Page 64 of Play Dirty (Brooklyn Dawn 1)

I’d been fucking singing. Not just in the past. Now too. She’d dragged the words out of my chest by force. Now she was wrapping me in comfort I wasn’t strong enough to refuse.

Still singing about turning away, about last times and loss and never wanting more, I’d sought her softness all the while.

It was the thread connecting me to this planet. Keeping me here with her and not mired in the past.

She didn’t speak. I couldn’t have withstood the mercy of her voice, not right now. But she held me through the worst of the tremors, her arms banding tight. I hoped like hell the shakes were only inside me. Not visible. But I couldn’t have been able to stop them even if they were.

When I could breathe through the fire in my throat, I moved back and did the one thing I still knew how to do.

I played.

Fifteen

As he started to play again, I closed my eyes and prayed for strength.

To not fuck this up.

To not give too much or not enough.

To be just what he needed in this moment, even if I’d never figured out how to be it in any other.

Unless we were naked. That came down to instinct. No thought required.

The exact oppo

site of whatever this was now. I was a good listener and a good friend and I usually knew what to say to make people feel better. But I’d never dealt with anything this monumental.

I’d endured my share of struggles. Dealing with the perils and the peaks of the music business had been no cake-walk, but I’d never hurt or been hurt by someone I loved.

Until Nash.

And I didn’t love him. Only a masochist would fall for someone like him, despite the slices of himself he showed me completely against his will.

The way he’d trembled in my arms. Like a statue nearly leveled by an earthquake, something so huge and epic I couldn’t begin to guess its scope.

Then he’d rebuilt himself stone by stone before turning away and making magic with his ruined hands all over again.

But they weren’t ruined. Already his world view was taunting mine. I didn’t see destruction when I looked at him. I saw life. Experience. Possibilities.

And yes, pain. So much that I ached to alleviate it without understanding how deep it ran. I still had hope that healing could occur.

For him, certainly. Also for us, although I still wasn’t sure how to mend the rift.

Or what had caused it.

Once more, he played through the beginning we’d fumbled through together. I wet my lips, but I didn’t open them. How could I? I was afraid of what might come out if I dared to sing. Music was my conduit to emotion, and my feelings were already boiling too close to the surface.

I wouldn’t use his against him. I wasn’t yet sure if the reverse was true.

He stopped the song and started again. And played through to that same point, the one where his lyrics would begin. I hadn’t read them yet. I couldn’t.

Again and again, he repeated the beginning, pounding the keys. Finally, he growled, “Fucking sing.”

I did it because he’d asked, not because I wanted to. I didn’t want to show him what was inside me, and in music, there could be no lies. No safety zone.

Music was an outlet, a respite, a sanctuary. But it also meant stripping bare, even more so than I’d felt as I sat on the bench wearing nothing but my pride.

At least for a moment, he’d sung with me. Almost involuntarily. His voice had been raspy, rusty, as if he rarely used it. But its depth and haunting quality had made me reach higher.

---