Chapter 11
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
I learn all the back entrances that don’t look like back entrances. And that isn’t a euphemism.
Not yet anyway.
The music building has three: the delivery ramp (too exposed), the stairwell by the faculty lounge (smells like burnt coffee and tenure), and the practice-room fire door that sticks unless you hip-check it just right.
Thursday night, three weeks and change since New Year’s, I’m at the fire door at 9:02 a.m., hands jammed in my jacket, pretending to be part of the brick.
He’s late by two minutes, which for Ollie probably counts as a felony.
I hear him before I see him: the soft thud of sneakers, the whisper of nylon, the careful way he breathes when he’s trying not to look winded.
Then he turns the corner, hoodie up, cap pulled low like we’re avoiding paparazzi instead of Econ majors with gossip addictions.
“You look like you’re about to rob the bursar,” I say.
“Hello to you too,” he mutters, and I can hear the smile he won’t risk yet.
We don’t hug. We’ve learned not to. Cameras on every hallway, coaches who hear about everything, teammates who think “privacy” is the name of a bench player. Instead, I bump my shoulder into his as I key open the door. He bumps back, a second longer than necessary, and my ribs loosen.
The door sticks, like always. I hip-check. It gives with a sigh, and we slip inside. The stairwell hums with the old building’s lungs: clanking pipes, the distant drone of a piano that’s been out of tune since the Bush administration, vents rattling like they’re practicing scales.
He peels his cap off as we climb and shoves it into his pocket.
“I booked the room till ten.”
“You bribed someone.”
“Booked,” I repeat innocently before adding, “With coffee.”
He huffs, almost a laugh. His hand brushes mine on the railing. Not on purpose. Not not on purpose. The tiny arc jumps through my skin and sets up shop behind my sternum.
Room 3C is the one with the busted fluorescent that dims whenever the AC kicks on.
It’s also the one farthest from the hallway window, which means fewer curious faces—less chance of a random trumpet player clocking the captain of the Panthers slipping into a practice room with the tattooed bassist. I killed two birds with one room: bad light, good privacy.
I close us in and click the tiny slide lock, the one the fire marshal pretends doesn’t exist. Ollie exhales; some piece of him drops its shoulders.
“Hi,” I say at normal volume for the first time.
“Hi,” he says back, and it hits harder than it should.
We do the inventory because we always do: ear to the door, quick glance at the window, the automatic check of phones in pockets set to silent.
Then I pull the secondhand acoustic from the stand and hand it over.
He takes it like it’s a living thing. He’s careful with gear in a way that makes me want to kiss him just for understanding.
“I can only stay till nine fifty,” he says, settling onto the low bench. “Film review at ten.”
I drop onto the amp opposite, ignoring the sting of disappointment that he has to leave early as I sling my own guitar into place. “You’ll be gone by nine forty-eight,” I promise. “I’ll even walk you out and pretend I don’t know you.”
“I’d appreciate that,” he says, deadpan, and then he bends his head and starts changing the B string I bought him last week because “Metallica experiments” apparently shredded the last one.
The way he focuses… it’s not for show. It’s not the captain mask. It’s just how he’s built. He braces the guitar against his thigh, fingers sure and careful as he threads and winds, and I swear I feel another verse scratch at the back of my skull like a polite cat.
“You wrote today,” he says without looking up.
“How could you possibly know that?”
“You texted me two lines at 6:17 a.m. and then nothing after.”
“Maybe I fell asleep.”
“You don’t sleep after you send me lyrics,” he says quietly, and that little truth lands right where it’s supposed to. “You pace. You rewrite them. You fight with your coffee.”
I grin at my fretboard. “You spying on me now, Captain?”
“Call it film study,” he says, and his mouth curves.
I strum something lazy, a chord that’s not a chord, more a question.
He finishes the string, gives the tuner a quarter turn, and then, like we didn’t both walk here looking everywhere but at each other, we start playing.
Nothing heavy. Nothing new. Just sound to make room for us.
The room brightens-dims-brightens with the vent’s rattle; it feels like the light’s breathing with us.
We steal hours like this. Not whole ones—those are too obvious, too suspicious.
We take the broken kind: forty-seven minutes between film and weights, fifty-three after my shift when the café shuts down early because two baristas called in sick and the manager gave up.
We live in the cracks of calendars, sending times like contraband, moving pins on maps only we see.
When he looks up over the curve of the guitar, it’s the quiet face. The one I’m a little stupid for. The one that isn’t the interview smile. He watches my hands. I watch his mouth. The song finds a groove, and so do we.
I set the guitar aside first, because I’m weak and we both know it. I cross the room and sit beside him on the low bench, our knees lining up. We stay facing forward for a beat, like this is just another duet, nothing to notice here. Then he turns his head and the air changes shape.
“Hi,” I say again, softer this time.
He doesn’t answer with words. He tilts forward, just enough that his forehead almost touches mine, and the match we carry everywhere lights without sparks.
I kiss him. Not to be clever, not to win a point.
Just because I needed to all morning—despite it still being ridiculously early for a strung-out songwriter who’s been poring over song lyrics since six this morning—and the ability to delay gratification atrophied with everything else that isn’t him.
He eases down—four inches of him folding to meet me.
His lips are warm and a little chapped. The first breath he pushes into me shivers. The second steadies.
He tastes like the chocolate protein shake he swears is “medically necessary.” I make a mental note to bully him into better choices and promptly forget it when his hand finds the back of my neck.
The kiss deepens a fraction, then a fraction more.
We stay careful. Not careful enough to pretend it’s nothing.
Careful enough to pretend we’re still people who remember doors exist.
A floorboard squeaks in the hallway. We break—soundless, practiced, full of sin we refuse to name. The fluorescent flickers. We stare at the door, not breathing, counting in place of words.
Footsteps pass. Voices, a burst of laughter.
The muffled thud of a case being set down, someone complaining about reeds.
The hallway swallows them. We look back at each other at the exact same time and then both start to laugh—quiet, helpless, the nervous kind that’s one more millimeter away from panic.
“We’re idiots,” he whispers.
“Idiots with good taste,” I whisper back, and his eyes flash, the closest he gets to cocky in a room without a court.
He sobers quickly. “How’s the song?”
“Vicious,” I say. “In a patient way.”
He nods like that’s what he hoped to hear. “Play me the bridge?”
He’s thrown me a rope. We use music like that—for cover, for cooling, for saying things sideways.
I pick up my guitar and play him the new bridge to “Crimson High,” the one that fell out of my hand when we first met.
He listens with that focus that made me write a chorus the first time I saw him.
There’s a part where I lift into a higher vowel; his eyes close for half a bar and open again like he just made himself do it.
“Again,” he says when I stop.
“You’re bossy.”
“Effective,” he says, and I love him for stealing Miles’s line without knowing it.
I play it again. The last note fades. He’s close enough that I could count the flecks in his eyes. He chews the inside of his cheek, head tilted.
“You make sounds feel like choices,” he says, and I pretend that compliment doesn’t set up residence in my ribs. “Like they’re not accidents.”
“They aren’t,” I say, and set the guitar down a second time because I’m tragically single-minded.
The kiss this time starts slower. He meets me halfway before I do something dramatic like stand on my toes. He’s gotten better at leaving the first stunned beat behind; the tremor in his hand still shows up, but now it remembers where to go: my jaw, my hair, the hinge of my shoulder.
There’s a click in the hall.
We fly apart like teenagers in a sitcom.
I grab the guitar. He stands too fast, bangs his knee on the bench, swears under his breath, and then—because he’s a goddamn star—drops into a crouch and pretends he’s inspecting the leg like that was the plan.
I turn my head away and start playing the worst, most innocent chord progression of my career.
It sounds like a lullaby for geese. The door handle rattles.
The lock holds. A beat. Another. Then knuckles rap twice.
“I’ve got this room till ten,” I call, calm as you please, like I wasn’t about to climb him like a ladder thirty seconds ago.
A voice through the door, bored and nasal, says, “Facilities. Leak check.”
Ollie’s eyes widen: panic, confusion, the calculus of Risk vs. Shame vs. I Really Want To Stay.
I mouth, “Bathroom.” He points at the tiny restroom door in the corner (practice rooms here are fancy in exactly one way) and moves like a shadow. He closes it quietly, so it won’t click, while I set my face to “harried music student.”
I slide the lock, crack the door. A man in a navy polo stands there holding a clipboard and the kind of flashlight that makes you feel guilty for no reason. He squints over my shoulder like water’s about to pour from the ceiling.