Page 59 of Rock & Roll Nights: The Lila and Rivers Edit
Then I saw who’d done it and changed my mind. Because when you were one of that lead singer’s best friends in the whole world, I guessed it gave you some leeway.
“Matt,” I ground out. “What the fuck?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said quietly. “Where are you running off to? The audience is calling for an encore, and when I looked over to see whether my lead singer was willing to do another song or two, all I could make out was your footprints in the dust.”
I pushed him off, realizing that he wasn’t going to step back unless I made him do it. Matt Lawson had never been the most aggressive guy—actually, he was way too nice for his own good—but when he got an idea in his head he was like a dog with a bone. It was nearly impossible to sidetrack him.
Which didn’t bode well for the escape I’d been planning.
“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no dust back here.”
He made a face. “And yet I’m sure you know exactly what I mean. Where were you going in such a hurry, Shine?”
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped. “You know I hate when you call me that. I always have.”
He shrugged like he didn’t care, and the shitty thing was he probably didn’t. He didn’thaveto care. Matt was my oldest friend in the world, and that meant he got away with stuff no one else did. We’d been at the same orphanage, which meant I’d known him since I was just a kid named Rivers, not the music phenom the rest of the world knew. The same was true of all the guys—Hudson and Noah had both been in and out of that group home for our entire childhoods—but those two were older than us. They’d been our protectors.
Big brothers, in a way, to kids who’d never had that sort of thing naturally.
Matt and I... We were in the youngest group of kids, and we’d both been small for our ages. The older kids had picked us earlyon as easy targets, and we’d been too young to know how to defend ourselves. We’d teamed up as the underdogs and started watching each other’s backs, and eventually Noah and Hudson had found us and taken on the roles as our protectors. Matt, a naturally happy kid, had leaned into it like he’d finally found the family he’d been missing.
I was not a naturally happy kid. I’d already realized how dark I was on the inside, and that nothing was going to change that. I’d stuck with Noah and Hudson but hadn’t really trusted that they would do any better than anyone else ever had. I’d thought they’d desert me just like my mom had.
They hadn’t. And somewhere along the way I’d learned to lean into them, too.
But Matt? He would always be the kid that had my back when no one else did. Even if he was way too good to hang out with someone like me.
“I’ll call you what I want,” Matt said, pulling me back into the conversation. His eyes darted to the exit and narrowed. “And what I want is to know what you’re doing. What the fuck is up with you the past week? You’ve disappeared on all of us, and the level of scruff on your face is truly alarming.”
He brushed a fingertip over my five o’clock shadow, smirking, and I jerked back.
“I’m not in the mood.”
The smirk dropped off his face, and his eyes got even narrower. “I don’t give a fuck. I’m your best friend and bandmate, Rivers. I want to know what’s going on with you.”
What was going on with me. Right. I was fighting against falling for a girl I knew I couldn’t have and watching my band play with her every night. I could see her path laid out in front of her, from this small bar to the stadium tour, and knew that she had the brightest future possible. Unless I fucked it all up. Unless I let her fall for me and took her down into my darkness.
Got her canceled by Taylor.
Hell, got my whole band canceled by Taylor.
Not that I was going to tell Matt any of that. Sure, he was my best friend. That had never meant he got to have access to all the inner workings of my brain.
Though there was one thing I couldn’t hide from him.
“You know what the problem is. Think about it.”
Matt made a face. “You saw the itinerary. You knew we were coming to Missouri. Now you’re going to fuck everything up just because we’re here?”
I felt like a puppet whose strings had just been cut at the bald-faced mention of the place. Like I was a balloon that had just had a pin pushed into it. I wanted to sag against him, close my eyes, shut it out, but I knew that wouldn’t stop the voices in my head. The ones that said that being back in this state was going to bring all the bad in me to the forefront.
“That doesn’t mean I was ready. And you know exactly what I mean by that.”
“You guys okay?” another voice asked from my right.
I did close my eyes then, because the very person I didn’t want seeing me right now—the person I’d been trying to avoid—had evidently found me after all.
She put a hand on my arm before I could turn to face her, and I cringed away, no doubt looking like I was disgusted by the fact that she’d just touched me. I glanced up just in time to see the hurt flitting across her face, the flash of tears at the edges of her eyes, and then she was gone, swinging around and running in the other direction like I’d just bitten her.
