Pursuit of Happiness | Taz Skylar [1]

088. for now

When Taz pushed the front door open and stepped into the house, the first thing he heard was Zoe's voice as it echoed through the house. She was speaking loudly and angrily, and when Taz followed the sound of her voice into the living room, he found her pacing back and forth across the space where the living room and the kitchen met, a vein pulsing in her forehead and her phone pressed against the side of her face.

" – no, no, no, you listen to me," Zoe was saying, her tone so angry that it almost sounded like a snarl. "If you take those songs from me, I will sue you from here to kingdom come, do you understand me?"

Zoe's fury sounded almost foreign in Taz's ears as he set the cardboard cup tray holding their drinks down on the kitchen table and then sat down. Taz wouldn't have described Zoe as having a particularly short temper. In fact, he would have described Zoe's temper as being fairly moderate and slow to build, but the caveat to that was that when Zoe's temper did flare, it didn't just flare; it exploded.

And judging by the way that Zoe's skin was pulled taut across her forehead, her temper had most definitely exploded.

The anger in Zoe's expression didn't fade when she turned on her heel and spotted Taz, stalking across the room to stand in front of him. Taz sat up straight in his chair, a little alarmed, but when Zoe reached out to smooth her fingertips across his cheek, her touch was just as tender as it always was. Taz relaxed under the callouses that covered the ends of Zoe's fingers as Zoe bent down to kiss the top of his head, her lips brushing the skin just below his hairline.

As she straightened up, Zoe was barking out a laugh, but it sounded bitter, like talons had clawed their way into her throat to drag it out. "What? You don't think I have the money to make your life absolute hell?"

Taz faintly heard the person on the other end of the line say something in response, but he couldn't hear exactly what was said. In the end, he didn't need to, not when he saw Zoe's mouth twist, making her look even more furious than she already did before she turned away from him to resume her pacing.

"Those are my songs," Zoe snapped, tension visible in the set of her shoulders. "I composed them, I wrote the lyrics, I rewrote them over and over and over again until they were perfect. Not you. They're mine. They're coming with me. If you try and take them from me, you can talk to my fucking lawyer."

Zoe reached the far wall once she finished speaking and she turned on her heel to avoid colliding with it but stopped walking to listen to the person on the other end of the phone speak. As she listened, Taz watched Zoe's lips twist again, this time curling upwards into a smug smirk that told him that she'd gotten what she wanted. "Yeah, that's what I thought."

With that, Zoe hung up the phone and heaved out a sigh, tucking it into her back pocket so that she could rub her hands over her face.

"So I'm guessing that the record label took option two," Taz said quietly.

Zoe nodded, taking her hands away from her face so that she could look at him. Despite only having been awake for a handful of hours, Zoe looked tired already, but it didn't look like something that sleep was going to fix.

"Can they even do that? I thought you had a contract."

"I – probably not," Zoe admitted, walking over to join him at the table. She sighed again as she pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, resting back into the chair. "But I'm just . . . I don't care anymore. They're letting me walk away with all the songs I had written, so I can still do something with them if I get another record deal. That's all I care about right now, to be honest."

Taz was quiet as he listened to Zoe attempt to convince herself that this was fine. He could hear the disappointment in her voice, could see it left behind in her expression as her anger faded. Reaching over to take Zoe's hand, Taz turned it over so that he could run his fingers across the lines in Zoe's palm. "How much of that was actually true?"

"Not much," Zoe admitted, her eyes slipping down to watch Taz drag his index finger across a line that ran diagonally across her palm. While she'd been on the phone, she'd been so furious that she hadn't been able to feel anything else, but now that that anger was beginning to fade, she could feel just how heavy her heart had become.

"What am I supposed to do if I can't get another record deal?" Zoe asked, dragging her eyes up so that she could meet Taz's eyes. "What if those two albums are all I get? What if I never get to step foot in a studio ever again? There's so much more I want to do, I can't – "

"Hey," Taz said, shifting his chair closer until he was close enough that he could touch Zoe's face, pushing a few strands that had escaped her haphazard ponytail behind her ear. "That's not going to happen."

"But how do you know?"

"Because you're you. You're too good," Taz answered. "And you did it once. I don't see any reason that you can't do it again."

Zoe's eyes flickered across Taz's face, looking for any evidence that would indicate whether he was telling her what he truly thought or simply what he thought she wanted to hear. "And what if you're wrong?"

"I'm not," Taz replied, brushing his thumb back and forth across her cheekbone once, twice, three times, before he drew his hand away from her face. Then, wanting to change the subject before her self-doubt could rear its head any more than it already had, Taz told her, "I think I have something that'll cheer you up."

"Other than the coffee? You're spoiling me."

Taz smiled at her, leaning over to dip his hand into the cup tray that he'd set on the table when he came in. Zoe had been so distracted that she hadn't even reached for her coffee yet, so she hadn't noticed the tiny object hidden inside a little paper bag tucked into the cup tray next to her coffee.

Interest danced in Zoe's eyes as she watched Taz dip his hand into the cup tray to retrieve the little object, before he took Zoe's hand and pressed the object into her palm. The object hidden inside the paper bag was thin, and hard, like it was made of metal. Taz watched Zoe's brow furrow as she opened the bag and dipped her hand into it, pulling out the key hidden inside.

"What – " Zoe started, turning to him.

"It's for the front door here," Taz said, before Zoe could even get the question out. "I figured that if we're serious about this, then you should probably have one."

Zoe's smile was so brilliant that it was almost impossible to believe that self-doubt had raged its way through her only moments before. "You're serious?"

"I wouldn't have asked you in the first place if I wasn't serious about you," Taz said. Before he had even finished speaking, Zoe was launching herself out of her chair and into his, straddling his lap and kissing him with enough force that the chair briefly teetered on its two legs. Taz laughed against Zoe's lips and wrapped his arms around her, trying to cradle her against him in case the chair tipped backwards. Instead, the chair slammed back down onto the floor on all four legs.

"I love you," Zoe said, her hands on either side of Taz's face as her mouth left his, kissing a trail from his lips and across his cheek. "I love you so much."

"I love you too," Taz said, turning his head until he could slot his mouth against Zoe's again.

Zoe was still smiling when she broke the kiss, keeping two fingers curled around the key as she reached behind her head to undo the plain gold chain she was wearing. There was a shift in Taz's eyes as he watched her slip the key onto the chain, but he said nothing, just clenched his hands around her hips. When Zoe clipped the necklace back around her neck, Taz smiled at the sight of the key resting against her collarbone, lifting his hand so that he could fiddle with it.

"Just for now," Zoe said, linking her hands together behind Taz's head. Taz said nothing, but he dropped the key so that he could reach up and press a kiss to the patch of skin between her eyebrows.