Chapter 6 #2
I nod, and he looks almost relieved. Like he thought I’d laugh. Like he thought sharing even that tiny piece would sound stupid outside his head.
We slide into another song, this one slower, not Metallica or anything flashy. Just chords that stretch into the air, filling the small space between us. His voice surprises me when he hums along—low, tentative, but steady.
“You sing too,” I say, startled into a grin.
“No,” he says immediately, cheeks coloring again.
“Yes,” I shoot back. “You do. And it’s not bad.”
He shakes his head, but he doesn’t argue harder. Which tells me enough.
By the time the strings go slack and the quiet settles back in, we’re closer than when we started. Literally—he’s shifted forward, I’ve drifted to the edge of the bed, and the gap between us is maybe two feet at best. Our knees brush now and then, and neither of us moves away.
“You’re good at this,” I say finally.
“So are you,” he replies. His voice is softer now, his eyes less guarded. “I didn’t expect….” He trails off, shaking his head like he can’t finish.
“Didn’t expect what?” I prod.
He exhales, slow and heavy. “I didn’t expect it to feel easy.”
And there it is again—that glimpse of the real Ollie. Not the captain, not the jock, not the golden boy. Just a guy who wants something to be easy for once.
I want to tell him it could be. That with me, it might be. But I don’t. Not yet.
Instead, I nod, pick up the guitar again, and let the music carry us forward.
I keep us moving because stopping feels dangerous. Every time it gets quiet, my head tries to fill it with questions I’m not ready to ask. So I noodle through a lazy progression, something warm and uncomplicated, and he follows without comment, his fingers sure even when he pretends they aren’t.
We let the last chord fade. He doesn’t look away this time.
“What are you working on?” he asks, nodding toward my desk, where the mess of paper is a crime scene of crossed-out lines and coffee rings. His voice is steady, but his knee bounces once, betraying nerves.
I glance at the pile and then back at him. My mouth tries to offer up a safe demo, something old and faceless I can pretend I care about. Instead, I hear myself say, “You really want to know?”
He holds my gaze. “Yeah.”
Fuck it.
I reach for the notebook on the nightstand—one I didn’t mean to touch today—and flip past pages that look like I wrote them on a moving bus. I find the one that still hums in my hands and set it on my thigh. My pulse ticks in my throat. If I’m wrong about him, this is the place it’s going to hurt.
“It’s not finished,” I say, buying myself a second I don’t use. “And it’s not pretty.”
He nods, like he understands the difference. “Okay.”
I breathe once, drop my eyes to the fretboard, and start. A spare pattern, thumb and first finger, the kind of rhythm that lets the words sit up front without drowning. My voice comes quieter than usual, rough at the edges because I don’t sand anything down when it matters.
“Found you in the loud, and everything went still.
Armor on your shoulders, hands that never spill.
You looked up like a question, I answered with a song—
if you stand here for a minute, you won’t have to stand alone.”
I don’t look at him on the first verse. I’m not that brave. I watch my hands, the way my right wrist loosens, the way the low strings bloom in this cramped room. By the second verse, I can’t help it—I check.
He’s gone very still.
Not frozen, not shut down. Still like he’s listening with his whole body.
His jaw has that tight line I’m starting to recognize as him trying not to feel too much in public, even when “public” is just me, a crooked lamp, and a sofa that hates asses on it.
His eyes are dark and clear. They don’t dart away.
I keep going, because stopping now would be worse.
“Crowd keeps calling captain,
you keep calling plays.
I keep writing verses
to say the thing I can’t say.
If you want a quiet corner,
I’ll be noise you choose—
three chords, a place to breathe,
a yes that you can use.”
My voice scrapes on yes, and the scrape is the truth I can’t hide. I let it be. The chorus returns. His breath hitches—tiny, but there. His fingers curl once against his knee and then flatten, like he remembered he has hands and they might give him away.
Closer. I don’t remember shifting, but we are. The guitars bridged a gap, and our knees are a whisper from touching, the kind of almost that heats the air. The lamplight turns the room into a small circle, everything else falling off the map.
I finish on a held note, no flourish, just the line hanging until it gives up and settles into the room. The quiet afterward is louder than the song.
He swallows audibly. His eyes flick down to my mouth, fast, then back to my eyes like he’s yanked himself on a leash. Color climbs his neck, slow as a sunrise. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Tries again.
“That’s… good,” he says, and the word is too small for how he says it. He laughs once, short, breathless, like he hears himself and can’t fix it. “No. It’s—” He searches, cheeks hotter now, and when he finds the word, it lands low in my chest. “It’s honest.”
I don’t move. If I move, I’ll do something stupid. If I breathe wrong, I might too.
“It’s new,” I manage. “I… wasn’t going to show it to anyone.”
“Why did you?” His voice is soft. Not suspicious, but curious in a way that feels like a hand offered.
I could lie. I don’t. “Because you asked what I’m working on,” I say. “And because you listened to everything else.”
He looks at my notebook like it might bite, then up at me like I might too. His knee shifts again, and this time it touches mine, lightly, a press and release, as if he’s checking to see if I’ll flinch.
I don’t.
He doesn’t either.
There’s a noise from somewhere down the hall—one of my roommates arriving, keys jangling, a muffled curse about the lock—and it’s like a spell threatens to crack.
We both blink, the room snapping back into its shabby walls and questionable carpet.
He sits back half an inch, breath evening out, the captain’s mask trying to climb back over his face.
I clear my throat, roll my shoulders, and give us a way to keep what we just had without pretending it didn’t happen. “Second verse needs work,” I say, flipping the page with a finger that doesn’t quite feel steady. “The middle’s soft.”
“It didn’t feel soft,” he says quickly, then looks like he regrets how fast it came out.
“I mean—maybe the line about the crowd…” He frowns, thinking, and it’s devastating, the way he takes it seriously.
“What if you don’t use ‘captain’ there? It’s elsewhere in the song.
You could… I don’t know… describe the pressure without naming it. ”
I blink. I wasn’t expecting him to… help. “Like what?”
He stares past me for a second, focused on the wall like he’s watching some highlight reel only he can see. When he speaks, he does it slow, choosing. “The way the air feels when a free throw matters. How it gets dense. The way everybody stops breathing until you do. You could write that.”
I’m not sure I breathe for a full count. “Yeah,” I say, a little rough. “Yeah, I could.”
He lifts a shoulder, almost embarrassed by his own idea. “Just… a thought.”
“It’s a good thought.” I tip the neck of my guitar toward him like a salute. “You can’t sing your way out of a paper bag, but you might be a lyricist.”
He snorts, caught off guard. “I don’t sing.”
“You hummed,” I say. “That counts.”
He rubs his thumb along the edge of the cushion, eyes flicking to my mouth again, then to my hands on the guitar. “Do you always write like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re telling the truth even when it costs you.”
The question hits somewhere tender. I look down at the strings, pluck one idle note that rings too long. “It’s the only way it works,” I say. “Otherwise, it sounds like… homework.”
A slow nod. “I get that,” he murmurs.
We sit in it. Rather than being awkward, it feels charged and careful, like we’re handling something fragile together. He shifts closer again, only enough that our knees stay in contact. The heat there is ridiculous for how slight the touch is. I’m absolutely reading into it. I don’t care.
“Play it again,” he says.
“You sure?”
He nods. “I want to hear it.”
So I do. And this time, when the chorus comes around, his voice—quiet, untrained, low—threads under mine on a single sustained note. It’s barely there. It still knocks something loose inside me.
We end together without meaning to. The last sound is our breath.
He exhales a shaky laugh, looks at the wall, the ceiling, anywhere but me, and then back. “Today was a good idea,” he says.
“It was,” I say, because my mouth doesn’t trust itself with anything more ambitious. “Same next week?”
He hesitates, a single heartbeat of war between duty and want, and then the want wins by a hair. He nods. “Yeah. Same.”
The keys jangle again outside, a door thumps, and somebody yells that the stove is doing the thing again. The spell thins but doesn’t break. He stands, and I do, too, close enough that if either of us leaned forward, we’d find out everything in one second flat. Neither of us does.
He looks at me like he’s memorizing a picture. “Text me the time,” he says.
“Will do.”
“And Rafe?”
“Yeah?”
He swallows, then gives me the smallest, bravest smile I’ve seen on him yet. “It wasn’t soft.”
I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath until he’s halfway down the hall and I let it go, smiling like an idiot at the empty doorway. When the room is only me again, I sit, put the guitar across my lap, and touch the place on my knee where he pressed, the ghost of it a steady pulse.
Then I flip the notebook to the blank space at the bottom of the page and write:
The air goes dense; no one breathes until you do.