Page 30 of Cadence
I move without thinking, pushing my chair back hard enough that it topples over, crashing to the floor. “Watch it.”
Eli doesn’t flinch, just grins at me like this is one big joke as Beau throws an arm out, slamming his palm into my chest. “Okay, enough. Eli, stop being a dick and winding him up, and Maddox, sit the fuck down and work out what’s going on in that thick head of yours before you screw us all over.”
“Look, I’m not trying to stir shit.” Eli exhales, dragging a hand through his hair and lifting both palms. “And for the record? I’d never go there. Not with her.” Shaking his head, he mutters, “I’m not suicidal.”
“And we both know you’re not stupid to mess around with Kit Deveraux’s daughter.” Beau stares me down, voice like steel. “Not after what happened to—”
“I’m not,” I snap, but the long silence follows as I look at my bandmates screams they don’t believe me.
And I don’t either, because I don’t fucking know what I’m doing.
My stomach twists, nausea edging behind my ribs, because they don’t know. They don’t know that I’ve woken up thinking about her every day since we met. That every rehearsal I feel her behind me in a way I never did with Austin. That she’s somehow fucking rewiring me from the inside out.
“All we’re asking is that you fix this,” Beau says as he turns and walks to his guitar. “Figure your shit out before it’s too late.”
They’re right. I’ve been a complete asshole, and not because she deserves it, but because I saw something in her that terrified me.
And now that I know who she really is, if she saw the whole picture, if she knew the one thing I’ve buried so deep it now claws at me worse than before, she wouldn’t just walk. She’d fucking run.
So yeah, maybe I was being a dick, for reasons other than her last name. Maybe, subconsciously, I was trying to push her away, make her hate me.
Because it’s inevitable anyway.
Because it’s better that she hate the version of me I choose to show.
And not the one I actually am.
Chapter Twelve
Things are starting to settle. Everyone’s found their rhythm, and it feels like we’re finally moving forward.
I should be happy.
I think I am.
But sometimes happiness feels like something I’m rehearsing instead of feeling.
There’s this tension I can’t shake. I know he feels it. Hehasto. It’s in the way he sometimes looks at me… the way his voice shifts lower in the few words he offers.
He’s keeping his distance, and that’s fine with me.
It’s easier when he doesn’t look too closely.
P x
Chapter Thirteen
Paige
“Oneaway,”Eligrumblesfrom the couch. Lying on his back, his legs dangle over the armrest, phone held above his face. “Always one away, and thenboom…no more mistakes remaining.”
“What game are you playing now?” I ask from the floor. Legs crossed, my tablet perches on my knee, my latest video halfway through editing as I unwrap a sugary rope of candy that somehow makes the process more exciting.
“Connections,” he replies, jabbing at his screen. “The one that makes you question your intelligence every damn day.”
“I thought you did that without the help of a game?” Beau teases, threading a new string through the bridge, the thin wire catching the light as he snakes it up the body of his guitar to the headstock.
“Ha-ha,” Eli grumbles. Sitting up, he tosses his phone down next to him. “Let me wallow in my self-pity for a second, okay?”
