Chapter 4
four
CASS
The final song is our biggest anthem, the one some people in the crowd always shout back at us, and I tear it apart like it personally wronged me.
Every ounce of rage I’m carrying—at the hands, the humiliation, and that stammering giant who groped me—gets channeled straight through my fingers into the strings, weaponizing the song and dropping the rage bomb into the pit in front of me.
As I play, my amp roars beneath my hands, that beautiful, warm tube breakup performing exactly the way I need it to. It’s the sound that makes us us, and sets us apart from every sterile indie band with their pristine gear. And tonight, I push it to the limits.
The tone starts to fray at the edges, the controlled growl turning into something rawer, meaner, the kind of sound that makes people either fall in love or walk away. I don’t care which, because the pit is a churning mass of bodies and sweat, and I can feel their energy surging back at me.
But on the final chord, the amp betrays me.
What should be a triumphant, earth-shaking note disintegrates into a piercing, ugly squeal of uncontrolled feedback that I can’t choke off. I yank my hand to the volume knob, twist it down, and stomp on my noise gate pedal, but it’s too late.
The screech cuts through the room like a dentist’s drill, and I watch in real time as the crowd’s energy deflates. A few people wince, someone near the front actually covers their ears, and the maelstrom I’d been building becomes a confused mess.
My hands freeze on the guitar, and I just stand there, staring at the amp like it’s a friend who just stabbed me in the back. The chassis is warm under my palm when I rest my hand on it, the metal still vibrating faintly with the ghost of the last note.
I built my entire sound around this amp—the warmth, the growl, the way it breaks up when you push it. That’s Pinebox. That’s me. And it just humiliated me in front of a crowd. When I kill the power, the feedback dies with a pathetic little whimper.
The silence that follows is worse than the squeal. Across the stage, Joel’s bass hangs from his shoulder, and his eyes meet mine. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. The single, weary shake of his head says everything.
I told you so.
The anger and adrenaline that carried me through the set evaporate instantly, leaving behind a cold, hollow ache in my chest and the phantom sensation of strange hands on my body. The show is over, and I’m standing in front of a few hundred people who just watched me fuck up the ending.
“Did you see that lumberjack asshole?” I snap, the words vibrating with adrenaline as I wipe sweat from my forehead. “Grabs me like I’m a sack of flour in the middle of a set? Who the hell does that?”
“You know,” Milo says, his voice a low counterpoint to the din of the bar, “the guy you screamed at wasn’t one of the gropers. He was the one who boxed them out. I saw the whole thing from the drums. He shoved the assholes away. Then you fell, and he caught you.”
The words are a sharp, immediate impact against my sternum.
Oh.
Oh, shit.
I open my mouth to argue, to say something, to defend myself, to hold onto the anger because anger is safer than guilt, but the certainty I’d been clinging to—the righteous fury that carried me through the last few minutes—crumbles. Because Milo doesn’t lie, and he doesn’t have a reason to.
If he says that’s what happened, that’s what happened.
And that means I yelled at the wrong guy.
But it’s worse than that. I didn’t just lash out at some random drunk asshole who deserved it. I screamed at someone who was trying to help me, and I did it in front of a hundred people. I made him the villain when he was the only one trying to be the hero.
“Great,” I mutter, more to myself than to Milo.
Milo shrugs, slipping his hands into his pockets like he’s just delivered a weather report. He’s already moved on, as if this revelation is just another piece of mildly interesting data in his ongoing study of human chaos, but I don’t get that luxury.
I need to get our money.
I jump off stage and keep moving until I reach the scarred wooden bar top and the man standing behind it, Frank Kowalski, the owner of the bar. His balding head is shiny with sweat under the dim lights, and his damp bar rag is draped over his shoulder like some kind of badge of honor.
He doesn’t look up, just licks his thumb and flips through the bills with the kind of practiced efficiency that comes from decades of scraping every possible dollar out of broke college kids and desperate musicians. But he pays on time, usually, so whatever.
“Hell of a show, firecracker.” He slides the cash across the bar. “Crowds love that sort of drama. The stage dive? The grab-ass? Good for business!”
I stare at him.
Good for business.
Not “Are you OK?”
Not “Do you want me to kick those guys out?”
Not even a performative “Sorry that happened to you, kid.”
Just good for business.
The comment lands with a sickening familiarity. Like everyone else, Frank loves the performance and the spectacle—the girl on stage with the choppy hair and combat boots who crowd-surfs and gets groped and keeps playing like nothing happened because that’s what tough girls do, right?
They take it and keep going.
He and every other man in this bar don’t want to know me.
They want the product. The idea. The poster on the wall.
But if they saw the real, messy person underneath—the poor girl from Camden who’s terrified of failing, loathes herself and doubts her ability most of the time, and is one bad midterm away from flunking out—they’d run for the hills.
I snatch the cash off the bar, my jaw so tight it aches.
“Yeah, real inspiring stuff.” I give him the smile I reserve for men who think we’re on the same team. “I’ll be sure to get groped again next week.”
His grin falters for a second—just long enough for me to see the flash of confusion—before he recovers with a forced laugh. “That’s the spirit.”
I walk away before I say something that gets Pinebox permanently banned, and Frank’s cheap praise is still ringing in my ears when I see him. The tall dude who’d plucked me out of the air, put me in a fireman’s carry, and deposited me back on stage.
The target of my mistaken fury.
He’s sitting at a booth near the back wall, surrounded by some guys who look like they stepped straight out of a campus recruitment poster for “Generic Jock Starter Pack.” Broad shoulders, backwards caps, the easy, boisterous energy of people who’ve never doubted themselves or not fit in.
They’re loud, laughing, and very clearly giving him shit about something. One of them—a guy with a smirk that looks like it’s been surgically attached to his face—is reenacting something with exaggerated hand gestures, and the table erupts in laughter.
I’ve been around enough groups of guys to recognize their wolf pack behavior, isolating the weakest member and tearing him down in front of everyone to see if he’ll fight back or fold. And the target has exactly two acceptable responses: laugh along and prove you can take it, or push back.
But my rescuer isn’t doing either.
He’s just sitting there, his broad shoulders hunched forward like he’s trying to make his 6’4” frame disappear into the vinyl booth. His hands are wrapped around an empty beer glass, his knuckles bone-white, and he just sits there, enduring it.
He’s not laughing.
Hell, he’s not even smiling.
It’s jarring.
After being so freshly reminded of the gross, entitled pattern I’ve come to expect from men—Frank’s slimy grin, the hands in the crowd, the endless cycle of being reduced to a spectacle—seeing the tall guy like this is off-script.
He didn’t leer. He didn’t grab. He didn’t laugh when his friends turned my humiliation of him into tonight’s entertainment. He tried to help, and when I screamed at him for it, he didn’t get defensive or aggressive. He just… took it.
And now he’s sitting here, letting his friends tear him apart, and he looks like he thinks he deserves it. It doesn’t compute, but even as I try to figure it out from across the bar, another thought arrives, cutting through the grime and guilt of the evening.
He’s cute.
Not just cute. He’s different. Stupidly, frustratingly handsome in a way that makes me irrationally annoyed, because of course he is. Of course the guy I just publicly destroyed is also the kind of good-looking that should come with a warning label.
I don’t know why I didn’t notice it before. Maybe because I was too busy being furious or too focused on the humiliation of being manhandled in front of a crowd, but now, standing here in the dim light of the bar, I can see it clearly.
Messy brown hair that looks like he tried to tame it this morning and gave up halfway through. A strong, angular jaw that’s clenched so tight right now I’m surprised his teeth haven’t cracked. And those eyes—green, kind, and utterly miserable as his friends get stuck into him.
He’s miserable. He’s outside the circle, even while sitting in the middle of it. And that makes him safe.
He’s a problem I didn’t ask for.
But one I suddenly feel compelled to solve. It’s a distraction, sure, but it’s mostly about taking back control. I’m done being the passive victim of this night—the girl things happen to. I want to be the one initiating the collision for a change. I want to see if the guy who saved me is real.
I don’t think; I just move, and the conversation cuts off mid-sentence when I get close. His friends’ mocking grins freeze in place, and their gazes shift to the tall guy with the kind of gleeful anticipation usually reserved for watching a car crash in slow motion.
He looks up.
His eyes widen with pure, animal terror. His mouth opens, then closes, then opens again, but no sound comes out. I watch, confused, as his brain visibly stalls out and panic is painted clearly on his face. Whatever I expected to happen when I walked over here, this wasn’t it.
“Looks like I yelled at the wrong guy,” I say, casually and with a smirk, trying to reboot things with him.
He doesn’t say anything, still staring at me like I’m speaking French.
His friends exchange glances. One of them—a guy with dark hair who looks like he was born wearing a shit-eating grin—leans back in his seat, his arms crossed over his chest, practically vibrating with the effort of not laughing. He’s watching this like it’s the best show he’s seen all year.
I don’t apologize. Apologies taste like ash. But I always pay my debts.
“Let me buy you a drink,” I say, ignoring the peanut gallery. “To make up for it.”
For a second, he just stares at me, his mouth hanging open. Then he tries to speak. “I—uh—I mean—”
The words catch in his throat, strangled and broken. He shifts in his seat, his long legs bumping the underside of the table hard enough to make the beer glasses jump and rattle. One of them tips, and he lunges for it with the kind of panicked reflex you’d use to catch a falling baby.
He fails.
The beer spills.
All over the front of me.
“Jesus Christ, Kellerman!”
“That was beautiful! Someone get that on video!”
As I look down at my boots and legs, now soaked in beer, he—Kellerman?—scrambles to his feet, his face now a shade of red that doesn’t exist in nature. His eyes are darting around for a bar towel, a loose sweater, anything to wipe the beer off me.
When he can’t find anything, he mutters something unintelligible—something that might be “I have to go” or “I’m sorry” or possibly just a string of vowel sounds strung together in a desperate plea for death—and bolts.
Not walks. Not exits. Bolts.
He’s a blur of flannel and shame, his long legs carrying him toward the front door with the kind of desperate speed usually reserved for people fleeing natural disasters. And then he’s gone, and I’m left standing in the vacuum of his departure, soaked in half a pint of beer.
Which isn’t even that bad, if I’m being honest.
I’ve had worse stuff spilled on me or thrown at me at gigs…
The table is silent for exactly two seconds. Then the guy with the dark hair—the smirking one—lets out a low, appreciative whistle. He leans back again, visibly enjoying the show, and his smug satisfaction makes me want to grab my guitar and slam it over his head.
“That went well,” he says.
The table erupts in laughter again, louder this time, the kind of raucous, uncontrollable laughter that comes from witnessing something so absurd it transcends normal human experience. I just stand there, my eyes still on the door, still trying to figure out what sent him running.
But as I flip the others the bird and walk away, I can’t help but smirk a little, because the mystery of the big man—Kellerman—has just become infinitely more interesting than I expected. I wanted to buy him a beer, maybe fuck him to help me feel better about the amp…
But this?
This is infinitely more fascinating.