8. Chapter Eight #2
The fact that neither of us was as cool as we pretended.
The fact that desire did not make us fearless.
It only made the fear glow brighter. Every touch felt charged.
Her fingers on my skin. My palms at her waist. The small hitch in her breathing when I moved closer.
The way she watched my face like she was searching for proof that this was real and not just another beautiful thing about to vanish.
I paused with my hand at her waist.
Her skin was warm beneath my palm.
“Tell me if you want to stop.”
Her eyes met mine, direct and bright, but there was softness around the edges. A tremor in the way she breathed. Not uncertainty. Not regret. Just the terrifying openness of wanting something and letting it show.
“I don’t.”
“Lila.”
“I want you,” she said, and the words came out rougher than she probably meant them to. Her throat moved. Her eyes flicked away for half a second, then back. “I want this. I want tonight. Stop making me say vulnerable things when I’m mostly naked.”
A laugh broke out of me, low and helpless.
Not because it was funny.
Because if I didn’t laugh, I might say something I couldn’t take back.
Then she pulled me down.
There were nights that felt like hunger.
This one felt like trying to memorize warmth before winter.
Her mouth biting against my neck. My hand in her hair.
Her leg hooking over my hip like she could anchor me there by force, pulling me deeper into her.
The sheets twisting beneath us. The mattress giving under our weight.
The old bed frame knocking once against the wall, then again, like a bad metronome trying to keep time with our breathing.
Outside, the city kept flashing blue-white through the curtains.
Inside, everything narrowed.
Her breath.
Her skin.
The salt of her shoulder.
The little sounds she tried to hide and the way I chased them anyway.
She whispered my name like she was trying to keep me in the room after I left it, Like some part of her already knew I would.
I took my time because I didn’t know how not to.
Because three days had been spent waiting outside the door of this. Three days of almost touching. Almost saying. Almost admitting. Three days of letting our hands brush and pretending it was an accident. Three days of her looking away first and me hating her for it because I knew I was worse.
Because the tour bus was coming.
The crowds. The interviews. The cheap motel rooms. The fluorescent gas stations at two in the morning.
The fans leaning over barricades with my lyrics written on their skin like I had given them something sacred when mostly I had given them the parts of myself I didn’t know how to survive.
All of it was coming.
The machine had already opened its mouth.
But right then, she was beneath me, I was deep inside her, with her fingers digging into my back and her forehead pressed to mine when the rest of the world fell away.
Every thrust telling her exactly what we were both too scared to say.
Her eyes stayed open longer than I expected.
That undid me. The looking. The refusal to make it easier by closing her eyes and pretending this was only bodies, only heat, only one night in a room neither of us would ever sleep in again.
I wanted to say too much.
Stay.
Come on tour with me.
Let me tell people.
Let me be yours where someone can see it.
Let me stop becoming someone else before it’s too late.
The words crowded behind my teeth until they hurt.
But I was a coward in the specific way boys can be cowards when they think silence is protection.
So instead I kissed them into her skin. Into her throat.
Her shoulder. The soft place beneath her ear where her breath broke apart.
When finally she came, her body collapsing under me, I finished too.
Never first, I needed to always make sure her pleasure was the most important thing.
Lila was always the most important thing.
Later, the sheets were tangled around us, hot and wrecked, kicked halfway off the mattress like we had fought them and lost.
Her leg stayed thrown over mine like she planned to claim the entire left side of my body by squatter’s rights.
Her hair was a dark spill across my chest and pillow, smelling like rain and drugstore shampoo and something that was just her, something clean and warm that made my throat tighten for no useful reason.
She lay on my chest, breath damp and slow against my skin, fingers drawing circles over the ink along my ribs.
The hotel room had gone quiet in that strange way rooms do after midnight, when even the ugly things turn intimate.
The air conditioner hummed and rattled. Pipes knocked somewhere in the wall.
The television, muted and forgotten, painted pale blue over the dresser.
Our clothes were scattered across the floor like evidence.
Beyond the glass, the city kept being the city.
A horn blared below.
Someone shouted.
A siren rose, faded, disappeared into traffic.
Life kept moving, rude as ever.
Lila’s fingers stopped over my tattoo.
For a while she said nothing.
I could feel the thought forming in her before she gave it a voice. Her body changed first. The tiny tightening in her shoulders. The way her breath shortened against me. The way her fingers pressed down, then eased up, like she was deciding whether to leave a mark.
“Don’t forget me when you’re famous,” she whispered.
I laughed, but it hurt.
A sharp little thing tucked behind my ribs.
My arm tightened around her shoulders before I could make it casual. Before I could make it cool. Before I could turn it into a joke and save us both from the naked, miserable truth that she had handed me a fear and asked me not to drop it.
“Lila.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
She lifted her head, chin resting on my chest.
Her face was close enough that I could see everything. The smudged edge of her eyeliner. The flush still high on her cheeks. The small crease between her brows. The way her mouth tried to smile and failed halfway through. She looked young and tired and too honest in the blue light.
“You’re going to be busy,” she said. “People are going to scream your name. Pretty girls are going to write bad poetry about your hands. Someone will probably start a conspiracy theory that you’re a vampire.”
“Only if I earn it.”
“You already wear sunglasses indoors.”
“Brand consistency.”
She smiled, but her eyes stayed sad.
That was the part that got me.
Not the joke.
The sadness under it.
The careful little grief she was trying to dress up in sarcasm so I wouldn’t feel cornered. So I wouldn’t run. So she wouldn’t have to ask plainly for the thing she wanted most.
Proof.
“You’ll be fine,” I said.
Her brows lifted. “That wasn’t what I asked.”
No.
It wasn’t.
I knew what she wanted.
Not a promise that tour wouldn’t change anything.
We both knew better than that. Tour changed people.
So did attention. Distance. Exhaustion. Being wanted by strangers who didn’t ask for the parts of you that hurt.
Being loved loudly by people who only knew the cleanest, brightest, most useful pieces of you.
She wanted me to say she mattered enough to survive it.
That we mattered enough.
That when the lights got bigger, and the rooms got louder, and every door opened toward someone new, I would still remember this room. This bed. Her hand on my ribs. Her voice saying my name as if it belonged to her before anyone else got to touch it.
So I tilted her chin up and made myself look at her, even though the honesty scraped.
“If I ever forget you,” I said, “it’s because I’m dead.”
Her smile trembled.
“Dramatic.”
“You started it.”
“I asked a reasonable question.”
“You asked if I’d forget the girl wearing my shirt in a hotel bed three days before my first tour.”
I brushed my thumb beneath her eye, catching the tear she was pretending wasn’t there.
Her skin was soft there. Warm. Treacherously real.
“That’s not reasonable,” I said. “That’s emotional sabotage.”
She leaned into my touch for half a second before catching herself.
Always catching herself.
Even then.
Especially then.
I should have noticed that more.
I should have paid attention to how often she reached, then pulled back. How often she wanted the proof but not the spotlight. How often she asked for promises in rooms with locked doors. How often she made herself easy to love in private and impossible to claim in public.
Instead, I held her closer and called it enough.
“I mean it,” I said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
She was quiet for too long.
The kind of quiet that starts as hesitation and becomes an answer.
Then she lowered her mouth and kissed the center of my chest, right over the place my heart was making an idiot of itself.
“I want to.”
That should have scared me.
Maybe it did.
Maybe I mistook fear for tenderness because tenderness sounded better. Maybe I felt the warning buried inside those three words and decided to hold her tighter instead of listening. People think denial is loud, but it isn’t. Most of the time, denial is just choosing the warmer thing.
She settled back against me.
Her breathing evened out, but I knew she wasn’t asleep. Her fingers kept moving over my skin, slow and restless, tracing lines between tattoos, ribs, scars, freckles, as if she were trying to leave a map only she could read.
“I’ll call every night,” I said.
“You’ll be exhausted.”
“I’ll call.”
“You’ll have shows.”
“I’ll call after.”
“You’ll have fans.”
I looked down at her. “I’ll call.”
She pressed her lips together.
For one second, I thought she might say the thing we were always circling.
Go public.
Tell them.
Make me real.
Let me stand beside you somewhere with lights on.
Instead, she gave me a crooked smile.
“Fine. But if you wake me up at three in the morning, I’m making you listen to me complain about class.”
“Hot.”
“Attendance policies. Group projects. The girl who eats tuna during lectures.”
“Filthy.”
“She eats it with crackers, Evan. In a closed room. At nine in the morning.”
“Absolutely depraved.”
“She has no shame.”
“Maybe she’s the vampire.”
Lila laughed.
And there she was.
My Lila.
Not sad. Not hiding. Not wrapped in fear she’d deny if I named it.
Just laughing against me in a hotel room I couldn’t afford, with my shirt somewhere on the floor and the future waiting outside with its teeth showing.
The sound went straight through me.
It was ridiculous how badly I loved it. How greedy I felt for it.
How certain I was that if I could make her laugh, I could keep her.
Like joy was a lock. Like, wanting something badly enough gave you the right to it.
Like the world had ever cared what boys in hotel rooms promised girls before dawn.
I held onto that sound anyway.
Greedy and stupid and sure.
Sometime near morning, the room turned gray.
Not bright. Not yet.
Just that thin, merciless pre-dawn light that makes everything look less romantic and more true.
The edges of furniture sharpened. The mirror above the desk reflected the wreckage of us in pieces.
A sock near the door. Her hair tie on the nightstand.
My guitar case half-open in the corner like a mouth waiting to swallow me whole.
She slipped out early for class.
I was half-awake when she moved, but I kept my eyes closed because I didn’t trust myself.
Because if I saw her leaving, I might ask her to stay.
Because if she stayed, I might miss the van.
Because if I missed the van, I might resent her one day for saving me from the thing I had asked the world to give me.
So I listened.
The hush of sheets.
Her bare feet on the carpet.
The quiet rustle of clothes.
The bathroom faucet turning on, then off.
The tiny click of her earrings.
At the door, she paused.
I felt it.
Even without looking, I felt her looking back.
Then the latch opened.
Closed.
The room changed.
Not dramatically. Not like thunder. Not like some grand cinematic rupture.
It simply became a room without her in it.
And somehow that was worse.
When I finally opened my eyes, the pillow beside me was dented where her head had been. The sheets still held her warmth in fading patches. Her smell lingered there, soft and cruel.
She had left a note on the pillow.
Her handwriting leaned hard to the right, impatient even on paper.
Don’t forget. Also, steal me hotel shampoo.Twilight
I stared at it for a long time.
Long enough for the air conditioner to kick on again.
Long enough for traffic to thicken outside.
Long enough for the future to start knocking.
Then I folded the note carefully, along the lines she had made, and tucked it into my guitar case like a prayer I would have mocked anyone else for making.
She may have kept me like a secret. But I kept her like an oath.