Maybe a little, but not in any way that mattered. I wasn’t his first responsibility, and I’d be damned if I tried to get in the way of what was.
This was one of my best friends, and I didn’t want to be the reason the good shit in his life made him so nervous.
“Yeah?” he croaked.
“This is amazing. I amsohappy for you.”
He blinked fast. “Really?”
“Yes! Kimmy’s fucking awesome, dude, and niblet number two is going to be just as cool. I cannotwaitto meet them.” I didn’t know what I was going to do without Craig. That was half the band, gone, and it felt... wrong to replace him. I didn’t want to replace him.
“I still want to play with you,” Craig rushed to say. “I mean, for fun. I might not be able to go as hard, but I still want to?—”
I held up a hand. “Anytime. Seriously.” There didn’t have to be any conditions to our friendship. We could still have fun and make space for him to be where his family needed him. “But I get it. This is yourlife, man. You have to be there for it.”
Craig looked at me and leaned back. His expression softened. His eyes searched my face. “Yeah, but the band is yours.”
I sucked in my cheeks. The tip of my tongue ran over the sharp edge of my front teeth.
After a few seconds, I nodded.
It was. Music was everything to me, and I couldn’t imagine what my life would look like without it.
Maybe I’d use Crescent company pizza nights to slide into a desk job and—and what? I wasn’t sure I had the skillset for anything but this.
“Part of it,” I admitted. “But you’re part of it too, whether you’re in the band or not, and this is awesome.”
“And you’ll be okay.” His voice raised at the end, like he wasn’t quite sure.
That was fair enough. Lucky Black Cat was down to two, and I didn’t know where we went next, but that wasn’t Craig’s problem to solve. He needed to be there for his family.
“I’ll be fine,” I promised.
I just had to believe it myself.
CHAPTER 13
LANDON
We were meeting up at the quiz place this time, which in its daily life was a plain old pub-style restaurant that served an array of beers and various sandwiches. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t love a good sandwich, so I was all for it.
It had been a long day at work, changing out the fans in one of the big servers because it kept overheating. It was the kind of thing that got first priority, jumping all the tickets in the queue, because if the servers failed, it could impact the business. There was redundancy, sure, but I was thinking it wasn’t quite enough. I needed to talk to... to someone. About that.
Maia? HR probably didn’t have much say in that kind of thing, but I wasn’t sure who else to go to, when I was thinking the company should spend more money than I made in a year to improve their server setup.
Anyway, work was done for the day. I was meeting Dean, and we were going to... go on a date. Another date? The day before had certainly been at least one date, surely, but Geoff had told me that I assumed too much from little things, like when I’d thought we were dating just because we’d gone out to dinner a dozen times. I was getting ahead of myself, he’d said.
While I wasn’t inclined to trust his word anymore since he’d been cheating on me with my brother, there still might be something to it. It wasn’t like I had much other romantic experience to fall back on.
So... just dinner. We were having dinner. And we’d had a great time at coffee, and the bookstore, and dinner, and coffee again the day before.
Not to mention the... well. One of us had had sex, sort of.
I still had mixed feelings about that.
Oh, not like I was sorry it had happened, but, well, mostly, I was confused. I’d never been in a situation like it before. Never had a man give to me without wanting something in return. Part of me still felt like I’d done something wrong by not reciprocating, even though he’d been the one to say he didn’t want that.
So when I walked into the pub and saw Dean sitting at the bar looking miserable, my mind went immediately to being dumped.
