4. Cass
CHAPTER 4
Cass
M arina del Rey, Thursday, August 14th
Levi.
I’d had days—no, weeks to prepare myself for this moment. I’d laid it all out in my mind—how I’d send him a soft smile that would hint at everything I was going to tell him. I’m sorry. You’ve never left my mind. I wasn’t ready then but now I am, so if there’s even a snowball’s chance in hell that you still care, even just a little… Let me take you out. Whenever, wherever. Just say the word.
And then our eyes met.
It felt like a gut-wrenching drop. My entire body weightless, caught in a rollercoaster that dipped over the precipice, heart suspended in this infinite second. He looked older, sharper, face unreadable. Something about the tilt of his head and the way he angled his shoulders signaled a confidence that tripped me up. Want knifed through me, not sure whether it was nostalgia or this, him, now.
I dropped my gaze. Too fucking much . Jace was still talking, words like the gentle drip of rain against the window of a tour bus.
Somehow, I kept walking, each step a ripple in my blood. Up the ramp and onto the boat, sun in my eyes and shadows in my heart. Followed Jace’s lead just like I had on the very first song we’d ever recorded, his voice soaring higher as I wove around it and then took over. Levi came in on the chorus, Ellis and Mason and Jace harmonizing about our butterfly girl, about sunshine kisses and summer skies. Even then, I’d found my attention straying to the delicate bow of Levi’s upper lip, some feeling I had yet to name twining around the base of my spine, impossible and radiant.
The boat swayed with each step I took, at odds with the Pacific’s silken calm. Feverish warmth rose to my cheeks. Don’t fucking blow it.
I exhaled, inhaled. Smiled at the woman who pressed a drink into my hand, condensation a cool touch against my palm. Turned to the others—Ellis and Mason.
Levi.
“Cass,” he said, as if I’d spoken out loud.
I drew another breath. “Levi.”
Neither of us moved. We stared at each other, brief darkness shading the green of his eyes before he blinked and it was gone, like a closing shutter. I forced the corners of my mouth into an upward tilt he didn’t mirror.
Yeah. I hadn’t thought he’d make it easy. I didn’t deserve it.
“We ready, then?” Mason asked, voice deceptively light. Could have fooled me.
“Oh captain, my captain,” Ellis intoned, saluting Mason as Jace followed it up with, “Arr, mateys.”
God, I fucking loved them for trying. Tension still hung thick in the air, but it felt bearable now.
Levi cracked a grin so small it hardly counted, and I pinned my hopes on that tiny twitch of his lips, the faintest give in the tightness around his eyes.
After all—well. He was here, wasn’t he?
By the time we left the marina, the thrum of the engine a low hum in my bones, the day had burned through the morning haze. A clear, sunny sky arched above us, seagulls sailing on the stiff breeze.
We ate breakfast on the lounge deck, laughing at random shared memories, just friends hanging out, faking obliviousness as a photographer, tipped off by Mason’s assistant, circled our yacht in a much smaller boat. My gaze kept snagging on Levi and then sliding past, heart clenched into a fearful lump. It dredged up memories of that final, awful year—empty smiles for the cameras, throwing ourselves into each performance as though it might be our last. As soon as the curtain fell, our ever-moving bubble blocked from public view, silence had spread like fog, creeping in around the edges of our friendship, heavy with all the things we didn’t talk about.
But that was then.
* * *
“Can I talk to you?”
My question landed like a whisper, quiet and timid, yet Levi snapped around as though I’d punched him. Just the two of us, alone on the top deck. His attention fell to my naked chest and lower—to the curl of a tattoo on my left hip.
For just a moment, his expression slipped into something raw and open. He swallowed, mouth firming into a thin line as he looked up. “The Lyra constellation?”
Pressure pooled behind my sternum. “Yeah.”
Four stars connected in a rhombus shape and a fifth extending out at one end. The lyre of Orpheus, its music so beautiful it could move even the gods. Passion, longing, and creativity. A constant anchor in the nighttime sky.
We’d talked about it, back then—matching tattoos, hidden away so only we would know. Funny how that hadn’t scared me while love did. Anyway, we’d splintered apart before we could follow through. When I’d eventually had mine done, I wondered whether Levi would catch a glimpse of it, maybe flicking through some magazine, pausing at a shirtless vacation picture of me, and he’d see the tattoo and just… know. His face, though, showed surprise and confusion, a flicker of something else before he masked it all.
“You went ahead and got it on your own?” His words were neutral. “When?”
I almost missed it, time whittling away at the contours of how well I'd learned to read him—his shoulders drawing in just a fraction, a minute inward tilt as though he was bracing himself for a hit. It was how he’d sat through the regular meetings to review and tweak our individual images, through award shows when we presented the easy butt of a joke, hugely popular and kind of cute but somehow just not serious musicians, ya know?
Because Levi had cared what people thought, too. He’d just refused to let it rule his life.
“About a year ago,” I said, my voice so low it barely rose above the hum of the boat. I held his gaze, waiting for more—some clue as to why this bothered him. Did it make him uncomfortable, the idea that I might still be holding on?
“Closure?” he asked, still so damn neutral . I needed a moment before it made sense.
“ No .” Too urgent. I paused to center myself, oddly soothed by the subtle dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose. “No. More… a reminder.”
Levi’s eyes narrowed very slightly, sunlight catching darker spots in his irises. “A reminder,” he repeated, no inflection whatsoever.
I resisted the impulse to cross my arms. “Of what it cost me—being too afraid to be true to myself.”
“What it cost you ?” Finally, a flicker of emotion. Even though it was meant to cut, I’d take it.
“I could only speak for myself. Maybe, in hindsight, you were glad things had worked out this way?”
He snorted, bitterness twitching around his mouth. “Oh, for fuck’s sake , Cass.”
Do you still care?
I didn’t have the guts to ask. Instead, I motioned at a beige lounge island off to one side of the deck, the glass railing offering uninterrupted views of the ocean’s shimmering expanse. “Can we sit down?”
He squinted at me, then gave a tiny shake of his head that seemed to be more at himself. “All right, I guess. But put a shirt on, will you?”
I bit back a joke about how, hey, does my chiseled chest make it hard to think? Not the moment, and Levi had a tendency to unleash his tongue when he felt backed into a corner. So I grabbed a shirt knotted around a chair, never mind that it was Jace’s, and slipped it on before I sank onto the bench. Levi slid in next to me, a careful distance between us that felt like an abyss. I blamed the gentle rocking of the boat for the unease that pooled in my stomach.
Silence. My gaze drifted to the coastline, softened by the midday glare and blurred into hazy shapes of land. A scattering of other boats dotted the water, their white hulls like dashes of punctuation on the vast blue page of the ocean.
When I turned back, Levi was studying me, his eyes sharp and face unreadable. The breeze caught the edge of his hair, ruffling it across his forehead. Backlit by the sun, he seemed ripped out of a dream. Here, up high and open to the elements, it felt like the world couldn’t touch us when of course it could, it had.
But he’d come.
“Thank you,” was how I reopened this impossible conversation.
“For…?”
“Being here. Willing to see me.”
“I’m not here for you, Cass.” Sharp as the crack of a whip, and yeah, ouch. I inhaled around the fluttering ache in my chest. He had every right.
“I know. That’s not how I meant it.”
“How did you mean it, then?”
Fitting that it hurt to look at him, the sun’s glare painting white spots across my vision. I didn’t reach for my sunglasses, though. “I know I’m not why you’re here, but I could have been your reason to stay away. It’d hardly be surprising.”
He considered me for a heavy, heart-wrenching beat. “What makes you think you still hold that kind of power over me?”
And once more, with feeling— ouch. I pressed my tongue flat against the roof of my mouth, held my breath for two, three, four, and exhaled. “You’ll take anything I say and twist it into its worst possible interpretation, won’t you?”
Something moved behind his eyes. “Can you blame me?”
Not even a little.
“No.” I leaned forward to touch his arm and thought better of it, hand dropping back into my lap. Brightness flashed on the edge of my vision—reflected sunlight that glinted off a nearby boat. “I know I fucked up, and I’m sorry. You were just… much braver than me.”
“Or maybe I was so in love with you that everything else paled in comparison.” There was no softness to his statement, gaze level as it held mine. I was first to drop my eyes.
Past tense. Of course—we barely knew each other anymore, even if my stupid heart shrank away from this truth that I’d set into motion.
“I was in love with you, too.” It wasn’t a revelation or anything—we’d said it back then, words shaped against skin, squeezed into the gaps between open-mouthed kisses. But out here in the open, it felt like a plunge into uncharted waters.
He blew out a harsh breath. “Just not quite enough, huh?”
Enough to scare me shitless. Enough that I don’t think there’ll be anyone else, ever.
“You’re wrong,” I said, quiet yet firm.
He appeared poised to argue when our gazes caught again. This time, I fought the temptation to look away, and whatever he found eased the sharp lines of his forehead. Waves washed against the boat hull, the others’ laughing voices drifting up from the deck below, a counterpoint to the layered silence that spun out between us.
Levi glanced down, something delicate about his torso framed against the cloudless, indifferent sky. “Maybe I shouldn’t have backed you into a corner.”
Oh.
I shoved a hand through my hair, curls tangled by the salty breeze. “You were tired. You were so fucking tired of it all. I think you were looking for a way out, and you needed to know where I stood.”
“Yeah.” He rolled his bottom lip between his teeth and released it again, voice slow and deliberate. “But that didn’t make it fair, did it? Asking you to choose. Forcing your hand like that.”
“I should have chosen you.” It came out rough, the words scraping against the back of my throat. In my mind, I’d said them so many times, but putting them out in the open like this, for Levi to hear and weigh—God, it scared me.
Something in his expression gave way, like the aftermath of a wave’s collapse, its hard crest dissolving into foamy whitewash. A softening, no longer resisting the quiet pull of the tide. “We were just really young,” he murmured. “Weren’t we?”
“You think we wouldn’t have lasted?” The idea tasted strange on my tongue, new and unfamiliar. I had fucked us up. It had never occurred to me to wonder what else could have.
“I don’t know.” One corner of his mouth quirked up, wry. “It would have been all eyes on us. Paps, interviews, the works. Not like I handled it well when it was the five of us, and just us two at the center of a publicity storm… It would have been next level. Although I might have done better that way, being myself rather than The Funny One.”
I shook my head. “Levi…”
“Who knows, huh?” He raised a hand, palm open, in some version of a shrug. “Or we’d have made it, only for reality to kick in. We would have lost some fans, most likely. Our next album might have done just okay. And maybe you’d have blamed me for that.”
I wanted to dismiss it and couldn’t. Levi was right—losing fans would have bothered me. Their adoration had been my crutch, an external source of confidence I’d lacked.
“We might have lasted, though,” I said softly.
“Maybe, yeah.” He sounded unconvinced, like he was humoring me rather than believed we’d truly stood a chance. Because he’d realized there was a better fit for him? Another love, a real grownup—not some lost little boy too scared to hold his hand where people might see.
Have dinner with me?
The question shriveled in my chest, crumbling like a plucked flower left without water. He might say no. He probably would. If his heart was already taken… Although the way Mason had acted, I’d thought maybe not. But even if it wasn’t, why would Levi believe that this time would be different?
I needed to show him.
Steps on the teakwood stairs burst our two-person bubble. A moment later, a crew member appeared to offer us drinks, snacks, anything that might make our stay on board more pleasant. No, thank you.
“Time to rejoin the others?” Levi asked, and perhaps it was for the better, so I nodded.
He was here for a week. I would do my damned hardest to make it count.