you keep calling plays.
I keep writing verses
to say the thing I can’t say.
If you want a quiet corner,
I’ll be noise you choose?—
three chords, a place to breathe,
a yes that you can use.”
My voice scrapes onyes, and the scrape is the truth I can’t hide. I let it be. The chorus returns. His breath hitches—tiny, but there. His fingers curl once against his knee and then flatten, like he remembered he has hands and they might give him away.
Closer. I don’t remember shifting, but we are. The guitars bridged a gap, and our knees are a whisper from touching, thekind of almost that heats the air. The lamplight turns the room into a small circle, everything else falling off the map.
I finish on a held note, no flourish, just the line hanging until it gives up and settles into the room. The quiet afterward is louder than the song.
He swallows audibly. His eyes flick down to my mouth, fast, then back to my eyes like he’s yanked himself on a leash. Color climbs his neck, slow as a sunrise. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Tries again.
“That’s… good,” he says, and the word is too small for how he says it. He laughs once, short, breathless, like he hears himself and can’t fix it. “No. It’s—” He searches, cheeks hotter now, and when he finds the word, it lands low in my chest. “It’s honest.”
I don’t move. If I move, I’ll do something stupid. If I breathe wrong, I might too.
“It’s new,” I manage. “I… wasn’t going to show it to anyone.”
“Why did you?” His voice is soft. Not suspicious, but curious in a way that feels like a hand offered.
I could lie. I don’t. “Because you asked what I’m working on,” I say. “And because you listened to everything else.”
He looks at my notebook like it might bite, then up at me like I might too. His knee shifts again, and this time it touches mine, lightly, a press and release, as if he’s checking to see if I’ll flinch.
I don’t.
He doesn’t either.
There’s a noise from somewhere down the hall—one of my roommates arriving, keys jangling, a muffled curse about the lock—and it’s like a spell threatens to crack. We both blink, the room snapping back into its shabby walls and questionable carpet. He sits back half an inch, breath evening out, the captain’s mask trying to climb back over his face.
I clear my throat, roll my shoulders, and give us a way to keep what we just had without pretending it didn’t happen. “Secondverse needs work,” I say, flipping the page with a finger that doesn’t quite feel steady. “The middle’s soft.”
“It didn’t feel soft,” he says quickly, then looks like he regrets how fast it came out. “I mean—maybe the line about the crowd…” He frowns, thinking, and it’s devastating, the way he takes it seriously. “What if you don’t use ‘captain’ there? It’s elsewhere in the song. You could… I don’t know… describe the pressure without naming it.”
I blink. I wasn’t expecting him to… help. “Like what?”
He stares past me for a second, focused on the wall like he’s watching some highlight reel only he can see. When he speaks, he does it slow, choosing. “The way the air feels when a free throw matters. How it gets dense. The way everybody stops breathing until you do. You could write that.”
I’m not sure I breathe for a full count. “Yeah,” I say, a little rough. “Yeah, I could.”
He lifts a shoulder, almost embarrassed by his own idea. “Just… a thought.”
“It’s a good thought.” I tip the neck of my guitar toward him like a salute. “You can’t sing your way out of a paper bag, but you might be a lyricist.”
He snorts, caught off guard. “I don’t sing.”
“You hummed,” I say. “That counts.”
He rubs his thumb along the edge of the cushion, eyes flicking to my mouth again, then to my hands on the guitar. “Do you always write like that?”
