1. Chapter One #2
“Is that what you’re calling it?”
“Yes.” He shifts his fingers on the neck of the guitar. “Now shut up and witness greatness.”
He tries again.
The second attempt is less terrible. The third has something in it. Not a song yet. Not properly. But a shape. A beginning. A rough little heartbeat dragged out of wood and strings by a boy who acts as if everything obeys him because he has never admitted how much he needs things to.
His fingers move clumsily at first, then with more confidence. He misses one note, curses under his breath, and tries again. He doesn’t look at me. For once, Phoenix Stone is not performing. He is working.
That does something strange to me. Watching him go quiet. The swagger pulled back just enough for the serious part of him to show.
He hums under his breath, as if the melody is hiding somewhere and he is pissed off that it will not come out when he tells it to.
I sit very still.
Then he sings.
Quiet at first. So quiet I almost don’t hear it over the rush of my own heart.
His voice is not perfect. It is thirteen-year-old rough, scratched at the edges, still growing into itself. But there is something in it already. Something raw. Something that knows how to hurt even before he understands what hurt is going to make of him.
My words leave his mouth and change.
As if they were sitting on that page waiting for him to touch them with his voice and make them dangerous.
If the world gets loud, I’ll be the quiet.
My chest pulls tight. Phoenix sings the line as if he knows exactly what loud feels like. As if he has lived inside slammed doors and raised voices and the kind of silence that comes after someone says something cruel.
Then he sings the next one.
If your hands shake, I’ll hold the song.
His voice dips on the last word.
I feel it.
God, I feel it everywhere.
In my throat. In my ribs. In the stupid soft place beneath my breastbone that has no business waking up for a boy who has been my best friend since I was six.
I forget to breathe.
Phoenix keeps looking at the page, singing my words back to me as if they belong in his mouth.
He trips over one phrase and scowls at the page as if the words personally offended him. Then he goes back and tries again. His voice cracks once, somewhat awkward through the middle.
“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath.
The word sounds different coming from him. Rougher. Warmer. Phoenix can take anything, even a curse, and make it sound as if it belongs in a song.
I should tell him not to swear because Mom might hear but he keeps going.
The melody is messy, but the feeling is not. That part lands hard. It gets under my skin in a way I don’t understand, twisting through my ribs, dragging something awake in me that is too young and too stupid to have a name yet.
Halfway through the song, he stops.
My stomach drops. “What?”
“That’s wrong.”
I look at the page, heat rushing to my face. “My words are wrong?”
His head snaps up. “No.”
The answer comes too fast. Too fierce. Then he frowns at the guitar and shifts his fingers. “Not your words, Wills. The melody I just played.”
He plays the last line again, then changes one chord.
The sound opens. It deepens. It stops being pretty and starts being painful.
Phoenix lets it ring out, his brows pulled together, his mouth serious in a way that makes him look older than thirteen for one dangerous second.
“There,” he says. “That’s better.”
My throat feels strange. “Why?”
“Because that line hurts.” His fingers brush the strings again, softer this time. “It needs something that hurts back.”
I stare at him.
At this boy with trouble in his grin and a house full of noise he never talks about. This boy who acts as if nothing can bruise him, then somehow knows exactly where my words are tender.
He plays again. This time, when he sings, the song feels different. Like there is something in it now. A bruise and a pulse. A place for the words to bleed properly.
I watch his mouth around my lyrics. I watch his fingers press the strings hard enough to leave marks, as if the guitar is something he can force into loving him back.
Something shifts inside my chest. I don’t know what it is. I only know I want him to keep singing.
When he finishes, the last note hangs between us.
Phoenix lets it fade. Then he looks at me, and for once, there is no smart-ass comment waiting behind his teeth.
“That’s good,” he says.
I swallow. “You think?”
“Yeah.” His eyes drop back to the page. “Really good. It might be the best thing you’ve written.”
Heat rushes up my neck. “You don’t have to say that because you’re my friend.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would.”
“No, I wouldn’t.” He gives me a look. “I’d tell you if it sucked.”
“You tell me everything sucks.”
“Because most things do.”
I laugh, but it comes out too shaky. Too much of me slipping through the cracks.
Phoenix looks down at the notebook again. “You should write more of this, Wills.”
“More depressing stuff?”
“More real stuff.”
That shuts me up.
Then his mouth curves and the boy I know comes swaggering back in. “When I’m famous, I’ll play that one first.”
I snort. “If you’re famous.”
“Not if. When.”
“Very humble.”
“Humility is for people without stage presence.”
“You don’t even have a stage.”
“I have your mom’s back step and an audience of one.”
He nudges my shoulder with his.
Then his voice drops, quieter than before. “You’re the talented one, Wills.”
I look at him.
His throat moves. “I’d be shit without you.”
And before I can make a joke, shove him away and call him an idiot, he wraps his arm around me and pulls me close.
My whole body forgets how to behave.
He pulls me in as if this is normal. As if boys say things like that and wrap their arms around girls without leaving fingerprints somewhere deep. As if my heart has not just done something stupid and permanent.
Those words sink straight into the softest part of me.
They curl up there and I have no idea where they are going to stay or the fact that one sentence can stay with someone for years.
And for one stupid, golden afternoon, sitting on a blanket under a tree, it feels as if the whole world begins right here.