Tag taps the front of his guitar. “You always said things happen for a reason, sis,” he says, voice softening. “That even the messy shit lines up somehow.”
She lets out a wry breath. “That doesn’t sound like me at all.”
“Right.” He snorts. “You know, I used to think it was just something people said to make sense of the madness. But then I think about how we met this asshole under the most messed up, wrong-place-wrong-time circumstances…and here we are.”
She inches closer to me. Doesn’t argue.
“If you really believe everything happens for a reason, then I guess this all started with that gas station clerk,” Tag adds.
Annie’s thumb pauses its tender strokes.
He continues. “I mean, a little less trigger finger and none of this happens. No band. No tour. No Chase-and-Annalise.”
“Yeah,” Annie says after a beat, her tone low. “At least they dropped the charges. The family seems to be doing well.”
“Still wild.” He nudges me, waves a hand in the air. “One second you’re pilfering dog food, and the next you’re stealing a car with a bullet in your leg and my sister in the back seat.”
My face sours. “She wasn’t supposed to be back there.”
I feel Annie shift beside me. Not away, but inward. Her fingers falter slightly at the base of my neck, just for a beat, and resume their rhythm like nothing happened.
Then she murmurs, almost to herself, “Yes I was.”
***
The guys pick up pizzas in town, and we play music on my living room floor, beers in hand, laughter on our lips, and old memories coming alive between chords and ancient stories. For a while, it’s easy to forget why they’re here. Easy to pretend everything’s normal and that I’m not walking around with a clock ticking inside my head.
Annie stays close, head tipped against my shoulder, hand brushing mine more often than it used to. I feel her eyes on me, lingering. Watching.
And I’d give fuckinganythingto see them. To go back in time and memorize them better. The icy blue, the shimmery flecks, the glaze of love.
Later, when the others have crashed in a row of sleeping bags in the second bedroom, and Rock is snoring like someone left a chainsaw running in the hall, Annie nudges me with her knee and gestures toward the back door.
“Come on,” she whispers. “Air.”
We slip outside, the wood cool under our bare feet, the night thick with crickets and the distant rustle of trees. The stars are brighter out here.
Or maybe I’m just trying harder to see them.
But we don’t make it far, stopped short when a soft noise breaches the air.
Not from her. Not from me.
A breathless laugh—hushed, close, and then cut off. Footsteps shuffle just out of my clear range of vision, near the far end of the deck, behind one of the support beams.
I squint into the blur, but it’s useless. What I can pick up is movement: shapes pressed together, a hand slipping around a waist, someone murmuring something low and half laughed. A pause. Then the unmistakable sound of a kiss, slow and familiar.
I turn slightly toward Annie. “Is that…?”
She cups a hand around her mouth, smothering a giggle, then tugs me backward into the house, granting privacy. “Kenna and Tag.”
Frowning, I scratch my head. I’d wondered, based on context clues. “That’s actually a thing?”
“It’s a semi-thing. A weird thing. But…I think it’s a good thing.” She quietly closes the door, taking my hand again, reminding me she’s close. “I walked in on them after one of our West Coast shows. It was horrifying. Truly traumatizing.”
“Shit. I didn’t know you walked in on them.”
“They both refused to talk about it. I think Kenna was ashamed.” She sighs, pulling me over to the couch. “Looks like she got over that.”
