Want to give it a try?”
Vicky couldn’t really believe how she ended up here, meeting a music producer and being offered a real gig on her own. Without Vale. Maybe their musical futures wouldn’t be as entwined as she first imagined.
“I don’t know. That’s so much pressure, singing somebody’s wedding song while they’re walking down the aisle. What if I messed it up?”
“Well, think about it,” Pat said. “You can wrap it into the tour. You guys are gonna be in Michigan in June anyway.”
“I think you’d do great, but no pressure,” Vale reassured her.
“Sure, as long as the audience is full of nine-year-olds, I’ll be fine,” Vicky said. “I don’t know, doesn’t it feel fast? Can’t I just be your undercover lyricist-slash-manager-slash-bodyguard?”
“Slash girlfriend.”
“Slash cleaning lady.”
“Hey! I’ve been cleaning so much more since you’ve been here. You don’t even know.”
“I probably don’t wanna know,” Vicky teased. 
While Pat and Vale talked shop in the studio, Raine snatched Vicky away to her bubblegum princess bedroom. She had a track of the song to play on her karaoke machine. “You must have heard it before, it’s on the radio like all the time. So I’ll take lead, and you take harmony. I hope you know how to harmonize.”
“Uh, yeah, I think so.”
The little girl was judging her, Vicky knew it.
They sang the song, and Vicky didn’t think she butchered it too much.
Baffled and out of place as she felt, she had to admit she was having fun with this. The city was so vibrant and busy, and Vale’s crowd of music friends were surprisingly interesting. She never dared to imagine anything like this for herself. It felt foreign, like she was playing a part written for someone else.
They completed the song and sat together on Raine’s bed. “That was okay,” Raine said. “But we should definitely rehearse some more. Aunt Steffie really likes that song, and you don’t want to mess it up.”
Vicky didn’t know when a “maybe, I’ll think about it” got turned into a promise not to disappoint Aunt Steffie, whom Vicky had never met in her life.
“So is Vale your boyfriend? He’s like super famous. He’s more famous than my dad. Not that I’m swooning or anything. I’m gonna be super famous someday, too.”
“I bet you are,” Vicky said.
“You can be, too.”
Vicky shook her head. “No, not me.”
“But you can sing. You’re pretty enough. Well, your outfit is a little frumpy, but that’s nothing a credit card can’t fix. Why don’t you want to?”
Damn, child, Vicky thought. “I just wrote a little thing for a friend, that’s all.” 
“Wait, I have an idea,” Raine said. “Follow me.” And she dashed for the door.
Raine raided her mother’s closet, grabbing slinky evening dresses of all shapes and colors, and she dressed Vicky like her own life-sized Barbie doll. She took them both to the full-length mirror in her mother’s bathroom. This was the exact opposite of her frumpy grandma outfit, being dressed by a spunky nine-year-old in this red dress.
“God, I hope I get boobs like yours someday,” Raine said. “They’re so big!”
Vicky was shocked, and somewhat terrified that she’d been wrangled into singing a duet with this pint-sized diva.
“Wait, I have another idea!” Raine darted out of the bathroom. After which, Vicky decided that she would definitely not wait for the girl’s next idea.
“Holy shit,” Vale said, gaping at the skin-tight dress and all of Vicky’s curves it contained.
“Can we go? Can we run? She’s coming back. She said she was getting five-inch stilettos.”
“I could stay for the stilettos,” Vale said.
“No,” Vicky insisted.
“But you’re borrowing the dress, right? We can bring it back tomorrow?”
They escaped the studio without further trauma, and with Vicky’s feet flat on the ground. They wasted no time getting straight into bed with that tight red dress.
“Do you realize how cool I am?” Vicky said. “I’m kissing a superstar. Raine said you’re more famous than her dad! She said I could be, too. But that’s not me, you know. That’s you, and I’m happy for you, but it’s not me. I’m fine being an obscure songwriter and bossy tour manager and bodyguard and sometimes wedding singer.”
“Then you’ll be my secret superstar,” he said. 
gameplay notes: haha, is she gonna think this every time they do it? 😂
So let’s take a moment to grab a close-up shot of this dopey boy’s love-struck face and his interactions panel full of proposal whims begging me to let him do it right here, right now, in Pat’s music studio while fleeing a rabid nine-year-old girl.
Not very romantic. However, by my own gameplay rules, after this many whims and with an auto-suggest proposal interaction lined up, a spontaneous proposal would not be unwarranted.
I’m not gonna let him yet, though, lol!
I’m not trying to torture him. He has plans and a time picked out. He just isn’t sure he can wait for the plans that he made, but they were good plans, so he’s going to wait.
I'm imagining Raine as this kid I had in my class once who asked if she could sing a song for the class. Then she gets up and sings a pitch perfect rendition of Rolling in the Deep. At 9 years old, lol!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this was not where I thought Vicky would go - ever - but I bet she didn't either! And I'm betting she *definitely* isn't going to be expecting that proposal but I hope she just goes with the flow with that and doesn't freak out! Although would she still be Vicky if she didn't freak out at least a little bit?