Page 62 of Play Dirty (Brooklyn Dawn 1)

“Strongest at the broken places.” Her hand brushed my arm and I flinched as if she’d slapped me. Hell, I hadn’t even flinched when she had.

Words lay on my tongue, sharp, cutting ones that would rip that flower she’d spoken of out by the root. Leave it to waste on the ground under my feet.

Probably as I’d already done.

Never going back there again, eh?

Except she had. I had. We’d gone there together, and now the trip was indelibly burned into my skin.

I picked up her stubby pencil and wrote my own words beneath hers.

Can’t return when you’ve never left

Arrow found its target

Opened a wound

Want what you can never have

Innocence tarnished, ripped to shreds

Oh, oh, never again

Taste the truth, swallow it whole

Until it stains everything

Hope doesn’t grow here

Memory rooted deep

Never getting it out again

Oh, oh, never again

I didn’t give it back to her right away. Couldn’t. I didn’t want to see her face close in, those beautiful blue eyes shuttering. I could take the sting of rejection and embrace it as what I knew.

What I understood.

That didn’t mean I had any fucking clue how to be the bigger man and accept that she didn’t want to go down this road again. She’d been strapped into a car she didn’t want to be a passenger in. In the piano bar, I’d overwhelmed her, surrounded her, lost myself in her. Today, I’d done more of the same.

A life raft for a drowning man. And she didn’t even know. I would never let her.

At least I still had my pride.

I turned to the piano and set aside the notebook, leaving it between us. She could take it or not. With my other hand, I gripped my phone and pressed a couple of buttons. Then I let my fingers wander over the keys, closing my eyes as I took her words and made them my own.

Made them ours even as nothing else ever could be.

She didn’t look at the notebook as she started to sing, matching herself to the notes I fumbled through. I wasn’t even sure what I was playing. Usually, I had a roadmap to start, enough to get me going. This was stumbling through feel, connecting notes into a melody I couldn’t even say lived in my head.

Only silence resided inside me, but she was teasing out a song I hadn’t even known to play.

She sang along while I played, and I didn’t know if she was leading me or the other way around. She sounded like a fucking angel, her voice climbing higher before dropping low to curl around words that meant so much more under her care.

Listening to her opened up something inside of me. Nameless, unspoken. Something I’d been sure had been lost for good when I’d turned the key in the ignition that night.

“Hey, man, just one more.”

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