32. Chapter Thirty-Two
Willow
Phoenix Stone tells me he loves me in the least convenient places.
Against my mouth while I’m trying to make coffee.
Into my hair when I’m half asleep, pretending not to notice his hand has slipped under my shirt.
With his face buried in my neck after mind-blowing sex.
It’s as if the words have become part of how he breathes now.
He’s told me every day since the first time he said those three words.
If you’d gone back a year and told me this would be my life, that I’d survive an overdose, get clean, and somehow end up with the man I’ve loved for most of my life, who would actually love me the way I needed him to, I’d have told you to lay off whatever you were smoking.
But this is my life now.
And I love him the same way I always have.
I love him in the ordinary places, too. In the way he still checks the lock twice before bed, as if some part of him is still protecting a version of me that no longer needs protecting.
In the way he hums whatever song is stuck in his head while he cooks eggs he’s convinced he’s better at than he actually is.
I love him in the quiet, unglamorous, everyday moments nobody writes songs about, and in the loud, reckless ones that started this whole thing.
I love him the way I always swore I wouldn’t let myself do again. Completely and without an exit plan.
Phoenix parks my car in the studio lot and shuts off the engine. He glances over at me.
“Ready?” he asks.
“No.”
His mouth curves. “Good. Means you’re not dead inside.” He leans in and presses a kiss to my lips. “I’m right here with you, Wills. I’m not letting go of you today.”
I nod because if I try to speak, I might not manage it.
We get out of the car and Phoenix reaches for my hand before I’ve even closed the door.
He doesn’t let go the whole way to the entrance, his thumb rubbing over my knuckles.
When we reach the room the band always practices in, the guys are already there, sprawled across the couch like they always do.
Cruz notices us first. His eyes dip to our hands and lift to mine. A grin forms before he can stop it.
“Songbird,” he says, pushing off the couch.
He crosses to me and pulls me into a hug. His arms close around me with more care than they used to. I let myself hug him back because I’ve missed him and the guys more than I let myself admit.
“It’s good to see you,” he says near my ear.
“You too.”
He lets me go, and his gaze flicks past my shoulder toward Phoenix. “Your guard dog is glaring.”
Jax is next. He comes in fast, restless energy and broad shoulders, pausing himself up half a step before a collision.
His arms wrap around me, softer than Jax has ever been about anything, and I hate it a little.
I hate that they’re all treating me like something that might crack if they hold on too hard.
“Fuck, Wills,” he says. “It’s good to have you back.”
“It’s good to be back,” I say.
When I pull back from Jax, Jett is already there, arms open as if he’s been waiting his turn.
“Missed you,” he says.
“I missed you too.”
Phoenix steps up beside me, close enough that his arm brushes mine. He doesn’t reach for my hand this time, but I feel him there anyway.
“Okay,” he says. “I called you in because we’ve got three weeks before the UK tour kicks off and I want to change the set.”
Cruz drops onto the arm of the couch. “Change it how?”
“Add a song.” Phoenix glances at me. “Willow and I have been working on something for the past week and it’s ready. I want it in the set.”
“Alright,” Jett says. “Let’s hear it.”
Phoenix moves to pick up a guitar from the stand in the corner. He pulls up a stool, settles the guitar across his lap, and finds the opening chord. He runs through the structure first, no words, just the shape of it, letting the guys listen. Jax’s fingers start tapping against his thigh.
When Phoenix starts to sing, the room doesn’t move.
Cruz closes his eyes and listens. Jax stops tapping and goes completely still, which anyone who knows Jax understands is significant.
Jett has picked up a guitar from somewhere and is holding it across his lap, not playing yet, simply feeling out the song’s shape before he commits.
Phoenix takes it all the way to the end. He lets the final chord breathe before lifting his hand from the strings.
The room stays quiet for a moment.
“Okay,” Cruz says, letting out a slow breath. “Yeah. That’s going in the set.”
After that, it’s work. Jax sits behind his kit and starts working out the rhythm, loose at first, testing where the weight should fall. He overshoots it twice, pulls it back, and lands somewhere that makes Phoenix nod once.
Jett and Cruz fall into it together naturally, the way they always have, playing off each other without needing to talk about it first. Jett lays something down and Cruz builds on it.
Jax slides underneath both of them and suddenly the song has a spine.
They go back and forth, trying things, scrapping them, and trying again.
There is none of the tension I remember from the last time I sat in this room, watching them work. No short fuses. No loaded silences. Just four people who are good at what they do and are actually enjoying it.
After a while, when it starts to sound less like a rehearsal and more like something real, Phoenix crosses the room to me. He leans down and presses a kiss to my lips, completely unbothered by the three other people in the room.
“Perfect,” he says.
I notice Cruz first, his eyes lifting from his guitar. Then Jax, who misses a beat, recovers and says nothing. Jett looks over and smiles.
They have never seen Phoenix like this with me before. Not open, unbothered, and unconcerned with how he looks. The Phoenix they knew before didn’t do soft in front of an audience. He didn’t lean down to kiss a girl in the middle of a rehearsal as if the rest of the room didn’t exist.
Nobody says anything smart about it or makes it a thing.
But I can see it in the way Cruz and Jax’s mouths twitch before they get control of it.
They’ve seen it. The change in him. The edges that used to cut everything and everyone around him have worn down into something that still has shape but no longer draws blood the way it used to.
An hour turns into two.
The song gets taken apart, bruised, stripped down, built again.
They pull threads out of it and restitch them somewhere else.
They slow a section down until it aches, then speed it back up because the ache was too obvious.
Phoenix stops them four times on the same transition until it sits exactly the way he hears it in his head, and nobody complains, because this is how it works, how it used to always work.
Jax and Jett argue over something pointless and Cruz tells them to pull their fucking heads in.
Between takes, Phoenix comes to me. He leans over my shoulder to read the notebook, one hand resting on the back of the couch behind me, the other taking my pen without asking.
He reads what I wrote, what I crossed out, and then writes one word above a line I’d given up on. He hands the pen back without a word.
I look at the word. He’s right. He’s always right about this, which is annoying, but I would never tell him.
He bends and kisses my temple, smug as hell, then goes back to the mic.
By the time the song finally sounds right, I can feel it in my bones.
It belongs to the band now. It is no longer just the thing Phoenix and I made in the quiet.
It’s bigger than just us now. Louder. It has been handed to four people who know how to make a room feel it and they have done exactly that.
The door opens on the fifth clean run.
Damon walks in wearing a black coat, with a phone in one hand, and the expression of a man who believes rooms should rearrange themselves around him on arrival.
The song falls apart. Jax stops first. Cruz lets a final note ring out. Jett lowers his guitar and says nothing. Phoenix doesn’t move from the mic.
Damon looks at him, then at the band, then at me on the couch with my open notebook in my lap. His eyes linger on me a beat too long.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
Phoenix’s hand rests on the microphone stand. “Practice.”
Damon’s eyes narrow. “That song isn’t on the set list.”
“It will be.”
“Who approved this?” Damon steps further into the room.
There it is. The old chain of command, where Damon approved, polished, shaped, softened, cut, and sold.
“We did,” Phoenix says.
Damon’s gaze sharpens. “We?”
“Yes, the fucking band. Keep up, Damon.”
“That’s not how this works.”
Phoenix looks at him for a long moment. The corner of his mouth tugs up, the old arrogant asshole peeping through. “It is now.”
Damon laughs. “You don’t make changes to the set list without me. Not three weeks before a tour. Do you understand what goes into production? Lighting cues, press, pacing, rehearsals, and the live mix.”
“We do when the song belongs in the set.”
Damon’s eyes flick to me and the room shifts before he speaks.
“So that is how this works now?” Damon says. “She disappears, comes back with one song, and the whole tour bends around her?”
Nobody moves.
I don’t look at Phoenix. I don’t need to. I can feel him from across the room, the way the air shifts around him when something trips the wire. And right now, every single wire has been tripped.
Jax stands so fast that his stool scrapes across the floor. “Watch it.”
Cruz sets his guitar down slowly. “Choose your next fucking sentence with your survival instincts, Damon.”
Jett doesn’t raise his voice. “Don’t make her the problem.”
“I am talking about business,” Damon says, lifting a hand, as if he is dismissing this whole conversation.
Phoenix moves away from the mic. He stops close enough that Damon has to hold his ground or risk looking like he isn’t.
“Say that again,” Phoenix says. “Go ahead. Say it one more fucking time and see what happens.”
Damon opens his mouth to speak but closes it instantly.
“Yeah, that’s what I fucking thought. She didn’t disappear, you asshole.
She nearly fucking died.” The quiet is gone now, replaced by something more dangerous than shouting.
“She didn’t come back and change everything.
She came back and reminded us what the fuck Static Hearts is supposed to sound like.
And if you have a problem with that, you know where the fucking door is. ”
My breath catches.
Damon’s eyes flash. “You are letting your personal feelings interfere with the band.”
Phoenix laughs. “My personal feelings wrote half the songs that made this band worth managing, you asshole. So maybe say “a thank you” and get the fuck out of my studio.”
Damon stares at him and I watch the moment he realizes it.
That the version of Phoenix he knew how to manage, how to push, and how to keep just unstable enough to need him, is no longer standing in this room.
That version is gone. Whatever leverage Damon built his whole relationship with Phoenix on has been quietly dismantled.
He looks between all of us, searching for the crack.
For someone to remember. He holds the clipboard, the schedule, the access, the doors that open and the doors that don’t.
He finds Jax still standing, jaw set. Cruz leaning back with the particular amusement of a man who would genuinely enjoy watching this go further. Jett cold and still.
Damon looks at me last.
I stare back.
I don’t lower my eyes, shrink, or make myself smaller the way I used to in rooms like this one, among men like him. I just look at him and let him find nothing he can use.
“This isn’t over,” Damon says, turning away and lifting his phone as he heads for the door.
“Yeah, it is,” Phoenix says. “You just don’t fucking know it yet.”
Damon glances at each of us one final time before leaving, the door closing behind him as he leaves.
“From the top,” Phoenix says, stepping back to the mic.
And just like that, the room breathes again.
The song builds around me.
Phoenix’s eyes find mine across the room, the way they always do when he searches for me.
This is my life.
This room. This band. These four brilliant, impossible people who somehow became mine as much as I became theirs.
I earned the right to be here, not because they let me back in, but because my words helped build the ground beneath their feet.
Because I bled for these songs. Because even when I stood in the shadows, I was never separate from the music.
Phoenix sings, and this time, it doesn’t hurt to hear my heart in his voice.
It feels right.
*******