All I do know is that I keep stepping closer, my vision narrowing in on that guitar in her hand, looking for a familiar quarter-sized chip in the warm, tanned veneer.
It’s not going to be there.
It has to be a coincidence.
But there’s something, a string, an echo, a calling,something, beckoning me forward. Making me step closer. To look.
Not just look, butsee.
I pause about ten feet in front of the small raised platform that’s a sad excuse for a stage. The girl reaches the chorus and her fingers dance along the strings with delicate purpose and clean execution. With each word, her voice grows stronger, harsher, like she wants to nail every single word into my skin. I can feel her watching me. Feel her eyes burning through my face. But I have to see for myself first what my gut is already telling me. Has been trying to tell me I think since I first sat down.
I narrow my eyes, straining to see, and as if she knows what I’m looking for, the girl adjusts her right arm slightly without missing a single beat. The small movement, the little gesture, gives me what I’m looking for.
Toward the bottom of the guitar is a missing piece of the veneer that one of my mother’s cigarettes burned through. I had used a pocket knife to chip away the charred surface while keeping the guitar intact. The damage was purely cosmetic, but I remember how angry I was that she was so careless with my most prized possession.
And I remember exactlywhoI left that guitar behind with.
The ground shakes beneath me but no one else seems panicked. No one else moves or raises concern. The music dulls and gives way to the roaring in my ears, overwhelming and desolate. The air grows thick and heavy as my nostrils flare, trying to take a deep breath but struggling.
And when I finally drag my eyes away from the damned spot on the instrument and look at her face, not just look butsee, her lips curve into a knowing smirk.
2
Aspen
Irecognized Reid Keely the moment he strode through the door. Not because of his notoriety as lead guitarist of Whisper Me Nothings. Not because of his online presence being photographed out at clubs with multiple women. Or engaged in some sort of brawl, sometimes even with his own friends.
But because he’s the one who gave me this very guitar, made sure I had food to eat every night before I went to bed so I didn’t wake up with a stomachache, and the one person who ever made me feel protected in my life.
He’s my foster brother.
And he left me behind without a second look.
He walked in today and I swear my heart stopped beating for a moment. Sound ceased to exist as time seemingly paused. My lungs ached for air as I felt a phantom punch delivered straight to my gut. When I moved to LA, I always knew there was a chance I’d see him again. Maybe even fantasized about it when I was eighteen and stillclinging to some sort of childish hope of him coming back for me. But as time went on and I created my own life, his presence in my mind got smaller and smaller. He had forgotten about me, after all.
And when he sat down at the bar, eyes briefly taking stock of me as disinterested as if he was scanning the aisles of a grocery store, I realized he truly did forget about me. Yes, I’d grown up and looked a hell of a lot different than I did when we last saw each other all those years ago, but maybe the last little naive part of me that I clinged to thought that there would be some intrinsic part of him that would know it was me. That he would take one look at me and feel that familiar tug I did every time I saw his photo online or heard one of his songs playing on the radio.
Wrong.
I was so very wrong.
All previous notions of what some sort of reunion would look like between us were smashed the moment he opened that mouth of his and shut me down, thinking I was some fangirl trying to flirt with him.
His voice is the same, though. I knew it was, having heard him do interviews and of course listening to his music. But still, the shock of it almost sent me teetering back into the shelves of liquor bottles behind the bar and right back into our old house in Pittsburgh.
He clearly took my shock at seeing my old foster brother for the first time in ten years as being starstruck.
Well, now it’s his turn to be surprised.
His jaw is slack as shock washes over his handsome face. No longer is his nose up in the air like he’s above everyone and everything around him like it was when he walked in, and that frown buried deep between his dark brows has morphed into slight confusion.
Good.
He maybe didn’t recognize me, but of course he’d recognize the gift he left behind. That and the song. It was one of his favorites to play. I’d listen through the thin walls of our bedrooms for hours as he softly sang the words to it over and over again, and I finally wore him down enough to teach me.
Still to this day, I can’t hear it without thinking of him. It’s not one I usually play, even though it’s one of my favorites.
Because it was always one of his, too.
