Chapter 3
three
BEN
The bar is called The Rusty Tap, and I shouldn’t be here.
The floor is sticky enough that my sneakers make faint peeling sounds with every step, probably from a mix of spilled beer, sweat, and whatever industrial cleaner they use to pretend this place meets health codes.
It’s like the whole room is coated in a film of bad decisions, and I’m just one more layer.
But Nash and Stiles had had other ideas after today’s practice.
“Come on, Kellerman, live a little!” Nash had bellowed in the locker room. “You can’t spend every night tinkering with junk.”
It was a vintage lamp, not junk, and it’s worth forty bucks when I flip it.
But explaining that to Nash would be like explaining quantum mechanics to a brick wall, except at least the wall would have the decency to stay quiet. So I’d tried the safer approach: a polite refusal followed by an attempt to edge toward the door.
It hadn’t worked.
Now I’m wedged into a booth that’s seen better decades, the vinyl cracked and patched with duct tape, listening to them provide color commentary on my romantic prospects like this is ESPN and I’m the underdog in a championship nobody wants to watch.
“OK, OK, what about her?” Stiles jabs a finger toward a brunette near the dartboard. “She’s hot.”
Stiles squints, then shakes his head like a judge at a talent show. “She’d eat him alive.”
“True,” Nash says. “And he’d overthink the approach, freeze trying to think of the optimal opening line, and she’d walk away before he got a word out.”
Stiles snorts. “Nah, he’d spend twenty minutes explaining some random engineering thing, and she’d leave before he finished.”
They both laugh, and I take another sip of beer. “I don’t think I need to find a girl tonight—”
“What about the blonde at the bar?” Stiles interrupts, his voice pitching louder, causing a few people at nearby tables to glance over.
This is the part where a normal person would stand up for themselves and ask them to cool it.
And, if the guys kept going, they’d throw the beer in Nash’s face, storm out, and spend the rest of the night doing literally anything else.
But I stay quiet, because fitting in is more important than standing out.
With a sigh, I take a look at the blonde. She’s pretty, but she’s also deeply engaged in conversation with a guy who looks like he stepped out of a cologne ad—all sharp jawline and artfully tousled hair, the kind of guy who probably makes a woman orgasm with a whisper in her ear.
“She’s with someone,” I say.
“That’s just a dude, not her dude,” Nash says. “Go work the Kellerman magic.”
“The Kellerman magic,” I repeat flatly.
Stiles nods. “Confidence… self-deprecating humor… she’ll eat it up!”
I know I’m incapable of that, because I’ve tried it. There’s a difference between “charmingly self-aware” and “please stop talking, you’re making this weird,” and I’m always, always the latter. So, usually, I short-circuit, mumble something embarrassing, and run away.
But Nash and Stiles are looking at me with the expectant, slightly manic energy of a crowd chanting for an encore, and I know from experience that they won’t let this go.
If I don’t give it a shot with the blonde, they’ll get increasingly loud and obnoxious, whereas if I try and flame out, they’ll laugh and move on.
Maybe.
So the only way out is through.
“Fine,” I say, the word tasting like defeat.
“That’s the spirit!” Nash shoves me out of the booth.
I make my way toward the bar, my heart already doing that thing where it tries to claw its way out of my chest and make a run for the exit without me.
I could follow it out the door, and I briefly consider doing so, until I remember that I don’t have a car and an Uber home from here would bankrupt me.
It’s just a conversation. You’ve had conversations before. You talk to people every day. You’re a functional human being. You can do this.
Except I can’t. Because talking to my project partner Anya about Kirchhoff’s voltage law in the engineering lab isn’t the same as talking to a girl at a bar. Anya and I communicate in the shared language of circuit diagrams and solder fumes. But this?
This is going over the top of a trench to face enemy machine guns.
The blonde turns as I approach, and her smile is warm and friendly, the kind of smile that in any other context would put a person at ease. But my brain interprets it as a spotlight, a searchlight cutting through the dark to expose me for the fraud I am.
My mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
Not even a sound.
Her smile falters, confusion flickering across her face. “Are you… OK?”
I try again. This time, I manage to produce something that might generously be called a syllable, but it’s strangled and broken, and her expression shifts from friendly to concerned to—and this is the worst part—pitying.
It’s the same look people give to lost kids in grocery stores, and I get it regularly as an adult.
“I’m sorry,” she says gently as she looks around for an escape. “I think my friend is waving at me.”
She’s gone before I can even process the rejection, slipping into the crowd with the practiced ease of someone who’s had a lot of experience escaping uncomfortable situations.
I know her friend isn’t waving; it’s just the polite lie people tell when they need to get away from you without causing a scene.
Behind me, the booth erupts.
“And there it is, folks!” Stiles’s voice cuts through the bar like a foghorn. “The Kellerman Retreat, live and in person!”
I have two options: walk back to the booth and endure an hour of this, or find somewhere—anywhere—else to be.
I choose the mosh pit, because the band has just fired up, and they’re loud.
Loud enough to drown out the laughter from Nash and Stiles and the few others at nearby tables who saw what happened.
It’s objectively the worst possible plan. The pit is chaos incarnate, a churning mass of bodies slamming into each other. But it’s the only refuge available that doesn’t involve walking back to Nash and Stiles, so I push my way in, letting the crush of strangers swallow me whole.
It’s so loud that I can’t hear my thoughts, which is almost a relief.
The music is a wall of noise—heavy, distorted guitar, a drumbeat that feels like a second heartbeat in my chest, and a bass line so deep it vibrates in my bones.
I focus on it, letting it drown out the memory of that girl’s pitying smile and Stiles’s laughter.
A guy slams into my left side, then another clips my right. I’m too tall, too much of a target, and the others in the pit seem to enjoy bouncing off me. So, as the guitars thrash, I shift toward the stage, trying to find a pocket of slightly less violent chaos.
That’s when I see her.
And for a second, my brain goes completely, blissfully quiet.
She’s maybe five-foot-seven, standing at the front of the stage like she’s daring the crowd to come at her. Choppy blonde hair falls across a face that isn’t smiling—isn’t even trying to—and is instead set in this fierce, defiant glare that makes her look like she’s ready to fight God and win.
She’s wearing a plaid skirt that’s been safety-pinned in about fifteen places, ripped fishnets, and combat boots. And it’s just about the most effortlessly beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, a girl comfortable in her skin and screaming at the world.
But not beautiful in the way that’s safe, or easy, or designed to make you comfortable. She’s beautiful in the way a lightning storm is beautiful—dangerous, unpredictable, impossible to look away from even when your brain is screaming at you to take cover.
Her stance is wide, braced, her guitar slung low across her hips like a weapon. She’s not asking for the crowd’s attention. She’s demanding it, and the crowd is giving it to her—I’m giving it to her, my focus on her cutting through the chaos like a blade.
Even from here, I can see the intensity in her eyes, the way her whole body is coiled tight, a spring compressed to the breaking point and ready to explode.
And then she does, her fingers flying across the fretboard, fast and precise, producing a driving, furious riff that hits like a freight train.
I can’t take my eyes off her.
It’s not just that she’s hot—though she is, in a way that makes my brain forget how to process visual information—it’s the confidence.
The way she owns the stage, the way she doesn’t give a single fuck what anyone thinks.
She’s not performing for the crowd. She’s performing at them, and they’re eating it up.
A girl like that would never go for a guy like me.
She’s everything I’m not.
Confident, fearless, and completely in control of the space she’s occupying.
But even as that thought settles, something else kicks in.
Something quieter, but just as powerful.
I hear the sound.
Not just the music, but the sound itself, the specific character of her tone. It’s gorgeous—warm, thick, with that slightly crunchy breakup that only happens when you push vintage tubes right to the edge, working with the guitar to give her that growl that cuts through the mix like a blade.
It’s perfect.
But underneath her perfect tone, my ear catches something else. A low, persistent hum. Sixty-cycle. It’s faint, buried under the distortion and the volume, but it’s there, lurking in the quiet spaces between the chords like a ghost in the machine.
She’s fighting it.
I see it now, the way her left foot taps a beat on one of her pedals—not for effect, but for control—and the way her right hand drifts to the volume knob on her guitar, rolling it back just slightly to kill the hum before it gets too loud.
She’s not just playing; she’s problem-solving, navigating the flaw in real-time.
And never missing a beat.
But before I finish my analysis of the problem, she does just about the only thing I didn’t expect. She takes three steps back, builds momentum, and then she charges, hurling herself off the stage and into the crowd with the kind of reckless, fearless abandon that makes my heart stop.
She’s airborne, her guitar still howling, her body a blur of motion and pure, unfiltered courage. A second later, the crowd catches her—barely—and she’s surfing, her boots kicking out, still playing uninterrupted, and I’m just standing there, stunned and completely in awe.
That’s what it looks like when someone isn’t afraid of anything.
And then I see it.
A guy near the front shifts his grip, and his hand slides down, blatant and deliberate, grabbing her ass. She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even seem to notice, but I do. And a second later, I see another hand—from a completely different guy—reach up and grab her chest.
The awe vanishes.
The music vanishes.
Suddenly, I’m not in The Rusty Tap anymore. I’m back in that dim, beer-soaked house party my senior year of high school, the one where I stood on the edges of the living room and watched my teammates mock Mia, their voices loud and cruel, and I didn’t say a word.
I just stood there, silent, letting it happen because I was too scared to say anything, too desperate for their approval to risk standing up. I told myself it would blow over, that speaking up would just make it worse, and that it wasn’t that big of a deal.
And when she broke up with me the next day, her voice had been quiet.
Disappointed.
I’m not mad you laughed, Ben. I’m heartbroken that you just… didn’t speak up, she’d said. I thought you were the one good one.
I’ve carried that sentence with me ever since, the second scar that never heals. But I won’t let it happen this time. Not again. Because, even though this short-haired blonde isn’t—and never will be—my girl, she deserves someone in her corner, defending her from these grabby-hand assholes.
I shove forward, using my size for once, and my elbow connects with someone’s ribs—the guy who grabbed her chest—and he stumbles back. Others are displaced as I plant my feet and box them out, the same move I use on the ice to protect the crease, my body a wall between the groping hands and her.
Bodies scatter around us, and somewhere in the chaos, the music grinds to a halt, the sudden silence filled with a high-pitched screech of feedback from her still-live amp. I turn to face her, and realize with horror that I’ve done too good a job getting the creeps off her.
She’s falling.
I catch her.
It’s not graceful. It’s not smooth.
It’s a panicked, graceless lunge that ends with her draped over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, her guitar dangling, her breath coming fast and sharp against my back. As she protests, the crowd goes silent, and I suddenly realize every person in the bar is staring at me.
I don’t know what to do.
My brain is screaming at me to put her down, to apologize, to explain, but my body is moving on autopilot, carrying her back toward the stage like she’s a live grenade I need to dispose of before it explodes.
I hoist her up onto the stage, and the second her boots hit the wood, I let go and step back, my heart hammering.
OK. Good. Mission accomplished. She’s safe. Now leave.
I turn to leave.
A hand slams onto my shoulder, stopping me cold.
It’s her.
Her eyes are blazing, her jaw tight, and when she speaks, her voice is low and furious, meant only for me. “What the fuck was that?” she says.
“Uh…” I try to answer. I try to explain—about the hands, about what I saw, about how I was trying to help—but the words won’t come. “I…”
It’s happening again.
“You think you can just put your hands wherever you like without asking?” Her voice is shaking now, not with fear, but with fury. “What gives you the right?”
“I—” I manage, but it’s useless. The sentence dies in my throat, unfinished, strangled.
Tell her. Just tell her what you saw. String the words together. You can do this.
But I can’t.
I’m drowning in front of an audience, and there’s no lifeline coming.
She stares at me for one more second, her expression shifting from anger to contempt. Bewildered, exhausted contempt, like I’m not even worth the energy it would take to stay mad. Like I’m just another problem in a long line of problems she’s had to deal with tonight… every night… her whole life.
Then she turns her back on me, grabs the mic, yanks it toward her, and her voice cuts through the silence like a blade. “THIS ONE’S ALL TORN DOWN!”
The other band members pick up her timing perfectly, and the music crashes back to life, louder and angrier than before. I watch for a split second, my face burning, my chest tight, and then I do the one thing I always do when it comes time to speak up or stand out.
I retreat.
Because doing anything else just makes it worse.