The Unexpected Encounter (An Eminem Fan Fiction)

Chapter 16: Throw That

After letting myself out, I sat there resting my head against Eminem, sniffling quietly.

He continued to hold me, his one arm wrapped around myself, the other stroking me gently. I drew some breath in and slowly let it out. I began to speak, breaking the silence after a while. "I'm sorry about that. It's been an emotional day. Thanks for bearing with me." I lifted my head off of him and sat back in my seat, pulling my legs up and wrapping my arms around them. I gave him a small smile as I returned back to normal.

"Don't worry about it. You feeling alright now?" he leaned in, brushing my cheek with his hand.

I blushed deeply. "I'm feeling great. Thank you, Em."

"It's no problem. You know you can call me by my first name if you want," he told me.

"Oh, yeah. Sorry. I'm just so used to calling you that." A small smirk formed on my face. "Can I call you Marshie?"

"You absolutely fucking can't," he responded briefly.

"Okay, Marshie," I played around.

Marshall leaned back in his seat with a bothered look on his face. "Bitch," he teased.

"So that's going to be my nickname now?" I questioned him, trying to hide my smile.

"Yeah, as long as you keep calling me that," he responded.

"Not cool," I stuck my tongue out at him.

He made a face at me back.

"Oh," I began, "I forgot to mention—I visited your old house on Dresden Street and walked down 8 Mile Road. It was so sad to your house gone like that, but 8 Mile was really fascinating. I even visited the Mobile Court, The Hip Hop Shop, and Chin Tiki."

"You did all that?" Marshall said surprised. "You fucking stalker." 

"I'm not! Those are just places that are associated with you," I tried to save myself.

"I'm just messing around. That's dope of you." He came forward and lightly punched my arm. "Want to check the sound booth out?"

I lit up. "Yeah, sure," I said, springing up out of my seat.

Marshall got up from his chair and I followed him as he made his way across to the smaller soundproof room in the back. I listened carefully as he explained how the process of recording works—how this room in the back would be where you record your voice and the machine room where we had just been in was where you would add and tweak the beats to the recording. There were so many other complex things included in this process that went right over my head but I got the main gist of it down. It was all fascinating, yet everything about it was so mechanical. I enjoyed learning about this.

"It seems like a hard process to put a song together with the many steps you have to go through. It's nice getting to know how songs are organically made, though. Thanks for teaching me about this stuff. It makes me appreciate song making," I commented, smiling brightly.

"Yeah, no problem. It is a lot of steps, for sure. It takes a long ass time to get the right sound together, you know? It's why you'll see me constantly in the studio. It takes a lot out of me, especially."

"I bet," I said, as we made our way out of the sound booth. "I really respect a lot of artists now. So you come to this studio a lot?"

"Yeah, pretty often, along with others. When I got to get together with other artists I'll usually come here. But sometimes I'll go down to L.A. to record pieces with Dre."

"I see," I said, taking a seat. "That's cool. L.A.—that's near me," I pointed out. I paused, a thought coming to me. "Hey, you should do something."