Chapter 32
thirty-two
CASS
The house lights die, and the darkness swallows me whole.
For one suspended heartbeat, everything goes silent—the murmur of the crowd, the bass-heavy thump of the venue’s shitty PA playing generic between-set filler—and in that void, I am nothing but adrenaline and rage, a live wire with nowhere to ground.
Then the stage lights slam on.
White-hot.
Blinding.
The Firehouse is known for a kind of theatrical overkill that makes this shitty dive bar feel like Madison Square Garden for exactly thirty seconds. Then you remember you’re standing on a platform held together with the collective delusions of every musician who’s ever thought this could be it.
I grab my guitar and step up to the mic.
The crowd is a blur of faces I refuse to focus on.
Because I don’t need to see them. I just need to burn.
Then I stomp on my distortion pedal. The click is satisfying—the physical confirmation that I’m about to make some noise—and I reach back to adjust the feedback on my amp. Just a quick tweak, nothing I even need to think about—
But then I freeze.
My hand hovers over the wrong amp.
It’s not the sleek black digital nightmare I bought a few days ago.
This amp is worn and battered, with peeling stickers from bands I loved in high school and torn grille cloth I never bothered to fix because it added “character” and a cigarette burn on the top corner from that one disastrous gig in Asbury Park where everything went wrong except the music.
This amp is mine.
That’s not possible.
It can’t be here.
But it is.
I can feel the familiar vibration humming through the wood—the amp is already on, already warmed up, already waiting. I know for sure this amp is going to hum, killing our show and making Joel pissed off at me all over again. But we’re here now, and everyone is watching, so what the fuck.
“Rock and roll, right?” I whisper to myself.
I hit an A chord.
CRANG.
The sound detonates through the venue. It’s massive. Warm. Thick with tube saturation and harmonic richness that vibrates through me in the best possible way. The low-end punches through my ribcage, and the highs shimmer without ice-picking my eardrums.
It’s every bit of the sound I love from this beast of an amp.
But there is no hum.
I mute the strings, and the room goes silent.
The signal is clean.
I’m standing here with my hand against the strings, listening to…
Nothing?
How?
My gaze finds Milo behind the kit. He’s already ready to count in the first track, drumsticks raised, but he pauses long enough to lean forward over the snare with a grin that can only be described as deeply pleased with himself, which for Milo is just another Tuesday.
He points a drumstick toward the wings. “The hockey guy,” he says.
My eyes widen, and I turn to look.
I spin the amp slightly, just enough to see the back panel. The screws are shiny. New. Brass heads gleaming under the stage lights like tiny medals of honor. Someone has been inside this thing. Someone with precise hands and obsessive attention to detail. Someone who knows it and knows me.
He didn’t buy me a new amp.
He didn’t try to upgrade me.
He fixed the ghost.
My eyes scan the crowd. Past the pit. Past the bar, where Nash is saying something to Stiles that’s probably idiotic. Past the sound booth and the emergency exit and all the faces that don’t matter. And that’s where I find him.
He’s leaning against a brick pillar, arms crossed over his chest in that way that makes him look smaller than he actually is, like he’s trying to compress his six-foot-four frame into something less noticeable. When he catches me looking, he doesn’t wave, doesn’t smile.
He just gives me a thumbs up.
You beautiful, stupid boy.
Milo counts us in. The drums kick. Joel’s bass drops.
And I play like a punch nobody saw coming.
My fingers find chords I haven’t played in weeks, muscle memory working its ass off to fly through the opening riff of our hardest track, the one with the quick changes that I always fumble live. But tonight, it flows out of me like water finding its natural path downhill.
Joel’s head snaps toward me mid-verse, and I catch his expression in my peripheral—confusion warring with something that might be wonder—because he can hear the difference too. The amp isn’t fighting me, and, for once, the gear and I are on the same team.
During the bridge, I close my eyes and just listen.
It’s perfect.
Track two… track three… we’re on fire, and tonight feels right. The crowd gets into it, although I can feel it more than see it—bodies moving that weren’t moving before, conversations dying mid-sentence, and attention focusing like a lens narrowing to a single bright point.
The pit sparks, and then ignites.
As the maelstrom of controlled violence and energy plays out before me, I’m like a goddess in charge of her demonic minions. They lap up every bit of me… us… our sound. And I decide halfway through track four that I’m never going to clean it up, polish it down, or make it acceptable for anyone.
“This one goes out to all the people who wanted me to be less myself and more manageable,” I say into the mic before track five. “It’s called All I Am.”
Then we’re off again, and I’m proving that, while I don’t belong in a university classroom with all the trained musicians, the ones who spoke theory like a native language while I fumbled through it like a tourist with a phrasebook, I definitely belong here on a sticky stage in a dive bar.
On top of the world.
We burn through the next few tracks, and by now the crowd is on fire. Everyone is pumping the air, and if nobody gets hurt in the pit, it’ll be a good night. And—not that I care right now—I can see the industry folk near the sound booth are listening closely.
And when the final song approaches, I know what I have to do.
My hands are shaking when I grab the microphone. Too much feeling, too much clarity, too much of everything I’ve been feeling and running from for weeks crashing into me all at once, while I’m also trying to control the beast that is our back catalog.
“This last one,” I say into the mic, my voice stripped of the sneer I usually hide behind. “This last one’s a dedication.”
Don’t think about it. Just do it.
“To my boyfriend, Ben.”
I point toward the back of the room. Toward the pillar. Toward the giant with the curly hair who’s currently going rigid with shock, his whole body doing that classic Kellerman freeze I used to find adorable, before I found it infuriating, before I found it adorable again.
“He’s back there, the huge hockey player who looks like he’s about to pass out.” I continue, grinning. “He fixed my amp, and he’s the real deal.”
I count us in with a scream and we detonate.
Joel’s bass drops like a bomb. Milo’s kick drum punches straight through my sternum. And I’m gone—fingers flying across the fretboard, bending notes until they howl, the amp Ben fixed is pushing every ounce of fury and joy I’ve got into the air.
We rip through the song, but before we finish, I take the car off the track, Milo and Ben looking at me sideways as the solo rips out of me—sixteen bars of absolute chaos, my pick hand blurring as I play my love letter to Ben.
And when the final chord crashes down, the room goes insane.
I catch it in fragments through the ringing in my ears, the crowd surging forward, hands thrust skyward, voices raw from screaming. In the back corner, two suits I don’t recognize are leaning together, one of them already tapping something into his phone.
The other bands clustered near the bar have gone still, their body language shifting from competitive tension to something deflated, resigned, like they know they’ve already lost to Punk Rock Barbie and the band up first on the night’s long card.
And the hockey guys. God, the hockey guys.
Nash and Stiles are whooping like idiots.
Rook is grinning.
Behind them, looking like he might actually die of pride, is Ben.
The applause is still echoing when I shove past Joel.
“Hey—” He’s trying to high-five me. “That was—Cass, wait—”
I don’t wait. I can’t. There’s too much electricity under my skin, too much urgency propelling me toward him and whatever comes next. I unsnap the strap and dump the Telecaster onto the drum riser with a clang of strings that probably gave the sound guy a heart attack.
Then I head for the hockey guys like a homing missile, grab his hand and pull. For anyone else, the sight of a five-four me pulling a six-four him absolutely anywhere would have been amusing, but he falls in behind me. A minute later, we burst out into the night.
And of course it’s raining.
Because apparently the universe has a flair for melodrama and I’m living in the final act of every romance movie ever. The first drops hit my bare arms like ice needles after the sweat-soaked heat of the stage, and in seconds I’m drenched, my hair flattening against my skull.
The alley is narrow and grimy, lined with dumpsters and the accumulated debris of a hundred load-ins and load-outs. A single security light casts everything in sickly yellow, turning the raindrops into golden needles slashing through the darkness.
And when I turn to face him, he looks absolutely wrecked in the best possible way—six-foot-four of soaked flannel and anxious energy, his curls flattened against his forehead, rain streaming down his face and dripping off his jaw.
“Cass,” he starts. The word comes out fast and desperate, like he’s been rehearsing this speech in his head for hours and needs to get it out before he loses his nerve.
“I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. In the hallway, when I said it wasn’t serious—I didn’t mean it. I never meant it. I was scared and—”
“Ben.”
“—and I hate that part of me, the part that learned the only way to survive was to—”
I grab his shirt. “Ben.”
He stops. His eyes are wide, rainwater collecting on his lashes. Up close I can clearly see the green of his irises, bright even in the dim light, and the exhaustion carved into his face—the sleepless nights, the weight of guilt he’s been carrying, the effort he’s put into my amp.
“Stop,” I say, as his chest heaves under my fists.
“But I need you to know—”
“I know,” I tighten my grip. “I know it was panic. I know you didn’t mean it. But I need you to know that the blame isn’t just yours, because I was waiting for the first sign that I was wrong and that you were rejecting the real me.”
His brow furrows. “Cass…”
“So I ran.” The admission tastes sharp. “When I heard what you said, I ran. I didn’t give you a chance to explain. I chose to believe the worst because if I was right about you hurting me, then I didn’t have to be vulnerable and I could just be angry.”
The rain is coming down harder now, soaking through my clothes.
“But you?” I say. “You built something with your own hands and risked everything to give it to me, knowing I might throw it back in your face anyway.” I shake my head, water flinging from my hair. “That takes guts I don’t have.”
“Cass—”
“Thank you for having courage while I was hiding.”
He’s staring at me like I’ve started speaking a language he doesn’t recognize. His hands are hovering at his sides, fingers twitching toward me and then pulling back. They’re hands that fixed my amp and built a bridge back to me.
“The amp... it’s the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me,” I say, my voice trembling. “But I’m still scared.”
“I know,” he says. “I know.”
“I need to know that the next time you’re scared—the next time your friends push you, or you feel like you don’t belong—you aren’t going to use me as a shield.” I wrap my arms around myself, shivering. “Because I can’t survive that again.”
“I would rather never play hockey again than make you feel small,” he says, and the ferocity in his tone cuts through the rain. “I was a coward, but fixing that amp taught me something. You don’t throw away the things that matter just because there’s noise in the signal. You fight for them.”
“You’re my grounding wire,” I whisper, the realization finally settling. “And I think... I think I’m done running from the things that scare me.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I take a breath that shudders in my chest.
“I love you,” he says, and there’s nothing careful about it. “I love you, Cass. Not the stage version, not the angry punk girl. You.”
Something breaks loose in my chest. Not breaking apart—breaking free.
“I love you too,” I say. “You beautiful, brilliant, stupid boy.”
And then—finally, inevitably—I kiss him.
I grab fistfuls of his soaked flannel and yank him down to me, and his hands find my waist—steadying, grounding, pulling me flush against him. His mouth meets mine with the desperation of someone who thought he’d lost something irreplaceable and just discovered it was waiting for him.
He tastes like the storm. His lips are cold, but his tongue is hot when it slides against mine. I press my whole body against his, feeling the solid warmth of him through layers of wet fabric, and his hands tighten on my hips like he’s afraid I’ll dissolve if he lets go.
I won’t.
Not this time.
His mouth moves from my lips to my jaw, trailing heat across my frozen skin, and I gasp when his teeth graze the spot just below my ear. My fingers tangle in his wet curls, pulling him closer, and his groan vibrates against my throat—a sound that goes straight through me.
“Cass.” His hands slide up my back, pressing me so close I can feel his heartbeat against my chest, or maybe that’s mine, it’s impossible to tell.
“I’ve got you,” I say against his lips. “And if you run, I’m going to chase you, Kellerman.”
He kisses me again—slower this time, deeper, the kind of kiss that makes promises. His hands frame my face, thumbs stroking along my cheekbones, and I lean into him the way you lean into shelter after weeks of standing in the cold.
My grounding wire. That’s what he is. The thing that takes all my jagged, sparking chaos and gives it somewhere safe to go. But here’s the thing about grounding wires—they don’t just absorb the spark, they conduct it, and right now, electricity is coursing through me.
“Ben.” My voice comes out rough, wrecked. “I want you. Now.”
His hands still on my waist. “Here?”
I grab a fistful of his shirt and pull him toward the door. “Not quite...”