8. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
Evan
Iused to think my heart had already run the emotional gauntlet. Adrenaline, anger, that bargain-bin brand of love that flares up, fizzles out, and leaves you with a headache and someone else’s lip gloss smeared on your collar.
I’d had nights that blurred at the edges and mornings that tasted like remorse. Girls who liked my leather jacket more than the guy inside it. Applause from crowds so tiny you could fit them all in a gas station bathroom, if you didn’t mind getting cozy with the air freshener.
Then Lila showed up and made all of that feel like background noise on a busted radio.
Being with her was different. Dangerous word, different.
I never trusted it. Usually, different just meant a bad idea with mood lighting.
Yet Lila looked at me like the music mattered more than the act.
She listened past the noise, past the swagger, past the version of me who knew how to lean into a mic and make a room want things they’d regret later.
She saw right through me, which should have been terrifying. I wanted her anyway.
The band had just booked our first real tour.
Actual venues, actual crowds, actual chaos.
Our streaming numbers had jumped overnight, and suddenly we were the opening act for a major pop star who sang in crop tops and glitter tears.
Not our genre, not even close. But the exposure was too massive to pass up, and everyone knew it.
The rest of the band went out to celebrate with said pop star and her entourage. Something about a rooftop pool, champagne towers, and a possible dolphin tattoo on someone's inner thigh because tequila had taken the wheel.
I didn't go.
I booked the nicest hotel room I could afford. Technically, I could not afford it. That was a problem for future Evan, and future Evan already hated me, so whatever.
Room service on white linen, pillows too soft to trust, a bathtub the size of a small country with mood lighting and faucets that looked like they'd been designed by someone who used the word ambiance without irony.
Because I knew the clock was ticking. Tour meant van miles, load-ins, soundchecks, interviews, bad sleep, worse food. Days measured in wristbands and greenroom coffee. It meant distance, and distance had teeth.
I didn't want to waste a second of her.
So I paced. Phone in my hand, checking it too often, hating myself every time the screen stayed dark. The city pulsed beyond the window. Cars below. Music leaking from somewhere. A siren in the distance that made my muscles jump.
I kept thinking about the schedule. About how time vanished when you lived out of duffel bags and borrowed showers.
About her. The way she watched my hands on a guitar.
The way she laughed when I tried to pretend I wasn't nervous.
The way she could pull me out of my own head without trying, which pissed me off because I'd spent years making that place hard to enter.
When the knock came, I reached the door before my brain caught up.
She stood in the hallway wearing flip-flops and one of my old shirts, the hem barely brushing the tops of her thighs.
Her hair was twisted into a messy knot that looked like it had been made with one hand and zero patience.
No makeup. Just Lila. Tired, gorgeous, mine in a way I wasn't allowed to say where anyone could hear it.
She paused in the doorway, eyes scanning the room. "You really sprung for the romance package, huh? What's next, rose petals and a violinist hiding in the closet?"
I shut the door behind her and tried to be cool. Failed immediately.
My gaze caught on her bare legs, on the slope of her shoulder where my shirt had slipped wide, on the fact that she had worn my clothes to me like she knew exactly what kind of damage that would do.
"Violinist canceled," I said. "Hot date with a cello."
She rolled her eyes, but her smile went slow and knowing. That smile meant she understood what I'd done and why. It meant she knew I was scared of distance and that I was pretending I wasn't. It meant she was going to let me pretend for maybe ten more seconds before she ruined me.
"Poor violinist," she said.
"Poor me."
"You're in a luxury hotel room with a bathtub bigger than my kitchen."
"And yet, emotionally devastated."
"By plumbing?"
"By impending separation."
She stepped closer and set her overnight bag on the floor. "Impending separation sounds like a Victorian disease."
"I might have it."
"Symptoms?"
"Terrible judgment. Overpriced hotel rooms. Thinking about you in my shirt so hard I forgot how doors work."
Her mouth twitched. "Serious condition."
"Terminal."
She came to me then, no more jokes, no more pretending the room was about the room. Her hands slid up my chest and my brain emptied out like someone had pulled a fire alarm. She smelled like citrus shampoo, summer air, and the kind of trouble I would have followed into traffic.
"You leave in three days," she said.
"I know."
"Three days is not forever."
"No."
But it sounded like forever. It sat between us, mean and small.
She looked up at me, and the playfulness in her face cracked just enough for fear to show through. I hated that. Hated that I had caused any part of it, even by chasing the thing I'd wanted before I knew her.
"Hey." I brushed my thumb along the edge of her sleeve, my sleeve technically, but it looked better on her. Everything did. "I'm not disappearing."
"You're going on tour."
"That's not disappearing."
"It is if you get famous and start wearing sunglasses indoors unironically."
"I already do that sometimes."
"Exactly. Slippery slope."
I laughed, but it came out rough. She heard it. Lila always heard both the wrong and the right things.
Her fingers curled into my shirt. "Don't do that."
"What?"
"Act like you're fine because you think it makes me feel better."
I looked away.
Rookie mistake.
She caught my chin between her fingers and turned me back toward her like she had every right to put me where she wanted me.
Like she knew I would go. Her touch was gentle, but there was steel underneath it.
A quiet refusal to let me disappear into the old trick of dodging eye contact and pretending that made me untouchable.
“Evan.”
There it was.
My name in her mouth. Not shouted from a crowd or drowned by amps and feedback. Not shined up in fantasies built from posters, interviews, and songs strangers thought they understood. No stage lights. No barricades. No one reaching for a version of me they invented.
Just her.
Lila, barefoot in the low hotel light, looking at me like I was still a person. Like she could see the scared, hungry, stupid boy underneath the leather jacket and the borrowed arrogance and the future everyone kept telling me was about to happen.
I kissed her because I didn’t have a better answer.
Because saying I’m terrified would have sounded too small.
Because saying I think I’m already yours would have ruined us both.
Because her thumb was still under my chin, and her eyes were too open, and my chest felt like something inside it had come loose.
She kissed me back like she had been waiting all day to stop being brave.
Like the second my mouth touched hers, something in her finally unclenched.
Her shoulders dropped. Her fingers curled into my shirt.
The breath she let out against me was shaky, almost angry, like she hated needing this and needed it anyway.
I felt it move through her. Felt it move through me.
A surrender neither of us would have called surrender, because we were young and proud and stupid enough to think naming a thing gave it power.
The room blurred down to hands, heat, and breath.
The lamp beside the bed threw honey-colored light across the walls. The curtains were half-closed, the city slipping through in strips of neon and headlight glare. The air conditioner rattled in the window like it was trying to cough itself to death.
Our mouths kept finding each other.
Messy at first. Then slower. Then not slow at all.
The soft, desperate sounds we made got swallowed before they could become words. Maybe because words were dangerous. Words had consequences. Words could be remembered in daylight. So we kissed instead, hard enough to bruise meaning into each other.
We stumbled toward the bed, and my knee hit the frame with a dull, ugly crack.
“Smooth,” she said, breathless.
I winced. “Don’t.”
“Very impressive, Mr. Rockstar.”
I groaned into her neck. “Never call me that again.”
She laughed, low and wicked, and I felt it against my mouth. “Mr. Rockstar.”
“Lila.”
“Mr. Rockstar.”
“Cruel woman.”
“Accurate woman.”
The laugh that came out of me surprised me. It broke through all the tension, warm and helpless, and for one second the room didn’t feel like goodbye waiting in disguise. It felt like us. Just us. The way we were when the world wasn’t pressing its face to the glass.
Then she looked at me again, and the laughter thinned into something fragile.
Clothes came off slowly, then not slowly enough.
My jacket hit the floor first. Then her hands were at my shirt, clumsy with nerves she would have denied under oath.
She tugged too hard at the hem and got caught, and we both laughed again, quieter this time, our foreheads touching.
My shirt slipped from her shoulders and landed somewhere near the room-service menu, half-covering a picture of pancakes neither of us could afford.
Her hands shivered when she touched me, and mine weren’t any steadier.