by Vivian Lux
Then—
Noelle.
I inhaled sharply when my ex’s face filled the screen. I stared as she sang, that sweet voice that used to raise goosebumps on my skin.
She had torn out my soul as well as my heart, but there was still that ache in my chest that she’d left behind. As I watched, I slowly realized that ache was a part of my old self that had belonged only to her.
I wasn’t that guy anymore. That old self had died, and I was here now. I watched her, waiting for the feelings to resurrect themselves, like ghosts in my cells. But the more I watched, the more I felt…
Nothing.
She was just another pretty blonde girl. Bubbly and sweet-voiced, nothing more and nothing less. I didn’t feel angry anymore, only a strange kind of nostalgia. She was a part of my life that had passed. It was over, and I’d moved on to something better.
I pressed stop, freezing Noelle in place. I lifted the tablet and stared into those wide blue eyes. “I’m done,” I told her.
Then I closed the browser and carefully set the tablet back onto my brother’s desk.
When I walked away, I didn’t even limp.
I got exactly as far as Beau’s doorway, only to come face to face with my younger brother as he came up the stairs.
He’d caught me red-handed snooping in his room. If it had been Finn, I’d be getting a beat-down even now. But since this was Beau, he gave me one of his level looks. “You need something?”
I let out a long breath. “Yeah. A dirt bike and a hundred-foot jump.”
He grinned. “Yeah…you’re not gonna find that in my room, though,” he pointed out. Then he widened his eyes a little. “But what you will find is this.”
He shoved past me and went right over to his guitar stand. “Here,” he said.
I swallowed and stared at the instrument. My brother held it out to me in some mix of encouragement and accusation.
I hadn’t played since the band broke up. Without my brothers around me, the idea of making music didn’t seem the same.
I took it from him anyway. Call it reflex. Call it curiosity. I slung the strap around my neck with careless confidence. I moved my fingers to the strings.
Then I stopped. “I don’t think I remember how,” I said slowly. I pressed down on the frets and winced. “My callouses are all gone.”
My brother gave me an encouraging nod. “You’ll pick it up again. It’s like riding a bike.”
I tested out a few hesitant chords. “Are you still playing?” I asked him. I hadn’t heard any strumming come from his room.
He shook his head. “Guitar was never really my thing.”
I nodded. Beau was a competent enough guitar player, but he only did it when he had to. “Are you playing your big-ass piano still?” I asked.
Beau’s eyes got a little foggy looking. “Not here as much. I found an even nicer one at the high school. It’s got the kind of tone I always wanted, but those little keyboards were so synthetic. Big and round and full.”
“You know you look like a total weirdo when you play,” I reminded him.
“I have passion,” he said primly.
Why did that make me feel defensive? “I have plenty of passion.”
“Your passion is getting your shit fucked up,” Beau said, his mild tone taking the sting out of his words. “We always knew you didn’t have music in you.”
Now I was really feeling attacked “I have music in me,” I protested.
“It’s okay, man. You are a good technical player. You have a good enough ear to fake it.” Beau lifted his chin a little and grinned. “It was enough for our purposes, right?”
The way he smiled, I could tell he meant nothing by it, but it still stung. “Fuck you, then,” I grumbled, clutching the guitar close and stalking back to my room.
I spent the rest of the night starting from scratch. I got out all my old instruction books, and even played along with a few of our old songs, humming my harmonies along with my brothers’ recorded voices. I was up so late that sleep overtook me. I woke up right next to the guitar and started practicing again.
It was only after I’d retuned it and picked my way through all the major and minor scales that I realized Beau had outwitted me. He knew I’d rather play music again than admit he was right.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Everly
“Coffee is magic,” Rachel grinned.
We’d been meeting before my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday classes for three weeks now, and in that span of time she’d developed a wicked caffeine addiction. “I can see why they forbade us drinking it,” she went on, cupping it in both hands before taking another sip. “I feel like I could take down a house. Or run a marathon.”
Her pupils were dilated the size of dinner plates. “Okay, champ,” I said, reaching over and gently prying the cup from her hands. “Let’s go easy on it, okay? You’ve got years of addiction to make up for before you can keep up with me.”
She laughed. We sat in the Student Union on a drizzly April afternoon. On the wall next to our table was the message board where clubs and groups posted their flyers. “They need to take down that one for the Blood Drive,” I commented as I glanced over it. “That already happened.”
“So take it down,” Rachel said.
I gave her a look. “If I get up from this table are you going to suck down the rest of this coffee in one gulp?”
“Yes I am,” she said with such prim dignity that I had to give in. “Fine,” I said, sliding my chair back. “That flyer’s been driving me nuts.”
I went over and yanked it down, exposing the post that had been hidden underneath. A house for rent—a small, two-bedroom cabin on Ridge Point Road. I knew that area. It used to be blocks of summer cabins situated on a low spit of land formed where the creek divided south of town, forking into two branches before coming together again a half mile downstream.
Without really knowing what I was doing, I yanked that flyer down too. Rachel watched me as I thoughtfully tucked it into my bag, but she didn’t ask me about it. She was good at keeping her thoughts to herself. I appreciated that about her. It was something that friends did.
I had a friend.
I sat back down and took the coffee cup from her hands with a shake of my head. My friend smiled with that little twist of her head, looking down as she did. It was this little tic she had, like she was afraid to let you see her smile. “What are you doing after class?” she asked.
I blinked. “I honestly have no idea,” I sighed. “I’ve been working my ass off, running this insane schedule for so long that now that I have a moment to myself I don’t know how to relax.”
“I get that feeling,” she agreed. “The rest of the janitors all complain about being exhausted, but I used to clean the whole house and care for all my little sisters and brothers.” That small twist of her head again. I could tell it hurt to mention them. “And after that, I’d still have to work with the rest of the women to get the meals done. Only having to look out for myself is so easy, I’m kind of bored.”
I grinned at her. “Well, as your official ambassador into the world of secular hedonism, I can’t have you bored. I was going to go visit Gabe—”
“Is that what you secular hedonists call it? Visiting?”
I did a double take. “Oh, oh! You’re catching on fast!” I laughed. Something in my chest unclenched, the tight fist that had held my breath in its grasp loosening. Rachel was smiling too, a smug little grin as she reached over and swiped the coffee cup back from me. “I feel like I’m corrupting a little baby lamb.”
She shook her head. “My older sister told me things. And you learn a lot growing up on a farm,” she said.
“Come on over with me,” I said. “If you really want to be like a normal girl, then you need to know who the King Brothers are.”
“They’re a musical group, right?”
“They were the obsession of every girl our age the whole time we were growing up,” I corrected.
“Including you?”
I felt the hair on my scalp raise a little. “I had a crush on one of them, yeah.”
“Gabe?”
“Jonah.”
Rachel clapped her hands together in glee. “Oh my gracious, does Gabe know?”
“No!” I said, clapping my hand over her mouth. “And you can’t tell him, either. He absolutely hates being overshadowed by his brother. It would drive him nuts.”
“I solemnly swear to never breathe a word,” Rachel said.
I glowered at her. “I feel like I should get you a Bible to swear on or something.”
She shook her head. “It would have to be the Prophet’s Missives,” she said, and the way she said it told me that those two words were capitalized in her brain. “The Bible is corrupted by Man’s touch.”
“Wow,” I whistled. “Don’t let my mom hear you say that.”
Rachel looked stricken for a moment, then let out a sigh of laughter. “Oh my word, I love caffeine!” she crowed, gulping down the last dregs from her cup.
I grinned at her. “Wait ’til you try alcohol.”
Her eyes widened, scandalized. “Devil’s water.”
“Oh, yeah.” I nodded eagerly. “You think you feel good now? Just you wait.”
Rachel looked eager, so I did some quick calculations. I couldn’t very well ask Gabe to come out to the bar with us, so it would have to be later in the night. Meaning I wouldn’t be home for 9:30 curfew. I’d been sneaking out so often to run over to Gabe’s, but going to the bar would require me taking the car. There was no way I’d be able to pull in again without waking my parents.
I pressed my lips together. “Hang on. I need to send my mother a text and tell her I’ll be out. She’s not going to like it, so I’m going to have to stay out until after she leaves. That’s not until two, which is when the bar closes anyway. You think you’ll be able to hang with me until then?”
“Gee,” Rachel said. “You have to account for your whereabouts more than I ever did.”
I looked up from my phone and stared at her. She smiled in her sweet way. “I guess I’m not the only one who grew up with controlling parents.”
“No, I mean, it’s not like that…” I started to say, but she raised her eyebrow in a way that silenced me.
Rachel had grown up under an oppressive, autocratic authority figure who made her feel shame every time she dared deviate from their rigid expectations.
Hadn’t I done the same thing?
“You’re right,” I said, completely awestruck. I reached down and brushed my hand over the flyer I had taken from the bulletin board without truly understanding why. “Hey,” I asked her. “You want to take a drive with me real quick?”
We pulled on to Ridge Point Road exactly eight minutes later, and I noted with satisfaction how close it was to school. The low-slung gray house hugged the banks of the creek like a lover. I got out of the car and pulled my hood up against the rain and grinned at Rachel, who looked shyly hopeful for me. “Look at that! If it ever stops raining, I could open the window at night and hear the creek,” I said, already relishing the idea of deep quiet. “It’d be like having a white nose machine.”
Rachel gave me that smile—the one that said she had no idea what I was talking about but didn’t want me to spend the time to explain it.
I stared at the little place, already dreaming of being on my own. I glanced down at the flyer again as cold reality smacked me in the face. “But I can’t afford the rent,” I sighed. “I’d need a housemate.”
Rachel was quiet. I looked over at her. Her eyes were cast downward.
That’s why she had looked so hopeful. “Rachel? Where are you living these days?”
“Hi-Lo Hotel,” she said softly. I hated when the confidence dripped out of her voice like that. “Everything for rent requires a security deposit and I haven’t been able to—”
“Rachel?” I asked my first real friend. “Would you like to live here with me?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Gabe
When Everly called to tell me she was moving out of her parents’ house, I jumped up and down for the very first time since my accident.
Then I came over to help her start packing.
She met me at the back door with a grin and a finger to her lips. “My parents are sleeping,” she whispered.
I furrowed my eyebrows. “It’s the middle of the day.”
“I know,” she hissed. “That’s why I need to move out.”
I stepped in and closed the door quietly behind me, then kissed her hello. “How’d they take the news?” I asked.
She lifted her mouth into a wry smile. “I think my mother wanted to ground me, then realized that wouldn’t exactly work. Then the two of them called my sister to try to get her on their side.”
“How did that go?” I wondered. Everly’s sister was still a mystery to me.
Her smile widened. “Abby cheered for me and then told them living in this house was like being a plant with no sunlight. They started fighting and I went upstairs and got a bunch of packing done in the meantime.”
I kissed her. “You’re spectacular.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Stop being so spectacular and I’ll stop.”
She grinned and gestured for me to head up to her room. This was the first time I’d ever been in the Fosters’ house, even after all these years of being neighbors. It was big enough, but there was an air of closeness that hung in each room, like the walls were pressing me down with invisible hands on my shoulders. I had the strangest urge to sit.
Instead, I bounded up the stairs.
“Stop,” Everly ordered when we got to the top.
I knew what she was going to say, so I took another five steps and added a little hop at the end as I turned to see my girl staring at me, open-mouthed. “You’re walking so well!”
“I know.”
“Doesn’t it hurt still?”
“Nah, baby. I’m on this new prescription that has me feeling better than I have in a long time.”
Her suspicious eyebrows first zoomed upward and then back down again as her eyes narrowed. “You have a new prescription?”
“You wrote it for me,” I told her, pulling her to me and inhaling the scent of her shampoo. “Take two of these and call me in the morning.”
She squealed as I cupped each of her breasts in turn and then swatted me away as she glanced out the door of her bedroom. “I can’t believe you’d do that with my parents in the next room.”
“We do things with my parents in the next room,” I pointed out.
She rolled her eyes but couldn’t hide the delighted smirk on her face. “Well, I don’t care how good your new prescription has you feeling. Sit down. Your nurse’s orders.”
I sighed and sat down at the edge of her tiny bed. “And how, exactly, am I supposed to be helping you move out if you won’t let me pack anything?”
“I told you I didn’t need help. You came over anyway. It’s not like I’m taking a whole lot with me.”
“You need help carrying boxes.” I glanced down at my phone. “That’s why Beau should be here in a few minutes.”
“Beau’s coming? Why?”
I shifted on the bed, trying to find a way to sit comfortably on the tiny mattress. From the looks of things, she hadn’t gotten a new bed since she was in kindergarten. “Well,” I said. “I told him you needed help and he said he’d come by.”
She colored and blinked back to her tiny, child-sized bookshelf. The blue of her eyes got intensely turquoise. “Baby?” I asked her, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
She abruptly shook her head and dashed her hands hastily against her cheeks. Then she smiled. “Nothing,” she said brightly. “Just, you know. Moving out.”
“It’s gotta be weird,” I agreed. “Hell, I’m still in my childhood bedroom, too.”
She gave me an exasperated look. “Yeah, but you’ve lived other places. Me, I’m l
ike—” She trailed off again, a faraway look in her eyes.
I thought I recognized it. It was far from standing at the edge of a bridge waiting for your turn to bungee jump, but it was the same idea. It’s fucking hard to force yourself to make that leap into the unknown. “Come over here,” I told her, patting the bed.
She set down the box and came over, a pile of books still clutched in her hand. “I’m proud of you, you know,” I told her.
“Really? Why?”
“Because you’re taking the first steps.”
“You should see the house. It’s a total dump.”
“You’ll make it a home, I’m positive.” I grinned. “And you’ll have me around to mess it back up again.”
She gave me a shy smile. “You’re gonna come over a lot?”
“Baby, you’re gonna need to keep a bat by the door to shoo me away,” I promised, pulling her in to me.
Even as I did, I felt my heart sink. I was promising something that could never happen. As soon as I was fully healed, my producer wanted me on a plane, ready to shoot the second season of King of Pain. The viral video of my near-death experience had made the buzz around the new season almost deafening, and Kit was rabid to start filming the second I left Crown Creek.
I brushed my hand up to cup it around Everly’s arm and gave it a guilty squeeze. Her suggestive smile made it pretty clear that she had no idea the thoughts that were going through my head, but I was pretty sure I could tell the ones that were running through hers. “When is Beau supposed to get here?”
I laughed, shaking free the cobwebs of guilt. We still had time. And right now, this girl was amazing. “You little devil, you,” I whispered, glancing in the direction of her parents’ room.
She wiggled in my arms, doing this cute little shimmy. “Can I tell you something? You’re the first boy I’ve ever had in my room.”
A hot rush of desire made my cock press painfully against my jeans. I shifted, ready to pull her to me, and as I did the books went tumbling from her arms. Instinct made me jerk back—gotta protect those ribs—and as I did, I caught sight of a familiar face.
