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Which was why, when she’d started texting him, he decided not to reply. He wasn’t going to make either of their lives harder than they already were.
After a minute, with her busy schedule, she’d forget about him.
And if she came to visit Nikki, he’d be busy in a different part of town.
Excellent plan, Asa.
Thank you, I thought of it myself.
But the pull to respond to Zara never fully went away.
Especially when she started messaging him two to three times a day. Sending jokes and random thoughts. His lack of response didn’t seem to faze her. She never addressed it.
He reread her last two texts that come in back-to-back a few minutes ago.
Z: remember that voice memo I made for you? I want to hear it with a crunchy guitar.
Z: let me clarify. I want to hear YOU play it on a crunchy guitar.
So, funny story. Hehadrecorded it on a crunchy guitar. Just that morning in fact.
Because even though he had no intention of contacting her, he’d still been playing with the idea she’d handed over to him. Like he’d won the Showcase Showdown onThe Price is Righton his birthday.
He played the voice memo of her humming again and felt that now familiar buzzing in his mind.
He hadn’t been excited about writing in longer than he could remember.
Music, the music that he used to live to make, hadn’t been a safe place for him for a long time. After everything with Shelby, he hadn’t been able to return to it. Not without the ache of knowing all that was gone and all that had been wasted.
Ithurtto make music.
Like he was forging weapons that would be used against him in the future.
So he avoided it.
Except for the very rare times Nikki had talked him into small things. The mixing of commercials, listening to what she was working on and giving his opinion. The piano bar.
But that stupid fucking voice memo in his phone had had him in a chokehold for seven days.
He thought about it constantly. He’d written lyrics, finished the melody, wrote a bridge and a chorus and an outro. He dreamed about it. He woke up in the middle of the night humming it.
It was fucking terrifying.
He hadn’t felt like this about music in so very long that he had honestly thought that part of his soul was dead.
Not in a melodramatic way, but in an actual, literal, not alive anymore, no hope of resuscitation way.
And then Zara Lorna had given him a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart and he was gasping and flailing andalive.
And that was terrifying in a different way.
He reread her texts way too often for someone who wasn’t going to be texting her back. But it was better than reading the ones that had come in from his mom.
Those had started immediately with a benign, “How’s it going?” And had escalated to unfounded accusations and weird demands. He’d muted the conversation immediately and hadn’t gone back to it. But every few hours it would be at the top of the inbox with new messages.
And texts from an unknown number started the day after that. He knew without looking that it was Shelby. He blocked thenumber. It was only a matter of time before she used a different one.
She was a human shaped hemorrhoid and there was not enough witch hazel in the world to stop that inflammation once it started.
