I knew I didn’t deserve to seek him out again. I shouldn’t get to be in the same room as him or reopen his life to the drama of mine, but being here reawakened something inside of me. My chest swelled to the music he created, to the words he wrote. My heart continued to beat as rapidly as it could and I felt more filled with life than I had in such a long time.
Unexpected tears pushed at my lashes and threatened to spill over. I left him to protect him, but I had sacrificed everything of myself to do it.
I couldn’t forgive myself for that. I couldn’t forgive myself for giving him up.
Even if it had meant freedom.
I sucked in a breath as if I knew I would need it and braced myself for the impact of Ryder’s attention.
He opened his eyes and his gaze swept over the crowd gathered for him. His brow scrunched together and his shoulders tensed even while he finished up his song. And then he found me.
His eyes bulged with surprise and his fingers slammed on the fret of his guitar, ruining the sweet ending that had been drifting around the room. His head jerked back from the microphone and he stared at me for a long time.
Too long.
The tension in the room skyrocketed as his attention stayed focused on me. His Adam’s apple bobbed tellingly and I could feel his furious emotions saturate the room.
My heart stopped. My breathing stopped. My thoughts stopped. Even time stopped. And it was just the two of us. The rest of the world faded away and I was left transfixed by Ryder’s unwavering concentration and those gunmetal gray eyes that held me so captive.
The curiosity of the impatient crowd broke through my haze as people started to turn around and try to figure out what had distracted their lead singer. I felt more eyes on me when Ryder’s bandmates noticed me too and reacted almost as strongly as Ryder had.
Ryder must have noticed the aggravated edge to his fans. He snapped back in place and shifted the guitar strap across his back roughly. He cleared his throat into the mic and then again as I watched him visibly attempt to pull himself together. He was fighting a battle that I had caused and I realized how bad of an idea this had turned out to be.
I had been selfish wanting to watch him play and hear the band again. But I should have waited until the show was over. It wasn’t fair for him.
I had been mesmerized by his singing voice, but when he spoke into the microphone and it was the voice I had known so intimately, had loved so fiercely, I nearly dissolved.
“I’m going to change up our set a bit,” he laughed, but it sounded bitter. Over his shoulder he told his bandmates, “Sorry, guys. I, uh, I’m going to take some creative liberty.”
They all shrugged their shoulders and mumbled that it was fine.
Ryder went on, “The next song I was going to play is called,The Siren’s Soul. It was a love song that I wrote a year ago and if I’m honest, it’s one of my best. But, yeah, I’m just not feeling it anymore. So instead, I’m going to play you another one we’ve been working on called,Aftermath. It’s more appropriate for tonight.” He strummed his guitar a second and looked back at the drums. “Bates?”
Phoenix counted the band off with a, “One, two, three,” and they playedAftermath.
If I didn’t think Ryder’s introduction of the song had been a strong enough message, the lyrics definitely took a turn for the Loud and Clear.
In a bluesy, melancholy voice that still managed to be funky, Ryder sang about black hearts and black souls. How love isn’t a feeling, it’s an infection. He sang about the lies of the body and the sins of the mouth. He sang about a girl that had promised love and delivered pain. She’d sworn happiness and sentenced death. She made him fall in love with her, and then she took her black heart and disappeared. She wasn’t supposed to kill him, but he was cursed from the moment he met her. Then he hit me with the chorus.
The aftermath of loving you is not love at all.
Your black soul bled all over mine.
Your black heart turned mine to stone.
The aftermath of loving you is nothing but pain I want to fade away.
Ouch.
I rubbed my thumb over the black heart tattooed on my wrist in a subconscious attempt to wipe it off. It didn’t work. The ink was as permanent as the black heart in my chest that it represented.
Ryder’s song affirmed it.
The crowd went wild over the song. They loved every bit of his angsty rock and roll ballad. I stood in the back and tried to pick up the pieces of the secret hope I hadn’t even known I’d been holding onto.
I had been stupid to come here, stupid to think that I needed to check on Ryder.
Obviously he was fine. And now that I had really forced myself to think about it, he could take care of himself.
