She exhales, a sound halfway between a scoff and a sigh. “You’re not supposed to admit it.”
“Honesty’s cheaper than pretending I’m safe.”
She looks away first, out over the edge of the roof, where the city stretches in low, easy lines. Lincoln isn’t a skyscraper town. It’s brick and trees and distant highways. It’s not trying to be something it’s not.
“How’d you end up doing this?” I ask. “Following bands around. Living on buses. Pining over guitar gods.”
“Presumptuous.” She snickers. “And I didn’t really ‘end up’ here. I chased it.”
“Why?” I wonder out loud, genuinely curious.
She shrugs one shoulder. “I like stories and I like sound. Cameras let me catch both. First it was shitty little clubs. Then regional tours. Then one of my sets went semi-viral and an editor at Amped called. I sent them three hundred shots. They hired me for one weekend. That turned into a month. Then two months. Now…” She gestures vaguely at me, at the hotel, at the pool, at the invisible bus humming down in the lot below. “Now I can pretty much pick any assignment I want.”
“You ever wish you’d picked something quieter?”
“Like accounting?” she deadpans, arching a brow.
“Like anything where you’re not sleeping in a coffin with wheels,” I jab back.
She thinks about it, eyes scanning the horizon like the answer might be written there. “Sometimes,” she admits. “There are days where my knees hurt, and my back hates me, and I’m three time zones away from anyone whose couch I might crash on if everything goes to shit.”
She pauses, glancing at me. “But then there’s a night where a whole stadium sings the same lyrics back at someone like it’s a holy sermon in a church. Or a girl in the front row cries because a song cracked something open in her that needed light. And I think, yeah, okay. This. I can live here.”
Her voice isn’t reverent. It’s resigned. And somehow, that hits harder than worship.
“I get that.” I sigh, nodding at the same time.
“Of course you do.” She grins. “You’re the idiot on stage.”
“I’m the idiot with the guitar,” I correct. “Big difference.”
She tips her head, studying me. “Why guitar? Why not drums? Or vocals? Or, I don’t know, kazoo?”
I snort. “Kazoo doesn’t get you laid.”
“Ah.” She chuffs. “So, this is all about sex.”
“It was,” I admit. “For pretty much the last decade.”
“And now?”
I pick at a loose thread on the arm of the lounge chair. “Guitar does what my mouth can’t,” I speak slowly. “When shit gets too loud in here,” I tap my temple, “it gets quiet when I play. Like it rearranges the noise into something I can breathe around.”
She goes very still. The wind brushes her hair again, but she doesn’t move. “That night on the road,” she inquires softly. “With the accident?”
My spine stiffens. “Not your story,” I snap out of reflex.
“I know.” Her brow furrows. “I’m not asking you to make it mine. I just-” She swallows. “You looked like someone who knows what it’s like to be ambushed by sound. Even when it’s quiet.”
The truth of that lands between us like a stone in water. Ripple after ripple. I should shut this down. Crack a joke. Change the subject. Talk about anything else. Instead, I hear myself confessing a little bit of my truth. “I was driving behind someone who crashed. Long time ago. Someone I…” My throat closes around the word; loved. “Someone I knew was in the car. There was nothing I could do.”
The admission tastes like rust in my mouth. I don’t talk about this. Not with interviewers. Not with fans. Not with strangers on rooftops who make my heart forget what species it is.
Sadie’s face goes soft around the eyes, but she doesn’t say she’s sorry. She doesn’t coo or tilt her head or ask for details to look for empathy. She just says, “That explains a lot.”
I exhale a laugh that doesn’t feel like one. “Yeah?”
“The control thing. The ‘don’t get close’ thing. The way you watch exits when you walk into a room.”
