Page 146 of Pierce Me

“First of all, gross, I am not.” I wrinkle my nose.

“You are,” Ari smiles under her breath. I pretend I didn’t hear that. Gosh, I like this girl. Spence is one lucky dude.

“Why don’t you give her a second chance?” he presses me.

“Because I’m scared. She hurt me pretty badly, ok?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You do?” I raise my eyebrows.

“The whole world knows now, Isaiah, but I like to think that I know a little more than the whole world. You know that your brother is one of my closest friends. He… He has been having such a hard time, worrying about you, these past years. He has needed help to deal with that.”

I flinch. This is news to me. I didn’t know that James was hurting because of me on top of every other burden he has to carry.

“I used to think about you,” Spencer goes on, “how does he do it? I used to look at you, singing and dancing for hours on end, and I would think, I don’t know how he gets up on stage and sings these songs without falling apart every night.” I purse my lips. He’s looking at me, examining my face. “Turns out, you were falling apart.”

“I was,” I tell him. “She hurt me.”

“I’m sorry.”

I shrug.

“Actually, that’s only part of the truth,” I add quickly. Suddenly, I don’t want him to think those terrible things about her anymore. The Eden that I’ve gotten to know these past few weeks has done nothing to hurt me. In fact, she’s been an angel while I’ve been an absolute jerk. “The rest of it is that I’m an ass and I couldn’t see that that was what she was hoping for. And then, when it finally got through to my thick head, maybe, I… I was too hung up on the past. It’s hard to move on.”

“I agree,” Spence says, surprising me.

“You do?”

He shrugs. “Your songs do reek of sadness,” he says, and there’s no judgement in his voice. Just empathy. As if he’s talking about a path he’s been down before, but he didn’t get stuck in it forever. How I envy him. “Maybe one way to move on would be to write new ones.”

“I can’t, unless it’s with her.”

“So, ask her.” The idiot smirks while he’s saying it.

“We’ve been writing for more than a week,” I say, and he smiles.

“Nice,” he says. “Finally, you did something right.” I want to smack him across the head with the half-full wine bottle. “Now ask her for more.”

I purse my lips. “I did that too, ok? I did ask for more.”

“And?”

“Would I be like this if I had a good answer to your ‘and’?”

He looks at me. He’s been doing a lot of that lately. Then, he says: “Ask again.”

“Are you soft in the head?”

He places his elbows on the table and leans forward. The shadows are playing with the electric blue-green of his eyes, his hair turning white in the midday sun. He looks intense, as if what he’s about to tell me might change my life. I hope so.

“It’s what I did,” he says simply. “And I would keep going, if she hadn’t said yes the third time.”

“Third?”

“Or seventy-third, can’t be sure.”

“Oh wow.”

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