Don’t look at him.
I fail spectacularly and look at him.
He’s the only still thing in a moving room. His friends are doing what friends do—talking, elbowing, making side comments, laughing in the way that says they’re alive and young and safe in their pack—but he’s fixed, eyes locked like he’s holding the stage in place with focus alone. Mouthy leans to him, says something like “It’s good, right?” but Ollie doesn’t answer. His jaw tightens. His throat works. He looks like someone slid a coin into him and he’s not sure what song it’s going to play.
We hit the pre-chorus, and I can hear my pulse in the wedge.
“If you stand where the lights burn cheap,
Where the floorboards groan and the sound runs deep,
I’ll give you three songs and a place to breathe?—
No jerseys, no speeches, just stay and be.”
It’s the most honest thing I’ve sung in public. My fingers bite the strings too hard, fuzzing the edge of the note; Miles tucks a gentler line beneath me like he’s laying down a rug so I don’t fall. I find Ollie again in the verse even though I shouldn’t.
“You don’t talk loud, you still the room,
You carry thunder like it’s perfume,
But the flush you couldn’t cage gave you away?—
I’m not your answer, I’m just your stray.”
It’s a risk, that line, the kind that could make someone flinch for the wrong reasons. He doesn’t. He goes stiller. His lips part a breath’s width, then close like he remembered the world. His hand tightens at his side; his fingers curl once, release. It’s tiny. It’s loud to me. The guys from the café glance between us like they’re watching a scene in a show they didn’t realize they bought tickets to. One of them—cap backward—tips his chin at me with anI see youthat’s more ally than warning. The mouthyone says, “Bro, he’s straight, you know that.” Not mean, more like he’s reading a footnote aloud. Then the cap one goes, “Yeah, yeah, but also… just listen,” and then they both shut up because the chorus is back, and even people who don’t like us are going to like this part.
The song ends like we cut a wire. For exactly one beat, the bar holds its breath. Then the noise hits—a roar, whistles, two hands slapping my back so hard I lurch, someone by the pool table yelling, “Run that again!” like we’re a jukebox. My chest doesn’t know what to do with itself. I laugh once, startled and stupid, and wipe my forearm across my mouth like I can clean the feeling off. I can’t.
It’s embedded.
It’s engraved.
It’s burrowed in.
We hustle our gear to the wall for the next band to sprawl out their ridiculous fog machine where it’ll make every asthmatic kid in here a martyr. The friendly café guys thread through the crowd, and the mouthy one calls, “Yo, Saints—nice set,” with a grin that doesn’t ask for anything. I bump his fist on reflex. He leans closer, voice pitched like he wants me to hear him and only me. “He doesn’t do bars, man. But he came for this. Don’t be weird about it.”
“I’m constitutionally incapable of not being weird,” I say, and he laughs, probably because he realizes it’s true.
There’s suddenly too much heat and not enough oxygen. I slip through the next wave of bodies and out the door. The night air hits like a good slap.
It smells like tailpipe and a citrus tree someone planted to make this block pretend it cares about beauty. The cold finds the damp at my collar, and I hiss and grin at once. I dig a cigarette out of a crushed pack and light it, the flame small and perfect,smoke curling into the cone of yellow parking-lot light. The first drag scratches, a familiar scrape that calms my racing heart.
The windowed door opens with a gust of music and voices, then eases shut. He steps out like he had to fight his way through a river to do it.
Ollie’s all controlled lines, even out here. The light from inside glows behind him; the streetlamp puts a soft edge on him in front. He looks at the cigarette and frowns—not performative, just… concerned. He monitors damage for a living. Of course he hates watching someone do it slowly and on purpose.
“That stuff’ll kill you,” he says, and somehow it’s not annoying, which I resent.
I start with the reflex—everything kills you—and get halfway. “Everything—” I stop, look at him, look at the smoke, look at his hand in his pocket, thumb worrying the seam. I drop the cigarette and crush it out under my boot. “There. Captain’s orders.”
He blinks like he expected me to be difficult. “You don’t have to?—”
“It’s fine,” I say. “I mostly like having something to do with my hands. Bad habit. Easily swapped.”
He steps to the wall, careful with the distance, like he’s trying to stand in a way that doesn’t make a promise. The bass from inside presses through the brick into my shoulder blade. Cars sweep past with soft shushes. Two girls stagger by, laughing like they’ll never cry again.
“You were… good,” he says, as if the word weighs more than the others and he had to pick it up first. His voice has lost the PA polish—quieter, rougher at the corners, a little tired. He looks too young and too old at once.
