Chapter 2 #2
Because it meant that everywhere else felt like waiting.
Everywhere else was bills and responsibilities and the constant low-grade panic that I was one bad month away from losing everything.
But up here, with the lights hot on my skin and the bass vibrating through my ribcage and my sticks in my hands, I could let go of all of it.
I could stop thinking about rent and custody and whether I'd remembered to pay the electric bill.
I could just hit and hit and hit until my arms ached and my chest loosened and my brain finally shut up.
The crowd was good tonight. Loud, drunk, energetic in the way that made the whole room feel alive.
I could see them moving in the half-dark beyond the stage lights, bodies pressed together, hands in the air, mouths open and singing along to lyrics they'd probably learned off our EP.
Luca was up front working the crowd like he'd been born to it, and June was holding down the low end with the kind of steady competence that made everything else possible.
I fell into the rhythm without thinking, letting muscle memory take over.
My hands moved fast and sure, sticks cracking against the snare and toms in patterns I'd played a thousand times before.
The noise was overwhelming, beautiful, exactly what I needed.
It drowned out everything else. The dressing room.
The phone call. The rent. The bracelet. The hollow feeling that had been sitting in my chest since I'd woken up this morning.
Drumming had saved my life, and I wasn't being dramatic about that.
Hockey had been my first language. The thing I'd understood before I'd understood most other things.
I'd loved it with the kind of single-minded intensity only kids could pull off, and I'd been good at it too.
Good enough that people had started talking about scholarships, about futures, about the kind of life I could build if I just kept skating.
And then everything had fallen apart, and hockey had become one more thing I'd lost in the wreckage.
Music had filled the gap. Not right away, and not neatly, but eventually.
I'd picked up drumming in high school because a friend had needed someone for his garage band, and I'd discovered that hitting things in rhythm felt almost as good as skating used to.
It gave me the same release, the same focus, the same sense of my body doing what I needed it to do.
And when my life had detonated senior year and I'd disappeared, drumming had been one of the few things I'd taken with me.
It had kept me sane through the worst years.
The ones where I'd been working three jobs and raising my siblings and trying not to drown under the weight of it all.
I'd played in dive bars and basements and anywhere that would let me set up a kit, and slowly, piece by piece, I'd built a life that looked almost functional from the outside.
The song ended and the crowd screamed, and I grinned and raised my sticks in acknowledgment before launching into the next one.
This was the part I was good at. This was where I could be the version of myself people wanted to see: confident, talented, alive.
I didn't have to fake it up here. I just had to hit and let everything else fall away.
By the time we finished the set, my shirt was soaked through with sweat and my arms were shaking from exertion.
I stood up from the kit and waved to the crowd one last time before following June and Luca offstage.
The adrenaline was still buzzing through me, making my hands restless and my pulse too fast, and I knew from experience it would take at least an hour for my body to come down enough to feel normal again.
Luca clapped me on the shoulder as we walked toward the dressing room. “Killed it tonight, man. That bridge on 'Static Bloom' was sick.”
“Thanks.” I grabbed a towel off the rack and wiped the sweat off my face, already thinking about the drive home and whether I'd have time to shower before crashing. “You weren't bad either.”
“Wasn't bad?” Luca pressed a hand to his chest in mock offense. “I was a goddamn rock god up there and you know it.”
June rolled her eyes and started packing up her bass. “You're both insufferable. I'm going home.”
We said our goodbyes and I grabbed my gear, loaded it into the back of my beat-up car, and drove through the quiet Toronto streets toward the small apartment I shared with my siblings.
The adrenaline had mostly faded by the time I pulled into the parking lot, leaving me hollow and exhausted in that familiar post-show way.
The apartment was on the third floor of a building that had seen better days, but the rent was cheap and the landlord didn't ask too many questions, which made it perfect for us.
I climbed the stairs with my bag slung over my shoulder and let myself in as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake anyone if they were already asleep.
Talia was in the kitchen when I walked in, sitting at the small table with her laptop open and a mug of tea cooling next to her elbow. She looked up when she heard me and smiled, tired but warm. “Hey. How was the second set?”
“Good. Crowd was into it.” I dropped my bag by the door and crossed to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of water, and drank half of it standing there with the door still open. “What are you still doing up?”
“Quarterly reports.” She gestured at the screen. “My manager needs them by seven tomorrow morning, which means I've been living in this document since I got home.”
I shut the fridge and pulled the chair out across from her. “How bad is it?”
“The numbers are fine. The formatting is a crime against humanity.” She turned the laptop around to show me, and I looked at the spreadsheet long enough to confirm that yes, it was a mess — columns misaligned, headers inconsistent, one section where the font had changed for reasons that were completely unexplained.
“Did you do this yourself or did someone send you a template from 2009?”
“Both, somehow.” She dragged the laptop back and rubbed her eyes. “I've been fixing it for forty minutes and I think I've made it worse.”
“Slide over.”
“You don't have to—”
“Tal.” I was already pulling my chair around to her side of the table. “Move.”
She shifted, and I took the laptop, and we spent the next twenty minutes working through it — me fixing the formatting, Talia narrating which numbers actually needed to go where, both of us talking over each other until we found a rhythm that worked.
It was the most useful I'd felt all night.
My hands had stopped shaking somewhere between the second song and the drive home, but the adrenaline residue was still sitting in my chest, that restless hum that needed somewhere to go. This gave it somewhere.
“Okay,” I said finally, pushing the laptop back toward her. “Check the totals in column D because I think one of them was pulling from the wrong cell, but the rest of it should be clean.”
Talia scanned it, scrolled down, scrolled back up. “How did you do that in twenty minutes when I've been losing my mind for an hour?”
“I had a spreadsheet phase in my twenties. Don't ask.”
“What kind of phase?”
“The kind where Micah needed school supplies and I was tracking every dollar we spent down to the cent.” I said it lightly, the way I said most things about that period, and Talia's expression did the small shift it always did when she heard something like that — not pity, more like a quiet acknowledgment that we'd both lived through it and were still here. “Anyway. You're good.”
“Thank you.” She closed the laptop and leaned back in her chair. “You look exhausted.”
“I'm always exhausted.”
“More than usual.” She tilted her head, studying me in that precise way that had always made lying to her feel slightly pointless. Talia read people the way she read spreadsheets — looking for the figure that didn't add up. “What happened tonight?”
“Nothing happened. Good show, decent crowd, came home.” I stood up and took my water bottle back to the counter, giving myself a reason to stop being looked at. “June reamed me out in the dressing room, but that's basically just a Tuesday.”
“What for?”
“Said I was in my head.” I shrugged. “She wasn't wrong.”
Talia was quiet for a second, which was more dangerous than questions. “You've been off for a few days,” she said eventually. “Not bad, just — somewhere else. Like you're running on autopilot.”
“I'm fine.”
“Mm.” She picked up her mug, realized the tea had gone cold, and set it back down. “You know you can just tell me when something's sitting on you, right?”
I looked at her. She was twenty-seven years old with tired eyes and ink on her wrist from a pen she'd been chewing on for the past hour, and she'd stayed in this apartment when she could have left, built her career from inside these walls instead of somewhere with more room.
I knew why she'd stayed. I also knew it had cost her.
“You should go to bed,” I said. “Seven o'clock deadline.”
“I'm aware of my own deadline, thanks.” But she stood, stretched her arms above her head until her back cracked, and grabbed her mug for the sink. “Just — don't sit up all night catastrophizing, okay? Whatever it is, it'll still be there in the morning and it'll look smaller.”
“It usually doesn't.”
“No,” she agreed, with the dry honesty that was her version of comfort. “But at least you've slept.” She paused at the kitchen doorway. “I'm proud of you, you know. Even when you're running on autopilot. Still showing up.”
She was gone before I could say anything back, which was very Talia — land the thing and then leave before it could get emotional.
I stood in the kitchen alone and listened to the apartment settle into quiet around me. The faint sounds of a TV two floors up. Traffic moving slow and distant outside. The hum of the fridge doing its job.
I walked over to the window and stared out at the city lights scattered across the dark.
Toronto was home now, had been for years, but some nights it still felt like I was just passing through.
Like I was waiting for everything I'd built to quietly collapse, for the universe to remind me that people like me didn't get to keep good things for long.
And then, because I was tired enough that my defenses had stopped doing their job, I let myself think about Rowan Kincaid.
I didn't go there often. Couldn't afford to, really.
Thinking about Rook meant thinking about everything I'd walked away from, everything I'd given up when I'd disappeared without an explanation and decided he'd be better off not knowing why.
But tonight the apartment was quiet and the city was dark and I was too wrung out to stop it.
I'd built an entire life without Rowan in it.
New city, new career, a version of myself that looked functional enough to pass inspection.
I'd gotten through custody battles and legal fees and years of scraping the bottom of the account and telling everyone I was fine.
I'd raised my siblings and played every show and kept going on the nights when keeping going felt like the hardest thing in the world.
And still. On nights like this, when the exhaustion cut down past the defenses—he was always the first place my mind went.