Page 10 of Before You Fell

So I do the only thing I know how to do with anything that gets too close. I turn it louder. I sing harder. Not for the crowd. For fucking her. Which is stupid as shit, because the crowd is screaming my name and Willow is probably standing there making notes about the second verse.

That’s Willow. Everyone else hears the song. She hears every place I get it wrong.

The crowd screams the chorus back at me. Thousands of voices throwing Willow’s words into the air until they don’t sound secret anymore.

I drag my mouth close to the mic and let the last line tear out of me.

Not pretty.

Not clean.

Raw enough to hurt.

The stadium shouts it back. Their pain. Her words. My voice.

That has always been the trick.

Willow gives me the heart. I give it a body, sweat, smoke and teeth.

The song crashes to an end with Jax murdering the final beat, Cruz holding the last guitar note until it bends into feedback, and me standing centre stage, head tipped back, sweat sliding down my spine beneath my shirt.

For one second, there is silence.

One sharp, impossible second where the whole stadium hangs there, breath caught, lights burning, smoke curling around my boots.

Then the place comes apart.

I laugh into the mic. “Fuck, I love you guys.”

They scream again. Louder. Needier.

So I take every scream. Every girl at the barricade who thinks she wants the real me, when the real me would only disappoint her by morning.

I take all of it.

By the time we finish the set, my shirt is soaked, my throat is raw, and my blood is running too fast for my skin.

The final song ends with fireworks cracking above the rig and Jax throws a drumstick into the crowd as if he is personally trying to start a riot.

Cruz catches a bra flung from the front row and hooks it over the neck of his guitar.

“Classy,” Jett mutters as we move offstage.

I laugh under my breath as backstage swallows us in noise.

Crew members rush around with headsets, cables, clipboards, and the kind of panic that makes rich men richer. Someone hands me a towel. Someone else shoves a bottle of water at me. I take both because apparently I am allowed to be a god onstage and a dehydrated bastard the second I step off it.

Damon Wilson appears in front of me in his perfect black suit, not a hair out of place, and not a drop of sweat on him.

Our band manager always looks as if he was born in a boardroom and raised by contracts.

He claps once, sharp and satisfied. “That was exactly what we needed.”

I wipe my face with the towel. “You’re welcome.”

“The label wants the next album darker,” he says, walking beside me as we head towards the green room. “More emotional damage. More bleeding-heart anthems. The kind of songs people sob to, fuck to, and post online at two in the morning.”

Up ahead, the guys have already stepped into the green room.