Chapter 12
DEION
Nova’s series of texts about the pop-up concert came through like most things from her. It was a decision masquerading as an option that I was being folded into.
This artist is doing something with live instrumentation I need to witness firsthand… I need someone who just gets it and that someone is you… If you say no, I will come to your house and play all of his links on YouTube loud enough to violate city ordinances until you change your mind.
Not one question mark was identified during the entire exchange. Nova didn’t use those unless the outcome was uncertain, and this apparently wasn’t.
I texted back okay before I finished reading the second sentence.
That was because I never said no to Nova over anything related to music.
Her taste had introduced me to things I wouldn’t have found on my own.
Things I now know I wouldn’t want to live without.
And partly for another reason I had stopped avoiding.
The venue sat inside a converted warehouse in Fishtown known for its exposed brick, industrial lighting, and sound that settled in your chest before your ears caught up. It was definitely a room that rewarded attention.
We got there early because Nova had rules about concerts. You showed up for the beginning or you missed part of the story.
I watched her as she pulled her phone out long enough to capture the room, then slipped it away after noting the moment then making a conscious decision like she always did to immerse herself in it without any outside distractions.
“Tonight,” she said, glancing at me, “I also need you to not think about the Archive.”
“Nov…”
“D.” Her stern expression that drew both of her brows closer together was so cute, yet so sexy at the same time that I restrained the response I wanted to give.
Instead I grazed my bottom lip with my teeth and kept my gaze fixed on hers. “You know me. I don’t know how to turn it off until the thing is done.”
“You do,” she said. “You just don’t practice it.”
She wore a leather jacket and green-and-cream sneakers, her hair pulled back but already loosening around her face.
A piece fell forward and she tucked it behind her ear without thinking.
I watched it like I always did, but this time watching her stirred even more inside me.
On instinct, I moved to touch a loosened coil, rubbing it between my fingers.
Her eyes grew in size quickly before softening into beautiful, dark orbs.
I released it and she looked away, suddenly seeking a spot for us to catch the show.
“You can feel the sub from here,” she said, already leaning into the room. “Somebody set this up right.”
I sensed she felt the moment we’d just shared but wasn’t ready to own it. So I pushed the emotions that were swelling up inside me and called on Deion the bestie to step up instead. “How can you tell?” I asked.
She started talking about bass not pooling and acoustics. I let her go on because animated Nova is the rush my own adrenaline yearns for. Periodically she looked up at me like she was expecting me to challenge her some kind of way, but instead I stood beside her and let her be right.
The set opened quiet with the piano first then voice. There was no rush, just a beginning that expected you to meet it where it was, and that’s what the room did.
Around us, conversations fell off and bodies settled.
Then Nova went still beside me, everything in her being pulled toward the sound.
Her hands rested at her sides. I watched how her mouth parted slightly when the piano moved somewhere unexpected.
How her head tilted just enough to catch it from a different angle.
Just like I had watched her do this for years.
At some point, watching stopped being neutral.
Standing beside her in that room, feeling her attention gather, I stopped pretending I didn’t know what it meant. I knew at that moment I was still and forever would be in love with her.
The piano brought in the bass, then the bass pulled in the drums. The room expanded with it, people shifting closer like distance had stopped making sense. And in the midst of it, something expanded within my ribcage that carried this woman’s joy inside me like a charge.
Someone shifted hard behind us, the kind of movement that ripples forward before you can brace for it, forcing bodies to compress toward the stage in a loose surge.
My hand came up instinctively and landed at Nova’s shoulder, steadying her before the push could carry her further than she wanted to go.
She didn’t turn or look. Her hand came up over mine like it already knew where I was, fingers warm, firm for a second. Not grabbing, not startled. Just anchored.
“I’m good,” she said, not loud, but I felt it more than heard it.
“Yeah,” I answered, my mouth closer to her ear than I’d realized.
She let my hand go. I dropped mine back to my side, but the contact didn’t leave with it, like my skin hadn’t caught up to the fact that it was over.
The music shifted, slower now. The piano stretched its notes out, and the room adjusted with it, bodies settling into something quieter, closer.
My hand moved again without asking me first. One moment it wasn’t there, and the next it was at her waist, light at first, careful, like I was placing something that could break if I got it wrong.
Nova stilled. Not in a way that pulls away; instead, it listens. I felt the line of her under my hand, the curve where her jacket met the softness beneath it, the heat of her immediate and real, not filtered through distance or time or whatever rules I had been keeping for years.
She drew in a breath, and I felt it under my palm before I heard it, the smallest lift, the faintest expansion. Then she held it there, like she was deciding whether to let it out or keep it.
I didn’t move. I didn’t tighten my grip or pull back. I left my hand where it was and let her choose what it meant.
The bass came in low beneath the piano, steady, and grounded the room, and with it she shifted forward, not away from me.
Forward into the space in front of her, closing the distance without breaking it.
Her back hovered just in front of my chest, the heat of her close enough to register without fully landing.
My hand stayed at her waist. I adjusted it without thinking, slower now, my thumb brushing the edge where her jacket lifted, finding skin. It was warm… immediate.
She inhaled again, sharper this time. Her shoulders lifted just slightly, and for a second I thought she might step away. Thank the Lord she didn’t. Instead she settled. Not fully back, not pressing into me. Just enough to say she felt it and wasn’t leaving.
That was the shift. Not the touch or the movement. It was the decision to stay inside it.
The room fell further into the song, drums easing in, the rhythm settling into something that made standing still feel like part of the music.
We stayed there with it, my hand at her waist, her body just out of reach and somehow closer than if she had leaned all the way back.
Her breathing found its flow again, slower now, but I could still feel the corners of where it had changed.
At one point she turned her head, half over her shoulder. “You hear what he just did?” she said, low and close. Her face was right there. Closer than it needed to be for conversation.
I didn’t answer right away. My attention had dropped to her mouth without asking me first. She caught it.
I know she did because she didn’t move, didn’t step back, didn’t fill the space with words.
She just held there for a second longer than necessary, like she was aware of exactly what was happening and choosing not to interrupt it.
“D?” she said, softer now.
“Yeah,” I answered, my voice lower than it had been all night.
“The drummer,” she said, like she was finishing a thought we both knew she hadn’t been focused on anymore.
“Yeah,” I said again, though I hadn’t heard a single thing the drummer had done in the last ten seconds.
She turned back toward the stage, but she didn’t create distance.
That was the part I felt most. I kept my hand where it was and let the song carry us through the rest of it, through the moments where the band pulled back and the room leaned in, through the places where the music left space and somehow made everything feel louder.
By the time the set ended, the air had shifted. Or maybe it was just us.
Outside, the cold hit fast, in the way that wakes you up whether you’re ready or not.
We stepped out with the crowd, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, then slowly back into our own space.
She moved ahead of me for a few steps, then drifted back beside me like we were still figuring out the distance.
Her hands went into her jacket pockets. “Most people fill every second,” she said, picking up a thought midstream. “Like silence means you lost the room. But that’s where it lives. In the spaces you don’t rush through.”
I watched her as she talked, the way her face lit up when she was breaking something down that she loved.
She stopped walking and so did I.
A streetlamp caught her just right, clean light across her face, no shadows to soften it. She looked at me, not casually, not passing, like she had reached the edge of something and was deciding whether to step over it.
“Nova,” I said. I didn’t know what I was about to say. I just knew I wasn’t finished.
“Yeah?”
“What you said the other day,” I said. “About moving toward something and calling it something else.”
She held my gaze. “What about it?”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Some things know where they’re going before we do.”
Something shifted in her expression. It was small but real.
“D…” she started.
I saw it coming this time, the moment before she pulled it back. And she did. Just like she always did.
“Thank you for tonight,” she said instead.
“You don’t have to thank me for that.”
“I do.”
She stepped closer, just enough to close the space between us again, and brushed the backs of her fingers against my arm. It was not accidental or meant to be rushed. Just placed there. Then she stepped back out of it, tucking her chin into her jacket, turning toward the street.
“I’ll text you when I get in,” she called out as she went.
“Okay.”
She walked off without looking back.
I stood there a second longer than I needed to, feeling the ghost of her hand on my arm and the weight of everything she hadn’t said sitting right between us.
Then I turned and headed for my car.