Before You Fell (Ruined Melody #1)

1. Chapter One

Chapter One

Willow

Thirteen Years

The song I wrote today feels too big for my hands.

It sits in my notebook with crooked lines, scratched-out words, and blue ink bleeding across the page as if I have cut something open and tried to make it rhyme.

Which is dramatic for a thirteen-year-old girl sitting under a tree in the backyard, but apparently my heart has decided to be an idiot before the rest of me catches up.

I know nothing about love.

All I know is that it turns girls in movies soft and stupid.

I know it makes people stare out rainy windows as if the weather personally betrayed them.

I know it lives in sad songs and in whispered promises, in the quiet second before two people look away because looking too long might mean something.

But I don’t know what I have written. I only know my stomach twists every time I read it back.

If the world gets loud, I’ll be the quiet.

If your hands shake, I’ll hold the song.

Jesus.

I slam the notebook shut.

Nope.

Absolutely not. That is disgusting. That is feelings with their shirt off, standing in the middle of my page, making everything awkward.

The old tree behind our house towers over me, all thick branches and peeling bark, its roots shoved through the dirt as if even the earth got tired of trying to keep it down.

Mum calls it ugly. Dad calls it a hazard.

I call it mine, because no one else sits beneath it with a notebook pressed to their knees, a pen leaking all over their fingers, and shame crawling up their throat.

I read the first line again because apparently I enjoy pain. Then I want to crawl directly into the dirt and let the worms handle me.

This is the kind of thing girls write before they turn tragic. Before they become the sad little side character in a movie who says things such as, “I’ll wait for you,” while some boy with stupid hair ruins her entire life.

I am not that girl.

I’m just a girl sitting under a tree in the backyard, trying to write a song for a boy who will probably turn it into a joke before I can stop him. Because Phoenix Stone jokes about everything.

He jokes about my hair when it goes frizzy in the rain and sticks out around my face.

He jokes when I trip over my own school bag because the universe hates me personally.

He jokes when I get mad enough to throw a pencil at his head and miss by such a tragic distance that he spends three days calling me Sniper.

Phoenix laughs at the wrong times.

He grins when adults tell him off and smirks when teachers say his name with that tired, defeated sound. He acts as if the world is one big stage and he has already decided where the spotlight should go. Usually, right on him.

That is the problem with Phoenix. He has no respect for personal space, privacy, shame, or the basic human right to be embarrassed in front of anyone.

The other problem with Phoenix is worse. He is my best friend.

The side gate slams shut as Phoenix walks through it with the subtle grace of a drunk elephant and the confidence of a boy who thinks the whole backyard should make room for him.

Mom is at the kitchen window and I see her lift her head.

“Phoenix Stone, if you break that gate, you’re fixing it,” she calls as he passes.

“Love you too, Elise,” he calls back.

He keeps coming toward me with his battered guitar in one hand, the shoulder strap touching the grass beside him.

His black hair falls over his forehead in a messy way, making him look as if he got into a fight with sleep and lost. His shirt is wrinkled and his jeans are ripped at the knees.

There is dirt on his shoes, trouble in his grin, and too much swagger in a body that has not finished growing yet.

My mom laughs because she always does when Phoenix is around.

Everyone does.

He has that stupid gift. The ability to walk into a room with a grin too big for his face and somehow make people forgive him before he has even done anything wrong.

And Phoenix is always one breath away from doing something wrong.

I slam my notebook shut.

Too late. He sees the motion.

His dark hazel eyes drop to my hands, then lift back to my face, and his grin sharpens as if he has just found the best kind of trouble.

Shit.

He has grown taller over the summer. He moves across the yard with loose limbs and cocky shoulders, as if the world has never once landed a punch.

But it has. I know it has.

Phoenix drops down beside me on the blanket, because he has never asked permission to exist in my space. He just arrives, takes up half the air, and acts shocked when anyone notices.

His grin stays right where it is as his knee bumps mine.

“What are you hiding?”

“Nothing,” I reply, shoving the notebook under my leg.

“What did you write, Wills?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

His eyes drop to my thigh and a slow grin pulls at his mouth. “That is a very committed nothing.”

“It’s private.”

Phoenix reaches for my notebook.

I twist away. “No.”

His brows lift. Dark hazel eyes, gold in the sunlight, full of mischief and something sharper underneath. “Come on.”

“No.”

“You wrote something.”

“I write things all the time.”

“Yeah, but you’re acting weird about this one.”

“I am not acting weird.”

“You’re hiding it as if it has government secrets in it.”

“It might.”

“You’re thirteen and your mum still cuts the crust off your sandwiches.”

“She does not.”

“She did yesterday.”

“Because I hate crust.”

He reaches for the notebook again.

I squeal, which is humiliating enough that I will be taking it to my grave, and twist onto my side. Phoenix is faster. He always has been grabbing what he wants and acting as if the world should hand it over just to see what he does with it.

His fingers hook around the edge of the notebook.

“Phoenix.”

“Willow.”

“Don’t.”

“Too late.”

He tugs. I grab for it, but he pulls it free and leans back, holding it just out of reach with that smug little smirk sitting on his mouth.

“Give it back,” I snap.

He presses the notebook against his chest. “Absolutely not.”

“Phoenix, don’t.”

He stops. Not because he suddenly grows a conscience. That would be a medical miracle. He stops because my voice changes.

His fingers loosen on the cover as his grin fades a little.

“Is it bad?” he asks.

I stare down at the notebook in his hands.

The corners are bent. The cover is faded.

There is a tiny star sticker on the front from when I was ten and thought stickers made everything better.

I wish they still did. I wish I could slap one over my chest and fix whatever stupid thing keeps twisting there every time he looks at me too long.

“No,” I say quietly. “It’s just mine.”

Phoenix looks at me.

For one long second, he is too still for a boy who never stops moving. He is all noise most of the time. Mouth, grin, and trouble. A walking bad idea with too much swagger for someone who still has homework.

But right then, he goes quiet and leans back on one hand, the notebook still unopened in the other, and tips his face toward the branches as if he does not care either way.

“Fine.”

I blink. “Fine?”

“Yeah.” His mouth twitches, but it doesn’t quite become a smile. “Keep your tragic little secrets.”

“You’re tragic.”

“Probably.”

He says it quickly. Almost carelessly. But something in the word lands wrong.

I look at him then. Past the messy black hair and the grin he wears like armour. The cocky tilt of his chin that makes adults sigh and girls at school stare. His jaw is tight. His eyes are on the notebook, not me, and still he has not opened it.

“It’s just another song,” I say.

Heat climbs up my neck, which is ridiculous, because I write songs all the time. I show Phoenix half-finished lines, ugly choruses, verses that fall apart before they find their feet. He has seen my worst words and never once made me feel stupid for writing them.

But this one feels different.

This one feels as if it still has my pulse trapped inside it.

“It’s not finished,” I add.

Phoenix looks at me, the notebook still resting in his hands. “You always show me your songs before they’re finished. So why not this one?”

Because it is too soft and honest. Because I wrote it with him sitting somewhere under my ribs, and I have no idea what that means yet.

I don’t say any of that.

“Okay,” I say, my voice quieter than I want it to be. “You can see it.”

He looks at me a moment longer, as if he is trying to work out why my hands are so tight and why my face feels too hot. Then he turns his attention back to the notebook.

I hold my breath as he flicks through the pages. Until he reaches the last page.

My stomach drops.

There they are.

Those two dangerous stupid lines, that make me want to punch myself in the chest and tell my heart to grow some common sense.

If the world gets loud, I’ll be the quiet.

If your hands shake, I’ll hold the song.

I watch him read them and the whole world becomes too loud.

A car passes out front. A dog barks somewhere down the street. Normal life carrying on as if Phoenix Stone is not sitting beside me with my heart open in his hands.

He says nothing.

Not one smart-arse comment or a filthy little joke. Not one smug Phoenix line designed to make me glare at him instead of feel too much.

He just stares at the page and somehow, his silence is worse.

I want to snatch the notebook back. Tell him it was a joke and that the page means nothing.

That I was bored, that my pen got dramatic and my brain had no part in it.

I want to rip it out, screw it into a ball, set it on fire, and move to another country where no one has ever heard of me or my stupid bleeding heart.

But then he reaches for his guitar. He sits it across his lap and bends over it, brows pulling together, mouth pressed into a line. His fingers find the strings, all confidence until the first sound comes out.

Awful.

Truly awful.

I wince.

Phoenix stops and glares at me. “Don’t make that face.”

“What face?”

“The face that says I sound shit.”

“You sounded a tiny bit shit.”

His eyes narrow. “Creative process, Wills.”