My lips squish to the side as I’m starting to feel like a yo-yo. “I’ve already explained to your brother I was invited, and I assumed you had taken our last conversation into consideration when you extended that invitation, but now I’m beginning to feel like maybe I should leave. But know that if I do, you are to never text or talk to me again. I’m not a toy, and you are not allowed to jerk me around.”
“Drix didn’t invite you. His sister did by stealing his phone.” Axle sharply tilts his head in my direction. “Tell her.”
I glance down to see if my skin is turning black-and-blue because my pride was just beaten and bruised. I’m a joke. I was invited here as a joke. It’s my birthday, and I blink repeatedly because there is no way in hell I’m going to allow them to see me broken.
Keys out of my purse and I spin on my toes for my car. All members of the male species are stupid. Each and every single one. A complete waste of my time and I’m the idiot who had the moronic belief one boy was different from the rest.
With a push of a button, my Volvo blinks to unlock, and when I touch the handle, a body presses against the door and becomes dead weight. I look up, and Drix is staring down at me. “You move extremely fast.”
My fingers wrap dangerously around my keys. “I highly suggest you move away from this car before I raise my knee and make your life extremely painful for the next two minutes.”
Drix’s lips twitch, and there’s a spark in his eye that’s informing me he’s laughing at me in his mind, and that causes my blood to boil. “Last chance to move, Drix, and I would take me very seriously if I were you.”
Instead of heeding my warning, Drix hitches his thumbs in his pockets in a too relaxed position for someone who is about to be nailed in parts he should be protecting. “I want you here.”
I hate the small part of me that melts with those words, and I still own enough pride to cross my arms over my chest, refusing to give.
“Axle’s right. I didn’t invite you. My sister and best friend stole my cell. I didn’t type the words, but I agree with what they wrote. I want you here.”
“I’m not a joke,” I say.
“No one thinks you are.”
“This feels an awful lot like a joke. Contact the rich girl, invite her over on her birthday and then laugh it up when she finds out she came running after a setup text. What’s wrong, Drix? Was not everyone here to see the big reveal? Or is it a joke that doesn’t get old?”
“Then I’ll go with you,” Drix says. “If you don’t want to hang here, then we’ll go someplace else. I don’t care where. I’ll leave that up to you, but don’t walk, Elle. Just—” he lowers his head and when he lifts it again, his brown eyes bore into mine, and I’m close to hypnotized “—don’t.”
“You’re confusing.”
“I don’t mean to be.” Drix inhales as if he’s struggling. “A year ago, I would have said as many pretty words as it took to convince you to do what I wanted, but I don’t have much prettiness inside me anymore. I’m raw, and I’m telling you the truth. I want you to stay.”
I pull at the ends of a strand of my hair, and I welcome the pain over the conflicting emotions crashing into each other at every pressure point in my body. “What about your brother? What about what you said the night of the fund-raiser? What about—”
“My sister made you a cake.”
It’s like someone pushed pause on the treadmill I was running on. “What?”
“My sister. Holiday. You met her on the midway. She made you a cake for your birthday. Two cakes, actually. Big ones. Sheet cakes. One chocolate. One vanilla. My best friend, Dominic, has promised pizza and chicken wings. He doesn’t offer to pay often, so I’d jump on this train. They want to meet you, and I...I want you here.”
“What about your brother?”
“Axle’s only concerned about me. Same way your family is concerned about you. Give him a few minutes, and he’ll warm up.”
“Why should I stay? Why should I believe you?”
Drix shrugs. The same heart-stopping lift and lowering of his shoulder from the midway. “Why did you come?”
My mouth pops open, and no sound comes out. I came because of Thor. I came because it’s my birthday, and I didn’t want to be alone. I came because...because it’s Drix.
“Stay, Elle. Just stay.”
Hendrix
With her hands in the back pockets of her tan skirt, Elle wears that polite mask as she walks away from her car. I had her park behind our house and next to the garage. The front of the house isn’t much to see, the back not much better. Suddenly the idea of Elle hanging here leaves a pit in my stomach. We don’t have foyers and dining rooms with crystal chandeliers. Lemonade at my house is just a drink, not an event.
Elle skims a finger along the hood of Axle’s car. “If car crime is a big deal around here, do you park in the garage?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Because what’s in the garage is more important than any car. Since the night of the press conference, I haven’t entered the garage. I’ve played acoustic guitar with Marcus when he shows, but no garage.
My brother has gone in there; so have my best friends and my sister. At night, I’ve lain in bed and listened to them play, listened to them sing, listened to them laugh, and the sound was like shredded glass against my skin. It was also medicine on my soul.
Two parts of me pulling in two different directions. Both parts demanding they know what’s best for my future. I don’t end up going anywhere, though. I stay stuck in the middle.
Not eager to take Elle into the house, and in an effort to give Axle a few minutes to chill, I stride over to the door to the garage, undo the lock, flick the light on and step inside. Elle follows, a few steps back.
The flourescent light overhead buzzes, and Elle’s sandals quietly clap against the garage floor. “Wow. There are a lot of instruments in here.”
There are. Elle drops her small purse onto the floor near the door and returns her hands to her back pockets. She walks past the stands that hold Axle’s, Dominic’s and Marcus’s electric guitars, and Kellen’s bass. At the piano, she pauses.
“When I was a young, like five or six,” she says, “my parents took me to some congressman’s or senator’s or somebody important’s home. If you think our house is big, this place would blow you away. The moment I walked in, I thought I was in Cinderella’s castle. But then again, it was through a child’s eyes, so who knows how massive the place really was.
“Anyhow, we were in this sitting room with antique everything, including the furniture. My mom and dad talked with the other couple for what felt like days, and I was only allowed to eat one cookie and have one drink and I was incredibly bored.”
She regards the piano like it’s a religious relic she’s drawn to and terrified of. “I asked Mom if I could look out the window, and on the way there, I saw this beautiful piano. Chestnut color, hardwood, shiny, had one of those long open tops where you can see inside, and the piano had beautiful white and black keys. I wanted to touch and hear the sound it would make.”
I understand the feeling. Have felt it my entire life. This itch beneath your skin that can only be scratched by playing a chord, feeling that musical vibration down deep into the marrow of your bones.
The piano she stands in front of is nothing like the possible baby grand she’s describing. This is an upright acoustic Dominic and I bought for twenty bucks off a guy who was full-blown tweaking and had a shady white truck of stuff he was unloading to anyone with green. We were fourteen, and it took Dominic and me an hour to push the piano on wheels to this garage, but it was worth every blister and near heat stroke.
After listening to the notes, their pitch and harmonies, Dominic began playing as if he’d owned that piano his entire life because that’s how the son of a bitch is—pure talent.
Elle flashes a sly smile. “It was like I had an angel on one shoulder and the devil on another. The temptation to touch in direct contrast to my mother’s reminder that I was to be seen and not heard.”
I could definitely see her mother’s face when she said it. “What’d you do?”
“I touched.”
My eyebrows raise. “You touched?”
“I touched.”
“Born insurgent from the get-go.”
“Don’t sound so shocked. You’re talking to the Whack-A-Mole rebel and the stray dog–saving mutineer. I totally have a bad side.”
I laugh, the type that takes me by surprise, the type I’ve only been able to do with Elle, and she grins along with me. But then the smile falls, and it’s like watching a single candle that brightened an entire room be snuffed into darkness. “My mom was so mad. She slapped my hands. First and only time in my life she’s struck me, but I remember the sting on my skin, the cold shock throughout my body and her words. She was so ashamed of me, so disappointed, and then when I looked over at my dad, I could tell he felt the same way.”
A rip in my chest at the ache in her eyes. Elle’s always beauty, always impeccable manners, always this picture of perfection, but in this moment, there’s only pain.
“I have never touched another instrument since.”
It’s like someone staked my heart. “Never?”
She methodically shakes her head. “Never. I’ll be honest, I don’t listen to music much either. Whenever I hear it, it makes me feel...guilty. Like I’ve done something wrong.”
Guilty. Yeah. That I understand, too, but for Elle, it’s a shame. Music is life. “You can touch the piano if you want. It’s more against the rules here to keep your hands to yourself.”
Elle glances up at me, and I waggle my eyebrows. I love how she blushes.
“I’m serious. Play.”
“I don’t know how.”
“It doesn’t matter. None of us knew how to play any of these instruments at some point. First step is finding the courage to make a mistake. Playing music will mean mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes lead to new sounds, new rhythms. Music is not perfection.”
And it’s part of why I miss it so damn much.
She withdraws her hands from her pockets, but it’s like a force field has formed between her and the keyboard. Instead of reaching forward and pressing the key that will cause a hammer to strike a wire that would play a sweet note, she takes a step back and tucks her hair behind her ear.
The need to mirror her motions is too strong. For every step she takes, my body automatically takes one as well, but not to widen the gap, but to be near. Damn if I’m becoming her puppet, and she controls the strings.
“I was supposed to be in DC this weekend,” she says. “I was supposed to be meeting the president tonight.”
“That sounds important.”
Elle nibbles on her bottom lip as she continues to stare at the piano like the keys are razor-sharp teeth and if she makes the wrong move, it will jump forward, snatch her and bite.
“I have to kiss Andrew.”
Serrated knife cut to the throat. “What did you say?”
“Sean sent me my itinerary for when everyone returns from DC, and Andrew and I are scheduled to go to the minor league baseball game in Louisville. It’s been scheduled for Andrew and me to perform for the Kiss Cam.”
Jealousy smothers me as if I fell into an algae-thickened pool. A breath in. A breath out. I’m the one who sent her away. I’m the one who told her we wouldn’t work. I drove her straight into the arms of that bastard. “You’re with him, then?”
Her face twists in disgust, and she drops a hand to her stomach like she’s about to puke.
“That’s sick. On so many levels. Having him as my first kiss is the last thing I want.”
Did she just say...?
“I tried calling Dad, but Sean answered. I was mad and he knew I would be mad and he said words and I said words and then he said more words and somehow I agreed. Now I’m kissing a guy I absolutely hate in front of the entire world.”
A slight tremble to her lower lip, and her hand shakes as she twists her hair. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I want to take coding classes, and I want an internship. But now, I don’t know who I am. I’ve somehow become the girl who allows men to touch my body in unwelcomed ways because they have power. I’m now the girl who stays silent when people say things that are offensive, and I’m the girl who gives her first kiss to a guy who makes my skin crawl. I don’t know who I am anymore, but I do know I don’t want to be this girl. I just want to be me. But according to Sean, I don’t get what I want unless I compromise, and I don’t want to compromise.”
The rims of her eyes are filling, and she blinks like that will make all the hurt, all the pain go away. I understand her pain, understand her desperation. There were nights when tears spilled down my face. Late at night, in the dark, staring at a ceiling, missing my family. Hating myself for giving attention to anyone who used me and for ripping apart the people who really cared.
I understand trying to please someone you think loves you. To keep that love, you keep twisting and bending yourself to become who they want you to be until you eventually break. There’s a hole in them, a hole they need filled, and they want you to become the circle that will fit into them to make them complete, even though you’re a square. It’s an awful place to be, the person responsible for someone else’s happiness, because being human, we’re going to fail.
And by being human, we’ll take the lashing when we never meet expectations.
When I joined that band, my dad stayed in town, he talked to me, spent time with me... I thought he loved me, and I ruined myself to keep that attention.
I don’t know how to explain this to her. I don’t know how to tell her that tearing herself apart for someone else will end up killing her. As I told her earlier, I ran out of fancy words after being arrested, but she’s in pain. Knowing Elle, that pain is feeding into anger, and she’ll need a release.
I have a feeling Elle’s not into long walks through a bad neighborhood, then to a worse area along the creek. The type of walk I’ve taken nearly every night since I’ve been home. I have another feeling she’s not into building a fire with two sticks and some flint.
My heart pounds. I know what I need to do, and for her, I’ll take the risk. With her, maybe I can handle the high I feel behind the drums. Maybe I can trust myself. I pick up the piano bench, haul it over to behind my drums and shove the stool out of the way. “Come here.”
Elle’s eyes crinkle as she tries to understand what I could be asking her to do. I don’t want her to think. Thinking in this moment is bad. She needs to feel. If she feels, then she’ll be able to take all that’s bottled inside her and give it away. Maybe if I allow myself to feel, too, I can finally give away some of my pain.
Terror, fear and excitement become a potent drug as I pick up my drumsticks for the first time in over a year. Last time I touched these, I was on a path to self-destruction. My decisions, my behavior, my past all colliding and causing an explosion.
But a year ago, I didn’t know Elle. A year ago, I never thought of anyone but myself. According to my family and Elle, I’ve changed. Maybe it’s time to be man enough to figure out if that’s true. “Come here, Elle. I’m going to teach you how to play the drums.”
Ellison
Drix twirls his drumstick in his hand before pointing it toward me, then jerking it back toward him. I just got called out. Challenged. I sigh because I’ll hate myself if I cower back like a scared mouse. As if my ankles were shackled together, I cross the garage. Drix slides back on the bench and motions for me to sit in front of him.
I fold my arms over my chest and appraise the drums as if there were spiders scampering along them. “I’m going to make a fool out of myself.” r />
Drix bobs his head back and forth. “Probably.”
My mouth pops open, and when he flashes that heart-melting grin, I smack his arm and then straddle the bench to sit in front of him. Drix slides up the seat, his body pressed into my back, and air rushes out of my lungs with the contact. The insides of his thighs are touching the outside of mine. His heat penetrates through his jeans to my skin.
Drix reaches around, and his hands cover mine. His thumbs work open my fists I had no idea I had formed. I give, and he places a drumstick in each palm. His fingers skim my skin, and it’s such a beautiful tickling touch that my entire body hums. Then his large, calloused hands tenderly close my fingers around the sticks, and he covers my hands with his.
“Everyone thinks the key to playing the drums is a firm grip, but it isn’t.” Pleasing goose bumps form along my neck as his breath whispers against my ear. “You want a light grip. It’s not about muscle, it’s about momentum—the tighter you hold the sticks, the slower you’ll go. The sound comes with the opening and closing of your fists and of your wrists.”
He leans his head over my shoulder and raises our combined right hand. We hit a drum to the right and then a drum to the left. His deep voice drifts over me like smooth silk. “These are the tom-toms.”
He guides our right hands toward the floor and hits another drum. Every muscle in his arms flexes, and I’m quickly losing the ability to breathe. “This is the floor tom.”
Moving our left hands, Drix hits a smaller, thinner drum, and it has a quicker, snapping sound. “This is the snare drum.”
I shift on the bench in the desperate search to stay upright, and Drix somehow settles closer to me. Can he feel my heart beating at every pressure point? Can he feel the excited tremble of my body, the quick rising of my chest with my rapid breaths? Does he know, besides when he held me in the hotel room, this is the closest I have ever been to a boy?
His foot nudges the inside of mine and ushers it to a foot pedal. The touch of his leg twining with mine so intimate, I shiver. Drix gently pushes the pedal. “This is the bass drum, and these—” he moves his left foot to the inside of mine and delicately slides it toward another pedal “—are the hi-hat cymbals.”