When he asked if I was okay, I said yes.
Because lying was just one more thing to add to the list of my sins.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
BODHI
Ever since thenight of the ballet, I couldn’t shake the image of Iggy from my mind. Standing on that stage for the first time since his life-changing injury, his face soft and open, finally at peace. He’d rediscovered something he thought he’d lost forever. It didn’t look the same as it once had. It couldn’t. But when he danced, when he let himself move without expectation or grief weighing him down, he looked happy.
Iggy would never dance professionally again. His injury made sure of that. But he’d realised something far more important. That loving ballet didn’t have to mean performing it. That he could hold it close in a different way. Watch it. Feel it. Let it live alongside him instead of defining him. It wouldn’t ever completely fill the space that had been torn open, but maybe it didn’t have to. Maybe it was enough that ballet was still part of his world at all.
Watching him fall in love again had forced me to look at myself. At my own situation. I was lucky. Unfairly so. I could still do the thing I loved, even if it didn’t look like the version I’d once imagined. Even if it came with compromises and bruises Ihadn’t anticipated. And yet, somewhere along the way, I’d convinced myself I was trapped.
Iggy hadn’t.
He’d seen it clearly from the moment I’d bared too much of myself in group all those months ago.
“You could’ve stood up to them. Anytime. Your life didn’t change. You just stopped liking the current version.”
I couldn’t rewrite the past. Couldn’t undo the mistakes or the choices I wished I’d made differently. But the future wasn’t set in stone. I still had agency. Still had a spine. I could grow a pair and stand up to the people who’d been reshaping us into something unrecognisable.
We were Noctis long before the label got their claws into us. Before the money, the charts, the sold-out tours and shiny plaques. We were Noctis when we were just a group of scrappy teenage boys crammed into Mick’s garage, playing too loud and terribly out of tune. When we performed in dive bars for free drinks and barely enough gas money to get home.
It had been hard, yeah. But it had been fun.
We’d busted our asses to sell tickets for pennies. Written one awful song after another, until eventually one of them didn’t suck. We’d laughed through it. Loved it.
So when had music stopped feeling like that?
After the pizza restaurant, we’d returned to the hotel, and for the first time in days, Iggy and I slept in separate rooms. Tomorrow was our first of two shows in Milan, and he’d insisted on it. Said I needed rest. No distractions. Just sleep.
I’d argued, of course. Told him he wasn’t a distraction at all. That I’d slept better beside him than I had in months. That I liked waking up next to him. But he’d put his foot down, firm and unyielding in a way that felt unfamiliar coming from him. And I respected it, even if it caught me off guard.
Alone in my room, my fingers itched. Not for my sketchbook, not for charcoal. For a notebook. A battered, tattered thing that lived at the bottom of my backpack. Creased, faded, swollen with years of use. Pages filled edge to edge with frantic scrawls. Lyrics written in stolen moments, in airports and green rooms and the back of tour buses.
Some had become songs. Many hadn’t. As time passed, fewer and fewer made the cut. Some were shared and rejected. Others I never showed anyone at all, written only to quiet the noise in my head. Because if I didn’t get the words out, they’d circle endlessly until they drove me insane.
That night, alone in my room, I finally reached for it again.
I flopped onto my stomach on the bed, notebook and pen in hand, and flipped through the filled pages until I found an empty one near the back. There weren’t many left. I’d need a new notebook soon.
As I pressed the nib to the paper, it was Iggy’s face that came to mind. His blinding smile. His musical laugh. His take-no-shit attitude.
You move like you’re counting the floor, like every step still matters.
I learned how to stand in the noise; you learned how to fall without shattering.
His pink hair blowing in the wind while we sat surrounded by wildflowers. His tears. Those green eyes rimmed red as he looked up at me and called me an asshole for giving in so easily.
You wear your scars like constellations, mapping where you’ve been.
I hid mine in the sound, pretending I could drown them out again.
His fuzzy rainbow socks. His chipped nail polish. His tongue poking out in concentration while he painted my face in art therapy. His trembling frame as he crumbled apart on an opera house stage. His open mouth as he screamed with pleasure while I took him apart, piece by marvellous piece.
You remind me I’m breathing; I remind you you’re not broken.
