Part of me wants to take the blanket tube and whop Beau over the head with it, a makeshift jousting sword to knock him off the “I’m not explaining myself” horse he’s riding. Maybe start a rousing pillow fight. Or better yet, grab his hands and make him jump on the bed with me. Be wild and stupid and joyful, just for the fun of it.
But I don’t.
I tuck the idea back into the closet in my mind where I keep the loud, impulsive parts of myself—the ones I’ve learned not everyone wants to see. Sometimes staying completely on my side of the bed is the only way to protect my heart.
Beau builds the fire up again. I crawl under the quilt and lie there with my heart still racing.
I tell myself it was just a kiss. A gesture of growing fondness.
But it wasn’t. It was more.
My skin still buzzes where he touched me.
But inside? I feel like a brittle petal, beautiful and breakable. Not because of how I was cast aside before. But because of hope. Because Beau doesn’t only make me feel accepted. He makes me feel wanted.
And that might be the scariest part.
Because tonight, the voice Gray left behind is whispering again. Not loud. Not cruel. Just persistent enough tomake me wonder if this is another setup for heartbreak. Beau’s kiss didn’t take the fear away; instead, it cradled it carefully, like it understood the ache Gray left behind.
But what if?
If I fall for Beau and he lets go, I’m not sure I’ll know how to bloom again.
Chapter 12
Tangled and Terrified
Beau
The next morning, the quiet is laced with something heavier than when we went to bed. Maisie senses it before I say a word. She paces once, then steps toward me, as if she’s going to say something, but backs off just as quickly. Her hand twitches at her side. A half-formed wave? I can’t tell.
When our eyes finally meet, she opens her mouth to say good morning, I imagine, but falters, lips parting and closing as though the words catch on something fragile inside her. I’m kind, polite. But there’s a distance now.
I’ve gone somewhere in my head, somewhere she can’t follow. She doesn’t ask. But I can feel the questions sitting on her tongue.
The kiss stayed with me all night, keeping me up with worry. Did I let it mean more to me than it did to her? Or am I just terrified her responsiveness meant she has feelings for me, and I might not know what to do with that?
I didn’t only dwell on what-ifs. I also replayed thevelvety softness of her lips and her lean into me when I brought her closer. I thought about what the kiss woke in me. What it shook loose.
And with that came the memory, the one that is still scrolling through my mind now that daylight has arrived. One I’ve resisted revisiting for years.
It had been raining the night my ex told me. Not a storm, but the relentless drizzle that works its way into your bones. She sat across from me in a diner’s corner booth, eyes lit by ambition but shadowed with pity.
“It’s a good song, Beau,” she said. “It deserves a real audience. And I’m the one who can get it there.”
She didn’t ask. She just used it. And me.
I’d written the lyrics and the chords on a napkin, scrawled in a haze of instinct and honesty after a late rehearsal. But I kept coming back to it. Layering it. Honing every word and chord over months, doing carpentry with sound. By the time I showed her, it was the most complete thing I’d ever made. I asked her opinion, but never got the chance to invite her to shape it with me.
Before I even played it for her, she ran. Not intentionally away from me, but one hundred percent toward what she craved—fame. She ripped the song out of my hands, and she put her own spin on it.
Turned it into something polished. Packaged.
There was no mention of me in the credits when it went live. No hint of where it began. And that was the painful part. It wasn’t only the song she took. It was the truth behind it.
I never recorded it. Never even played it for anyone else. But I felt every word.
I don’t say her name. Not even in my head. And Ihaven’t in a long time. Let the world remember who they think she is.
