“You think he’ll come?” Drew asks around a mouthful.
“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t. The reasonable part of me says no. The part that writes songs saysmaybeis a word you can live on for a night.
We split, because he’s meeting a friend and I need to walk the buzz out of my legs before I try to sleep. I cut across the quad, where the palm trees are black cutouts against a sky that refuses to go fully dark. Finals ghosts drift in clumps, chanting, “We’re so fucked,” like a prayer. Somewhere a trumpet tries valiantly to find a key. The band room windows glow. My fingers itch for a pen.
Back in the apartment, Miles is on the couch with a guitar across his knees, coaxing a melody. He glances up, clocking my face like a seismograph reading a quake.
“How was it?” he asks.
“Loud,” I say. “Good loud.”
He nods once, like that answers everything he needs to know. “You write?”
“Soon,” I say, already digging for the notebook in my bag. “Very soon.”
I close my bedroom door, fall into the chair by the tiny desk that came with the place, and flip to a blank page. The pen hovers, then drops, and the lines spill out fast, too fast for my hand, clean in a way that tells me I’ll be able to read them tomorrow.
You looked up and I forgot the score,
A thousand voices, I only heard yours.
Armor fitted in a hallway light,
Towel twist, leader’s jaw, steady fight.
If you come where the lights are cheap,
Where the sound guy swears and the floorboards creak,
I’ll give you three songs and a place to breathe,
No jerseys, no speeches—just stay and be.
I stop, hand cramped, chest hot. I stare at the words until they blur, then sit back and let the adrenaline drain out of me in a long, shaky breath.
Maybe he’ll show. Maybe he won’t. Either way, I’ve got a chorus that tastes like the kind of trouble you only get once in a long while. The kind you chase because you know what it feels like to miss it.
I thumb my phone awake, open the email with the ticket confirmation from earlier for a different kind of stage—his—and smile like a thief.
Tomorrow’s ours.
And if he walks through that door and into that noise? I’ll have something to sing about that isn’t just a guess.
CHAPTER
FOUR
Barslike this always feel like they’re holding their breath. The air hangs heavy with the ghosts of cheap beer and poor decisions, neon signs buzzing like they’ve forgotten their own names. We shoulder through the side door with gear banging our shins—cables, cases, the pedalboard I bribed into behaving with electrical tape and patience I didn’t have. The sound guy watches from the back with the weary stare of a man who’s seen too much and keeps showing up anyway. He hates everyone equally. It’s comforting.
“Load quick, Saints,” he says, like a funeral director telling us to keep it down. “Six acts, no miracles. Fog machine’s already mad.”
“Romantic,” Drew mutters, nearly pulverizing his toes with a hardware bag.
“Try not to die before the bridge,” I say, and he salutes with a stick like he means to.
We claim the stage-that’s-not-a-stage: a scuffed rectangle of floor stolen from the tables. The ceiling presses low. The PA coughs. A monitor with a lightning-bolt crack faces us. I unzip my case and the bass comes out humming, a familiar weight across my shoulder, the leather strap creaking. I thumb a low Eand the floor answers, resonant, like the room has a spine after all.
Miles tunes in silence, surgical and sure, hand on the headstock, ear cocked. Eli argues with the sound guy about his DI box, using words that are mostly sighs. Drew unsnarls cables by snarling more. People shuffle in with the December chill—hoodies, thrift leather, glitter liner beneath beanies. Students with finals-panic eyes, locals with habitual slouches, a barfly who tells every band they remind him of someone famous even when they don’t. The place smells like fryer oil and beer and a cologne somebody bought with a fake ID.
