Then Eli ruins it, of course. “So this mystery muse,” he says, wagging his brows. “Am I supposed to believe it’s not me? Because I swear, man, the last chorus sounded exactly like my ass.”
We all crack up, tension bleeding out in the way only this band can manage.
The café feels too quiet once the interviewer’s gone, the recorder no longer blinking red between us. For a second, all I hear is the scrape of a chair and Eli slurping the last of his latte like he’s trying to be annoying on purpose.
Then Drew leans back, arms behind his head, and smirks at me. “Well, congratulations, Casanova. You just came out in print.”
“Please,” Eli says, wagging his brows. “Like that’s news. We’ve been living with the gospel of Rafe’s sex life since freshman year.”
I flip him off again, but there’s no heat in it. My pulse is still thrumming, the words still echoing—yeah, I write from experience. All kinds of experience.
Miles, steady as ever, says it before anyone else can. “Doesn’t matter. We agreed years ago—no hiding.”
That makes Eli sober up a little. He nods, curls flopping into his eyes. “Yeah. Fuck hiding. The whole point is honesty. We write what we live, we play what we feel, and we don’t make excuses for it.”
And fuck if he’s not right. And double thank fuck that while I don’t talk about it much with my parents, they know I’m bisexual and respect that there’s no way I’d hide that part of myself.
Drew drums his fingers against the table, voice lower. “Even if it makes people uncomfortable.”
“Especially if it makes people uncomfortable,” Miles corrects, and when his dark eyes flick to me, I feel it settle. This pact we made back when the band was nothing more than a half-broken drum kit, mismatched amps, and a handful of bad songs—when we swore we weren’t gonna twist ourselves into something fake just to fit in.
Eli grins again, lighter now. “Besides, I like to think of us as an equal-opportunity band. We’ve got enough kinks and preferences between the four of us to cover a whole damn Pride parade.”
That earns a laugh, because he’s not wrong. Eli’s stories alone could scandalize half the dorms. Drew’s quieter about it, but he’s never hidden the fact that his ex is a guy who still shows up to our gigs. Miles? He’s dated whoever the hell he wants without apology since day one.
And me? I guess I’ve always been open about not giving a shit who I fall into bed with. But saying it out loud, on record, where people outside this booth will hear it? That hits different.
“You good?” Drew asks me, softer now, like he can see the way I’m turning it over in my head.
I shrug, casual as I can make it. “Yeah. Just didn’t expect it to feel like… a line I crossed without thinking.”
Miles’s mouth tips at the corner. “Lines are bullshit. You don’t need to think about it. You just need to live it.”
Eli slaps the table like he’s sealing the deal. “Exactly. We live loud. No shame, no filters. That’s the only way we make music worth hearing.”
The words settle into me like another kind of bassline—solid, grounding, impossible to shake.
And just like that, the moment shifts again. Drew’s already reaching for his guitar case, Eli’s cracking some joke about groupies, and Miles is standing like he’s got rehearsal schedules tattooed on the inside of his skull.
But the vow hums under it all.
No hiding. Not from ourselves, not from each other, not from the world.
And fuck if that doesn’t make me proud to be theirs.
We spill out of the café into the sharp night air, guitars slung across our backs, cups still buzzing in our hands. The place is too small for all that energy, and the second we’re outside, Eli practically bounces down the sidewalk, already riffing on some ridiculous imaginary headline.
“Local band front man outs himself in indie rag, fans everywhere cry:Please let it be me!”
Drew groans, laughing anyway. “Jesus, Eli. You ever shut up?”
“Nope,” Eli says, popping thepwith a grin. “Besides, you saw her face when she asked. She wanted the scoop, man. And you just handed it to her.”
I smirk, even though my pulse is still twitching from the interview. “Better me than you clowns. You’d have turned it into a knock-knock joke.”
“Maybe.” Drew shrugs, hands stuffed in his pockets. “But it fits. The honesty thing. The pact. You said it, Miles said it. No hiding, right?”
Miles, walking steady as a metronome beside us, just nods. His voice is quiet but solid when he says, “Right.”
