Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Dean
Hurt
Johnny Cash
Memphis hits different. It’s sticky heat and barbecue smoke baked into the air, neon bleeding against brick, music crawling out of every alley like the city itself is a living amp.
Even the venue lot feels loud, as if the asphalt has its own pulse.
I step off the bus and the humidity wraps around my throat like a hand.
Good. Bad. Both. I should feel the buzz. The pre-show charge. The calm before we turn a stadium into a riot. Instead, I feel Lincoln, Nebraska and what happened there sitting quietly under my skin, the kind that keeps scratching at the back of your skull until you either drown in it or crack.
Sadie’s already out here. Of course she is.
Camera strap tight across her chest, lens pointed toward the stage rig while crew hauls cases like ants moving a house.
She’s talking to Cherry, nodding, focused, doing her job like she didn’t get her heart stepped on three states ago.
It’s impressive. Annoying. Dangerous. I don’t go near her. That’s become my religion lately.
Mikey bumps my shoulder as he passes, sweat already on his forehead. “Yo, you alive?”
“Barely.” I skate my gaze over the lot, pretending I’m scanning the setup and not scanning her.
“Cool. Keep doing that.” He smirks like he knows everything I won’t say out loud.
I flip him the bird without looking. He laughs, disappears into the chaos.
Hayden is with the tech team by the loading dock, checking the new cable run.
Luc’s not far from him, hands on hips, calm in that giant-mountain way he is when he’s trying to be normal.
He glances at me, sees my face, and doesn’t ask. Best friend code.
We move through load-in like muscle memory: cases to the wings, guitars to the stands, monitors to their marks. I take my own gear inside, shoulder brushing through black curtains and stage dust and the smell of last night’s smoke effects still clinging to everything.
The stage in Memphis is bigger than Lincoln. Higher. More steel in the air. More weight hanging overhead. More ways for shit to fall. A crew guy climbs the truss, shouting down to another. Chains clink. A motor whirs as a lighting bar rises inch by inch.
I should be thinking about setlist order, about the solo in track four, about my hands. Instead, my brain is too busy doing that thing it does when it wants to punish me. Counting dangers. Seeing ghosts.
I shake it off, head down, guitar on my knee, fingers rolling the strings in a quiet check. One note, then another. The sound is clean. I should feel relief. I don’t.
I look up without meaning to. Sadie’s onstage.
Not center, but close enough. She’s crouched near the upstage riser, snapping shots of a tech balancing on a ladder while another man below feeds cable through a pulley.
She’s got that focused face on; eyes sharp, mouth set, hair shoved into a bun that’s already coming loose at the edges.
She adjusts her angle, stepping back onto a taped mark that is absolutely not meant for a person to stand on right now.
“Camera girl,” I mutter to myself. “Move.”
As if she can hear me, she shifts, lifting the lens toward the ceiling rig to catch the bar as it glides into place.
She tilts her chin to follow it, the curve of her throat exposed in this stupidly casual way that has no business tugging at my attention.
I tell myself to look away. My brain doesn’t listen.
A shout cracks through the air. “Hold!” someone yells. “HOLD!”
The winch above us stutters. Metal shrieks high and awful, like something is tearing open. Time does that elastic thing. It stretches, then snaps. I see the lighting truss jerk sideways. A chain lurches. A bolt pops. The whole bar dips at a wrong angle. And Sadie is right under it.
“No-” The word doesn’t even make it out of my mouth before my body is moving.
The truss drops. Not all the way. Not a free fall.
But enough. Enough to rip a scream of metal through the space and send a fifty-pound spotlight swinging like a wrecking ball.
It slams down hard three feet from her shoulder, sparks bursting where it hits the steel stage.
Sadie freezes, the camera still up, caught between shock and instinct. I’m there before I know I ran. My hands clamp onto her arms. I yank her backward so hard she stumbles into my chest. I spin us away from the impact zone, my back to the rig, my body between her and what’s falling.
“Dean!” someone shouts. I don’t hear it right. I don’t hear anything right. All I hear is that sound. Metal tearing. Glass exploding. Her scream. Emily’s scream.
The stage tilts into asphalt. The lights become headlights.
The sparks become windshield shards catching the streetlamp glare.
My lungs seize and I’m eighteen again, mouth full of blood that isn’t mine, hands shaking so hard I can’t dial a phone.
I can’t breathe. My fingers lock around Sadie’s arms before I even realize I’ve moved.
“Dean…” she breathes my name, repeating it like a tether. “Dean, I’m okay. I’m right here.”
No. No, you’re not. You’re in front of me on a road that’s wet and slick. You’re turning your head to smile at me through the rearview mirror. “Don’t,” I choke. My throat is sandpaper. I smell fuel. I taste copper. My heartbeat is chaos.
Sadie doesn’t pull away. She should. She doesn’t. Her hands come up slow, careful. “Dean. Look at me.”
I can’t. If I look at her, I’ll see it happen. If I look at her, I’ll fail again.
“Ross.” Cherry’s voice cuts in, sharp but not unkind. “She’s fine. Let her go.”
Fine. Nothing about this is fine. “I thought—” My voice breaks, useless. I swallow hard. “I thought you were hurt.” The words land like a confession I didn’t mean to say out loud.
Sadie stills. Really looks at me now. “I wasn’t,” she says gently. “You got me out. I’m okay.”
My hands are shaking. I hate that she can feel it. I hate that anyone can see it. I step back too fast, like I’ve been burned. Sadie sways with me, still half caught between adrenaline and now. Her eyes are wide. Concerned. Not afraid. That almost wrecks me.
“You could have been killed,” I say, the anger gone, stripped down to something raw and shaking. “You could have been crushed, or hit, or…” I drag in a breath that doesn’t help. “I thought I was about to watch it happen again.”
Her mouth parts. “Dean”
“I can’t.” I shake my head, scrubbing a hand over my face. “I can’t do that again.”
Silence spreads. The crew holds still, but I don’t feel them anymore. I only see her. “I’m here,” she says softly. “I’m not hurt.”
I nod like I believe her, even though my body hasn’t caught up yet. My gaze drops to her hands, still steady. Still here.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she adds. “Or trigger that.”
“You didn’t,” I say immediately. Too fast. “This isn’t on you.” I finally look at her then. Really look. Alive. Breathing. Solid. My chest aches with the reality of it. I want to haul her into my arms and just hold onto her, but we’re keeping this professional, right?
She waits. Patient. Always patient.
“I just…” I trail off, jaw tight. There aren’t words for the shape of fear I carry. There never have been.
She nods once. Accepts what I can give. “I’m okay,” she repeats.
I turn away before she can see how close I came to breaking apart in front of her.
“Dean.” Luc’s voice is close now. “Hey. You with me?”
I nod because nodding is easier than words. Luc steps between me and the cluster of crew, not blocking, just giving me a line of space. A wall without walls. He doesn’t touch me yet. He knows better.
“You good to walk?” he checks, his voice low.
“Yeah.” Lie. Whatever. “Fine.”
“Okay. Come offstage for a minute.”
I don’t want to be led anywhere. I want to vanish. I want to crawl into a hole made of noise and sweat and never have anyone look at my face again. But my feet follow him anyway. Because he’s Luc. Because he’s the only person alive who knows what that sound really does to me.
We head down the side stairs into the wing, away from the spot where the truss almost took her head off and I almost lost my damn mind. My lungs finally pull a full breath. Not clean. Not easy. But full. Luc glances over his shoulder once, making sure I’m still there. I am.
“What the hell was that?” he murmurs when we hit a dark corridor. Not accusing. Not surprised. Just… steady.
“A truss.” I try for a scoff. It comes out thin. “Shit slipped.”
“I’m not talking about the truss.”
I swallow hard. The lights overhead buzz. The hallway smells like fresh paint and old concrete. “Just…” I run a hand over my head. “That sound.”
Luc nods like he always does when something hurts too much to say out loud. “Yeah. I know.” Silence for a beat. Then he asks softly, “You want to sit?”
“No.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t do the therapist thing. He just stands there, big and solid, a human anchor. “Sadie’s okay.” he assures me.
I flinch at the name. “She’s fine,” I snap automatically, then hate myself. I drag a hand down my face. “She’s fine. I know.”
Luc’s eyes narrow. Not at me. At the truth underneath me. “You scared the shit out of everybody.”
“Good,” I grit out. “Maybe they’ll stop hanging half a venue over people’s heads like it’s normal.”
“Dean.”
“What?”
His voice drops lower. “You scared the shit out of her.”
I stare at the wall. I don’t want to picture her face when I grabbed her. Don’t want to imagine what she saw in me. “She shouldn’t have been up there,” I mutter.
Luc lets out a breath. “Yeah. And you shouldn’t have been watching her that close.”
I whip my head toward him, ready to bite.
He lifts his brow. “You are.”
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. Because he’s right. Because I was tracking her like she mattered. Because my body moved for her before my brain had a vote. Because I didn’t even hesitate.
Luc watches me chew on that for a second and then add more gently, “You don’t have to punish yourself for having a reflex, man.”
I look down at my hands. They’re still shaking. “I fucking hate that she saw me like that,” I admit on a whisper.
Luc’s expression softens. “She didn’t look scared of you.”
“That’s the problem.”
He doesn’t say the next part, but I hear it anyway: She’s not scared. She cares. My throat seals shut. “Give it a minute,” Luc advises. “Then we go back out. We’ll finish safety checks, do line test, and pretend this was normal tour shit.”
It’s a kindness. I don’t deserve it. I nod once. Luc claps my shoulder lightly. “I’ll talk to Cherry. You breathe. Drink some water.”
“Yeah.”
He starts to walk away, then stops. “Dean?”
I look up.
“Don’t shove her away for being decent.”
My jaw clenches. “Not planning to.”
He holds my gaze like he knows I’m lying.
Then he goes. I stay in the corridor another beat, leaning my head back against the wall until the cold settles me.
The taste of panic is still in my mouth.
So is something else. Something like fear.
Not of the lights. Not of the accident. Not even of my own head.
Fear of that moment onstage when she said she wouldn’t hurt me. Fear of the fact that I believed her.
I push off the wall and head back toward the wing. Sadie is still there. Not on the riser now. Not in danger. She’s at stage right, talking quietly with Cherry and a tech, nodding as they explain how they’re re-securing the bar. She turns when she senses me, because she always senses me.
Our eyes meet. Her expression is careful. Not pity. Not panic. Just watching. Like she’s giving me space to choose what happens next. I hate that I’m grateful. I hate that she knows I’m grateful.
My mouth goes dry. My heart does that stupid leap thing. I force my face into stone. “Stay off the stage while they’re still rigging,” I bark, harsher than I mean.
She blinks once. Then lifts her chin. “Copy that.”
No argument. No smart mouth. Just a clean, professional yes. It makes me feel worse.
“Good.” I nod toward the floor, like I’m talking to a crew kid instead of the girl who has seen me bleed without blood. “We don’t need another incident.”
Her mouth quirks slightly. Not amused. Not warm. Something in between. “Right,” she agrees softly. “No more incidents.” It lands like she’s holding a secret between her teeth.
I step past her fast, before I do something stupid like apologize. Before I do something worse like mean it. Behind me, the crew starts moving again. Motors hum. Chains clink. The world resumes.
But inside me, something has shifted. A door I welded shut just rattled on its hinges. And the girl with the camera? She’s standing right outside it. Quiet. Watching. Waiting to see if I’ll finally open the damn thing, or slam it in her face.