“No,” he says immediately, cheeks coloring again.
“Yes,” I shoot back. “You do. And it’s not bad.”
He shakes his head, but he doesn’t argue harder. Which tells me enough.
By the time the strings go slack and the quiet settles back in, we’re closer than when we started. Literally—he’s shifted forward, I’ve drifted to the edge of the bed, and the gap between us is maybe two feet at best. Our knees brush now and then, and neither of us moves away.
“You’re good at this,” I say finally.
“So are you,” he replies. His voice is softer now, his eyes less guarded. “I didn’t expect….” He trails off, shaking his head like he can’t finish.
“Didn’t expect what?” I prod.
He exhales, slow and heavy. “I didn’t expect it to feel easy.”
And there it is again—that glimpse of the real Ollie. Not the captain, not the jock, not the golden boy. Just a guy who wants something to be easy for once.
I want to tell him it could be. That with me, it might be. But I don’t. Not yet.
Instead, I nod, pick up the guitar again, and let the music carry us forward.
I keep us moving because stopping feels dangerous. Every time it gets quiet, my head tries to fill it with questions I’m not ready to ask. So I noodle through a lazy progression, something warm and uncomplicated, and he follows without comment, his fingers sure even when he pretends they aren’t.
We let the last chord fade. He doesn’t look away this time.
“What are you working on?” he asks, nodding toward my desk, where the mess of paper is a crime scene of crossed-out lines and coffee rings. His voice is steady, but his knee bounces once, betraying nerves.
I glance at the pile and then back at him. My mouth tries to offer up a safe demo, something old and faceless I can pretend I care about. Instead, I hear myself say, “You really want to know?”
He holds my gaze. “Yeah.”
Fuck it.
I reach for the notebook on the nightstand—one I didn’t mean to touch today—and flip past pages that look like I wrote them on a moving bus. I find the one that still hums in my hands and set it on my thigh. My pulse ticks in my throat. If I’m wrong about him, this is the place it’s going to hurt.
“It’s not finished,” I say, buying myself a second I don’t use. “And it’s not pretty.”
He nods, like he understands the difference. “Okay.”
I breathe once, drop my eyes to the fretboard, and start. A spare pattern, thumb and first finger, the kind of rhythm thatlets the words sit up front without drowning. My voice comes quieter than usual, rough at the edges because I don’t sand anything down when it matters.
“Found you in the loud, and everything went still.
Armor on your shoulders, hands that never spill.
You looked up like a question, I answered with a song?—
if you stand here for a minute, you won’t have to stand alone.”
I don’t look at him on the first verse. I’m not that brave. I watch my hands, the way my right wrist loosens, the way the low strings bloom in this cramped room. By the second verse, I can’t help it—I check.
He’s gone very still.
Not frozen, not shut down. Still like he’s listening with his whole body. His jaw has that tight line I’m starting to recognize as him trying not to feel too much in public, even when “public” is just me, a crooked lamp, and a sofa that hates asses on it. His eyes are dark and clear. They don’t dart away.
I keep going, because stopping now would be worse.
“Crowd keeps calling captain,
