Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
Roderick
The urge to do something—anything—pushes me out of bed.
My muscles are tight. My skin’s buzzing, as if I’m coming down from something I didn’t even take.
The air in the room feels like static and nerves.
I head to the stereo Cleo bought me last month.
One of those all-in-one systems with a tape deck, CD tray, and turntable stacked on top.
I rummage through the plastic crate I shoved in the corner and dig out the few albums and cassettes I have.
Most of my collection is still at the band’s house—if they still have it.
And, fuck, I don’t even know how to call the guys and ask for it back.
What do I say? “Hey, sorry I fucked up everything with the band, and also, can I have my vinyl, my dignity, and the rest of my songs?” Yeah. Not likely.
And I found it on a tape. “Where the Wild Roses Grow.”
The opening notes drift through the room like silk soaked in venom.
It’s soft, sweet—but it lingers, seeps in, coats the air like perfume from a lover you shouldn’t miss but do anyway.
Nick’s voice slides in slowly, curls like a knife wrapped in lace.
His tone is seductive and damning, like he knows exactly what he’s doing to you and does it anyway.
I close my eyes. Let it breathe. Let it bloom inside my ribs like a fucking thorned vine.
It doesn’t soothe. Nope, it brands, demands, and owns every inch of me by the chorus.
And, fuck, it sounds like her.
This is what it feels like to love something dangerous and pretend it’s simplistically beautiful.
To mistake surrender for intimacy. That was Kit.
Every note of her. And me? I was the fool who thought I could hold her without bleeding.
Or maybe I was too young and na?ve to believe love can make you bleed.
Maybe I deserve every note and raging lyric that comes out of scornful songs. Maybe Kit wanted to scream like that once and didn’t know how. The thing is, I expected her to come back—to forgive me.
She didn’t. The girl who made me believe in something as fucking fragile as peace never gave me a chance. While I waited, I tried to forget, to go numb, to . . . erase everything that happened between us.
And now? I feel her in the space between tracks. Not as memory. Not as guilt. She’s here—woven into the quiet, spine to mine, her breath catching just a half-second behind mine. The ghost of her is more honest than most people in my life.
She exists in the gaps. Within the distortion. In the breath between lyrics. She’s not just someone I loved—she’s the unfinished song I never got to play live.
If I close my eyes, I see her. Cross-legged on the floor of the music room back at her father’s house, one socked foot tapping to some beat only she could hear, wearing a T-shirt three sizes too big that slipped off one shoulder and made me forget the fucking scales I was trying to practice.
“Try it like this,” she’d whisper, handing me a cello bow. “Play the silence, not the sound.”
And I did. I fucking did.
That was us, playing music, talking about music, or . . . making music. Like when I would play and she’d curl into me backstage. Her fingers tracing lyrics on my ribs, humming something half-remembered while I tuned a guitar we didn’t need for another hour.
When I visited her in New York—those stolen weekends when I flew out just to feel her breath on my neck—we barely made it out of the hotel room.
We’d play first—always. Sometimes for hours.
She’d sit beside me, cheek pressed to my shoulder, her voice melting into the notes I played with my guitar.
Until I didn’t know where she ended and I began.
And after?
She’d crawl into my lap, her mouth tasting like coffee and lipstick, her hands under my shirt before I even stood up from the bench. We’d stumble to the bed, laughing, breathless, desperate. I’d bury my face in her neck and whisper things. We were loud, tangled up, and fuck, we were alive.
There was one morning—sunlight spilling through the window, her leg thrown across mine, sheet knotted at her waist—she looked at me and said, “I hate that you have to leave—I hate that I’ll miss you and that I’m the happiest with you.”
“I’ll come back, Kit. I always do.” And I’d kissed her like that was a promise. Like I’d make sure she never had to hate it again.
But then I broke everything.
And now? All I have is the music we never played and her voice curling through my bloodstream like a goddamn drug. I press pause. But the silence isn’t any safer.
Kit’s still in it.
And I’m still the idiot who can’t stop playing her.
She meant everything she said or composed—every fucking word.
Kit Dempsey never said things just to fill space—when she spoke, it was a pulse.
A truth. A challenge. And I took it like gospel.
I learned how to hold a note without ever touching the strings, how to let silence speak louder than sound.
She taught me how to ache in quiet—how to carry pain in my chest without letting it bleed out.
She was young. But she taught me not only how to feel the music, but also how to draw it out from the depths of my soul. Maybe that’s what I need—more like who I need. Kit dragging me back from the inferno while I fight my demons.
I find “Fast Car” and play it. It fucking undoes me.
Not in a crash-and-burn, all-at-once way. It’s slower and more brutal. I’m unraveling from the inside out, like memory dragging its nails along my spine, making sure I feel every inch.
The guitar begins, soft and precise, and I swear my pulse syncs to it. My throat tightens. My grip goes numb. The air becomes too still. Tracy’s voice wraps around me with that fucking ache that’s always sounded too much like surrender.
It reminds me of that song . . . one Kit asked me to create but she never sang. She never claimed it; I just took it along with many others.
That’s probably why I can’t play. Every time I touch an instrument, I think about her. I might’ve known how to duplicate the notes as I heard them, but I never learned to create my own without her—or alcohol in the absence of her.
Suddenly, I can’t breathe right.
Now I’m sitting in this dim room with a playlist I can’t turn off and a memory that feels like it’s got its hands wrapped around my neck, not hard enough to stop me—but just enough to make me feel it.
There’s no fixing this. No lyric that can rewrite what I broke.
Just the realization that I fucking break everything hits me hard.
I fucking take and disregard. This is what the therapist mentioned when we discussed my upbringing.
My parents made me believe I was entitled to the world and never realized I had to work for anything.
Free is never free. Everything comes at a price.
More than ever it feels as if I need absolution—or a playlist for that. Something scraped together in minor chords and gospel undertones, something that can hold the ache without trying to heal it.
Maybe I should talk to Kit, apologize, beg . . . but I’m not ready to find her yet. Not until I can find the version of myself who won’t flinch at the memory of when she looked at me like I was her fucking everything. The version where I took and never gave anything—not even a thank you.
The version who believed he could be that for her. Who didn’t ruin it all.
I reach for the guitar.
My fingers brush across the strings, cautious, as if they might recoil if I press too hard. The neck feels wrong in my hands. Off. Like I borrowed it from someone who still knows how to hold things without breaking them. Someone more whole.
Still, I pull it into my lap.
I don’t tune it. Don’t even check if it’s in key.
I just try to play.
I just need a single note that makes sense. The notes come, but they’re uneven. It’s just air, nerves, and the sound of someone trying not to come apart.
The sound is fractured, scraped hollow. It stumbles out of me like grief set to melody—tentative and trembling. It’s not a song. It might be just noise and broken feelings.
But it seems that it’s all I’ve got. And right now, that has to be enough.
It sounds like something trying to remember how to exist.
I close my eyes, and there she is. Kit standing there, breaking from the inside. I saw it. I fucking caused it. The way she crumbled, like she hated me for being the asshole who couldn’t give her what she wanted. I wasn’t any different.
I strum once. Then again. Let the sound settle around me like a confession. Then I speak into the stillness, not even sure who I’m talking to.
“I still hear you, you know. In the chords I never finish. In the lyrics I don’t write down because they sound too much like you. They judge, they feel, and they try to shape the person I’ll never be.”
My eyes open, and I decide to write. Not lyrics, but to her. The stranger who’s making me feel something.