I was waiting on the floor in the living room, the same floor I had called nice the last time I had gotten super drunk with my brother. Although I knew I had a history in this house, it wasn’t the thing that spooked me the most, but you probably already knew that. The sun had started rising, causing the light pouring in through the windows to be a magical golden glow. I knew that any other day, if I woke up this early, I would have ran outside with my camera to take a good few pictures with this nice lighting I always missed.

But I actually had other plans. Yes, I know, I was awake for a reason! Surprise, surprise! Well, it wasn’t exactly my choice, but there wasn’t any other way. Jack was out in Australia playing shows, meaning that we never got to talk on the phone, only text with really long intervals between. The time zones were trying to test out our relationship. It took us so long to coordinate a time to video chat, that we didn’t even manage to set a ‘date’ the first week he was gone. Sad, sad story, amirite?

Meh, it wasn’t all too bad. I was busy most of the time anyway, so the days went by quicker than I expected. I used to just be hanging around at home all day, but now I was also actually doing something. It was way easier not to miss him while I was distracted. Although, I had to be honest and say that in the middle of the night, when I was in bed trying to get some sleep, I missed his comforting presence and warmth. It was difficult to fall asleep while not curled up beside or with him after having gotten so used to it. It was a habit that was too hard to break.

So, that was why I was sitting on the floor, at six in the morning, the sun causing the house to seem like it was made of gold. My laptop was sat on the coffee table in front of me. I had sent a message to Jack saying that I was ready whenever he was, but I had yet to get a reply from him. At least I wasn’t alone. John was also up. Something about his ‘dad form’ making him always wake up at ungodly hours. You’d think he’d take advantage and use his time to catch up on his sleep. But I guess his bad habit was Emily waking him up in the mornings. At least we were no longer jetlagged.

After a little while longer of me checking both my laptop and phone in search for any sign of Jack, the speakers finally emitted the horrible ringer. My heart started beating faster out of excitement as I reached out to answer the FaceTime call on my laptop so I could use my phone for any other things while chatting with Jack. I stuck my tongue out a little when I had to calm my shaking and click on the accept button. A few seconds later, Jack’s pixelated face appeared on my screen, taking up its entirety.

“Can I see you? No, I can’t see you. Can I? Why can’t I-- ooh, I can see you!” Jack frowned at the camera until my own video apparently popped up on his phone, turning his mood to the old hyper Jack we all knew.

“Hi, Jacky!” I grinned over dramatically, causing my eyes to squint a little, and brought my knees up to my chest.

“Oh my god, I’ve missed your voice,” he groaned and made his eyes roll back, “I think I just jizzed in my pants.”

“Ugh, gross,” John said from behind me, reached over and putting a large mug of black coffee on the table for me to which I mumbled a ‘thank you’ and he ruffled my hair a little. “Can you guys not do this when I’m in the room? Thank you very much.”

“It won’t be the first time you’ve done that,” I teased Jack, ignoring John’s pleas.

“Excuse me!” Jack gasped like a mother who had just heard her child swear for the first time. “One, we were having sex at that time. Two, we were having sex at that time. Three, your moans are what caused it. And four, we were having sex at that time!”

“Oh boy, you just corrupted my image of poor innocent Ireland,” John grumbled back in the kitchen, not having any choice but hearing our conversation. It wasn’t like we were being so quiet that he had to strain to listen in, it was loud enough for anybody to understand.

“Hey, I corrupted her way before you came back in her life!” Jack shouted back. I knew he would have crossed his arms in protest if it weren’t for the fact that he had to hold his phone in place.

I was about to remind him that that was, in fact, incorrect, except if he meant me walking in on unspeakable things or his stupid jokes, when Alex interrupted. He grabbed the phone from Jack’s hands, causing the image for me to move all over the place until it focused on his face.

“Is she naked?” He asked before looking at the screen to see me. “Awe, goddammit. What am I doing this for then?”

“Hey, that’s my girlfriend!” Jack exclaimed and stole his phone back. “Go have phone sex with Lisa.”

“Already done that,” I could hear Alex smirk smugly as he sat down beside Jack and forced himself into frame as well.

“Can you guys stop sexualizing me, gosh!” I scoffed and reached out for the hot mug, taking a sip from it and rolling my eyes.

Although I knew it was all jokes and nothing was meant seriously, but this wasn’t the reason why I was FaceTiming Jack. I actually wanted a semi-decent conversation, or at least something a little bit more normal. I knew it would eventually get to this, but if it started off this way, there was no way it was ever going to stray away.

“Okay, okay, fine,” Jack sighed, probably upset that it also meant I wasn’t going to give me anything (which I wouldn’t have done either way). “Alex, stop treating her like an object.”

“You’re such an ass, Jack,” Alex retorted and punched his arm.

“Thanks, Alex, that’s exactly what I would have done.” I smiled brightly. Honestly, though, I probably would have done worse. My words, that it. The punch was good enough for me. I’d, however, try to make Jack feel as uncomfortable as possible by treating him like an object as well.

“Hey, is John still there?” Alex asked next, annoying me since he was taking away my time with Jack.

But, I still decided to check for him. Maybe it would let him leave me alone sooner. “John, Alex is asking for you!”

John appeared with his laptop underneath his arm, jogging up to me and bending down to answer whatever he could be needed for. Even he seemed surprised to actually be wanted by somebody. Of course, it could have just been some stupid question, but still, Alex still was one of his greatest inspirations despite being younger.

“Whatever happened to those songs I wrote with you guys a while ago?” Alex inquired, trying his best to stay in frame with Jack trying to push him away.

John’s face fell and his eyes went wide. He nearly dropped his laptop as he sat down next to me and opened it up. I watched him clicking around on his screen while he was too concentrated to even notice looking me along--he usually hated us seeing what he was doing. After going through multiple folders, he ended up in one with a few audio files.

“Holy shit, I forgot about these,” he gasped and stared at the files as if they were of sentimental value.

“I was just wondering what happened to them.” Alex shrugged, not understanding the exact severity of the situation. He probably just thought some notes had been scanned in or small snippets were made. But no, I got it too now. Those tracks had the length of a full song.

“Damn… we were going to use them for the next album… we even have acoustic versions of songs from the last album. We were going to use those for a deluxe edition…” John shook his head, not just because he couldn’t believe his eyes, but also at how stupid it was of him to forget them.

“You guys actually…” Alex seemed to realize what was going on now.

I stared aimlessly at John’s cursor slowly hovering over the first track. He was prepared to double-click to open it on whatever program supported the format. The only thing going through my mind was that there were finished songs with Cam’s voice on this laptop. He had left behind more than just letters.

“Wait--” I stopped him from clicking. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for this. All this time I could barely even listen to the past songs that I had to sing up on stage. How in the world could I deal with this?

There was a silent tension in both Australia and the small living room here in LA. None of us knew how to react and nobody knew what to say. We all wanted to hear the tracks, our curiosity was so large. But then there was another emotion as well. Could we listen to an unreleased song from a man that was no longer alive? Could we deal with it? The others also had thoughts going about how I would react, but frankly I didn’t know either.

I took a deep breath, not sure if only a second had passed or if it had already been over a minute. “Ok.”

I braced myself as John clicked the track in what seemed to be slow motion to me. But then the intro riff started playing through the laptop’s speakers.

I forgot how you tasted
Just another night wasted
Spilling yourself all over me like you don't care, don't care anyway
If wrote it right off the page
Guess I'm safe for another day
Telling myself I can block out the distance like I don't care, don't care
Cue reality

I hope it all comes back again
I want to get stuck in your head like 'Everlong' playing on the late night radio (radio)
Because you lit a match with your nails on my back
And something tells me I'll never learn
Just another slow burn

Now you got my attention
Did I forget to mention I'll be gone by tomorrow, on a plane to Chicago
I say it's not fair, not fair anyway
(But you don't care either way)

I hope it all comes back again
I want to get stuck in your head like 'Everlong' playing on the late night radio (radio)
Because you lit a match with your nails on my back
And something tells me I'll never learn
Just another slow burn

We set a fire that both ends with our best lines
And best intentions
Let go of what we know and make tonight our reinvention

We set a fire that both ends with our best lines
And best intentions
Let go of what we know and make tonight our reinvention

I hope it all comes back again
I want to get stuck in your head like 'Everlong' playing on the late night radio (radio)
Because you lit a match with your nails on my back
And something tells me I'll never learn
Because you lit a match with your nails on my back
And something tells me I'll never learn
Just another slow burn (just another slow burn)

Strangely enough, my reaction wasn’t what I was dreading. I thought I was going to burst out in tears hearing his voice in a song I didn’t recognize. It was nothing like that. His melodic occasionally-raspy voice could only make me smile. It was a fucking good song. I could imagine how much fun Cam must have had with it and how he couldn’t wait to play it live. Now I couldn’t wait to bring that to reality.

“You said you wanted to use those acoustic tracks for a deluxe edition,” I started laying out my plan, “but why not add this as well? I’m sure the old fans would love hearing new music that Cam sings. We don’t have anything new to release anyway. It only makes sense to do it sooner than later.”

“Are you sure?” John questioned, concerned about my wellbeing. He didn’t want me releasing something I wanted to keep to myself.

I nodded enthusiastically. “Think about it. The song’s finished, it was finished before Cam died. I know for a fact he would always want to put out something that was finished. He hated having to wait. All we have to do is check with the others and see if the record label is cool with it.”

“Isle… you sure you want to do that?” Jack double checked, worried about the same exact thing John was.

Eventually, I managed to convince them that this was both what I wanted and what Cam would have wanted. As soon as that was done, Jack and I got our time to catch up. He told me all his fun tour stories while I told him what went down after I had given him his passport. His stories were way more exciting than mine. Mine mainly consisted of being trapped inside a house with three guys while we were trying to write songs. We had made some progress and added a few more rough demos to the one we already had. I wasn’t sure what was a good place to stop, but I couldn’t wait to bring them to a better recording studio and work on them with a producer. But before we did that, we had to send the demos back to the label, we were just waiting until we had a few things to work on.

As time kept ticking, is slowly turned into time for us to end the call. It was way later back in Australia and I didn’t want to be the reason why Jack was exhausted the next day. So, we had already said our goodbyes multiple times, always finding one more thing we had to say. The last time, however, it was my fault.

“Oh yeah, remember I might not reply to messages as often. I won’t have very good reception occasionally,” I added just before I was about to hit the hang-up button.

“What? Why? Where are you going?” Jack frowned, his face illuminated by only the light of his screen. Everybody else had left him and the lights were turned off.

“Shit, I forgot to tell you about that! I got a call a few days ago. There’s this ‘camp’ not all too far away from here next week. It’s like a summer camp for kids who love dancing, only it’s not summer. One of their instructors/counselors broke her leg, so they contacted me. Apparently, they had a reference. I just thought it was a good idea to get out of here and out into nature for a while.”

“That sounds like a fuck load of fun,” he drowsily smiled and yawned. I knew it wasn’t because he wasn’t interested, but because it was getting super late.

“I know. I’ll tell you all about it when I come back. We’ll have to set up another time for us to talk,” I said back to him. “But for now, you need to go to sleep. We’ll do all that later. Goodnight, Jacky.”

“Good mornin’, Isle,” he mumbled back with a goofy grin before I finally officially ended the call.

Notes

Ok, so, my time is going to be all over the place right now. It is going to physically be impossible what I'm going to fit into 'two months', but I have so much that needs happening. After that, things will move way faster. Just don't hate me for things being a little unrealistic time-wise.