He opens his mouth to respond—most likely to deny that he did that tonight—but I place my trembling fingers against his lips, firmly breaking our ten-year unspoken no-touching rule. I’d like to take a moment to enjoy the soft, full, sensuously masculine mouth of his, but there isn’t time. I need to focus all cylinders of my brain on what I’m trying to say.
“I told you how I feel, what I want. And I get it. You don’t feel the same way. Or you won’t act on your feelings. But that doesn’t mean I can switch mine right off for your convenience. And it doesn’t mean that I’m not jealous, not hurt, and that I don’t hate, hate, being in the presence of any woman who is going to have you in a way that I never will.”
I’m breathing hard, tasting his anxiety and frustration in the air between us. Removing my fingers from his mouth and placing them on mine, I watch him go to war with himself.
His neck loosens, allowing his head to fall forward. Remaining completely still while he inhales the length of my neck, I swallow hard.
“Tell me I’ll never have you that way. Tell me to move on and let this go,” I whisper, needing to hear him say it and terrified that he actually will in equal measure.
“You’re my best friend. Growing up, you were my safe place,” he tells me on a ragged breath that seems to pull the life completely out of both of us. “I don’t want to ruin you, Bluebird.”
Before I can assure him that he won’t ruin me, Gavin does the absolute last thing I expect him to.
In my mind’s eye, I watch him grab me, kiss me, and we spend the entire night making love. But in the real world, where I unfortunately live, where parents die, and dreams don’t usually come true, Gavin Garrison bites out his favorite curse, turns away from our intimate confrontation, and walks out on me.
Chapter 6
Austin MusicFest—Day 1
“ONE, TWO, ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!” GAVIN BEATS OUT THE count with his drumsticks and it feels like he’s playing the drums on my temples.
After he left last night? I lay awake and tried to come up with some excuse for why I’d behaved the way I had. The memory of the humiliatingly honest truths I’d told made me want to turn back time, slap the me from yesterday, and shove a gag in her overactive mouth.
Could I tell him I’d felt sick and taken unnecessary cold medicine in order to avoid getting ill and screwing up MusicFest? Or maybe I could say that I had food poisoning and wasn’t myself. Except he knew I hadn’t really ever eaten.
My intro comes and I play my few lines in “Whiskey Redemption,” a slow ballad Dallas wrote about a man who loses everything to a drinking problem. I usually love this song, love the harmony that Dallas and I play, but today it’s grating on my sleep-deprived nerves.
Gavin Garrison riled me up and left me hanging and it’s only now that I’m realizing how incited my pissed-off side is by him igniting a flame he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stick around long enough to extinguish.
We finish up and play a few classic hits and then some up-tempo stuff. By the end of the set, the anger is ebbing and flowing, effectively draining me.
That’s the funny thing about music. Part of the magic, I guess. Sometimes it replenishes me, like I’m feeding off its energy and it fills me. And other times, it pulls at my pain, weaves its way through the strands of my soul and wrecks it.
Between the man in “Whiskey Redemption” ending up homeless and dying alone, and Gavin refusing to so much as look at me, my emotional climate is dangerously unstable and the music is taking more from me than I have to give right now. Dallas is pleased, though, and says if we can just do that well tonight, he’ll be a happy camper.
God. Tonight. The first night of Austin MusicFest.
I can’t even stomach the thought of the redhead flinging herself all over Gavin. Or trying to play and listen for my intro cues while watching her executing her attack.