12. Luca
TWELVE
Luca
It wasn’t like I hadn’t imagined it since I started this whole fucking healing journey—what it would’ve been like if I’d actually made the choice to leave this world for whatever came next. How it would have affected my friends. But imagining it and facing it were two entirely different things. McKenzie’s grief for her brother was still an open cut, even fifteen years later. In my head, I imagined that agony faded with time. But maybe it merely scabbed over, scratched open with every milestone that passed without them or with every birthday or holiday missed.
I rubbed my hands along the tops of her shoulders. “Thank you for sharing that with me. I know it had to have been hard. I wish I’d known last night. Maybe there was something I could have done to help.”
“Honestly, you just being there was…really great,” she said. “And you kept me from doing anything stupid. Well, anything more stupid than getting wasted and puking in the bushes.”
“Do you normally spend the anniversary alone?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m usually with my mom, but she had the opportunity to go on the trip of a lifetime to Italy, and I told her she needed to take it. I wanted her to, and Brennan would have wanted that too. Then I made plans with some friends, but I don’t know…my mind started going to some dark places, so I canceled. Then I ended up at The Piccadilly Deli, and you know the rest.”
“I’m glad I ran into you.” For so many reasons. So that I could keep her safe. Because I enjoyed her company. Because she saw the darkest parts of me in a way many couldn’t, and it didn’t seem to scare her.
“Me too. And I’m sorry I broke down on you like that,” McKenzie said, pulling out of my grasp and dabbing her fingers beneath her lashes. “This isn’t like me. I don’t do this.”
“Do what?” I asked.
“Talk about shit,” she said with a nervous laugh. “You know. Feelings. I’m more of the suffer in silence type. Or on rare occasions, get blackout drunk.”
“I can relate to that,” I admitted. “But all that managed to do was send me to therapy, so maybe it’s good to talk about shit sometimes.”
“Maybe,” she said with a faint smile.
I reached out, swiping away the lingering dampness on her cheeks with my thumbs. Her gaze snagged on mine. My eyes were drawn to her mouth like a bee to a flower. I swear, her bottom lip quivered slightly. Did she feel it too? Could she see the effect she had on me?
This wasn’t like me. None of it. I didn’t take care of people. Hell, I barely took care of myself until recently. I didn’t do the feelings shit either, and I definitely didn’t do relationships. I was into more… casual connections, but there was nothing casual about what I felt forming between McKenzie and me.
She let out a small shudder of a breath. “But I think that’s enough feeling for one morning.”
My chest tightened, and I pushed my hand through my hair to keep myself from touching her. I’d wondered if she’d remember the rest of what happened the night before. I’d almost hoped she would, but she didn’t. It was what I’d been afraid of, what I’d wanted to avoid. I hadn’t wanted her to hook up with me in a moment of drunken delusion and regret it. The old me would have been far less discerning or too drunk myself to make the right call, but now…things were different. Though, I’d kind of hoped her drunken desires might reflect her sober ones.
“Yeah,” I said. “How about we finish breakfast and then go pick up your truck?”
“That would be great,” she said. “And a shower. I smell like a whiskey sour.”
I shot her a playful grin. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but yeah…”
She swatted my arm and rolled her eyes, heading back to the counter. We finished our food and coffee, chatting while the cats wove between our feet. Then I waited while she took a quick shower, trying to keep my mind from wandering to the space behind the closed bathroom door.
“Ready?” she asked when she emerged with damp hair and wearing a black sweat suit. How was she so fucking cute in sweats?
I shrugged on my jacket and reached inside the pocket for my keys. “Ready.”
Suddenly, I itched to get my journal back in my hands. Finally, I had something to say.
I returned to Dallas and Katie’s after taking McKenzie back to her truck and immediately opened the moleskin journal. With McKenzie’s advice to think of it like writing a song at the forefront of my mind, I found that the words came easier. They weren’t cohesive or even good, but they were mine.
After pouring over the blank pages for a couple of hours, scratching through lines, and adding new ones, I began hearing melodies in my mind. Of course, when I’d come back to Nashville, I hadn’t thought to bring my guitar. Music had been the last thing on my mind. So, I took Emilia for a quick field trip to pick up a coffee and a pup cup before heading to Guitar Center.
“If you tell anyone about this, I will deny it,” I said to Emilia as she licked the whipped cream from the tiny cup I held for her in my lap. Not that the geriatric dog could hear me anyway. “Who even am I?”
When we got to the store, I tucked Emilia under one arm and went inside. There were a few other customers, some being helped by employees wearing black button-downs with the Guitar Center logo.
“Hey, man, can I help you?” a tall young-looking guy asked as he approached. His eyes widened as he leaned a little closer. “Holy shit, dude. You’re Luca Sterling. Big fan.”
“I need a guitar,” I said by way of a greeting.
“I can definitely help you with that,” he said eagerly, clasping his hands together. “Follow me. I’m Quentin, by the way.”
I nodded, too focused on the mission at hand for pleasantries, and trailed behind him.
“Cute dog,” he said over his shoulder.
“Thanks.”
Quentin came to a stop in front of a wall filled with electric guitars and started rambling about the different models they had available.
“You can’t go wrong with a Fender Strat,” he said, tapping his fingers along a seafoam green version propped against a stand. “But I’m a Schecter guy myself. The necks are slimmer, and they’re just a bit more versatile depending on what your needs are. I play in a Metallica cover band, and my C-1 FR shreds like a fucking dream.”
That was not what I needed. I wasn’t envisioning soaring guitar solos or anything like that. I wanted something a bit…softer.
“Actually, I think I’d like to check out your acoustics,” I said, gesturing down the wall with my thumb.
Once again, Quentin launched into more specifics about each of the various brands that I didn’t really care about. I had enough talent in my left fuck-you finger to make any guitar sound good. What I really needed was something that felt right.
I was drawn to the Gibson Hummingbird hanging in front of me.
“Here,” I said, pressing Emilia into Quentin’s chest. “Hold her.”
“Oh, uh, sure.” He hesitantly scratched the pup’s ear. “I never had a dog growing up. I did have a ferret once named Nikki Sixx. I used to take him to school in the pocket of my hoodie. One day he chewed a hole through it and stuck his head out of my stomach like in that movie Alien .”
“Believe I would’ve kept that one in the vault, Quentin,” I said, sitting on a nearby stool with the Hummingbird propped on my leg. The neck fit in my hand like it was made for me. I started strumming the melody that had been in my head all day as Quentin yammered on about his old ferret, and Emilia let out an annoyed huff.
“…and one day he got out of his cage, and the little fucker got into a hole in the drywall,” Quentin said with a heavy sigh. “Never saw him again after that.”
I stopped playing and stood, snatching Emilia from Quentin’s grasp, and handed him the guitar. “I’ll take this one.”
Emilia and I returned home with the brand-new guitar, and she snacked in the kitchen while I went back to the bedroom. I opened the notebook and began to play, the gravel in my voice filling the silence.
“ The only way I can win is to fix the game so everybody loses
Pay to play, drop your guard
Won’t know what hit you, but you’ll feel the ache of my bruises
Because when you get high, I go low
Pull back, don’t get too close
Or I’ll go
So it goes”
I dropped my pick to the pen-scrawled page with a smile and nodded. It was far from perfect, but it was a start. But more importantly, it felt fucking good.
It was as though I’d taken a sledgehammer to the wall I’d built between me and my emotions. Once I gave voice to one feeling, another would raise its hand and demand to be heard. By the time I heard Dallas and Katie’s car pull in the driveway that evening, I’d filled half the notebook with lines upon lines of my thoughts and incomplete songs.
I was glad I’d been able to find an outlet, but I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to actually hear what I’d written, so I put it away for the night. I went into the living room and thanked Katie for sending McKenzie the text earlier that morning, giving her the day off.
“Of course. I was happy to do it,” she said. “How was she today?”
“Okay, I think,” I answered. I wasn’t sure if Katie knew about McKenzie’s brother, and if she didn’t, it wasn’t my place to tell her. “She didn’t say a lot about what was bothering her last night, but she did seem to be feeling better when I dropped her off at her truck.”
Katie gave a solemn nod. “Thanks for looking out for her.”
She and Dallas told me about their day while I kept quiet about mine. Then Dallas mentioned they were going to watch a show before they made dinner and asked if I wanted to join them, but I opted to lie down for a few minutes.
I was physically exhausted, but my mind was wide awake. About half an hour later, I realized staring at the ceiling wasn’t doing me any favors, so I decided to get up and do some laundry. When I’d first started staying there, Katie insisted on doing every little thing for me, including throwing my wash in with theirs. But once I started to regain my footing, I’d gotten into the routine of heading down to the musty basement in the morning after they’d left for work to wash a load so I wasn’t tying up the water in the old house while one of them was in the shower.
With my earbuds in, I turned on some music and piled my heap of dirty clothes into a basket. I carried it through the hall and into the kitchen, opening the door that led to the basement. Balancing on the rickety steps, I pulled it shut behind me in case Emilia wandered in and got curious. I descended the stairs, an old Blink-182 song playing in my ears. When I got to the bottom and turned toward the machines, a shriek pierced through the music, and I nearly tumbled backward.
There was Dallas, sitting buck naked on top of the washer with his legs spread and Katie—thankfully, still in a bra and some shorts—standing between them. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to keep me from seeing Dallas’ whipped cream-covered dick or the patches of white stuck to Katie’s chin.
So that’s why they keep all that shit in the house!
“Fuck,” I shouted, dropping my basket to the concrete floor, sending my clothes scattering as I covered my eyes with one hand and plucked my earbuds out with the other.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you guys were down here.”
“We thought you were resting,” Dallas cried.
“I was,” I said with a shudder, squeezing my eyes shut. But it was too late. The vision of Dallas and his banana split dick was already burned into my retinas. I’d never be able to listen to “All the Small Things” ever again. “I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d do laundry. How was I supposed to know you’d be down here receiving mouth to south resuscitation?”
“Oh my God,” Katie muttered. “Kill me now.”
“You couldn’t have put a sock on the door or something?” I asked. “Maybe a Tide Pod? I mean, you are in the laundry room.”
“You can open your eyes now,” Dallas said.
“I’d rather not.” I’d never get that image out of my head as long as I lived.
“We’re covered,” Katie said, but I opened my lids slowly, just in case. Sure enough, they’d both managed to get their clothes back on.
Katie’s cheeks were flaming red, and Dallas’ face was partially obscured by his hand.
“Sorry, guys,” I said, piling my clothes back into the basket. “I’m gonna…go be anywhere but here.”
“You don’t have to leave,” Katie said, tugging at the hem of her shirt. “You can use the machine.”
“I think I’m gonna pass on that.” I nodded toward the stuff in my hands. “In fact, I might just burn these and start over.”
Dallas shot me an annoyed glare. “Really? You do remember we all had to hear you have sex in the bathroom that one time at Sunday dinner, right?”
“Not my proudest moment,” I said with a wince. “Listen, I’m gonna go out and grab something to eat if I can find my appetite again. Maybe I’ll go for a drive. At any rate, I won’t be back for a few hours.”
Katie tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. “Seriously, you don’t have to go anywhere.”
“Oh, I do,” I said, backing away toward the stairs. “Because I’ve got to go buy some bleach to wash Dallas’ whipped cream wiener out of my head.”
Dallas grabbed the aerosol can and popped the top, pointing it at me. “You better watch it.”
I scrunched my nose. “Again, I’d really rather not.”
He threw a towel at me, but I dodged it, ran up the stairs, and was in my car in less than ninety seconds. I headed to a local pizza joint and picked up a pie. But I didn’t open the box right away. Instead, I found myself driving down the same roads I’d been on the night before until they led me back to the house with the upstairs apartment and a truck parked outside. Before I could stop to ask myself why I was there, I was climbing the iron staircase, pizza in hand.
I tapped out three rapid knocks on the door, and only then did my mind pause long enough to wonder what the fuck I was doing showing up at McKenzie’s unannounced—or at all. But I didn’t have long to consider it because she appeared, wearing an oversized fuzzy sweatshirt, leggings, and no shoes.
“Luca,” she said, blinking as though I was some sort of apparition. “What are you doing here?”
What was I doing there? I couldn’t tell her the truth. Not the part about Dallas and Katie because I couldn’t bring myself to relive that ever again. But I also couldn’t tell her that when I got in my car with nowhere to be, she was where I wanted to go. She was my somewhere.
I swallowed hard, holding out the pizza box. “Um, I thought maybe you could use some dinner?”
She studied me for a moment with narrowed eyes, but finally stepped aside, her lips curling into a half smile. “Well, you thought right.”