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“Someone drag Mason up here already,” Waylon calls out into the mic, and I have to grit my teeth, fighting an eye roll as people laugh, and someone gives me a shove from behind.
Jeremy’s lip ticks up, and he steps back. For a moment our hands are the only things still touching—our only link—and then he’s ripping that away too, and stuffing both hands in his pockets like he’s been standing that way all along.
He tilts his head, and jerks a chin behind me. “You’ve been summoned.”
Smirking, I take a step back, then another, mindless of the people I bump into and the splash of a sloshed drink. “You’ll still be here when we’re done, right?”
He nods, and flashes a thin smile.
Blowing out a breath, I nod back, and then and only then do I turn away, leaving him to bore holes into my back as the crowd swallows me up.
Back on stage, I spot his silvery head through the shadows almost immediately. He’s standing right where I left him.
Into the mic, I call out loudly, “Alright, O’Leary’s. Lay it on me. What do you want next?”
Shouts fill the room—a cacophony of barely distinguishable requests.
I fight a laugh, shaking my head, and in the corner of my eye, I don’t miss Jeremy doing the same from where he hovers by the stage.
Waylon groans into his mic. “Seriously?”
I glance over at Shawn who just shakes his head and strums a couple cords.
Sighing, I look out into the crowd, and find a random person waving their hand and shouting requests that get swallowed up by the noise. “You.”
I cup a hand around my ear to hear him, and once I check with the guys to make sure it works for them, we kick off what will be our final set of the night.
For the first time since we started playing for a packed bar, I’m impatient to end the night. Sure, we quickly smoothed things over before I got back on stage, but it doesn’t erase the twinge in my chest telling me things are far from resolved.
I shouldn’t be surprised things are a little awkward—our friendship rusty in a way it’s never been, even when Jeremy was at his most closed off. Last we saw each other—in person that is—I was in a hospital bed having just survived an overdose, for fuck’s sake.
And here I thought maybe we’d come away from that unscathed…
Clearly, I was wrong.
But hell if I’m not more determined than ever to make things right in a way I couldn’t over the phone, whatever it takes.
Waylon counts us back, and I nod my head as Shawn comes in with the opening rift to “Pardon Me” by Incubus.
Closing my eyes, I lean into the mic, and croon the first lines, hands cupped around my mouth to give my voice a slightly muffled effect.
All through this song, and the next, I let myself get lost in the music once more, using it as a sort of filtering system to reset this sense of wrongness inside me, and fuel my determination to fix things.
I’m acutely aware of Jeremy lingering by the bar, watching our set.
So acutely aware of it, that I sense when it his attention is no longer there.
My eyes fly open as I continue singing, a frown forming between my eyes as I dart my gaze around the shadowed bodies filling the room.
My heart quickens, and dread pools lowly in my belly.
Because I already know, just as certain as I knew it when I spotted him across the room earlier?—
He’s gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
It’s late when I pull into the driveway of my childhood home.
