Chapter Eighteen – Wren #2
The moment his green eyes lift to my face and he recognizes me, he scowls and hugs his guitar a bit closer to his chest, like he’s trying to hide it.
The guitar’s case lays before his feet, and it makes me wonder if he’s afraid to go for it, like in doing so he’d draw more attention to the fact that he was playing the instrument.
“The fuck are you doing here?” he asks with a frown on his face.
“I was—” I can’t seem to find the words.
My thoughts are all jumbled, and I can only blame the fact that I heard him sing.
Logan has an amazing, unique voice. Sexy, even.
I can easily imagine that voice being sung into a microphone, singing a twisted lullaby.
Something hard. Something borderline metal.
Hard rock. The kind of stuff you bang your head to.
Logan, on the other hand, is still more than capable of speaking, unlike me, because he hisses out, “Stalking me now, nerd?”
I reach for the strap over my shoulder and absentmindedly tug on it with my pop-free hand, as if touching that strap will help keep me grounded.
“I wasn’t… I had no idea you would be here.
” My eyes fall to the guitar on his lap.
“Why are you here? I mean, don’t you have a full room dedicated to this stuff at your place? ”
The sound that comes out of him is one of annoyance, a hard breath through his nostrils.
He leans forward and sets the guitar in its case, then zips it up, all without looking at me.
I don’t know if he wants to avoid answering the question, or if he’s simply trying to avoid me.
He gets up, swings the case’s strap over his head and shoulder, and starts to walk away.
I should let him go. I should. Nothing good could possibly come out of me chasing after him. I might not know the guy well, but I should know that much. For some ungodly reason though, I can’t let him go.
I hurry after him, saying, “Wait!”
He doesn’t stop. I have to pick up the pace so that I can out-speed walk him and get in front of him. Only when I stand in his direct path does he stop, and when he turns that glower to me, I can’t help but want to shrink and hide.
What am I doing? If he wants to go, I should let him go. Now that I got him stopped, what am I going to say? What is there to be said? He clearly doesn’t want to talk about it; his avoidance for this is about as massive as how badly I never want to see my ex or my ex-best friend.
“You have a really good voice” is what I end up saying, and I say it quite lamely, too.
A muscle in his jaw ticks. He doesn’t respond to that, instead growling out, “Get out of my way, Wren.” I can’t say he’s ever spoken my name like that before, and I can’t lie, either—now that I’ve heard him sing, I can recognize that scratchy timbre in his voice.
He has such a deep, attractive voice. How have I never really noticed before?
“Why do you get so… upset about this? You have an amazing voice, and it sounds like you can play the guitar really well. There’s nothing to be—”
Logan takes a step toward me, and even though there’s nothing but air behind me, I still feel boxed in.
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, so why don’t you just forget you heard me sing.
” Though one might mistake that for a question, it comes out sounding like an order, like he’s attempting to force me to forget all about his voice.
“But why? I don’t get—”
Again, he interrupts me, “It would be better for us both if you fucking dropped this, so drop it.”
I’m not someone who doesn’t listen. I like to think I make good choices—prior to having my heart broken, that is. My decisions as of late might not be what most people would call smart, but I’m not the sort who goes after something when it seems like a stupid idea.
Right here, right now, pushing Logan definitely seems like a stupid thing to do, but I can’t pull myself away, either. I can’t stop from wondering why it matters so much to him, why he’s so avoidant.
Maybe something happened to him. Maybe he had his heart broken like I did.
I don’t know what to say to him, so I settle for whispering his name, “Logan…”
But he doesn’t want to hear it. He shakes his head once before he steps to the side to get around me. As he storms away, I turn around and watch him go, wondering what he’s running from, why this is such a sore subject for him.
My voice is nice, yeah, but there’s nothing too special about it. I can hit notes and I have great control, but it’s not what I’d call unique. Logan’s, on the other hand, is the very definition of the word. A voice like that could dominate the charts with the right lyrics and band behind it.
I watch Logan go, stand there until I can’t see his retreating figure any longer, and then I force myself to turn away.
It’s silly how a part of me wants to chase after him, even now.
I end up sitting against the same old headstone he’d been sitting at, and as I pull out my food, I can’t stop my thoughts from racing.
And his voice… I can’t get it out of my head. Even though he wasn’t singing at me, even though that voice wasn’t at its full power, it’s like it found itself a spot inside of me, between my bones, in my very blood.
Ugh, so much for trying to get stuff done here.
If I would have known that Logan would be here the exact same time I planned on coming, I wouldn’t have come at all.
Things would be so much easier if I didn’t run into the guy everywhere I go, if I didn’t see him every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday during psych.
For a guy who was supposed to be nothing but a hookup, I’m seeing him an awful lot.
I lean my head back on the stone. My salad is in my lap, my plastic fork at the ready. I’m hungry, yes, but I just can’t seem to pull my mind off Logan and that wicked voice of his.
And that song… that song he was singing, I recognized it, but I just can’t place it. That’s going to bother me for the rest of the day, I just know it. I think back to the lyrics I heard him singing, and I pull out my phone, ready to type those lyrics into a search engine and see what pops up.
Wait a second. What am I doing? Why do I care so much? Ugh. What the heck is Logan doing to me?
I stick my phone away and force myself to eat while I try to think of other things, such as the whole reason I came here in the first place—but it’s exactly as they say: the more you try not to think about something, the harder you think about that exact thing.
Something like this would be something I’d talk to Meghan about. She’d help get me out of my head. She wasn’t as much of an overthinker as I am, and she was nowhere near a perfectionist. For so long, she was my perfect foil.
Not anymore. All I really have is Sloane, and she’s…
nice enough, but also kind of weird. She helped me out by giving me a place to stay so I wouldn’t have to room with my lying ex-best friend, but she has a lot of stuff in her past that makes me wonder if all rich people are that messed up or if it’s a Karnagy specialty.
And by that, I mean, we’re not super close. Sloane and I aren’t best friends or anything. I don’t know what she’d say if I called her right now and told her about what just happened.
I eat my salad, and then I eat my turkey sub, and all the while I try not to think about Logan. Not his voice. Not that muscle in his jaw. Not the way his green eyes can seem so dark when he’s glaring down at me from his six-foot-tall frame.
Obviously, not thinking about him is impossible.
And then, something inside me clicks. It’s like magic.
Like a bit of the old me reappeared and guided the new me toward a destination: I know what I want to do our psych group project on.
We can do anything we want, anything we find interesting.
I think there’s only one thing that fits our group of two.
The psychology of avoidance.
Yes, that’s perfect. I’ll turn in our topic tomorrow.
I unlock my phone screen after I finish eating.
If avoidance is going to be our topic, then best work on overcoming it, right?
If I’m trying to turn a new leaf this semester, it means I need to do things I might not normally.
Hooking up with a stranger was only the beginning.
I might still have an overthinking problem, but I’m going to work on it, just like I’m going to work on my avoidance issues.
And I’m going to work on Logan’s, too, whether he likes it or not. If he doesn’t like it, well, he can go suck an egg for all I care.
I type in the search bar the lyrics I remember Logan singing, and when I hit that enter button, I honestly don’t know what to expect.
Some classic rock song? Something a little more recent?
Whatever it is, it’s not a sleeper hit. It’s a popular one, and that’s why it’s killing me that I can’t recall on hand what song it is.
When the search results pop up, one band dominates the website titles, along with one song.
Pray for Me by… Black Sacrament. It’s an older hit for the band, one that was originally recorded before they kicked out their old singer and introduced the world to Angel and Priest as their frontrunners.
The new and improved Black Sacrament re-recorded some of their older songs and re-released them with Angel and Priest’s voices dominating the lyrics.
A list of videos pop up in the search results, one comparing Black Sacrament’s revised version to the older one.
I click on it and have to listen to some boring un-skippable ad before the actual video begins to play.
It dives right in to Angel and Priest on stage, singing together, generally looking and sounding amazing.
Even though the video is a few months old, the views it has are impressive, and I scroll through the comments as it plays through my speaker.
There are the typical comments you see on videos that feature a pretty girl: why can’t she show more skin, how hot she is, blah, blah, blah.
Typical sexist stuff. Some comments about how Black Sacrament never should’ve brought in a girl.
Also sexist. There are, of course, other comments saying they dig the new sound and can’t get enough.
And then… then I get to the comments that talk about the old singer, Pope. One reads: He might’ve been a dick, but no one can beat Pope’s vocals. Priest wishes he was Pope. That comment is severely downvoted, but it also has some upvotes, which tells me some people agree.
I scroll back up to the video and drag the cursor through it, fast-forwarding it to get to what I hope is Pope’s version of the song, and once the video switches to a different live performance, I pull my finger off the screen and let it play.
The person who recorded must be in the front row, because the video is right up there, practically on the stage itself.
It’s focused on Pope as he grips the standing microphone and belts out the same song.
The soul behind it, like he’s begging everyone in the audience to pray for his damned eternal soul, is palpable, so palpable I get literal chills even though I’m sitting there in the sun.
The video gets to the same part of the song I came upon Logan singing, and that’s when I hear it: the roughness.
The deep scratchiness in Pope’s voice… just like Logan’s.
In the video, Pope’s voice lowers to a low whisper, and yet he’s still able to hit all the notes as he croons the words into the mic.
He then angles his head and stares right at the person who’s taking the video, and a slow smirk tugs at his mouth.
I pause the video right then, my breath catching on something in my throat.
The song choice. The similarities in the voices. That smirk.
I turn my phone’s brightness all the way up and try to zoom in to the video a bit. Black Sacrament’s thing is that they all wear masks and body paint, so you can’t see who they are. The identities of the bandmembers are a secret. Everyone involved with them must sign NDAs or something.
Pope wears a mask, but that mask doesn’t cover his entire face.
His lower cheeks and mouth are uncovered, so he can sing.
Every bit of bare skin has black body paint; they’re demons or devils or something evil.
All of their songs involve either biblical references or demonic ones, and every member has at least one white upside-down cross on them.
It’s a little blurry since the video isn’t meant to be zoomed in on, but I find what I’m looking for: the color of Pope’s eyes. Surrounded by the black body paint beneath the mask, even in the eyeholes, his eyes are a bright, vibrant, beautiful green.
I let out a breath that’s harder than it should be, and I set my phone down on my lap as I try to reason with myself.
Lots of people have green eyes, and all smirks are the same, aren’t they? But the voice… there’s no explaining away how similar Logan’s voice is to Pope’s, so I hit play and watch until the video ends. I watch and I listen, and, for some reason, I can’t stop picturing Logan beneath that mask.
No. No, it can’t be. I mean, what are the odds that Black Sacrament’s disgraced singer is here, at my college? What are the odds I ran into him, hooked up with him, and can’t seem to shake him? Small. Teeny-tiny. Like, indescribably minute odds, next to impossible.
But I’m sure that’s what Angel thought before she was thrust into stardom, too.
It would explain why Logan is so against talking about it. It’d definitely explain his avoidance. Pope was a jerk, and Logan fits those shoes, too.
Is Logan Black Sacrament’s disgraced former singer? My mind whirls with the possibility. Some might say let sleeping dogs lie, but I know it right then—there’s no way I can let this go. I need to find out the truth. Suddenly, I need it more than the air I breathe.
One way or another, I’ll get to the bottom of this.