“Like what?”
“Like you’re telling the truth even when it costs you.”
The question hits somewhere tender. I look down at the strings, pluck one idle note that rings too long. “It’s the only way it works,” I say. “Otherwise, it sounds like… homework.”
A slow nod. “I get that,” he murmurs.
We sit in it. Rather than being awkward, it feels charged and careful, like we’re handling something fragile together. He shifts closer again, only enough that our knees stay in contact. The heat there is ridiculous for how slight the touch is. I’m absolutely reading into it. I don’t care.
“Play it again,” he says.
“You sure?”
He nods. “I want to hear it.”
So I do. And this time, when the chorus comes around, his voice—quiet, untrained, low—threads under mine on a single sustained note. It’s barely there. It still knocks something loose inside me.
We end together without meaning to. The last sound is our breath.
He exhales a shaky laugh, looks at the wall, the ceiling, anywhere but me, and then back. “Today was a good idea,” he says.
“It was,” I say, because my mouth doesn’t trust itself with anything more ambitious. “Same next week?”
He hesitates, a single heartbeat of war between duty and want, and then the want wins by a hair. He nods. “Yeah. Same.”
The keys jangle again outside, a door thumps, and somebody yells that the stove is doing the thing again. The spell thins but doesn’t break. He stands, and I do, too, close enough that if either of us leaned forward, we’d find out everything in one second flat. Neither of us does.
He looks at me like he’s memorizing a picture. “Text me the time,” he says.
“Will do.”
“And Rafe?”
“Yeah?”
He swallows, then gives me the smallest, bravest smile I’ve seen on him yet. “It wasn’t soft.”
I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath until he’s halfway down the hall and I let it go, smiling like an idiot at the empty doorway. When the room is only me again, I sit, put the guitar across my lap, and touch the place on my knee where he pressed, the ghost of it a steady pulse.
Then I flip the notebook to the blank space at the bottom of the page and write:
The air goes dense; no one breathes until you do.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The buzzer sounds,and the gym erupts. Bodies leap to their feet, the bleachers shaking under the stomping and hollering. I’m already on my feet, too, not because I know what the hell just happened in the last thirty seconds—I still don’t get half the rules—but because the roar is contagious, and because Ollie’s out there with his arms raised, sweat slicking his hair to his forehead, and every eye in the building on him.
It’s the last game before Christmas break. They won by a margin even I can tell is impressive, and the whole place feels like it’s buzzing out of its skin.
I clap with everyone else, even whistle, though it feels ridiculous. My bandmates ditched town yesterday—Drew back to Phoenix, Miles to Portland, Eli to bum around San Diego for a few days—so it’s just me tonight. And apparently, I’m not content to sit in my apartment scratching out lyrics in the margins of old notebooks. No, I’m here, watching the golden boy of UC soak up a victory like I’ve got stock in the team.
The thing is, maybe I do. Not in the team, but in him.
He catches sight of me in the stands, just a flicker of recognition as he scans the crowd. And maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s just coincidence, but I swear the tiniest smile twitchesat his mouth before he turns back to the court. My chest tightens like I’ve been hit with a bass drop.
I hang back as the place empties, students flooding out into the night, laughing and shoving and still vibrating from the win. Scarf up around my neck, I stuff my hands into my jacket pockets, trying to look like I belong here when I know I don’t.
