by Piper Lawson
I wanted to tell her I’d fucked up—not because I lost my contract, but because I missed her and I hated that I couldn’t text her funny things from my day, that I didn’t get to hear her low voice in my ear… that I didn’t get to kiss her, to feel her breath mix with mine.
I wanted to say Jax was wrong, that I’d be willing to do whatever it took to be the guy she needed.
I hadn’t thought of what would happen when I got to her, just that when I did, everything would somehow be okay.
It wasn’t. At least, it wasn’t the okay I expected.
She was standing outside the library where she was working for the summer with a guy—not someone from Oakwood, or I would’ve known him. She was smiling and laughing, and without so much as looking at me, it was clear that we were done. She was over it.
I had to be over it too.
When she responds, her voice is lower, more vulnerable. “If you’d told me you chose your career over me, I would’ve understood. But you just left. I know it was high school, but one second you were sleeping next to me and kissing me and touching me, and the next you were gone. Did I do something to fuck it up?”
“No. Never.”
The ache is more than physical now, as if it’s pulling at the corners of my soul. Talking to each other without seeing each other feels safe, as if there are no stakes, no rules—as if every word is no sooner spoken than forgotten.
I drop my head back, shutting my eyes and remembering that day, seeing her with that guy. “You got over me,” I say, needing confirmation.
“I wrote you sixty-three times. Emails, texts, letters. All summer, halfway through the fall.” Her low laugh is dry. “I didn’t send them, didn’t try to reach you, because I didn’t want to be selfish. I knew you chose your future, and that was enough for me.”
The anguish rips through me, and I force myself to stop tearing at the edges of the Polaroids in my fingers. The backs of my eyes burn, and I swallow against the emotion rising up my throat.
“It wasn’t enough.” My voice comes out rough. “You taught me to want things I never let myself want. Fuck, Annie. You taught me to dream.”
Her shallow intake of breath has me turning, and once I do, I can’t look away.
Here, in a black bra and panties with wet hair sliding over her shoulders, she’s more than a dream.
My gaze drags down her small breasts, her stomach, the flare of her hips.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t attracted to her, but now she’s every wish and regret and ache wrapped into a single person.
I was a boy who cared too much. She was a girl infatuated with something she didn’t understand.
None of that’s responsible for the way the air crackles between us now, for the way her eyes widen in warning as if she feels it too.
“Tyler…”
I close the distance between us, one slow step at a time. When I come to a stop inches away from her, the blood pounds in my veins, my ears, my temples.
“Give those back.”
Her voice has an edge it didn’t a moment ago, and I blink when I realize her gaze has dropped to my hands—to what I’ve forgotten to conceal.
She lunges for the photos, and I hold them out of reach.
When her half-naked body brushes my chest through my T-shirt, she’s close enough I can smell her light floral scent, and I want to drop the photos and tangle my fingers in her hair, drag her angry mouth to mine.
As if maybe that can fix what’s between us, what’s inside each of us.
“You wrote them about me.” My voice is a rasp, and her chin snaps up, eyes flashing.
“Taylor Swift writes a song after every breakup. Doesn’t give her exes the right to hear her private thoughts until she makes them public.”
Her breath is light on my face, her lips close enough I could swoop down and claim them, learn whether her taste is the same or whether it’s changed, too.
“One problem with that assessment.” I breathe, and her brows lift. “We never dated.”
She shoves against my chest. I don’t budge, but I do capture her hand with one of mine, hold it there until she stops trying to twist away.
“I don’t care what you call it,” she retorts. “I was a kid. I was in…”
“In what?” Her palm covers my heart, and I know she can feel it hammer in my chest.
We stare each other down, neither of us ready to give in.
I want her to finish that sentence more than I’ve ever wanted anything, as if her saying she loved me gives permission for me to unload on her, too.
To tell her she was my entire damned world, that when I learned she was at Vanier, I was confused and frustrated, but more than all of it?
I was fucking elated.
The one thing I consoled myself with a year ago was that she’d be better off without me. I never let myself use the L-word with her, swore that whatever I felt for her was mixed up shit amplified by our circumstances.
You can’t fall in a matter of weeks.
Just like you can’t fall for someone who’s not talking to you.
Who refuses to look your way in the hall.
And she can’t fall for you.
I was wrong. I see it now.
But even if she didn’t get over me as fast as I thought, even if there’s still enough attraction between us to incinerate a city…
She’s over me now. I know it when she pulls her hand out from under mine, and my blood cools a degree the second her touch is gone.
“The photos, Tyler.”
I hand her the stack. Annie turns and sets it on her dresser under the photo of her and her dad.
Then she grabs the faded jeans on her bed and tugs them on. I don’t bother looking away. She doesn’t ask me to.
The desire’s still there, but it’s overshadowed by something bigger, an uninvited emotion filling my chest.
“So, if I help you throw this party for Beck tomorrow night, you’ll keep my secrets,” she says under her breath.
“I will.”
Annie buttons her jeans, straightening to look me dead in the eye. “Tomorrow, then. For Beck.”
I nod. “For Beck.”
But as I start for the door and she turns away to reach for a shirt, my gaze drags back to the stack of photos…
Hating that I didn’t realize how deeply I’d hurt her.
Wondering what parts of her body she inked me on.
Wishing she’d never erased me.
7
“How nervous are you?” Elle asks me on the way out of Entertainment Management Friday.
“It’s going to be great. I didn’t even know Finn was on the faculty list until the fall,” I admit as we start down the hall. “He wasn’t when I auditioned.”
“Finn Harvey?”
I look up to see Jake, the guy from the library, fall into step with us.
“Lucky,” he goes on. “The guy’s a rising star. But I don’t know anyone else who got Finn. It’ll be cool to work with someone who knows how to bust in.”
Excitement works through me. “Exactly.”
Elle jerks her head toward the dining hall. “I’m this way. Annie, I’ll catch you tonight?” Her eyebrows wiggle.
“For sure.”
“What’s tonight?” Jake prompts as she leaves.
“A bunch of us are going out to this club. You should come.” I give him the details, and he nods.
“You give any thought to the showcase?” he prompts.
“Yeah. I’m auditioning for sure.” Last night I watched some video from past events. The talent level is off the charts, particularly from the people who close.
But the faculty who preside over the auditions have to choose someone. I’m already strategizing how to make sure that someone is me.
“It’ll be a first-year uprising.” Jake pumps a fist in the air giddily.
I wave goodbye, then head for the stairs to the practice rooms on the second floor. I’m five minutes early, and my swipe
card doesn’t let me in. I wait in the hallway, watching people flow by.
Classes have been tough the first week, but deciding to focus on the showcase has given me an anchor, a reminder of why I’m here.
I’ll do whatever it takes to be that good. No excuses, no distractions.
Tyler coming to my room yesterday was a distraction.
Not only walking in to find him there, studying my things as if he had every right to be in my space, but the things he said…
“You taught me to want things I never let myself want. You taught me to dream.”
And the look on his face—like I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
It doesn’t matter that he sounds torn up about what happened between us. He’s the one who walked away.
My hand finds my necklace under my shirt.
After The Little Mermaid, I took the rose Tyler had handed me in the garden and had it preserved in order to remember what happened, to remind myself I’m not fragile and that my dreams matter more than a broken heart.
Now, every time I look at it, I think of him.
I’m not letting him in again. We can coexist, we can even be civil, but we’re not going to be friends. We’re definitely not going to be more than that.
I’ll have my chance to practice keeping him out because we’re all going out to a club tonight for Beck’s birthday.
“You ready?”
My gaze snaps up as a guy maybe ten years older than me appears down the hall dressed in jeans and a denim jacket over a dark T-shirt. His hair is dirty blond and unruly, as if the wind had its way with it.
“Finn. Mr. Harvey? I’m Annie. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Finn’s good.” He retrieves something from his pocket and waves it in front of the door.
The door unlocks, and I follow him inside.
I set my bag on the floor. “How did you end up at Vanier?” I ask.
“They’ve got a push on recruiting people with industry experience for the contemporary program. An old friend twisted my arm.”
The room is about half the size of my dorm room upstairs, and it contains a piano with a bench, three stools, a white board, and two music stands.
Finn says, “So, the next semester of lessons is supposed to improve your technique and performance, blah, blah, blah. But none of that can happen unless I know why you’re doing this. So, tell me what you want.”
His bluntness has me leaning in. “I want to be on a stage.”
“Why?”
I blink. “Because I love creating music. I love when I’m in it.”
“Why else?”
I dig deeper, thinking of what drove me to work my ass off these past couple of years.
“Because I want the world to see me.”
Satisfaction works across his expression. “Show me.”
I take a seat at the piano and play my audition piece, singing overtop.
He cuts me off three bars in. “No.”
I try something else. And another. And another.
Each time, he stops me. “Any kid in a talent contest could sing that.”
“Then tell me what you want me to sing,” I say eventually, frustrated. I rise from the piano bench and turn to face him. “I have some classical training, but I can’t give you Puccini or Strauss. Maybe someone in the next room can”—I hitch a thumb at the wall—“but this is what I am.”
He’s standing in the corner, smirking. “I wouldn’t be wasting my time here for Puccini or Strauss. I saw your audition tape. You grabbed me. You want to be seen, make me see you.”
My chest tightens. Moments before the audition, I’d run into Tyler. It was a kick in the gut. It took everything I had to make it through my piece. I was raw and desperate and earnest.
I don’t know how to be that girl again.
My fingers find my necklace again, twisting the chain between my fingers. Under Finn’s stare, I think of the pictures Tyler found in my room, the words I wrote when I was coming apart.
I reach for the fallboard and tug it down over the piano keys. Then I shift back onto it, perched on the edge, resting my feet on the bench.
“A heart breaking has multiple acts. It doesn’t break in a moment; it breaks over years.
“It tears, not in half, not perfectly. But in layers. Like flower petals.
“Pieces, one at a time. Peeling away.
“And you can put it back together. Collect the pieces. Sew them back.
“It might even look the same, from the outside.”
I lift my gaze to see Finn leaning against the opposite wall, his face impassive.
My throat tightens, and I force myself to take a breath that fills my lungs even though it’s hard.
He’s going to tell me it’s not a song.
He’s going to kick me out, say this was all a mistake, that he doesn’t want to supervise me.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he says, “Keep going.”
“Are we having fun yet?” Elle asks over the music, reacting to my grin as I dance next to her.
“Better than class,” I call back.
I’ve never been to a bar or club except for a concert. This place, with its pounding bass and neon lights and grinding bodies, barely seems in the same category as Leo’s.
If the first few days were like learning to play an impossible sheet of music, the rest of week one was like turning the page and realizing there are ten more pages, each harder than the last.
After my lesson with Finn, which improved somewhat in the last fifteen minutes in that he let me finish but still said we had a lot of work ahead of us, I started sociology homework only to realize I’ve been working from an old textbook.
Wednesday, Talbot assigned us hours of film to watch before next week’s class, which is going to be nearly impossible given I’m going to Dallas for the weekend for my dad’s celebration. Plus, I narrowly avoided slipping up on the phone when we were talking about my visit.
Once I get the showcase, everything will be okay. I repeat it like a mantra.
Auditions are in three weeks. I need to use every second I have to choose the right piece, to work it until it’s perfect.
But for tonight, it’s hard not to want to let loose and be young and alive.
“You seen Jake?” I ask Elle. “He said he’d come tonight.”
He’s the only first year who seems to want the showcase as much as I do.
Elle shakes her head. “But there’s Rae!”
She points at the DJ booth, where Rae’s charmed her way in.
I’m no closer to making inroads with her. I know she makes electronic music. Her chest has an old-style turntable and a bunch of mixing equipment. But I don’t know about her family or her dreams or anything except what toothpaste she uses.
My phone vibrates in my bag.
Beck: BAR. NOW.
Elle and I wind through the crowd to where Beck is holding court at the bar in a pale-purple dress shirt, half tucked-in. His dark hair is spiked, his grin wide.
“Shots!” he demands.
The bartender’s pouring into almost a dozen glasses, and I wrinkle my nose.
Beck passes me two, and I pass one back. “Going home for the weekend tomorrow,” I tell him.
He slides back the second shot. “Your family’s anything like mine, this might help.”
I grin as my attention skims the group of us at the bar—about ten from Vanier, a mix of first years we know and second years Tyler invited—my gaze locking on a familiar one a few bodies away.
Tyler’s a dark knight all in black. His dress shirt is rolled at the sleeves, revealing curls of ink that trace one arm like venom taking over his bloodstream.
A wave of desire washes over me before I can stop it. Electricity buzzes through me—my lips, my fingers, my bare shoulders and breasts under the backless silver halter top I bought this afternoon.
Dammit, I want to know what happened when he came to New York.
I want to
know what he’s thinking right now.
Stop wondering.
I toss back the drink. The sweetness and alcohol burn down my throat, settling in my stomach with a not unpleasant buzz.
The next second, Elle’s between us, an expression of shock on her face.
“Jake isn’t coming. He got kicked out of school today. He was selling uppers from his dorm room.”
The comfortable warmth of the booze is overtaken by disbelief. “It’s the first week of school.” I look between Elle and Beck.
Beck shrugs. “Sometimes you want something so bad you’ll give up who you are to get it.”
My chest feels hollow.
Yes, Jake fucked up, and I won’t do that, but you can be on top one moment and back on the bottom the next.
“You know what time it is, Manatee?” Beck proclaims, and I try to refocus on him. “It’s dancing time.”
“I’ll be right there. Think I need that second drink after all.”
I watch him and Elle head toward the floor.
When I reach for the second shot, fingers close around my wrist.
I jerk my head up to see Tyler looming over me, holding a plastic cup of what looks like water.
“I don’t want it,” I say.
“What do you want?”
I lift my chin, suddenly angry. “I want people to stop leaving. Everyone leaves.”
I pry the shot from his hand and down it before taking off toward the dance floor.
I’d thought once I got to Vanier the rest would be easy. None of it’s easy.
Once I find my friends, I link hands with Elle and Beck, and the three of us dance.
I focus on the music.
That’s what I’ve always wanted—to lose myself in its power, to be part of it.
Elle splits off to dance with a guy from school, and Beck grins at me.
I move closer. My hand finds his shoulder, and he smiles.
“This is a good birthday, Manatee. But I’m supposed to be helping you, not the other way around.”
My chest expands. “We’re friends, right?”
He nods. “For sure.”
The song changes to something hip-hop, and when his hands find my hips, I go with it, moving closer.
My arms wind around his neck as I smile up at him.
