“You’re scared,” Noah said. “You’re scared to give your voice a chance. Your writing. It’s easier to keep your dreams tucked away in a shoebox under your bed.”
I felt it land. It wasn’t cruel because he wasn’t wrong, but it still pissed me off. “Don’t call it fear because it doesn’t match what you want.”
“Skye.”
“Yes, I’m scared,” I said, before he could keep going. “I’m scared of getting swallowed whole. I’m scared of finding myself six months from now in some hotel corridor with my insides scraped out. I did the band thing. I watchedwho you had to become to survive it. I wasn’t good at that then, and I won’t be good at it now. But that isn’t the same as hiding.”
“You think I’m asking you to disappear into me,” he said, running a frustrated hand through hair that I’d idly played with after we’d made love the night before. “I’m not.”
“I think the machine is big,” I said. “It’s scary, Noah. Even if you do it smarter this time around. It’s still a machine. I don’t want to be a cog in it.”
He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I want you,” he said, simply. “Not as a prop. As the person who made me remember why any of this matters. I want to write with you. I want to sing with you. I want to come back here and have this place be home. We can make it work.”
“Last time we said we could make it work, too. We fought about a manager and blew up the band. I went home. You went bigger. We didn’t talk for almost fifteen years. I’m choosing not to do that again.” I shook my head.
“So that’s it?” He wasn’t angry. It was almost as if he couldn’t really hear what I was saying.
“That’s it,” I said. My throat burned. I had to swallow before I could keep going. “Take the contract. Take the tour. Be good to yourself in the doing. Call me when you want to know whether the blue room radiator is leaking. Send me postcards. I’ll cheer for you from here.”
“And us?” he asked.
The word landed in the quiet that stretched between us. I clutched my hands so hard my nails dug into my palms.
“Timing isn’t our friend,” I said. “Maybe it never was.I’m not asking you to choose me over this. I’m asking you not to ask me to leave my life. I can’t do it, Noah.”
He stepped back like he was just giving me space instead of falling away.
“Okay,” he said, after an interminable beat. “I hear you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.
“Don’t be,” he said, and there was the kindness I fell for when we were kids in a borrowed garage. “You told me the truth.”
We stood there in silence that made you aware of your own heartbeat. He looked at me like he wanted to memorize something, and I looked at him like I was trying not to.
“I should pack,” he said.
“Okay.”
Noah crossed the room and paused in front of me. I lifted my chin and locked eyes with him, falling, as I always did, into the depths of his soul. Regret and something more flashed there.
“Skye … I …”
I waited and once again, for someone who had so many words to put into song, Noah couldn’t seem to find any to say. Instead, he brushed his lips over my forehead in a kiss that made my eyes sting and left the lounge.
I stayed where I was until I heard his boots on the stairs and then I went into autopilot.
I put a fresh set of towels in the green room. I restocked the tea station. I went to the front desk, opened the ledger, and stared at a page I wasn’t really reading.
Moments later, Noah came down the stairs with a bag and his guitar. He looked tired. Again.
I looked up when he set something on the table in front of me.
It was a guitar pick. Worn smooth at the edge. One of mine from years ago with a tiny star inked in the corner. I didn’t remember drawing it, but I knew that I had.
“For when you want to finish something,” he said. “Or start it.”
“Thank you,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else without crying.
