Page 18 of Tattoos and Heartbreak
To my horror, Lila was standing on the other side, her arms full of boxes. She’d been helping the band, I realized. Carrying stuff around for us. Making herself a part of our family.
And now she was standing in harm’s way.
I was moving before I made the decision to do it, rushing toward her with my arms outstretched and my gaze locked with hers. I couldn’t let her get hurt. Couldn’t let her be crushed under falling speakers on my watch.
I got to her in three strides, wrapped my arms around her, and threw us both out of the way, my body surrounding hers so that I was the one who hit the ground first. We rolled over and over, crashing through boxes of supplies and a couple of microphones, and finally came to a stop with her underneath me, her chest heaving and my arms still wrapped around her.
I rose up a bit so I could look down at her and met those green eyes, my breath caught in my throat. “Are you okay?” I whispered.
She huffed out a laugh. “Sure. I was just tackled by an enormous rock star and thrown around, but that’s nothing new. No problem.”
Her eyes flicked to the scene behind me and she frowned.
“Though I do sort of wonder what you were doing. I mean if you wanted a hug or something, you could have just said so.”
In that moment, I realized that I didn’t hear the crashing sound of speakers coming down or the shouts I would have expected to accompany them.
In fact, all I heard was silence.
When I sat up and turned to look, I saw that the stack of speakers I’d been sure was falling was... still standing there, the speakers stacked like they’d always been.
They hadn’t fallen at all.
I’d completely overreacted to the idea that Lila might get hurt. And judging from the looks on everyone’s faces, they’d all seen me do it.
Terrific.
LILA
These words weren’t coming out right.
I wrinkled my nose in frustration and scratched out yet another line of lyrics, frustrated beyond belief. I never had trouble with lyrics. They were my thing. Sure, I could write music with the best of them. I’d never had any trouble coming up with a tune and making it dance to my needs. But lyrics were something altogether different. Those were like magic for me. I’d have a thought that I needed something—some line or emotion—and that something would just appear in my head, like someone else had written it and sent it right into my brain. The words would come flowing out like I’d always known what they were and just had to reach out and grab them to make a song. The hard part had always been deciding which tune to fit them into.
But right now, I couldn’t write anything. I couldn’t come up with good emotion or words that fit together the way they should. Everything I wrote felt like I was back in the sixth grade trying to write my first love song when I didn’t even know how being in love felt.
Something was wrong.
I pushed back from the table and pulled my guitar into my lap. Maybe if I worked on some tunes instead, the language part of my brain would free itself up.
I strummed the strings and closed my eyes, letting myself sink into the chords that had been my home for years, and started plucking out a tune. It wasn’t complicated and it definitely wasn’t original—it belonged to Olivia, actually—but as I played, I felt the music work its way into my blood, and then into my imagination. And I was able to start thinking in what I’d come to term ‘lyrics language.’ I started seeing the world and everything in it in music and lyrics rather than regular old English. Everything was colored with notes.
With emotions and the words that described them.
There it was, I thought, relief flowing through me. There was the piece of me that understood this sort of thing. I hadn’t seen her in days—not since we’d started following this tour—and I’d been worried that she’d decided to fuck off and take a break when I needed her most.
“What are you doing?”
My eyes snapped open, the spell broken, and I looked up to see someone standing in front of me. Not just any someone, either. The someone I was pretending to date—and who had been studiously avoiding me for the most part, except for when some handy photographer was around.
“What areyoudoing?” I asked.
He dropped into the seat across from me and sighed. “Can’t sleep.”
Then he took in my guitar, the half-eaten blueberry pie in front of me, and the sheet of paper next to that. His eyes traveled over my body and I remembered—belatedly—that I was dressed in my pajamas. Plaid pajama pants and a t-shirt that was at least a size too small.
Things I almost never let anyone else see.
I felt the flush start at my chest and rise rapidly up my neck and into my face, and I watched as he watched me blush.
