For the first time in a long time, the silence around me doesn’t feel like armour.
It feels like punishment.
Chapter 12
Lucky
ThemomentI’minthe living room, the quiet hits me like a shift in air pressure. I stand there, staring at nothing, letting the afterburn of Ethan’s tone settle in my chest. It’s stupid how easily it gets to me. But ever since everything happened, the edges of me feel thinner, easier to bruise.
I exhale slowly and sink onto the sofa.
He didn’t mean it. I know that. But knowing doesn’t stop the sting.
My eyes drift to the guitar leaning in the corner, half hidden in shadow. I’ve been playing old songs all week, but haven’t produced anything new in what feels like forever — not properly. Not since LA, when the music just… vanished. Like someone flipped a switch in my brain, and everything went dark.
But now, something inside me shifts. A quiet ache. A pull.
Before I can overthink it, I cross the room and reach for it. The guitar feels heavier, the wood cool against my fingertips. I settle it on my lap, letting the familiar shape nestle against me.
I strum one chord. It’s rough. Uneven. Another. Better.
Then my fingers… move. Muscle memory guiding them through new sounds I haven’t touched in months. A few hesitant notes spill out, then curl into a tiny, fragile melody. Not a song — not yet — but something new. Something alive.
A breath catches in my throat.
It’s the first thing I’ve created since everything broke. And it feels like slipping a pin of light into the fog that’s been thickening in my head for weeks.
I close my eyes. Keep playing. The melody softens the tightness in my chest, unspools the tension Ethan's tone left behind.
For the first time in a long time…I feel like myself. Even if it’s just for the length of a few trembling notes.
The melody is barely a minute old when words start tugging at me — small at first, like whispers coming from far away. I blink, startled by the sudden thrum of them, the way they push forward all at once.
Oh God. This is happening.
I set the guitar down so fast it nearly slips, grab my notebook from the coffee table, and flip it open with shaking hands. The pen jumps across the page, messy, frantic. I don’t even think; the lyrics come like they’ve been waiting just behind a locked door.
“You’re close enough to ruin me, too far for me to touch…”
Another line hits me, sharp and clean.
“I reach, you pull away, and maybe that’s what saves us both.”
My breath comes unsteady. The words feel too true. Too raw. But they won’t stop, so I keep scribbling.
“Still I’m caught in every shadow that moves the way you do,”
“trying not to want the thing that never wanted to be wanted too.”
I pause, pen hovering. The room feels different. Like it’s breathing with me.
This is more than a song. It’s a pressure valve opening — everything I’ve been holding in, everything I haven’t let myself name.
Untouchable.
That’s the word that keeps circling back. A shape I can almost reach but never hold.
I sit back on my heels, staring at the page as if someone else wrote it. My pulse is still racing, but the fog in my head… It’s thinner. The heaviness that’s been wrapped around me for weeks shifts, loosens.
