Page 9 of Take My Hand

“I haven’t in a few days, but I’ll try giving him a call tomorrow. I’m sure he has parties with his friends he just wants to be around for.” I try to ease her concern, knowing she doesn’t need the extra stress.

“Are you doing alright? Do you have anything planned for tomorrow to take your mind off things?”

I crack my neck side to side, exhaling hard through my nose as I feel a stirring deep in my gut, dread filling my veins with lead. I’ve been trying to keep my mind off it, keep the anxiety at bay. But I don’t want to shut her out like Will.

“I don’t have anything planned. Maybe I’ll go shopping for a new couch.” I angle the phone so she can see the stain next to me and she squints her eyes, trying to get a better look before shaking her head at me.

“I taught you better than to eat on the sofa!” she scolds, and it brings a smile to my face. “In that giant house of yours, you couldn’t find an appropriate table to eat at?”

I actually have three dining tables and an entire bar top area in my kitchen, but it feels lonely to eat in there by myself. At least here in my living room, I can turn on the TV and fill some of the silence.

“What’s the golden boy getting yelled at for? I want to hear this.” Lucas’s voice calls out in the distance before he steps up behind my mom, planting a kiss on her cheek before looking at me through the phone.

I roll my eyes at his comment.

“He’s still such a messy eater,” my mom chides.

He laughs and grabs a bag of chips from the pantry behind him. “At least I have my own furniture to ruin,” I call out to him, taking a jab at him living back home with our parents.

“I’m saving up,” he calls through a mouthful of chips. “Livvy is going to want a nice ring and that’s gonna cost me a pretty penny.”

He’s been with his girlfriend for a little over a year, and now that they’ve both graduated college, he’s been talking about taking that next step with her.

I kinda like that he moved back home, for both of my parents’ sake. They seem happy to have him back there, but I wouldn’t be a proper big brother if I didn’t give him shit over it.

“Are you gonna be able to afford that house of yours with no job soon?”

I throw my head back. “What are you talking about?”

“Haven’t you been seeing anything online? Everyone’s saying you and the guys are breaking up.”

Walker’s words echo in my brain. We do the summer shows, but after that, we’re done.

Two words that completely altered the course of all four of our lives.

We’re done.

He threw them over his shoulder at us as he stormed out of the conference room Arun pulled us into back in April, trying to get us to talk through our issues. Tension and betrayals had been brewing for months and instead of working through it that day, lines were drawn in concrete.

I open up the internet browser on my phone and start searching, immediately seeing article after article speculating about the future of Whisper Me Nothings.

Ever since the photos surfaced of Reid and Walker punching each other outside of a radio station in Boston, the rumors haven’t stopped. Now, everyone is overanalyzing every scrap of interview footage they can, dissecting our body language and facial expressions, trying to find truth to their theories. No announcements have been made. No one knows that these summer shows are our final ones, except the four of us and our inner circle. And it’s weighing on me.

It also hasn’t helped that as a group, we haven’t been spotted out anywhere together since we’ve been back from tour. We used to go out for dinners, frequent clubs, but while I’ve been out with Walker and Nikolai individually, the four of us haven’t.

Granted, that shouldn’t seem unusual to the public since after the shooting happened, I didn’t step foot into a club for almost a year and half, basically holing myself up in my bedroom until the tour dragged my ass out. But now that people know that I’ve been out and about more, it’s more glaringly obvious that the four of us haven’t hung out publicly.

“You should know better than to read that bullshit,” I tell him, trying to brush it off.

“Hard to ignore when that’s all people wanna talk to me about.”

Shaking my head, a stone settles in my stomach, knowing I can’t keep something like this from my family. But I also have been dreading saying the words out loud, because then that makes them feel more real. And the state of all of our relationships aside, I don’t want to break up.

“We, uh…” I scratch the back of my neck, stalling. “I should actually tell you guys this before you find out anywhere else, or I guess you already kinda did.”

My mom straightens, wiping her hands on a dish towel before giving me her full attention. Lucas also stops eating for a moment, brushing his hands against his work shirt.

“The guys and I had a meeting with Arun after the fight between Reid and Walker happened, trying to see how we move forward. And we basically came to the decision that after these festival shows are over, we’re gonna call it.”

---