by Quinn, Cari
“No. I don’t want you to understand that. It’s not for you. And fuck broken.” It took everything in me to not throw her notebook as I’d thrown mine, but I wasn’t a baby tossing things out of the pram.
I thought I’d slaked the edge of violence inside me, quelled the jagged bits that never quite let me rest. And here she was stirring them up again.
“Strongest at the broken places.” Her hand brushed my arm and I flinched as if she’d slapped me. Hell, I hadn’t even flinched when she had.
Words lay on my tongue, sharp, cutting ones that would rip that flower she’d spoken of out by the root. Leave it to waste on the ground under my feet.
Probably as I’d already done.
Never going back there again, eh?
Except she had. I had. We’d gone there together, and now the trip was indelibly burned into my skin.
I picked up her stubby pencil and wrote my own words beneath hers.
Can’t return when you’ve never left
Arrow found its target
Opened a wound
Want what you can never have
Innocence tarnished, ripped to shreds
Oh, oh, never again
Taste the truth, swallow it whole
Until it stains everything
Hope doesn’t grow here
Memory rooted deep
Never getting it out again
Oh, oh, never again
I didn’t give it back to her right away. Couldn’t. I didn’t want to see her face close in, those beautiful blue eyes shuttering. I could take the sting of rejection and embrace it as what I knew.
What I understood.
That didn’t mean I had any fucking clue how to be the bigger man and accept that she didn’t want to go down this road again. She’d been strapped into a car she didn’t want to be a passenger in. In the piano bar, I’d overwhelmed her, surrounded her, lost myself in her. Today, I’d done more of the same.
A life raft for a drowning man. And she didn’t even know. I would never let her.
At least I still had my pride.
I turned to the piano and set aside the notebook, leaving it between us. She could take it or not. With my other hand, I gripped my phone and pressed a couple of buttons. Then I let my fingers wander over the keys, closing my eyes as I took her words and made them my own.
Made them ours even as nothing else ever could be.
She didn’t look at the notebook as she started to sing, matching herself to the notes I fumbled through. I wasn’t even sure what I was playing. Usually, I had a roadmap to start, enough to get me going. This was stumbling through feel, connecting notes into a melody I couldn’t even say lived in my head.
Only silence resided inside me, but she was teasing out a song I hadn’t even known to play.
She sang along while I played, and I didn’t know if she was leading me or the other way around. She sounded like a fucking angel, her voice climbing higher before dropping low to curl around words that meant so much more under her care.
Listening to her opened up something inside of me. Nameless, unspoken. Something I’d been sure had been lost for good when I’d turned the key in the ignition that night.
“Hey, man, just one more.”
“One more what? Think you’ve had enough, pal.”
Laughter. His. Mine.
In my memories, I couldn’t distinguish them.
I could now though. Because Kyle didn’t laugh that way anymore. It had been nearly a decade, and he still didn’t. I’d killed that side of him as surely as I’d nearly ripped out my own vocal cords.
“The pub down the street. There’s live music tonight. Open mic. I’ll sit in.”
“Sit in? You can barely sit up. Sure you don’t want me to drive? Better yet, let’s call someone. I’m crispy too.”
“No, no, don’t want to wait. I want the music. I need it.”
His reluctant agreement, me driving down that rain-slicked street. Slipping inside that moss-sided building on the corner, my nostrils quivering at the smell of liquor the moment we walked inside.
The stage shrouded in blue and green smoke. A guy up there already, singing his heart out. I didn’t care about him. I was gonna be on that stage.
Stumbling away from Kyle, making excuses about needing the bathroom first. Bracing my arm against the wall as I took a piss, then moving to the sink for what I’d really come for. Snorting the line off the back of my arm, feeling the power flow through my veins as I stared at my bloodshot eyes in the mirror.
Snorting had never been my method of delivery. Except that night, I’d craved something more. A new experience. I’d carried the coke for days, testing myself. It had been a party favor at some shindig I couldn’t even remember now.
I had definitely gotten a new experience that night. Even now, it was all so fucking clear.
Laughing with the guy on the piano, pushing him out so I could sing. Higher than the rafters and I still had my voice, my mind, and the music burning the tips of my fingers as it flowed out into the keys. I was on goddamn fire. Pretty girls around the piano, leaning forward, offering me everything while they shoved money in the jar.
I didn’t need that. I had what I needed. Anything I could ever want.
Until I staggered to my feet and found Kyle, hooking an arm around his neck as I dragged him out into the rainy night.
“Sure about this? It’s late. Let’s call for a ride.”
“I’m good.”
Those two words haunted me.
I wasn’t good. And I’d certainly never been good again after that night.
He didn’t press. Because he hadn’t seen me drink inside. I hadn’t needed to. The vial still in my pocket was my cure.
My other drugs of choice hadn’t been getting the job done anymore. But this…this was what I’d been looking for.
It’d be there when I got home to my flat and morning came too hard and fast. Dawn would eat away the night, leaving me bare. Exposed. Nothing more than a fraud who couldn’t get through life without chemical help.
After a snort or three—whatever it took to finish it off—another pint of whatever came to hand would go down easy. Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, after all.
Finally, silence. Oblivion. The voices quiet, if not the music.
Never the music.
Except I hadn’t greeted the watery morning light that day with a line of powder and a bottle on the table. I’d been in a twisted wreck of my own making.
If only they’d gone to him first. If they’d left me last.
Just left me.
“Alex.”
I didn’t jump from her touch on my arm. I turned into it, and the embrace she pulled me into. My eyes were dry and hot, my throat raw.
I’d been fucking singing. Not just in the past. Now too. She’d dragged the words out of my chest by force. Now she was wrapping me in comfort I wasn’t strong enough to refuse.
Still singing about turning away, about last times and loss and never wanting more, I’d sought her softness all the while.
It was the thread connecting me to this planet. Keeping me here with her and not mired in the past.
She didn’t speak. I couldn’t have withstood the mercy of her voice, not right now. But she held me through the worst of the tremors, her arms banding tight. I hoped like hell the shakes were only inside me. Not visible. But I couldn’t have been able to stop them even if they were.
When I could breathe through the fire in my throat, I moved back and did the one thing I still knew how to do.
I played.
Fifteen
As he started to play again, I closed my eyes and prayed for strength.
To not fuck this up.
To not give too much or not enough.
To be just what he needed in this moment, even if I’d never figured out how to be it in any other.
Unless we were naked. That came down to instinct. No thought required.
The exact oppo
site of whatever this was now. I was a good listener and a good friend and I usually knew what to say to make people feel better. But I’d never dealt with anything this monumental.
I’d endured my share of struggles. Dealing with the perils and the peaks of the music business had been no cake-walk, but I’d never hurt or been hurt by someone I loved.
Until Nash.
And I didn’t love him. Only a masochist would fall for someone like him, despite the slices of himself he showed me completely against his will.
The way he’d trembled in my arms. Like a statue nearly leveled by an earthquake, something so huge and epic I couldn’t begin to guess its scope.
Then he’d rebuilt himself stone by stone before turning away and making magic with his ruined hands all over again.
But they weren’t ruined. Already his world view was taunting mine. I didn’t see destruction when I looked at him. I saw life. Experience. Possibilities.
And yes, pain. So much that I ached to alleviate it without understanding how deep it ran. I still had hope that healing could occur.
For him, certainly. Also for us, although I still wasn’t sure how to mend the rift.
Or what had caused it.
Once more, he played through the beginning we’d fumbled through together. I wet my lips, but I didn’t open them. How could I? I was afraid of what might come out if I dared to sing. Music was my conduit to emotion, and my feelings were already boiling too close to the surface.
I wouldn’t use his against him. I wasn’t yet sure if the reverse was true.
He stopped the song and started again. And played through to that same point, the one where his lyrics would begin. I hadn’t read them yet. I couldn’t.
Again and again, he repeated the beginning, pounding the keys. Finally, he growled, “Fucking sing.”
I did it because he’d asked, not because I wanted to. I didn’t want to show him what was inside me, and in music, there could be no lies. No safety zone.
Music was an outlet, a respite, a sanctuary. But it also meant stripping bare, even more so than I’d felt as I sat on the bench wearing nothing but my pride.
At least for a moment, he’d sung with me. Almost involuntarily. His voice had been raspy, rusty, as if he rarely used it. But its depth and haunting quality had made me reach higher.
To see how we blended beyond the physical.
Too soon, his singing had ended. Then we’d had that instant where he turned into my arms. So brief. I’d touched the ends of his soft hair, fighting every urge to slip my fingers through it. To draw him even closer.
Before I could, he’d hauled himself back in line and pulled away. Retreated back into the music.
He never got past my part of the song.
He tweaked and improved upon the lyrics I’d scribbled down on the fly, writing notes in the margin with the pink floppy-haired pen in between run-throughs. I would’ve laughed if I wasn’t so wrapped up in watching him work. That lock of dark hair that always fell across his forehead into his eyes until he flipped it out of his way. The way he gripped the pen, no longer noticing its ridiculousness, his brow furrowed as he wrote and crossed out and returned to playing again.
Every time, he demanded more from me. Even as I demanded everything from myself.
I wasn’t one for vocal tricks. For him, I showed off my range. Deliberately. Straining to hold notes I wouldn’t have tried in a rehearsal otherwise to save my vocal cords.
There was no way to protect myself here. In any way.
After we’d gone through the beginning of the song what felt like fifteen times, I blew out a breath. “Let’s move on. What about your lyrics? Can we rip those to shreds for a change?” I snatched the notebook before he could argue with me.
As hard as it was to keep my face emotionless, I tried. I wasn’t sure I pulled it off. Probably didn’t even come close.
While I’d been ripping myself open for him, he’d written about brushing me off.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was what he did. We hadn’t had much of a relationship thus far, but what we’d had mostly consisted of fighting, tension, blow-the-roof-off-sex, and then an Irish-flavored boot.
He wondered why I ran. Try self-preservation.
I wasn’t going to do that this time. These were just lyrics, written in his precise handwriting. Tiny arrows that couldn’t hurt me if I didn’t allow it.
Just words on a page.
I started to sing, connecting the lines he’d written to what I’d composed so far. Well, before he’d annihilated what I’d done with his brand of improvements.
That made the song better, dammit.
Just as his lyrics worked for the kind of fuck you anthem that played well to the fans. Everyone knew what it was like to want the wrong person.
Did they ever.
The more I sang, the angrier I got. I didn’t have to feign the growl in my voice. It wasn’t sandpapery like his when he started to sing with me—again—but the kind of pissed off every woman could relate to.
Oh, yeah, don’t want this? Don’t want me? Then never again for you too.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“That’s it. Exactly it. Christ, that was magnificent.”
I cut myself off mid-note, my head thrown back as I shouted out my displeasure to the rafters. I hoped it wasn’t actual shouting, but I couldn’t be sure.
And that was what he called magnificent?
“Sure your ears are still working?”
He was back writing in the notebook again. Playing with one hand, messing around with the lyrics with the other. His hair was disordered, as if he’d been running his hands through it while I was rage-singing. Or maybe that was still left over from me.
From us.
Fucker.
“This isn’t even what we’re supposed to be working on,” I muttered, picking at my nail polish. I didn’t do that anymore. I’d left that bad habit behind in high school.
Leave it to Nash to send me back to my nervous tics.
“Logan knows the craft isn’t linear.”
“The craft? The fucking craft? Do you know how pretentious that sounds?”
The worst part about being rude to someone? When they didn’t even acknowledge you.
Fine. I’d just let him work on that piece of emotional anarchy while I put together something sweet and hopeful and festive. Our whole point of being here.
Not delicious sex and stupid fights and big, jagged emotions that had no place inside me. Since they definitely weren’t inside him. Not when it came to me. His thoughts and feelings were for his messy past. Probably as they should be. He had unresolved issues, and now he was becoming mine.
Unless I put a stop to this.
Since he was still occupied with my notebook, I picked up the one he’d discarded. The line at the top about light was what I needed.
Light in the night, I see you shine
Last hope in a canyon
Last broken dream, almost forgotten
You’re my faith
The reason I can find my way through
Holding onto a dream
Holding onto you
Light in the night, I see you shine
I still believe
The guiding post for me, for mine
No matter how far I go
You draw me back
Draw me home
I still believe
Light in the night, I see you shine
You’re the reason
For all the celebrations, all the happy times
And wishes in children’s eyes
Without you there is no season
No tidings of joy
In the darkness of a winter’s night
Light in the night, I see you shine
No one can turn a heart cold
With that glow inside
A gift to me and mine
Better than any presents under the tree
That belief I’m with you
And you�
�re with me
I didn’t look up for so long that I didn’t know if he was still working on the song or brooding or who knows what. The piano had gone silent.
When I finally lifted my head, my back aching from my bent position, he was watching me. Unabashedly. He held out his hand and lifted an eyebrow when I didn’t hand over my pad.
Rather than waiting for him to take it apart when it was still so nebulous and fresh inside me, I yanked out a piece of the staff paper from the back and hurriedly scrolled out a series of notes, trusting he would roll with what I gave him and keep it going.
Unless he deemed it worthless, and in that case, fuck him. I’d take it to Logan.
Or I’d call Jamie and figure it out with her over the phone. I could definitely use some of my best friend’s sarcasm right now.
Especially when it came to Nash. She’d say, girl, he’s not good enough for you. Drop his ass.
But that was the problem. He was a musical genius. He was also one of Lo’s best friends, and Logan was an incredible judge of character.
So, maybe it was me. Nash wanted to get me naked, but that was all.
Except that didn’t ring true either. I was used to living by rhythm. Everything in life had a cadence. And absolutely nothing about the one between us made sense.
On top of that, I couldn’t ask for Jamie’s opinion on Nash. She didn’t know we were a thing. Because we weren’t. I was his secret, and he was mine.
One more layer of insanity to this whole thing. Secrets didn’t last long in our business. Even one-time events were blown up and replayed for the benefit of a hungry media.
Twice was just begging for trouble.
Nash played the notes I’d written, making adjustments as he went. Adding another layer, switching chords. Making it better. Hearing the song begin to come to life was enough to draw me out, the moth to his flame. The tap of my fingers against the side of my thigh equivalent to the frantic flap of wings as I tried to resist.
Futilely.
Again.
I didn’t close my eyes as I started to sing. Instead, I focused on his hands. The scar tissue and rough lines stretched over their breadth. Power encased in experience. He’d seen so much more than I had. Than I wanted to. Not when it came to the music business, although his years offered a wisdom I hadn’t yet earned. But the rest. The cycle of addiction and trying to fight back from that precipice. I’d done and seen plenty and I’d experimented a bit when I was younger. Nothing like he’d gone through.