Chapter 4 #2
It’s the most honest thing I’ve sung in public. My fingers bite the strings too hard, fuzzing the edge of the note; Miles tucks a gentler line beneath me like he’s laying down a rug so I don’t fall. I find Ollie again in the verse even though I shouldn’t.
“You don’t talk loud, you still the room,
You carry thunder like it’s perfume,
But the flush you couldn’t cage gave you away—
I’m not your answer, I’m just your stray.”
It’s a risk, that line, the kind that could make someone flinch for the wrong reasons.
He doesn’t. He goes stiller. His lips part a breath’s width, then close like he remembered the world.
His hand tightens at his side; his fingers curl once, release.
It’s tiny. It’s loud to me. The guys from the café glance between us like they’re watching a scene in a show they didn’t realize they bought tickets to.
One of them—cap backward—tips his chin at me with an I see you that’s more ally than warning.
The mouthy one says, “Bro, he’s straight, you know that.
” Not mean, more like he’s reading a footnote aloud.
Then the cap one goes, “Yeah, yeah, but also… just listen,” and then they both shut up because the chorus is back, and even people who don’t like us are going to like this part.
The song ends like we cut a wire. For exactly one beat, the bar holds its breath.
Then the noise hits—a roar, whistles, two hands slapping my back so hard I lurch, someone by the pool table yelling, “Run that again!” like we’re a jukebox.
My chest doesn’t know what to do with itself.
I laugh once, startled and stupid, and wipe my forearm across my mouth like I can clean the feeling off. I can’t.
It’s embedded.
It’s engraved.
It’s burrowed in.
We hustle our gear to the wall for the next band to sprawl out their ridiculous fog machine where it’ll make every asthmatic kid in here a martyr.
The friendly café guys thread through the crowd, and the mouthy one calls, “Yo, Saints—nice set,” with a grin that doesn’t ask for anything.
I bump his fist on reflex. He leans closer, voice pitched like he wants me to hear him and only me.
“He doesn’t do bars, man. But he came for this. Don’t be weird about it.”
“I’m constitutionally incapable of not being weird,” I say, and he laughs, probably because he realizes it’s true.
There’s suddenly too much heat and not enough oxygen. I slip through the next wave of bodies and out the door. The night air hits like a good slap.
It smells like tailpipe and a citrus tree someone planted to make this block pretend it cares about beauty.
The cold finds the damp at my collar, and I hiss and grin at once.
I dig a cigarette out of a crushed pack and light it, the flame small and perfect, smoke curling into the cone of yellow parking-lot light.
The first drag scratches, a familiar scrape that calms my racing heart.
The windowed door opens with a gust of music and voices, then eases shut. He steps out like he had to fight his way through a river to do it.
Ollie’s all controlled lines, even out here.
The light from inside glows behind him; the streetlamp puts a soft edge on him in front.
He looks at the cigarette and frowns—not performative, just…
concerned. He monitors damage for a living.
Of course he hates watching someone do it slowly and on purpose.
“That stuff’ll kill you,” he says, and somehow it’s not annoying, which I resent.
I start with the reflex—everything kills you—and get halfway. “Everything—” I stop, look at him, look at the smoke, look at his hand in his pocket, thumb worrying the seam. I drop the cigarette and crush it out under my boot. “There. Captain’s orders.”
He blinks like he expected me to be difficult. “You don’t have to—”
“It’s fine,” I say. “I mostly like having something to do with my hands. Bad habit. Easily swapped.”
He steps to the wall, careful with the distance, like he’s trying to stand in a way that doesn’t make a promise. The bass from inside presses through the brick into my shoulder blade. Cars sweep past with soft shushes. Two girls stagger by, laughing like they’ll never cry again.
“You were… good,” he says, as if the word weighs more than the others and he had to pick it up first. His voice has lost the PA polish—quieter, rougher at the corners, a little tired. He looks too young and too old at once.
“Thanks,” I say. “You pulled a stupid one from space last night. Rude.”
“Lucky,” he lies. I huff. He glances toward the door like there’s a leash tied around his ribs and someone’s tugging. “They wanted to come,” he adds, as if I asked. “I’m supposed to… I don’t know. Be here.”
“You are,” I say before I sand it down. “It’s annoying.” I’m so full of shit and we both know it.
A ghost of a smile runs across his mouth and vanishes like it’s not allowed to stay.
He leans his head back against the brick, the tiniest clunk, and stares at the slice of sky framed by the alley like it might give him a playcall.
The streetlight runs over the line of his throat when he swallows, over the steady plane of his cheek.
He does controlled so well it makes me want to throw something just to see what he’d do.
“That last song,” he says, and his voice dips even lower, like he’s trying not to wake something. “It was different to the first two.”
My chest goes tight. He didn’t ask. He doesn’t have to. The question is in the air like smoke anyway.
“New,” I say carefully. “Sometimes they come out that way. No time to lie.”
He nods slowly, as if he’s filing that in a cabinet he doesn’t want anyone to know exists. He tracks his gaze back to me. “Why’d you sing it tonight?”
“Needed to,” I say, because anything else would be an insult to both of us.
He stares at me like I’m a language he’s only ever read on street signs.
A car glides by and a fan of light sweeps the alley; for a second, we’re two silhouettes pressed flat, and then the world has depth again.
He looks like he might say something else and then chooses not to, which is maybe the most honest thing he could do.
“Your friends,” I say, because I’m not made of ice, “they were… cool.”
He huffs a small laugh through his nose. “They’re idiots. But good ones.”
“They said you’re straight,” I add, soft as I can. Not a jab, just a reported weather condition. “Like a… footnote.”
His shoulders go still. It’s not anger. It’s a brace. “People say a lot of things,” he replies, and there’s a flicker of something that might be hurt if I were cruel enough to pry. I’m not. Not tonight.
“Not my business,” I say, meaning it, and for once my mouth doesn’t run past my sense. “I’m glad you came.”
He meets my eyes for the first time without flinching. Whatever he’s made of, it’s not brittle. It’s dense. Heavy. He carries it like he’s used to the weight. “I don’t really do bars,” he says, which I already knew.
“Habit’s a hell of a drug,” I answer. “Sometimes you need a loud room that isn’t about you. Where you can be bad at something and no one will put it in a notebook.”
He almost smiles again. Then the door opens behind him, and someone yells his name into the night, friendly and too much: “Marshall! You ghosting? It’s Jason’s birthday, man!”
He tightens, muscles turning rigid. He looks at the flyer corner peeking from my jacket pocket. I pull it free and hold it out before I can second-guess.
“Longer set in two weeks,” I say. “If you want noise that’s yours for a minute. No jerseys. No speeches. Cheap beer. Terrible lights. The whole sin.”
He looks at the paper. Then he takes it carefully, but his fingers still brush mine. It’s heat in a small place, and I hate that my body writes songs without permission. He slips the flyer into his jacket pocket.
“I don’t promise,” he says. It’s new, that phrasing. He’s a captain; promises are his bones.
“I’m not asking,” I say. “I’m just telling you where the door is.”
There it is: the quick, reckless, real smile I don’t think he ever puts on camera. It lifts the corner of his mouth and turns his eyes warm for a second, and it feels like I just saw a shooting star—which I would mock if anyone else said it to me.
“That last song,” he says again, almost to himself this time, as if the words are pressing his ribs from the inside. “I like it.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying not to swallow hard. “Me too.”
Inside, the friendly guys from the café cheer something indecipherable.
The door belches heat and bass again, and a wind of bar air wraps around us both.
He glances back, then to me. The look reads I should go and I want to stay and I don’t know what to do with that, which is a language I speak fluently.
“Good set,” he says, softer than anything else he’s said. He adjusts the flyer in his pocket like he wants to make sure it won’t escape. “Good night, Rafe.”
My name in his mouth is dangerous. It fits there too well. “Night, Ollie.”
He steps back once, turns, and disappears into the warmth. The door swings shut, muffling the room. I stare at the place where he was like an idiot until the bass re-synchronizes with my pulse.
The alley is suddenly only me and the lamplight and the far siren of a city that refuses to sleep. I think about lighting another cigarette but don’t. I pull the pen from my pocket instead, bend my notebook over my thigh, and write with fingers that still tremble like I sprinted.
You said you don’t promise; I said come breathe,
You’re built out of duty and I’m built out of need.
You looked up and the noise turned thin—
If you walk through the door, I’ll let you in.
The letters lean like I’m on a moving train. I cap the pen, tuck the book away, and breathe in the thin citrus night. The door opens; it’s not him. It’s the mouthy café teammate, who pauses when he sees me and lifts his hands in a no-big-deal peace sign.
“Yo,” he says, amiable, voice low so it doesn’t travel. “You guys were solid.”
“Appreciate it,” I say, and mean it.
He nods at me. “Cap’s… he’s focused. Season and all that. He’s straight too.” He says it like a friendly guardrail, not a warning. “Just… don’t make it weird for him.”
“I’m allergic to normal,” I say. “But I can avoid weird.” For him.
He snorts. “You and me both, man.” He hitches a thumb back at the door. “Thanks for the rec. Better than a frat. We’re gonna bounce before somebody tries to crowd-surf and breaks their neck.”
“Good call,” I say.
He starts back in, then glances over his shoulder.
“He likes music,” he adds, a little conspiratorial. “Like, actually listens. Don’t know what that means. Just… you know.”
“I know,” I say, and he grins and vanishes into the heat.
I push off the wall and head back inside because I should, because the band is mine and we’ve still got cables to coil.
The sound guy pretends he didn’t like our set by finding new things to complain about, which is how he says good job.
Drew appears with water he will later insist was tequila and wiggles his eyebrows until I tell him to fuck off.
Eli announces he talked the bartender into one free gin and tonic, which is a lie, and Miles plays a three-note melody under all the noise that makes me want to write a bridge immediately.
We break down gear, laugh too loud, invent stupid in-jokes that will last a week.
My body starts to come down from the cliff, the buzzy jitter settling into a warm ache that means I did something that mattered to me and survived it.
Through the smear on the window, I can’t see anything but neon and flyers and the reflection of my own grin, which I don’t recognize but don’t hate.
On the walk home, the city does its after-hours trick—sirens a few blocks away; palm fronds rattling like bones; someone practicing trumpet out a dorm window, scales climbing rung by rung. The air is cool enough to feel new in my lungs. The word maybe weighs like a next song.
He said good night like he meant it. He said the song was different like it surprised him.
He took the flyer without promise, and that’s better than a promise right now.
I’m not stupid; I heard straight. I heard it from mouths that like him.
I saw the leash tug. I also saw the split second where he didn’t look away.
People are contradictions. Songs happen in the cracks.
Tomorrow will be whatever it is. Tonight is enough to write on. I have four lines I didn’t have before, a chorus I believe in, and a reason to put my cigarettes in the trash.
I let the strap of my bass dig into my shoulder and walk faster because I want to get home, I want to write, I want to sleep, I want to wake up already wanting the next loud room.
And beneath all of that, steady as a bassline I can play blind, I want him to walk through a door that isn’t his, into a place where no one tells him who to be, just for one song.
That’s the want. I can live on it awhile.