“Oh God, Shea, you really like this guy?”
“Too much.” I slanted her a somber smile. “But it doesn’t matter anyway.” I plucked at a loose thread on my comforter, hoping if I focused on it hard enough it would keep the tears at bay. “I ran into him downtown this afternoon. I had Kallie with me. He took off faster than a dog that’d caught its tail on fire.”
“Jerk,” she said as if it was going to make me feel any better. My smile just weakened, but hers was just as weak, filled with sympathy and compassion.
I chewed at my bottom lip. Fighting. Fighting the emotion. I sniffled, wiped at a single tear that broke free. “It’s fine. I already knew. I already knew, April.” My voice turned pleading, somewhere inside berating myself for being so foolish. “I shouldn’t have let myself get caught up in the moment.”
I shouldn’t have let those glimmers of a simple girl’s dreams invade my mind. Because they’d taken root—each second growing stronger. The impossible idea that someone could love me.
That someone could love us.
I should have known it was inevitable I’d end up alone.
April crawled up beside me and pulled me into her arms. “He doesn’t deserve you, Shea. Doesn’t deserve either of you. Don’t let assholes like him bring you down. One of these days, the right guy is going to show up and sweep you right off those pretty feet.”
I forced myself to smile at my best friend. She was only trying to help—voicing out loud what I knew was her own secret hope for my daughter and me.
It wasn’t her fault I had already been swept.
I knew it though, when Baz stood staring at me in shock, a look of terror crossing his perfect features. Hardening them more. Those grey eyes dimming the darkest dark.
I’d already started the fall.
And he wasn’t going to be there to catch me.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWN HERE?” Lyrik stood on the third step from the bottom, squinting at me. I sat in the virtual dark down in the secluded basement. It was a lounging area outside the recording studio, basically a man cave with couches, TVs, and a pool table. I guess a place to unwind or get sloshed after a gruesome recording session, but I’d been using it as some kind of asylum.
I shrugged at him as I resituated the guitar on my lap. “Nothin’.”
He scowled. “Nothin’? What the fuck is up with you, man? Your pissy ass has been even pissier the last few days, and that shit should be damned near impossible.”
I grunted. “Love you, too, asshole.”
Deep laughter rolled from him, and he drove a hand through the disarray of black hair on top of his head. He sauntered my direction and plopped down on the couch opposite me, a gush of air rushing from his lungs. “Seriously. What’s going on with you? You’ve got the rest of the guys worried. You’ve basically been down here by yourself for the last three days.” A sharp brow lifted in warning. “Zee is about to stage an intervention.”
I grabbed the half-empty beer from the coffee table cluttered with papers, empties, and overflowing ashtrays, and gulped down the bitter liquid that had turned warm and tasted like piss. “Just been in the mood to write.”
“Huh.” Eyes narrowed in speculation, Lyrik scratched his temple with the tip of his index finger. “All right then, let’s see what you have.”
He reached across the coffee table and snatched up the open notebook with my handwriting scratched all over it, deep lines cutting into all the shit I kept crossing out. The nearby pencil was dulled and blunted with the indecipherable chaos that had bled out on the pages.
That was the problem. I’d been sitting down here for days, searching for the right note. For the right words. For the right feeling.
But all of it remained convoluted. Just contradictions and misapprehensions.
All of it was her.
Dark. Light. Heavy. Soft.
Trouble.
Trouble.