"Bradley-WeLoveLydiaLove" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Denton)

anyway."

Or maybe I would have dumped her. Smug asshole never considers that.

I remember Lydia's rage this morning. No matter how beautiful and talented she
is, that sort of thing can wear a man down. "I think she might be about
half-crazy," I say.

Daniels laughs. "The bitch is a genius. What do you expect?"

Well, I guess I expect her to dump me, have her usual creative burst, and for
the world to be in my debt. And for my first album, Willie Todd, to be released
on datacard, digital audio tape, and compact disc.

You are Christopher. Yeah, yeah.

"Guess that's all, Danny," I say. "Just figured I should check in."

Why? He's watching us all the time anyway.

"Glad you did, Chris," Daniels says, and the line goes dead.

I head into the ice-cold store, and now that I'm off the phone, I have a moment
in which all of this -- my new voice, my new face, my new name, my place in the
bed of Lydia Love -- seems like a lunatic scare that can't work and can't be
justified.

But CCA has the psychological profiles, the gizmos, and the money, so CCA knows
best. If it makes sense to them, it makes sense to me too. And what makes sense
to CCA is that Lydia Love's creative process has followed a repeating cycle for
the past eleven years:

At seventeen, after graduating from high school in Lubbock, Lydia had a violent
breakup with her first serious boyfriend, a skate-punk Nintendo freak.
Immediately following that breakup, she went without sleep for six days, writing
songs and playing guitar until her fingers bled. Then she slept for three days.
When she awoke she drained her mother's savings account, hopped a bus to Austin,
and bought twelve hours of studio time. She mailed a digital tape of the results
to Creative Communications of America and went to bed with the engineer who'd
recorded it.

The recording engineer became her manager, and he lasted in both his personal
and professional capacities for a little over a year -- long enough for Lydia to
start gigging, to land a contract with CCA, and to buy a house in a rich Austin
suburb. Then her new neighbors were awakened one night by the sounds of
screaming and breaking glass, and some of them saw the manager/ boyfriend
running down the street, naked except for a bandanna. The sound of breaking
glass stopped then, but the screaming continued, accompanied by electric guitar.

The next day, Lydia's debut album, First Love, was released at a party held in