In case you missed this deleted scene from Fully Automatic during the 2014 blog tour, I’m preserving it here. 🙂
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But he didn’t exactly inspire confidence. He’d called and said he couldn’t take Chris for his visitation, and she laid into him about it over the phone. When they hung up, though, she told Brad that he’d said Chris wouldn’t have wanted to see him the way he’d been. “No, not drugs,” he’d told her, but they were both still nervous.
But they talked about it. Both of them thought it was important to both Ethan and Chris to be part of each other’s lives. Val was convinced Chris didn’t see Ethan as his real father, but Brad wasn’t so sure. Val had started teaching Chris to call him Daddy Brad, and he thought maybe she was hoping for that, but Brad knew it would fucking kill Ethan. Ethan deserved the love of his son, and Brad wanted him to have it. It wasn’t that he himself didn’t love Chris, because he did. He was a wonderful child full of joy and laughter, and he couldn’t imagine his life without the kid.
But he was not Chris’s dad.
Ethan finally arranged to pick up Chris for visitation and Val acquiesced. Brad felt some relief, because he’d also been needing to talk to Ethan about Fully Automatic. Brad, Zane, and Nick had settled on a fistful of songs for their third album, and the label was getting itchy. They and the band manager were no longer wanting to bank on Ethan’s rehab-and-bad-behavior fueled publicity. They wanted the band recording and touring again. It had been too long.
That pissed Brad off. They were like petulant children who didn’t know what they wanted. But, he supposed, they knew the business better than he did. He’d spoken to Ethan a week earlier and told him the band was ready and they needed to know his decision. Brad had told him to think about it. He didn’t want his friend’s decision immediately.
So when Ethan and Jenna showed up that afternoon, he couldn’t help the smile that crossed his face when, after Ethan took Chris in his arms, he asked Brad, “Can I talk to you about business sometime?”
He couldn’t read his friend, though, and he was worried that maybe Ethan didn’t want to be part of the band anymore. He hoped his feelings weren’t showing on his face. “Have you thought about it?”
“Yeah. I can’t walk away. I’m in.”
Brad nodded. He was grateful and happy to hear it. His friend—and his band—would be whole again, and that was huge news. Val walked in then and said, “Ethan. Glad you could make it.”
“Yeah.”
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