The Moments We Share

by Barbara C. Doyle

  The confusion washing over her face looks genuine. “I didn’t ask her to stay to watch us. It’s not like I don’t trust—” She stops herself, sighing. “It’s not like I think you’ll hurt me.”

  My lips twitch at the correction.

  She doesn’t trust you.

  “Listen, you don’t have to bullshit me, okay? I’m a big boy, I think I can handle it. I’d hate to keep being the poor decision you make. Just know that you’re only adding to our list of firsts.”

  The concept makes her cheeks flush, or maybe it’s me calling her out. Either way, I want to know if they’re warm over the idea. My palm itching to press against them to know for sure.

  Shoving my hands in my pockets before they get me in trouble, I walk over to the piano. “We should call a truce until we get something done.”

  She slowly makes her way over to me, giving me a studious stare before sitting back down on the bench, adjusting a blank sheet of paper in front of her.

  “You’re good,” I blurt out.

  She looks up at me.

  I clear my throat. “Playing the piano,” I elaborate, shrugging. “Heard you when I came in. What’s your favorite to play on it?”

  Her brows arch up. “You want to talk about what I like to play on the piano?”

  The surprise in her tone is like a punch to the gut, but every blow I get is deserved. When do I ever put interest in something that doesn’t directly involve me? No wonder she’s surprised over the fact I’m intrigued with her.

  And fuck me do we need to put a stop to that.

  Brushing it off, I flick some music sheets already set up on the stand. “Yeah, I do. If you like playing it, you must have a favorite.”

  She waits a moment before answering. “I never would have admitted this, but I have a place in my heart for classical music.”

  I hear an untold story threaded between the lines of her explanation, and I want to dive into it.

  “Why wouldn’t you want to admit it?” I prod.

  She lets out a soft sigh. “My grandpa taught me how to play a lot of the classics when I was little. But after a while, playing songs like that didn’t seem like fun. It felt like a chore, and I didn’t have interest in it. Back then playing piano was just something I did to make him happy.”

  “But?”

  She shifts slightly, body angling to me like it’s drawn by my interest. “I found music that I wanted to play, and fell in love with the sound. The feeling. When I play, it’s like every vibration is felt throughout my body. Grandpa didn’t like much music, so he stopped teaching me when I learned to play on my own. But he … he passed away, and it’s the music that I used to hate that I love the most now.”

  I nod. “It reminds you of him.”

  Her smile is sad. “Yeah, it does.”

  I peer down at the keys in front of me, grazing their cool surface. “I’m more of a guitar guy myself.”

  “I figured as much since you play one in the band,” she replied half-heartedly, sarcasm mild in her tone.

  I chuckle. “Guess that gave it away.”

  “Do you play anything else?”

  “Not to brag, but I was a badass recorder player back in third grade.” I wink at her, grinning when I see the smile wavering on her lips.

  She wants to fight it, but she can’t. Her battle to hate me is being won out by the possibility of something lighter between us. No matter how much hating me would be easier, we speak to each other on a level that not even hate could deter.

  Most people pride themselves in love, like hate is the weaker emotion and a sign of failure. But it takes more time and effort to hate somebody to hide how they really feel. When somebody hates you, their true feelings are screaming out to be felt.

  My eyes rake down Ashton’s profile—nude makeup, hair pulled back into a high ponytail, loose sweater that slips off her shoulder, and ripped blue jeans. She’s downplaying her beauty, but it’s still blinding.

  Unlike the other girls, she doesn’t try to stand out. And every time she talks back, snaps, or tries to dislike what I say, it only makes her eyes light up like her true feelings are trying to break free from those soulful eyes.

  “I’m sure nobody can play ‘Hot Cross Buns’ like you,” she retorts, shaking her head.

  I nudge my shoulder with hers. “You know it, baby. All the other kids were jealous over my mad skills.”

  She laughs. “I’m sure.”

  “So you probably play a lot of country stuff on this, right?”

  She looks at me from the corner of my eyes. “Just because my sole genre is country doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate other music. When I play on my own time, it’s usually pop covers. Adele, Michael Bublé, that kind of thing.”

  “You sing Adele?”

  “It’s nowhere near as good as her, but—”

  “Never downplay your own talent,” I cut her off. “I’m no Jimi Hendrix but I’m still pretty fucking good. Just means we bring different shit to the table.”

  She snorts in disbelief.

  “Hey,” I reason quietly, “I mean it. I may have listened to some of your songs. You’re good at what you do. I can see why Tom wanted us to work with you.”

  Her disbelief softens, eyes blinking slowly.

  My eyes shift down her again, this time much slower than before, soaking in every inch she gives me. Knowing that she’s watching me only stirs my dick in my pants, causing it to strain against the zipper.

  “I should get something from you since you’ve made me spill,” she bargains, voice wispy.

  The lust in her eyes can’t be ignored, and I can only image mine are the same way when they lock together.

  “What are you thinking?” I ask in a low tone.

  We stare at each other, not saying anything. Not moving. Yet our bodies somehow angle toward each other, leaning forward like there’s a force drawing together two poles.

  Something inside of her snaps back to reality, the shift inevitable after her eyes blink away the temptation.

  Not letting her be the one to end it, I blurt out, “I dance to Abba when nobody’s around.”

  Her eyes widen at the admission, and the silence is deafening. After a too long moment, it’s broken by her outburst of laughter, holding her stomach as her body quakes over it.

  I close my eyes. Nice one, douche.

  Rubbing a palm down my face, I let her laugh it out, getting it out of her system until her eyes are wet from tears as she’s gasping for breath.

  “You done?” I grumble, staring at the paper in front of me, picking up a pencil and squeezing it tightly between my fingers.

  She presses her lips together, wiping her cheeks of stray tears. “I’m sorry, it’s just not what I was expecting. Please tell me you jam to “Dancing Queen” the most.”

  She breaks into another fit of giggles, jaw quivering to contain herself.

  “Abba is legendary,” I defend.

  “But you’re … you,” she reasons, blinking away tears that form in her eyes. She takes a deep breath, her chest rising with flooded oxygen before slowly lowering again.

  A stray tear falls down her cheek, and my thumb captures it before I stop myself.

  Her body tenses at the contact as I move my thumb up the trail the tear leaves, slowly wiping away the evidence.

  Her eyes are a stunning shade of emerald from the tears, even more captivating than her usual shade. Not that I ever want to see them this way if it means her tears are the only way they come.

  I move my hand back, her eyes traveling down to it as I clench the edge of the bench we’re sitting on.

  “I’ve never told anyone that,” I admit.

  “I don’t see why. It makes you likable.”

  Exactly.

  She catches on, rolling her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re hiding from, but I’m going to find out. There’s nothing wrong with people liking more than one side of you. Real people will like every version of you anyway.”

  I don�
�t grace her with a reply to that. “We should get down to business. We need to decide how this is going to work. What instruments to use, the pace, that kind of thing.” I look at the piano. “We should have you play if it means that much to you.”

  Her eyes go from me to the piano, and I see her swallow like she’s surprised I suggested it.

  “I’d like that,” she admits quietly, more to herself than to me.

  I just nod.

  She picks up her pencil. “So I think a slower paced song would work best for what we’re going through.” I open my mouth to argue, but she stops me. “I’m not talking a love song. Just something that isn’t so …”

  “Our normal?” I guess.

  “It should be in between what we both do.”

  “Your songs are all slower.”

  “We could always cut two songs and see what everyone likes better,” she concedes, albeit not very enthusiastically.

  My brows go up. “We’re already struggling with one. Do you think two is a good idea?”

  “It’s just a suggestion.”

  My eyes go to her notebook. “What about something you already have? We could always tweak it to work for both of us.”

  Her eyes snap to mine. “No way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Do I ask to look at your music? You barely let me into your personal life through conversation. What makes you think I’m willing to bare my soul to you through my music?”

  You’ve already bared more than you think.

  I don’t know which one of us the thought is directed to, so I fling that nosey dick of a conscience away from my shoulder and move the fuck on.

  “I never said I had any for you to look at.”

  She eyes me my notebook. “You have something similar to my music book. Unless yours is a diary, which would truly be amazing on top of knowing you love Abba, then you should probably stop lying. If we’re going to work together, we need to be real with one another.”

  “Real?” I repeat slowly.

  She nods once.

  “You want real?” I ask, leaning into her so our faces are so close she can feel my breath against her lips. “Real would be admitting that I’d much prefer bending you over this piano and fucking you so hard from behind that you forget everything I told you today. It would be making you scream my name when you’re so full of me you can’t take it anymore. If you want real, baby, I can show it to you way better than I can tell it. And you’d feel it for days after, branded onto your skin, in your head, and on your soul, because I’m the realest fucking person you’re ever going to meet in this industry.”

  She’s so still that I think I broke her. But I feel the faintest breath against my own skin, the warmest caress of what my words did to her, and when she blinks there’s something screaming out to me in her eyes.

  But I don’t act out on it. Not even with my dick hardening in my pants and yelling for release. Or when she looks down at my lips, her eyes traveling farther down until they see the bulge that wants her attention.

  “But we’re not capable of that type of realness yet,” I inform her, leaning back. “Not until you let me call you Ash. Not until we’re friends.”

  She licks her bottom lip, wetting it. “Friends don’t fuck, Dylan.”

  “On the contrary, many of my friends fuck,” I argue, thinking of Will and Tessa back home in New York. Or even Ian and Kasey in Vermont.

  “Well it crosses every boundary.”

  I snicker. “Baby, it disintegrates every boundary out there. That’s what makes it’s so intoxicating.”

  “Are those friends together?” she asks, her eyes staying on the blank paper.

  “Yeah, they are.”

  “Well that’s different then. They’re friends because they love each other. We’d … we’re—” She sighs, not knowing how to label us. “We aren’t like them.”

  “We love to hate each other,” I agree. “It makes this even more fun, don’t you think? Pretending to get along only to feel that hate bubble until we explode?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Don’t you get it, Ashton?” I press quietly, letting my fingers trail up her thigh. “We’re inevitable. Because even though you don’t want to admit it, you’re wet right now just thinking about all the bad things we could do to each other. How bad we’d be together. And that’s the truth. We’re not made to love each other. We’d be a disaster in the making—a storm nobody can control. A combination nobody would understand. What’s the point of being perfect when being so wrong is where the fun is at?”

  She inhales a sharp breath, chest rising and falling faster than before. Drawing in her bottom lip with her front teeth, she tries to focus on anything but me. But what I said. The truth.

  My lips graze her ear, brushing against the tops of them, teeth nipping at the flesh. “They think we can fix each other, but we’re already too consumed in the fire.”

  Her eyes drift close when I draw back.

  The sight of her flushed skin and pink cheeks, her full lip suckling in her mouth, eyes closed, gives me all the inspiration I need for our song.

  We need something that shows our struggles—something that tells our deepest truths. Even the ones we don’t always want to admit to ourselves.

  Even forever has a limit

  Even always has to end

  Some people strive for forever when they meet people they connect with, but even forever has to end.

  Ashton

  Damn him.

  It’s been over a week, and my mind can’t stop wrapping around the first day in the studio. Everything he said, the words he wrote, the damn thoughts he put in my head.

  Spending three hours a day in a small space with him is only getting harder—no pun intended—when he does everything he can to make me squirm. A soft brush of his fingers when he takes the paper from me. How his eyes burn my body as he watches me try finding the perfect keys for the song.

  He knows what he’s doing, and he wants me to break. But I won’t let my body make any decisions for me, no matter how much it cries out to be touched, kissed, and caressed by every part of him. Good and bad combined, he’s right. We would destroy each other if we ever gave each other the chance.

  I’m the realest fucking person you’re ever going to meet.

  I think of the ways he wanted to brand the reality of our destruction on me, feeling every shred of truth he listed absorb into my soul like he knew it would.

  His grueling voice made it sound like a threat. A warning. But his eyes made it look like a promise. An anticipation to an unhealthy fixation on something neither of us should try discovering.

  Dylan’s uncanny ability to send sparks through my body is dangerous, and he’s going to lead us right off the edge of never.

  And I’m going to let him.

  Because I’m stupid.

  Because I’m weak.

  Because I want him to.

  I told myself that I wouldn’t let a guy destroy me again—that the next time I let somebody into my life, it would be somebody worth mending back together the pieces.

  But maybe I just need to experience destruction on my own terms, letting myself pick up the pieces when the time is right. To feel what it’s like to break down in the best way, to feel the war path, the pain, the wave of wrong and embrace how right it can be.

  Dylan is going to end me. But I’m going to rebuild myself from the ground up, and the pieces we leave behind when we end will make me unbreakable.

  Over the week, we’ve only gotten two verses down. Dylan has been working on adding acoustics into the song with his guitar, and I’ve been playing around with the piano, trying to get the instruments to meld together.

  It doesn’t matter how much we distance ourselves, we always end up side by side by the time our session is done. Me sitting on the edge of the bench, him watching me play the piano like he hasn’t seen anything like it before.

  Dylan left twenty minutes ago after getting a phone call that se
emed to deviate his focus. It left me time to adjust the music sheet, finding the perfect sound to go along with the lyrics that we came up with.

  The keys start to form a hellbent sound that’s somewhere in between cryptic and jarring, a match to the equally jarring lyrics that Dylan is set on, yet the vibrations liven a dead piece of me. My fingers dig into the keys, my eyes closing as I drag my fingertips across the tops to lighten the darkness coming from the instrument.

  Two parts of my soul are shaking, the gap between them teasing the idea of being healed, but never stuck together enough to be fully mended.

  But music is a powerful medicine that can cure the noise my mind drowns in. If it can become a white noise in the chaos, then maybe there’s hope for me yet.

  The melody plays on without a second thought, and I’m lost in the music echoing in the studio. Even outside of our sessions, I want to perfect this song. It’s become more than just a collaboration to save my reputation.

  This song will save me.

  I can see the notes float by in my mind, drifting in the darkness, completely consuming me. The emotion building in my chest as the music gets heavier swells my heart, and fighting back tears makes me realize that it’s not always the song that causes the emotion, but the people behind them.

  A tear slips down my cheek, a testament to the truth hidden behind the words.

  You think that you’re a burden.

  You think that you’re weak if you cry.

  But we both know that you’re more than,

  The pain that’s hiding in your eyes.

  My fingers still on the last note, eyes scanning the paper in front of me.

  Heart thumping against my chest trying to gain my attention, I focus on the words that stick out. Words I don’t know if I can stand behind, like their accusations. Hypocritical notions that keep hiding behind broken truths.

  My pen strikes a line through each word, red ink blotting over the new formation, heart lightening its weight in my ribcage.

  She thinks that she’s a burden.

  She thinks she’s weak if she cries.

  Does she know that there’s more than

  The pain that’s hiding in her eyes.

  Jaw grinding at the new words, my pen hovers over the paper, itching to write the next few verses. I let out a heavy breath, hand shaking, and set the pen down.