2. Context (1/2)
tommy sat in the producer's chair looking into the empty recording booth for a long time. he glanced at the bag of red liquorice sitting over to one side of the board with a half smile and regret. he rarely questioned his promise to mrs. m. that to quit smoking but on nights like liquorice was no replacement for a cigarette.
his conversation with kwest kept on repeating in his mind. the sound engineer was right, jude was owed an explanation for why he acted the way that he did yesterday. normally he didn't mind fighting with her - in fact it was half of what made working with her so much fun. but today wasn't fighting, she was right, he had humiliated her. however, he was right too, he couldn't change his past and she had to trust him. still, she was keeping it together pretty good for someone who was just over 18 (far better then he had at that age), and was owed some "context" as kwest put it.
context. pondering that notion, tommy flipped several of the switches on the sound board in front of him, and jude's vocals filled the room.
"look working on a song, it is like falling in love. at first it is a rush, but then it gets painful and sometimes you got to walk a way. but sometime you walk out of it with something beautiful." when they had first start working together he had told her that writing music was like falling in love, but what he left out was the intimacy of producing her music. he helped coax out her deepest feelings, tried to share the music and rhythm which were in her head. tommy knew better then anyone that you could easily have sex and not be intimate, but he didn't think that he could produce music with jude and for it not to be an emotional process.
initially, he had tried to ignore his reaction to her; then promised himself that he wouldn't cross that line, that he wasn't that guy. but at her 16th birthday when he had seen her so heart
oken in the rain, asking him what was wrong with her, something took hold of him and he literally took hold of her.
"you are asking the wrong guy!" it wasn't just lust, it was this overwhelming desire to make it better, to tell her she didn't need to change one thing to make him crazy about her. the kiss had been electric, and had taken everything he had to
eak away. equally, last winter when she finished the album, the heady mixture of producing an amazing track and working on very little sleep resulted in them just falling into each other's arms. they had
oken it off a bit stunned that it had even happened, but also because they both knew that if it had carried on a few minutes more it would have gotten a lot more serious.
something was still missing from the track and he opened up on pro tools and started playing around with some of the guitar solos.
"you don't know about how many times i thought about…just asking you to leave with me." but he never did because she deserved better. despite his attraction to her, he had really tried to be the better man. and there were always more reasons then he could count for her to be off limits. she was too young. she was his artist. she was some else's girlfriend. not factors that had ever stopped him before, but with jude he wanted to be worthy of her. so even though he wanted her he had insisted on their limits. during their first year working together, he almost left, twice. he could feel what was building between them and had tried to just push it away. he dated her sister, tried to move on, but still found himself savouring casual touches and hugs.
the irony was that jude never thought that he was anything else other then a good guy. even her reaction to his list of women was to see a positive in him, she never assumed that sex with him would be anything more the memorable for herself; rather she worried about whether she would be memorable for him.